Over the weekend I made chicken sandwiches from a recipe entitled “Copycat Chic-Fil-A Sandwiches.” I also watched a movie where a discontented, immature male relived the same day over and over again and was only shaken from his mundane life by trying to win over a lady love interest. You may have heard of it, it’s called Groundhog, er, Palms Springs.
When I first saw a trailer for Palm Springs, I was excited. It looked funny, and while some are put off by Andy Samberg (who plays the lead, Nyles), I rather enjoy him. But my main question was, “Is this going to be any different from Groundhog Day?”
Strong horror stories thrive on the mysterious and the unknown. They are anchored in a sense of atmosphere and emotional evocation that, when most effective, connect with us on a visceral level. That effectiveness can often be undermined, however, by a listless sense of scope or underdeveloped elements. The Beach House, the debut feature film by Jeffrey A. Brown, walks a thin line between what works and what frustrates to create a film with several memorable sequences, even if the whole of the experience remains somewhat lacking.
Sometimes a film hits all the right personal preference buttons yet still leaves you underwhelmed. That was my experience with Shirley, Josephine Decker’s loosely autobiographical account of fiction writer Shirley Jackson’s years in North Bennington, Vermont. It really gets the process of imagining characters and bringing fiction to life in your head. It captures with great specificity both the intrigue and the trappings of elite university culture, particularly during the 1950s in America. Its depictions of what it means to be a woman, a wife, and a creative person are also excellently realized. Yet rather than boldly claiming new cinematic territory with these themes and concepts, I found the film, in both style and storytelling, to vary little from the lineage of films that have covered this same ground.
Going into Palm Springs, I had not seen a trailer. I knew who the two leads were and a friend of mine had told me she’d enjoyed it. That’s it. So when it very suddenly becomes something more than a standard rom-com about 15 minutes in it comes as quite a shock. If you have not watched the trailer and want to go into the film completely unspoiled then I recommend simply going to Hulu and watching the movie before reading the rest of this review so you can be as surprised as I was. Also, that makes this easier for me as it’s really impossible to review Palm Springs by dancing around the bulk of the movie.
