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    ‘Stress Positions’ Review: It’s Giving Pandemonium

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    The writer-director Theda Hammel’s biting, delirious quarantine comedy skewers white gay men in a world where fact, fiction and authentic experiences collide.For “Stress Positions,” the writer-director Theda Hammel shows her hand when a character says, in a world-weary voice-over, that the madness we’re about to witness “happened so long ago.”The movie is set in summer 2020.Karla (portrayed by Hammel) is a sardonic transgender massage therapist in New York, and the first of the film’s two narrators. Her opinion of white gay male privilege, especially that of her best friend Terry, who went from intern to husband of his boss, can be stinging.“Stress Positions” finds Terry (John Early) in lockdown in the brownstone of his soon-to-be ex-husband, Leo (John Roberts). Upstairs, Coco (Rebecca F. Wright), a tenant, puffs cigarettes and vaguely hews to Terry’s Covid safety protocols. Terry’s nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a Moroccan fashion model, is ensconced at the garden level. The 19-year-old Bahlul is the son of Terry’s estranged sister who converted to Islam. He has a broken leg, soft brown eyes and a small notebook. Is it a memoir? A novel? As he writes, he ruminates on his mother in a voice-over. We find out that Karla’s girlfriend, Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), wrote a minor-hit novel with material filched from Karla’s life. Here, fact, fiction and authentic experience are all themes to be mined.Beyond skewering white gay male culture, the movie is also a dig at the pieties of the recently politicized. Terry, Karla and Vanessa don’t know where Morocco is, or Yemen or Kabul, for that matter. And Ronald, a food delivery guy (Faheem Ali), plays a telling role in exposing the hierarchy of lives that matter.If some of the points seem muddy, the filmmaking is expressive and deliberate. With shimmer, shadow and verve, “Stress Positions” — which recently closed the New Directors/New Films festival — captures the often hallucinatory pandemonium wrought by that “long-ago” moment.Stress PositionsNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      Theda Hammel’s Road to a Directorial Debut With ‘Stress Positions’

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      Theda Hammel is under no delusion that Covid is box-office gold.“I don’t think it’s going to draw people in, the idea of dwelling on that time,” she said last week at the Soho Grand Hotel in Manhattan, sipping an herbal tea on a leather couch. “But I think it has value as a little bit of a time capsule.”Later this month, her debut film, “Stress Positions,” an ensemble comedy that showed at Sundance, will ask audiences to return to the early days of the pandemic, a time that many people would rather forget.And what about the no-straight-people-in-her-entire-movie thing? Was that some sort of canny strategy?No, just a function of circumstance.“I don’t know any straight people,” Ms. Hammel, 36, said. “I don’t know any.”The film is largely set within the confines of a Brooklyn brownstone, where an anxious 30-something, played by the comedian John Early, tries to keep his potentially virus-carrying friends at bay as they clamor to meet his 19-year-old nephew, an injured Moroccan model he started caring for just as the world shut down.Masks dangle from chins, but the word “Covid” is uttered only once. That’s because Ms. Hammel is less interested in life during the pandemic than the way a certain set of bourgeois millennials responded to it. The preoccupation of her movie is privilege: the way it coddles, insulates, divides.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Best Comedy of 2023: Jim Gaffigan, Beth Stelling and More

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      It’s time to stop taking Jim Gaffigan for granted, and more surprising takeaways from specials, stand-up sets and other funny moments this year.Comedy didn’t boom or bust this year. It sprawled. There seemed to be many more specials than ever, most self-released. Yet Netflix still reigned, dominating the conversation with event specials from John Mulaney and Chris Rock. Twitter (now X) became old news for jokes, while TikTok and Instagram bustled with young performers. Here are a few highlights.Best SpecialIt’s easy to take Jim Gaffigan for granted. His consistency can become boring, and his interests (food, religion) tend not to draw headlines. Over the years, he’s been pigeonholed as the clean comic or the Hot Pockets one (because of a signature bit). But while he’s not flashy, each year he gets a little better, figuring out new challenges that fit his everyman aesthetic. With his 10th special, “Dark Pale” on Prime Video, his comedy has become so skillful, varied and pleasingly prickly that it demands closer attention. Leveraging his benign dad persona, he paints a scathing portrait of our culture post-pandemic that makes you laugh at our cruelty, haplessness and delusions.Best BreakthroughBeth Stelling is a meticulous professional in “If You Didn’t Want Me Then.”Netflix“You have to be careful with pedophilia,” Beth Stelling says in her wry new hour, “If You Didn’t Want Me Then” on Netflix, pausing for a precise beat, “because you catch it just by touching a kid.” After this risky joke, she picks up a cup of tea and sips, daintily. Then she sticks her pinkie out, as if she’s a member of the royal family. It’s one of many small perfect moments in her comedy, which can be as warm and loving as it is crass and ruthless, that reveals her as a meticulous professional in her prime.Best StorytellerIt’s exciting to come across a comic who resists comparisons. In his fascinating special “The Domino Effect Part 2: Loss,” on YouTube, Ali Siddiq tells childhood stories with a jaunty delivery that has a different pace than anyone else’s. Is he even a comic? He’s telling high-stakes, dramatic tales of heartbreak and run-ins with the police, but with the lightness and ease of someone just filling you in about their day. Sad and thrilling, odd and straightforward, rambling and intentional, these are yarns that grab your attention, then toy with it.Best BitJohn Early (with Will Lawrence) mixes satire and cover songs in “Now More Than Ever.”HBOJohn Early is a forerunner of, and the gold standard for, the fashionable genre of musical comedians (Catherine Cohen, Caitlin Cook, Sophie Zucker, Leo Reich) parodying millennial and Gen Z vanity. His long-awaited special, “Now More Than Ever” (on Max), is a mix of stylish satire, soulful cover songs and occasional observational humor. At its high point, he takes a conventional premise, about how Apple manipulates users to collect their data, and transforms the idea into a comic tour de force centered on the ugly phrase “Ask app not to track.” He repeats it so memorably that it’s been lodged in my brain ever since.Best New Double ActLike many funny duos, April Clark and Grace Freud of Girl God look and sound nothing alike — one a lanky slacker, the other a more fiery baritone — but they riff so effortlessly that they seem to merge. In videos announcing themselves as joke writers for Dave Chappelle or in shows raging sarcastically about their Uber driver asking how they are (“Google: The news”), they favor fabrication and transgression, accumulating momentum out of pingpong conversation more than conventional jokes.Best Closer Even an act-out is haunted by death in Marc Maron’s special “From Bleak to Dark.”Oluwaseye Olusa/HBOWhat would suicide by bat look like? Only a comedian would think long and hard on the subject. In “From Bleak to Dark” (Max), Marc Maron imagines it as pitiful, anguished and riotously comic. This act-out, coming at the end of a special haunted by death, operates like the scene in Hunter S. Thompson’s book on the Hells Angels in which Thompson, after spending months hanging out with the biker gang, describes getting beat up by them. It’s a perverse catharsis.Best Online RoasterThe arch-elitist Dan Rosen has created his own critical beat on Instagram, doing stylish and ruthless insult comedy on tasteless interior design, hack décor and shallow architecture. Projecting his face over photos of celebrity homes, he displays an acute eye for overdone trends (anyone with a green kitchen should be ashamed) and a knack for the perfect put-down (“the granny couch”). He compares Chris Brown’s floors to a bowling ball, then says: “I would say it’s the worst crime he ever committed” before a pause.Best Canadian Newcomer“I moved to America this year,” Sophie Buddle said at the start of her “Tonight Show” set in April. “I wanted to see it before it ends.” Then she sucked in her bottom lip and giggled. This chirpy, comic maintains a steady nervous chuckle while joking about masturbation and annoying Los Angeles types. But she knows what she’s doing, finding fresh spins on familiar subjects. She is part of a long line of cheerfully raunchy young comics, and her sneaky jokes are full of sharp elbows. When talking about the United States, there’s pity in her voice that feels like revenge for so many years of American comic condescension toward our northern neighbor.Best Take on Crowd WorkIn a short Netflix set commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Improv club, Deon Cole lays into how comics repeatedly ask audiences to do things like “give it up for the ladies.” Looking besieged, he says, “Got me wasting my claps.”Best Response to a Beeping CellphoneUpon hearing that familiar sound during his recent hour, Joe Pera responded in a deadpan, “You just ruined my life,” then kept it moving.Best ImpressionThat the John Mulaney special “Baby J” (on Netflix) manages to live up to expectations is a feat, considering he addresses his much-publicized stint in rehab and, less so, his equally talked-about divorce. His re-creation of his star-studded intervention shows off a multitude of niche accents. And yet, he gets the biggest laughs going broad and traditional with his Al Pacino take. One distinctive voice nails another.Best BuffoonDiana Morgan as Philomena Cunk in “Cunk on Earth.”Jonathan Browning/NetflixIn the grand British tradition of Alan Partridge and Borat, Diane Morgan’s long-running character, Philomena Cunk, finds laughs through the bloviating of a self-assured idiot. Her comic documentary series, “Cunk on Earth” (on Netflix), finds her in tasteful clothes, inside museums and outside ruins, asking intellectuals questions like, “Is there a great roof of China?”Best YouTube SpecialA highly competitive category. Never have there been more funny people putting out specials on this platform. Django Gold’s folksy screwball jokes, Chase O’Donnell’s deliriously ditsy act, Seaton Smith’s sneaky Madison Square Garden show and Joe List’s hilariously straining efforts to prove that he is fun are highlights. But Nathan Macintosh’s “Money Never Wakes” stands out for its exasperated comic laments about the cocooned lives of the 1 percent. His jokes are tightly constructed, and what makes them sing is his nervy voice, which starts to squeak when he gets worked up, almost as if the sound is coming from a record speeding up.Best Comic-on-Comic ComedyGary Gulman’s new special, “Born on Third Base” (due Dec. 21), is filled with the intricate, language-drunk jokes that have built him into a critical darling. This is his most political and pointed work, focusing on the inequities of class. He uses many subjects to illustrate his point (his take on dentistry is very funny) including the disparity in comedy, with Jerry Seinfeld as an example of the elite. Gulman’s consideration of Seinfeld’s wealth will get attention, but what stands out more is his strong series of jokes on Pop-Tarts, a subject Seinfeld has owned for years and is making a movie about for Netflix.Best Gen Z SurrealistIf the next David Lynch comes from TikTok, where a Dada aesthetic reigns in many of the short comic videos, keep an eye on Savannah Moss, a cheerful young Arizona absurdist who is just getting started. She produces, edits and stars in cartoonishly bizarre videos featuring milk spilling from the sky, goofy puns, jump scares and prop humor, along with Moss herself leaping and spinning in the air for no reason. She calls these quick hits of nonsense fever dreams, and they resist logic, though they have circular narratives that work well on repeat. And while these bits remain raw, watching her slowly but prolifically develop a distinctive handmade visual vocabulary gives me hope for this digital medium. More

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      in Television

      John Early and His Dizzying New Special, ‘Now More Than Ever’

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      In his new Max special, “Now More Than Ever,” the comedian mixes cringe comedy and cabaret to dizzying effect.John Early’s boundary-blurring new Max special, “Now More Than Ever,” has the perfect title. The hyperbole, salesmanship and euphony of the expression match his literate satirical persona. And it also hints at the main asset and flaw of his hour: the too-muchness of it all.Early is a triple threat in the old-school sense (singing, dancing, acting) as well as in the comedy one (stand-up, sketch, improv). And by improv, I don’t mean the Second City variety so much as the art of vamping, which he jokes is the one thing members of his generation, millennials, were taught to do. Perhaps. But anyone who has seen Early glamorously filibuster (a paradoxical phrase that also suits him) while hosting a live show knows this can be as entertaining as anything.While he might be best known for his scene-stealing flourishes on the series “Search Party” or his long-running double act with Kate Berlant, Early, whose influence can be seen on a whole generation of comedians, shows off a little bit of everything he does here. Using the frame of a behind-the-scenes pop music documentary (Think “Madonna: Truth or Dare”), he mixes goofy comic scenes in which he plays the vain, jerky star with observational stand-up and sultry cover songs.Unlike comics whose music punches up a joke, Early commits to his songs, using a lovely falsetto and pumping bass line in strutting performances of work by everyone from Britney Spears to Neil Young. It’s unusual for a special to toggle between cringe-comedy punchlines and triumphant cabaret exhilaration. And it’s a tricky mix, because the music slows the comedy, and the jokes don’t necessarily complement the music. Early likes being elusive, conflating sincerity and parody, while Ping-Ponging between broad subjects (Donald J. Trump, Silicon Valley) and rarefied references. (He’s the first comic to ever make me cackle at the word “plosive.”)He has more than enough charisma to fit together this jigsaw puzzle of a show. It’s coherent if not easy to access. The key to his persona, I think, can be found in the joke he tells about the always-be-selling vanity of his generation, presenting himself as its avatar. “Here’s what it boils down to,” he says. “I don’t know how to do my taxes, but I do know how to be a badass.” Then he clarifies, “A shell of a badass.”That’s the role Early plays here. In black leather pants, he dances across the stage, flirting with the crowd with as much ingratiation as the camera fawningly displays toward him. This shell is fun to look at, in part because it’s full of cracks. And you don’t just see it when he introduces his parents in the crowd and reverts to a bratty, insecure kid, or when he does a very funny take on the “Access Hollywood” tape that compares Trump to Early as a closeted 12-year-old in the locker room trying to convince his friends he likes a girl. “If we’re honest,” he says, “Donald Trump is not a sensual person.” It’s the way he says “If we’re honest” that cracks me up.One of the many reasons Early is so hard to pin down is that while he leans on swagger and gusto, his most distinguishing moments mix in another register, his bookish alertness to language. My favorite bit is an inspired mountain-out-of-a-molehill joke about how Apple manipulates you into giving up personal data by offering these choices when you try to download an app: “Allow,” a word he describes as “pillowy,” or “Ask App Not to Track,” which he terms “the single most suicidal sequence of monosyllabic sounds.” There’s no way I can do this justice in text, but it’s essentially five minutes of close-read literary criticism that ends in tears and hysteria. If, like me, that’s your kind of thing, you’re in luck.There’s also a strain of comedy here that lampoons the virtue-signaling language of the overly online. Early taps the microphone: “Check, check. You guys can hear me, right?” he asks before adding: “I just want to make sure this is amplifying queer voices.”While Early defines himself as the quintessential millennial, he has the Generation X obsession with a romanticized version of the culture of the 1970s. The grainy film stock and chunky red font of this special remind me of a Tarantino movie. In one revealing nostalgic riff, Early yearns for the days of Bob Fosse, when louche choreographers were on talk shows and dance could be “kinky and mysterious.”Fosse could also be both sexy and ridiculous. While I wish “Now More Than Ever” had a bit more precision and ruthlessness in its direction (by Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey), and there’s a visceral energy lost in the translation from live performance to film, at his best, Early evokes a gyrating, deliriously decadent razzle-dazzle.Toward the end, Early invites his band members to teach him how to play instruments so he can flirt and sexually harass the band, which leads to a visit from the channel’s woman from Human Resources.You get the sense that Early is annoyed by such bureaucratic scolds, but you would never find him responding to it with something as boring as complaining about cancel culture. Instead of defending himself, he flashes a guilty look and rushes into a final song. It’s a hypnotic, joyful performance of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”As the camera swirls and splotches of yellow light flare, Early, sweat glistening under a disco ball, loses himself in reverie. At the start of the special, titles on the screen instruct you to turn the volume up, and it’s good advice. You can’t recreate the feel of a New York dance party by watching a special at home, but why not try? This is comedy that wants you to get up and dance. More