Moana (2016)

The Disney formula of a girl experiencing the call to adventure is usually made more interesting by a twist on the basic premise. In Mulan, Fa Mulan has to pretend to be a boy. In Tangled, Rapunzel shares protagonist duties with Flynn; in Frozen, Anna and Elsa share protagonist duties, and one has to rescue the other after she isolates herself for being too dangerous (and almost becomes the film’s antagonist), while a character who seems like the love interest turns out to be the real antagonist, and the true love story is between two sisters. A similar villainous inversion features in Beauty and the Beast, where Beast is set up as an antagonist and becomes the love interest, flipping the story from one of resistance in imprisonment to finding understanding beyond superficial barriers.

Where other Disney princess films have tried to liven up the rigid formula with twists and variations, Moana slavishly follows it to a T, presumably hoping its colourful setting will compensate for its total lack of creativity. The film is predictable from beginning to end, far more so than even other Disney princess features – it doesn’t even attempt to vary the little things. Its largest departure from the predictable is an absence – unlike previous pets/mascots which usually had some kind of personality, Moana’s pet is a chicken who is so stupid it can’t even be trusted to eat food or stay away from the ocean, constantly trying to peck at and swallow stones or walking off cliffs. Its total lack of a brain is the joke. The laziness of this detail sums up the film in microcosm.

Moana herself is charming, in a prefabricated sort of way. She is introduced as capable and determined, having already become accomplished enough to be considered a chief of the tribe at 16. While more sensible films would leave some room for development or at least introduce a flaw, Moana is perfect from the start. She just doesn’t know how to sail, and she learns that over five minutes’ screen time. It’s a testament to Auli'i Cravalho’s performance as well as proof of how starved we are for capable, independent female protagonists that she remains likeable despite being utterly-middle-of-the-road: nice enough, brave enough, kind enough, smart enough. If you mapped her traits onto a polygon of numbered lines, like an RPG character, she’d be a perfect circle: totally capable and not at all interesting.

Although Dwayne Johnson can usually be counted on for outsize charisma, his egomaniac demi-god Maui is a mixed bag, owing to the inconsistent characterisation of a script which can’t decide whether he’s an amoral antihero who’ll use Moana as monster-bait to get back his magical fishhook, or a rogue with a heart of gold who’ll go along with her on her prospective suicide mission and even teach her to sail. Adding to the way he bounces between the two extremes is a perfunctory attempt at deepening his characterisation with the sombre revelation that he was abandoned by his parents – despite being the sort of devastating fact that would require years of therapy to work through, the depression Maui falls into is cured by a spirited pep talk from Moana.

This refusal to seriously deal with anything that might be remotely negative or involve conflict is typical of Moana, which is written to have as many triumphant shots of Moana sailing forward with joyous music playing is possible, and to minimise any sign that she might have flaws or weaknesses. Once Maui obligatorily storms off and leaves Moana hopeless, and she experiences her dark night of the soul and doubts her ability to be the Chosen One and save the world, her heroic resolve is found and reaffirmed within two minutes. At a pivotal early moment in the film, a beloved family member dies, and as her spirit moves through the sea to lift Moana’s boat, not a single moment is spared on tears or a recognition of the fact that Moana’s loved one is dead: we transition instantly to the same Polynesian choir harmonies and dramatic shots of Moana sailing to her uninteresting destiny. Consider how Frozen could spend multiple songs on the conflict between Anna and Elsa; consider that “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” is a whole song dedicated to their separation and loneliness. How much more emotionally earned and heartfelt is the triumphant climax for this time spent on establishing the sadness and the heartbreak? But Moana doesn’t want to do the work. The climax is presented as a meaningful moment, as if it's bring some theme to fruition about "remembering who you are" and love conquering hate and heartlessness, but the script never lays the groundwork to develop any of those themes, so it just comes off as weird and incongruous.

Lin Manuel-Miranda, evidently exhausted from Hamilton, produces an uninspiring soundtrack whose sole highlight is thankfully also the main theme, Moana’s “How Far I’ll Go” – the rest is unfunny riffs on demigod sidekick Maui’s egomania (“You’re Welcome”) that will make you nostalgic for “Gaston”, the ridiculous novelty character spotlight song “Shiny”, and admittedly-decent Polynesian vocal harmonies for the ancestral song, “We Know the Way”.

While the script may be lazy and uninspiring, and the music little better, half of Moana’s crew have clearly put in the work – the animators. Full of gorgeously detailed and beautifully-rendered undersea locations, storms, lava-monster battles, and verdant islands, Moana is a visual delight. Since acquiring Pixar, Disney can count on always impressing the viewer with the look of the film – an ideal marriage of the two companies can produce something heartfelt, with universal archetypes used in the service of a personal and moving story, like Frozen. When one half of the team slacks off, you wind up with the gorgeous-but-empty Moana.

Doctor Strange (2016)

Can you still call Doctor Strange the Marvel film with the highest potential for weirdness after they adapted Guardians of the Galaxy? The latter definitely seemed like more of a gamble when it was coming out, but the source material of GotG has always been relatively conventional compared to the cosmic psychedelia of the Doctor’s adventures. Taken at face value, Steve Ditko’s acid-trip visuals and the hokey mysticism of Strange’s spells and costume seem like a harder sell to the current generation of filmgoers. There’s no longer much tolerance for fantasy campiness; Thor was reinvented as an alien for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the more magical elements of The Dark World (elves, for god’s sake) were drowned in pseudoscientific babble to make them sound more acceptable. These days, magic in movies is presented with the veneer of science to make it go down easier; just look at Neil DeGrasse Tyson trying to pretend Interstellar’s space bookcase made scientific sense.

So, while all that comic book weirdness is crushed into a recognisable hero’s journey formula, you have to give Doctor Strange some credit for showing us levitating cloaks, mandala-type mystical shields, and wizards tearing open fiery portals in the air, even if the bulk of the magic shown looks like the city-rearrangement scene from Inception on crack. It might not be as wacky as a battle between magicians should be, but it’s spectacular viewing – Strange is easily the best-looking Marvel film, and the first to really push the envelope with special effects instead of just using them to make traditional superhero action look more real; the dizzying abstraction of its city-warping battles actually makes iMAX worth the money.

As front-loading the verdict with praise of its special effects might imply, there’s not much more to Doctor Strange than its looks. Stephen Strange is pricklier and more obviously arrogant than his narrative cousin, Tony Stark: they both had hubris, and in both cases, it was shattered by a wound which left them helpless. But while Tony is too charismatic to stay down for long or not make it a part of his big comeback story, Stephen is more fragile, more broken. Some of the best character work in a Marvel origin film comes from the genuinely upsetting scenes post-accident when Stephen frantically bankrupts himself trying to heal his now-useless surgeon’s hands, and becomes a bitter wreck, driving away his only friend – Rachel McAdams in (even for Marvel) an unusually slight love interest role. But all that drama, where Benedict Cumberbatch’s gift for picturesque brooding and sneering hatred is well-used, comes to an end once he goes on his mystical quest and finds the cure: magic.

What follows then is pretty typical. Strange proves a highly talented student after some minor struggles, is inducted into a secret society which protects the world, struggles with the choice of accepting his weighty responsibilities, is thrust into battle against the villain (who is a version of himself, in the most boring Marvel tradition, a hubristic magician), etc. The best thing to say about the second half of the film is that the fight scenes are far more interesting than usual and the expected action climax is neatly subverted. Aside from that, it’s largely just a grievous waste of Mads Mikkelsen and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One is briskly quirky in a way that works rather than being annoying, but her character could be far more intriguing than it is.

Ultimately, Doctor Strange is another competently-made Marvel product. It would be nice if they aimed higher, but it’s a well-made and passable film, which will delight a lot of niche fans even if it disappoints those looking for the more complex drama of something like Triumph and Torment. As a another Marvel installment, it’s promising: the visuals are superb and the finale is subversive and inventive, suggesting that good things are ahead.

Rogue One (2016)

Hopefully the final Star Wars film which is centred around the Death Star or its copies, Rogue One turns a tired premise into a solid sci-fi action film which improves in many ways on The Force Awakens, though it lacks the reboot's charm.

Set just days before the beginning of A New Hope, the film is the untold story of how the Rebel Alliance discovered the fatal flaw in the Death Star. What was an unexplained and convenient cliché in the original film is cleverly repurposed as the sacrifice of a rebel scientist, Galen Erso, who leaves behind his family and his ideals to work on the genocidal weapon, knowing only he will be committed enough to sabotage it and give the rebels a chance.

Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla film found a mixed reception for going easy on the monster fights and the spectacle and focusing too much on generic audience stand-ins without any unique personality or characterisation, like the protagonist played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. But it had notable strengths, including wonderful visuals – dramatic contrasts of light and dark - and an awe-inspiring sense of scale. Godzilla never looked more terrifying and elemental than when Edwards used the huge disturbances caused by his passing (the aircraft carriers overturned by waves when he swam underneath them) to suggest unfathomable power.

Edwards brings those talents to Rogue One in spectacular fashion, staging the greatest space battle ever seen in a Star Wars film as well as the greatest land-battles. The traditional three-part finale is pulled off especially well, with the Alliance fighting the Empire in orbit above an imperial planet, while rebel troops re-enact the Normandy landings against Stormtroopers on the ground, and the protagonists infiltrate the imperial complex to find the Death Star plans. The battles are thrilling and unsparingly vicious, with a rawness to the violence that Star Wars previously lacked.

Unfortunately, Rogue One also shares some flaws with Edwards’ previous film, most notably its uninteresting characterisation. Felicity Jones is steely as Jyn Erso, but flips inconsistently from an anti-hero who’s out for herself and doesn’t care about the Rebellion’s ideals to a shining-eyed Joan of Arc who makes stilted speeches about hope and fighting on, seemingly without cause. Rather than an arc, she has two points of personal development with nothing connecting them. Diego Luna is convincingly rugged as Cassian Andor, a ruthless Rebel black ops captain, but he can’t sell the shift his character makes from cold-eyed assassin to sentimentalist because there’s no explanation for it in the script.

The cast is rounded out by bit-part ensemble roles for Donnie Yen (the stereotypical Asian monk with an enigmatic attitude and a Force fixation), Riz Ahmed (as a defected Imperial pilot who spends most of the movie too shellshocked to have a personality), and Forrest Whittaker as a extremist renegade rebel cyborg, used by the script to perfunctorily imply what happens if you go too far for revenge. Ben Mendelsohn plays the villain, Director Krennic, commanding officer of the Death Star, mostly notable for being the least threatening major Star Wars villain – a careerist bureaucrat with big dreams of being noticed by the Emperor. All of these actors could – and have – anchored better films on their own, playing complex and compelling characters. Here, they are each given a quirk or two in place of backstory or independent motivation (except for Mendelsohn, whose motivation is just boring), and sent their separate ways – their performances are appropriately lackluster. Compared to the blazing charisma of Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron, the crew of Rogue One is no more eye-catching than the drab earth tones that make up half the film’s colour palette.

The film’s plot can best be summed up as competent. There are no overt contrivances and events follow in a logical chain of cause and effect, straightforwardly moving from the Rebellion’s attempts to contact Galen Erso to the Empire cleaning house once the Death Star has been completed to Rogue One’s assault on the imperial base. If this sounds like grudging praise, it’s because the film never once surprises or shocks you: it just moves linearly towards the climax. Nevertheless, since the plot isn’t copied minute-by-minute from another film (as with The Force Awakens), its predictability is not as much of a blemish. The script has little to recommend it – aside from the wonderfully sarcastic K-2SO, a reprogrammed Imperial enforcer droid with no tact and a lot of repressed violence, there’s little amusement to be had, and the dialogue lacks the slightly overwritten, dramatic feel that made the original trilogy so quotable.

This is a deliberate choice. The tone of Rogue One is sombre and businesslike, aiming for a war movie more than the pulpy goodness of the original Star Wars films or episode VII. Although the blaring and distracting Michael Giacchino score does its best to replicate John Williams, the film just barely feels like Star Wars – which isn’t all bad. At its best, the emphasis on sacrifice and on the value of living and dying for an ideal makes it as profound as the single strongest moment in the entire series – Luke’s affirmation at the climax of Return of the Jedi (“I am a Jedi, like my father before me”). Rogue One is the rare blockbuster which isn’t afraid to kill off its characters instead of finding contrived ways to let them survive inescapable doom, which gives it weight and a well-earned meaningfulness. Although it has a weak first half and the characters are nothing to write home about, the climax fully redeems it: it’s arguably the strongest Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back.

Mustang (2015)

Five sisters in conservative, rural Turkey find the net of tradition closing around them in this eloquent and gorgeous debut feature from Deniz Gamze Ergüven. After they’re seen playing with boys at the beach, a nosy neighbour tells their family, inciting patriarchal fears about their marriageability and their sexual corruption. An early scene features them being taken to the doctor so he can confirm that their hymens are intact and they remain virgins – the matter-of-fact acceptance of this violation by all involved is chilling.

There is a loose age cluster of three older sisters – the liberated Sonay, the resigned and apathetic Selma, the impish and rebellious Ecce – and two younger sisters – Nur and Lale, who serves as the narrator and offers a perspective by turns childish and curiously cynical and penetrating. Regardless of the age gap, they’re united in a way which seems to transcend their individual identities – they blur together in dreamy montages featuring them packed into a single bedroom, enjoying a playful physical closeness, one soul in five bodies. The sisters are orphans, raised by their grandmother and living under the roof of a domineering, violent uncle, the patriarch Erol. They have been given free rein by their grandmother rather than routinely crushed into obedience, which makes them unused to the sudden strictures of barred windows, high walls, and the shapeless dresses – denounced by Lale as excrement-coloured– they’re made to wear to preserve their modesty.

For all that the social issues make the film sound preachy or political, Mustang’s ideological ambitions never interfere with its art. Its explorations of masculine possessiveness and insecurity are woven seamlessly into the narrative – when Selma’s wedding night doesn’t result in the blood-stained sheet which is prized by the husband’s family as (disturbingly medieval) proof of a virgin wife, her husband suspects he’s been duped and takes her to the hospital so the doctor can inspect her for the second time. A still, minimalist shot takes in Selma lying on the berth with a sort of impassive discomfort, as the doctor probes off-screen. Her hymen was present all along – her husband simply couldn’t penetrate it. It’s an elegant comment on how the girls have been objectified and dehumanised to assuage the pride of weak men.

While those elements of society are given their just – and stomach-turning – representation, Mustang doesn’t dwell on misery. The girls are vibrantly alive, finding ways around paranoid familial monitoring, high walls, and forced marriages. Not all of them make it – but they rarely resign. A particularly beautiful sequence has them escape from the house to go to a football match in Istanbul. When they wind up appearing on TV as part of the crowd, their grandmother and their aunts must scramble to prevent their uncle and the other men from seeing, which leads to a deliciously comic solution. There’s an interesting distinction between the gentler, more discreet tactics used by the women and the simple violence of the uncle, Erol. Their scramble to save the girls is a rare moment of female solidarity across generations. But when the girls return from the match, it’s their grandmother who has the house walls raised and locked gates installed. She’s the one who knows that Erol is sexually abusive, but doesn’t go to the police. She’s the one who has them married off, happily or otherwise. Even the women are complicit in the oppression of their nieces and granddaughters.

While Mustang occasionally delves into montage, it's for the most part a naturalistic film (albeit with beautiful, saturated cinematography which gives it a hallucinatory shimmer), stringing together incidents of cause and effect, sibling banter, and vignettes of household routines. The life of the sisters is neither all misery nor the happy childhood it should be. Being trapped in their situation, they accept the presence of inequality and oppression without fully reconciling themselves to it. There’s no thesis-statement scene where they have a philosophical debate over the rights of women with their elders – luckily for Erol, who could have scarcely moved beyond the repellent platitudes which come from his educational TV programs (‘Women are too bold nowadays – where are the women who blush when men look at them?’) if challenged on the point. The film’s retort to this imprisonment is made ably by taking the perspective of the sisters and showing them both for the blossoming young women and the playful children they are. In its world, the former must be stifled – the latter robbed of innocence. Thankfully, though Mustang is unsparing in its depiction of the realities of life as a young girl in backwater Turkey, it has the heart to give the girls some freedom. 

The Nice Guys (2016)

Between the mismatched pair of investigators, the convoluted criminal conspiracy, the steadily-rising death toll, and the LA setting, it’s obvious that Shane Black is repeating himself with The Nice Guys, and his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a hard act to follow. But with an upgraded central pair of Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, and an even more quip-heavy script, Black pulls it off – and then some.

Holland March (Gosling) is a private investigator ripping off old ladies to make the rent on his ostentatious palm-fronted house. Jackson Healy (Crowe) is an enforcer who beats people up for a fee – bad people, usually, like a 70s version of pre-superpowers Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool. They collide when March goes looking for the wrong girl – Amelia – who hires Healy to break his arm and warn him off. After couple of semi-competent henchmen pressure Healy to give up Amelia’s location, he teams up with a very reluctant March to figure out what’s going on, and why everyone around Amelia keeps dying.  

While the plot lacks the elegance and the final emotional gut-punch of Kiss Kiss, the film more than makes up for that with sheer entertainment. Crowe and Gosling are an even more delightful comic pair than Downey and Kilmer, because while the latter two had a largely-stable dynamic of Downey being a bumbling idiot and Kilmer insulting him, Crowe and Gosling take turns to be the smart one. Gosling’s alcoholic private eye Holland March is likeable in spite of himself – underneath his cowardice and basic lack of morals, there’s a sort of scrappy underdog cleverness which resembles the famous fictional private eyes of old, and his honest terror at the chaos around him adds an audience-surrogate aspect to his charms. Crowe is largely relegated to playing the straight man as the bemused enforcer Jackson Healy, but March is so vibrant as a character that Healy doesn’t need to do more than stare in disbelief at his screw-ups to get a laugh.

The Nice Guys has a hilariously wacky plot featuring a porn film that’s secretly an environmental expose about car pollution, and auto manufacturers trying to suppress it, but it never quite comes together into a sensible, coherent whole. The villains are similarly unengaging – they either follow in the tradition of Iron Man 3’s amusingly self-aware henchmen or play stone-faced killing machines. The most enjoyment to be had out of them is either watching their incredulity when our heroes – for want of a better word – keep making fools of themselves.

Nevertheless, the opulent excesses of 70s porn mogul’s mansions and five star hotels being recreated in full, the joke-a-minute pace of the script, the unusual amount of slapstick and inventive physical comedy, and incredibly weird – but hilarious – divergences involving a giant fly and Richard Nixon, all signal that Shane Black had the time of his life directing this film. His enthusiasm is contagious. 

And while the film’s delights are mostly on the surface, Angourie Rice as March’s precocious 13-year-old daughter Holly is the film’s emotional center, in a superb performance. At one point, March asks her: “Give it to me straight. Am I a bad person?” and she agrees with zero hesitation. Their dynamic is almost one of equals, with Holly more a sort of long-suffering little sister than a daughter. At one point, fed up with March’s apathy and alcoholism, she explodes at him, and you can’t help but wince at her cuttingly honest anger and disappointment. If the film has any emotional arc, it’s about Holland learning to live up to his daughter’s expectations. That might be clichéd, but like everything else about The Nice Guys, all you have to do is put the right actors in and give them a good enough script - and it works great. It might the most entertaining film of the year so far.

A Bittersweet Life (2005)

A Korean gangster, Kim Sun-woo, is told to shadow his boss’s girlfriend to find out if she’s unfaithful. If she is, he must execute her and the man she’s with. When Sun-woo can’t go through with it, his life gets complicated.

Sun-woo is presented to us as the epitome of professionalism, a man equally comfortable while obsequiously pouring drinks for his boss and while beating up thugs from a rival organisation. Early long shots that follow him gliding through the gleaming, symmetrical decor of the hotel owned by his organisation underscore the impression of his infallibility. The camera moves from the visitor’s areas to ramshackle brick service corridors with leaking ceilings, which I took to mean little more than that the Korean mob’s respectable front hides a grubby interior. But it seems to replicate the experience of watching A Bittersweet Life, too.

The first twenty minutes of the film are typical to a fault, introducing Sun-woo, his boss, the task that’s set to him, with room for action scenes and the first blush of attraction between him and his boss’s mistress, Hee-soo. Present too is the definite implication of infidelity – he doesn’t yet have proof, but it’s almost certain that he’s eventually going to have to kill her. In this respect, the film’s conflict plays out fairly predictably. What’s odd is its tone.

The first sign that I wasn’t watching something by-the-numbers (if very well-made) came with the introduction of the loathsome Baek, the employer of the thugs Sun-woo casually dispatched. He’s not happy. He calls Sun-woo, who’s apathetic, telling him to come to the hotel and speak to him in person if he has a problem, then hanging up. What follows is an odd mixture of comedy and brutality, as Baek snatches the handle of the corded phone away when one of his henchmen tries to take it and redial. The cord detaches from the phone, rendering it useless. It’s a neat gag, and the henchman can’t help but giggle. The psychopathic Baek explodes, throws the phone at him, comes around the desk, and uses the phone to beat him till we hear the wet thump of flesh and bone rupturing. He can't use a phone with bloody hands, so another henchman flips open a phone and puts it to his ear without having dialed anyone. Baek is incensed to the point of giving up entirely, cursing at his incompetent staff before telling the man who to call.

That dual sense of comedy and brutality pervades A Bittersweet Life. Scenes which would be tiresome if played straight, with Sun-woo as an invincible action hero killing his way through the mob, become arresting, tense, and amusing as they're played to maximise the bumbling of all involved. Sun-woo’s veneer of urbane unflappability is shattered when his boss finds out he didn’t kill the unfaithful girlfriend, and he’s brutalised and brought low in surprisingly pathetic ways. From then on he’s less the dangerous gangster we saw early on then a sort of scrappy, miserable underdog, like a hard-boiled PI on the downslope of one of his stories, taking beating after beating while trying to reach the truth. The film has the familiar skeleton of a revenge narrative – our hero trying to get even with the boss who betrayed him – but engagingly subversive execution which keeps it from ever getting boring.

A Bittersweet Life begins and ends with two pieces of sappy Zen wisdom. A disciple sees a tree moving in the wind and asks his master what moves. “Neither the wind nor the branches move, it is your heart and mind”, his master says. Later, the same disciple awakens from a dream, sobbing, and says he cries even though it was a good dream, because he knew it was too good to ever come true. I’m not sure those extracts are appropriate – the film’s subversively comic approach and its casual brutality seems to work against their melodramatic, faux-profound nature, even as the occasionally-overwrought weeping violins of the soundtrack and Lee Byung-hun’s moving performance as Sun-woo justify their inclusion. The film seems torn between Fargo-esque black comedy and an urge to romanticise its subject matter. But even if it’s not perfectly-realised, it’s certainly worth a look.

Anthony Jeselnik: Thoughts and Prayers (2015)

When you come to an Anthony Jeselnik show, you know what you’re going to get. He’s become famous as a shock comedian who’ll joke about everything from dead babies to national tragedies. That can be a problem. It's hard to surprise people into laughing if they're prepared for everything. He gets pigeonholed as someone with a shock-value gimmick, and if that was true, he'd have flamed out a long time ago. But there’s a lot more to his technique than getting laughs out of saying what you’re not “allowed” to say.

Here’s an example. He opens Thoughts and Prayers with this joke, after the usual region-specific spiel (here, it’s in San Francisco) about how he loves being in wherever-he-is.

“Got to walk around a little bit today. Saw a baby.”

Pause. The audience is laughing in anticipation. This is one layer – for someone else, seeing a baby might just be nice. But they’re anticipating the sick twist.

“Saw a baby locked inside the back of a hot car. So it’s been a great day. Love that.”

Pause. They’re cheering. This is what they expected: I saw a baby – the baby was dying, I enjoyed that. Is that the whole joke? But then:

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a monster. I tried to help the baby. Tried to throw a rock through the window.”

Pause. More laughter. This is the escalation of the original joke: I tried to help it, by probably killing it with a rock. He’s piling on. Is this the whole joke?

Wait:

“Window was down.”

They erupt. He set it up, hit the punchline – perfect delivery – then doubled down on the punchline, then added yet another twist. Epilogue:

“Ruined that baby’s whole weekend. It was worth it.”

That’s Jeselnik’s solution to an audience who thinks they know where you’re going. It’s not as simple as just extending the jokes. It’s about making the expected become unexpected, through framing. It’s about misdirection. Anthony Jeselnik is probably better at misdirection than any other comedian right now. That joke isn’t even in the top 10 jokes from that special. It’s just a warm-up, so I felt comfortable spoiling it because it demonstrates his technique. Regardless of your attitude to his material, you have to appreciate his craftsmanship. He keeps pulling the rug out from under the audience, in almost every joke, and it magnifies the impact.

There’s an inherent self-reflexivity to Jeselnik’s act that other comedians with more normal material don’t have, or need. Throughout Thoughts and Prayers, he comments on how the crowd is reacting to each joke. Right after the baby-in-the-car joke, he throws out another offensive one. Great delivery, great misdirection – everyone erupts. I won’t spoil it. Point is, after it, comes an aside:

“See, that joke, that joke is a test. To see if you guys are cool or not. That thing about the baby in the car, that’s just me clearing my throat. If you laugh at that joke, whole show goes great.”

Getting the audience into that cosy space of mutual acceptance is gratifying for them, but Jeselnik’s act has sharp edges and a constant need for surprise and a slight discomfort. So this isn’t a ceasefire. If most comedy acts are the performer and the audience laughing together, Jeselnik’s is the performer vs. the audience. He makes them laugh even when they’d rather not. People laugh while covering their eyes in amused shame, while shaking their heads in half-hearted negation. Which is why the next joke is immediately prefaced with: “This next joke is a test to see how cool you are”. And so it continues, Jeselnik letting them get comfortable before shocking them again. It’s a masterful, rhythmic manipulation of the audience.

Regardless of his technique, jokes which are getting laughs from violating established morality only work for as long as you’re still in a mental space where you’re clinging to that morality. So after about 15 minutes of the act, just when you’re getting used to it, the jokes change – less dead babies and rape, more subversion, more off-the-wall misdirection. From relatively short one-liners to stories. And then back again. The set concludes with 18 minutes of Jeselnik getting real, talking about his experiences as a ‘controversial’ comedian and how Comedy Central tried to control his show. That’s probably the best part – it’s just as funny as the rest, but the ironic distance he keeps from the audience has shrunk. He’s almost confiding. And what he has to say is honest and occasionally even profound. Plus, he ends on maybe the single best joke in the whole special, an act of misdirection which required a solid 5-6 minutes of setting-up. How real was he being? Who cares? 

Anthony Jeselnik: Thoughts and Prayers is on Netflix.