Review: Shiva Baby

by Ben Miller

Part cringe-comedy nightmare dripping with passive aggressiveness and part look at the complexity of modern sexuality and relationships, director Emma Seligman's Shiva Baby shows a unique perspective on attending a party from hell. Rachel Sennott stars as Danielle, a college senior who starts her day having sex with her sugar daddy Max (Danny Deferarri) before heading off to a shiva with her parents Joel and Debbie (Fred Melamed and Polly Draper).  Danielle is a college senior with no real prospects after graduation and she knows this will be a frequent topic of conversation among the party-goers.  She trudges on, but sees Maya (Molly Gordon), her high school girlfriend as the belle of the ball being lauded over among the many guests.

Debbie wants Danielle to focus on her future and uses the party as an excuse to try to get her a job.  One of those outlets is Max, who used to work with Joel.  Max and Danielle play dumb and attempt to assuage any suspicions, but things get infinitely more complicated when Max's wife Kim (Dianna  Agron) shows up...

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Jessica Walter (1941-2021)

by Nathaniel R

Showbiz lost another great this week as Jessica Walter passed away at 80 years of age. Her sensational and much-memed performance of smug, biting, privileged Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development, will live forever but it was just a small portion of her long career...

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Gay Best Friend: Oliver T'Sien in "Crazy Rich Asians" (2018)

 a series by Christopher James looking at the 'Gay Best Friend' trope 

Nico Santos does what every gay best friend does in a romantic comedy, stage a makeover montage.After a few retro episodes, we've made it back to modern examples of the Gay Best Friend trope. Crazy Rich Asians employs so many classic romantic comedy moments. When Nick Young (Henry Goulding) asks Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) to meet his family in Singapore, some nearby people overhear and set off a chain of texts that break the news to the entire Young family circle. Bright animated colors pop around the screen to demonstrate word spreading, recalling classic Doris Day title sequences of the 50s and 60s. This pastiche blends well with the grand opulence of the Young’s Singapore compound that feels in line with the worlds of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the recent Sex and the City movies. 

Any love letter to the romantic comedy has to employ one of the character mainstays of the genre: the gay best friend. This comes in the form of Oliver (Nico Santos), the rainbow sheep of the family...

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What did you think of WandaVision?

by Nathaniel R

DO NOT READ OR COMMENT IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED WANDAVISION - SPOILERS

Today we were treated to the final episode of Disney+'s hit WandaVision, returning us to the Marvel Cinematic Universe by way of streaming sidebar. Watching WandaVision was a like a meta experience on steroids. The show itself was intentionally constructed that way using Wanda Maximoff's (Elisabeth Olsen) love of TV sitcoms to comment, however broadly on them, but more pointedly on nostalgia and the human need for escapism...

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Showbiz History: It's "One Night in Miami" day!

8 random things that happened on this day, February 25th, in showbiz history...

Feb 25th, 1964 in history (left) and reenacted in 2020 for One Night in Miami... (right)

1950 Your Show of Shows premieres on NBC. The live variety show starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, was a stepping stone for legendary comedy writers like Mel Brooks and Neil Simon. The show helped create the  variety genre and inspired both the TV classic The Dick Van Dyke Show and the movie My Favorite Year.

1956 Poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes meet at a party. Their doomed romance is dramatized in the 2003 film Sylvia starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig...

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