Rom-coms and a killer robot.
PALM SPRINGS (2020)
When I wrote about The Rental last week, I mentioned that I haven't been paying close attention to Dave Franco's career up to this point. Now I have to admit that the same is true for the career of Andy Samberg. I have seen him in movies here and there, but I'm not a regular Saturday Night Live viewer, so I have missed the majority of the 140 episodes he has done of that show, and I don't watch the series Brooklyn Nine-Nine, so I haven't seen any of the (so far) 145 episodes he has done of that one. So when I saw Samberg take the lead in Palm Springs, it was kind of a revelation: I need to watch more Andy Samberg comedies.
Here Samberg plays Nyles, a guy who was attending a lame wedding in the title location with his even more lame girlfriend when he wandered into a cave with some kind of strange energy glowing within... and woke up at the start of the day all over again. "It's one of those infinite time loop situations you might have heard about." (See Groundhog Day or Happy Death Day, among others.) Now Nyles has to live his day at the wedding over and over again, never able to escape from it no matter how he changes the events, always just waking up at the start of the day again in the room he shares with his cheating girlfriend Misty (Meredith Hagner).
Nyles is already deep into the time loop by the time the film begins - apparently director Max Barbakow, writer Andy Siara, and Samberg were approaching this with the idea that Nyles has been living this same day over and over for around 40 years when we meet him. He has accepted the fact that he has to go through this forever. On the day we join him, he hooks up with wedding guest Sarah (Cristin Milioti)... or tries to. Their time together is disrupted by Roy (J.K. Simmons), another wedding guest who Nyles unthinkingly got caught in the time loop some day along the line. Roy has to take a long drive to reach the wedding, so he doesn't always show up, choosing to live his time loop at home - but sometimes he returns so he can kill Nyles for trapping him in the loop. Wounded by Roy, Nyles crawls back to the cave so he can just start the loop over instead of suffering. Problem is, Sarah follows him into the cave and becomes the third person caught in the loop.
Palm Springs is a romantic comedy at its core. Both stuck living the same day together over and over, Nyles and Sarah spend a lot of time hanging out and gradually falling for each other. That aspect of the film is fun, but this is also a bit of a sci-movie movie. While Nyles gave up on trying to figure out what's happening, Sarah is smarter and more determined, and she dedicates herself to finding the way out of the time loop. Since this isn't obviously "a karma thing" like Groundhog Day and there's no murder mystery to solve like in Happy Death Day, that means Sarah has to dig into the science of it all. Thankfully, the audience isn't asked to understand the science along with her, but the filmmakers have said that they really did research the science of this.
The resulting sci-fi romantic comedy is really entertaining and amusing. Samberg and Milioti both deliver great performances, and I enjoyed every minute I watched of Nyles' and Sarah's time looping.
AUTOMATION (2019)
The sci-fi thriller Automation is the feature debut of writer/director/producer/editor Garo Setian, but he assembled a dream team of genre regulars around him to make sure this project would be as interesting and entertaining as possible. He wrote the screenplay with Matthew L. Schaffer and Rolfe Kanefsky, who includes the horror comedy classic There's Nothing Out There among his many credits. Then he filled prominent roles with the likes of Elissa Dowling, Sadie Katz, Parry Shen, Graham Skipper, and Sarah French. Of course, the fact that Setian already had twenty-five years of experience making short films and editing also helped him pull off this impressive feat.
The story crafted by Setian, Schaffer, and Kanefsky centers on a robot called Auto, which was brought to life through some RoboCop-esque "man in suit" technology, with Jeff J. Knight doing excellent work with the robotic movements while Jim Tasker provides the perfect voice for the character. Not every bit of Auto looks completely convincing, but the suit does look cool and it's convincing enough that I was able to become emotionally invested in Auto. Originally designed for military use, Auto now works at an insulation company where his creator Alan (Shen) and company owner Susan (Katz) are planning to replace 90% of the work force with robots. They're also planning to replace Auto, who is now obsolete. It makes sense that Auto's days at the company are numbered, he's suffering from a dying battery and some memory problems (he keeps flashing back to his disastrous time in the military), but at the same time it's sad because this robot, which is able to learn from human behavior, has such kind, innocent interactions with the people around him. The character who interacts with Auto the most is office worker Jenny (Dowling), who dreams of being a professional singer. The robot is able to gain a semblance of humanity thanks to his conversations with Jenny, and it's really nice to watch these two bounce off of each other. Unfortunately, Jenny is the only person Auto is able to form a true bond with, which is why he's in danger of being destroyed instead of just retired.
Auto reminded me of Johnny 5 from the Short Circuit movies in the way he was so sweet and likeable... and just like Johnny 5 had to take drastic action to make sure he wouldn't be disassembled, Auto ends up taking drastic action to make sure he won't be shut down. Problem is, Auto is malfunctioning so badly at that point, while tapping into his military programming, that his attempts to save himself turn the movie into something of a slasher in the second half - and that's when I started thinking of Chopping Mall.
Set during a Christmas season in the near future, Automation finds the employees of Alert Insulation being notified that their jobs are over right before most of them will be going to the company Christmas party. The place clears out, leaving only a handful of people in the building, including the characters played by the actors mentioned above. And that's when Auto starts picking them off one-by-one. It takes a while for the movie to reach that point, some viewers may start to feel antsy waiting for the violence to begin, but the pay-off is worth the build-up and we get some good character moments along the way.
There are also some good special effects on display in the film. Although it was very clearly made on a low budget, Setian was still able to pull off things like a war scene with a flying, hi-tech attacker in it and shots of a city that include futuristic technology. The characters ride the streets in regular, modern cars, but there are strange flying vehicles in the sky above them. I have seen Automation draw comparison to early Full Moon movies, and the special effects definitely have that sort of charm to them.
Setian has said that the goal he and his collaborators had with this film was to tell a "timely story with characters the audience cares about", and they succeeded in that. I cared about Auto and Jenny and wanted things to go better for them. At the same time, once things fell apart for them I appreciated the violence and bloodshed. This is a movie that made me feel sad for a non-living character who kills people. That's a rare accomplishment.
If you've ever wanted to see what it would be like if Johnny 5 had been unhinged and homicidal, or if you ever wished Chopping Mall had let you develop an emotional attachment to the Killbots, Automation is the movie for you.
The review of Automation originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
ONLY YOU (1992)
Between 1989's Weekend at Bernie's and its 1993 sequel, Andrew McCarthy starred in the romantic comedy Only You, which doesn't have any scenes in which someone tries to pass off a corpse as being a living person, but felt to me like it was along the same lines as a Weekend at Bernie's movie. I don't know, maybe I was just reminded of the Bernie flicks because Only You features McCarthy hanging out on a beach.
Directed by Betty Thomas from a script by Wayne Allan Rice, the film starts out in the freezing setting of Chicago at Christmastime. McCarthy plays Cliff, who is planning to escape the cold and spend the holidays at a beach in Mexico with his girlfriend. Unfortunately, his plan falls apart when his girlfriend dumps him so unceremoniously that he's informed of their break-up by a friend over the phone. He goes to the travel agency to get his money back for the plane tickets, but butts heads with travel agent Clare (Helen Hunt) over the tickets being non-refundable. But then he finds a reason to use those tickets when he goes to a bar and crosses paths with Amanda (Kelly Preston), a beautiful young woman who is heartbroken over the fact that her boyfriend has chosen to spend the holidays with his wife instead of her.
By this point we've been informed that Cliff values beauty over substance when it comes to women, so of course he's head over heels for Amanda from the moment he meets her. He whisks her away on the beach vacation, and she's so drunk by the time the plane takes off that she has no memory of agreeing to leave Chicago with him when she wakes up in the morning. Still, they agree to spend the holidays together - and even though Amanda is pretty awful toward him, always standing him up when they make plans and clearly preferring to hang out with anybody but him, Cliff still pursues a relationship with her, making decisions that are beyond all reason, simply because she looks good.
Soon we discover that Clare is also at the beach, having been hired to take photographs of the area for a travel brochure. Since Amanda is never around and Clare needs help with her photographs, Cliff ends up spending a lot of time with the woman who refused to refund his plane tickets. We all know where this is going, even if Clare isn't perceived as being a total knockout like Amanda is.
Only You is quite predictable, it's very much your average rom-com and there's not much about it that's likely to stick with a viewer, but it's fun while it lasts and provides some pleasant entertainment.
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