Editor’s Note: Freeline Media’s movie critic, Mike Fried, has the scoop on new films that are streaming. Worth a watch — or stay away? Read on!

By MIKE FRIED

IF I HAD LEGS, I’D KICK YOU (HBO Max)

****

Rose Byrne delivers a career-best performance, a performance that in any other year might cop the best actress Oscar; but all the prognosticators have said that Jessie Buckley will win it as Linda, a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown and having to deal with a sick child, an unsupportive and critical husband who is away for several weeks, a bad therapist and a ceiling that collapses, forcing her and her daughter to live in a shabby motel.  She can’t sleep and spends her nights drinking wine and smoking marijuana and her days as a psychotherapist dealing with demanding clients. 

With one exception, this movie is all about Rose Byrne. That exception is Conan O’Brien who as a fellow therapist who shares office space with Linda and who happens to be her therapist and who absolutely crushes his dramatic screen debut. He plays a defensive and unsupportive prick of a doctor, who abandons her as her physician when she needs it the most. 

A$AP Rocky is also pretty funny as James, the motel superintendent who lives in the unit and who befriends Linda, much to his own detriment. 

Writer-Director Mary Bronstein, who only has one other feature film to her credit (17 years ago), has fashioned what is really an update to the 1970 movie Diary of a Mad Housewife (which coincidentally garnered lead actress Carrie Snodgrass an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe award, like Byrne). Someone told me that it was an exhausting movie because of the range of emotions on display, but I just did not get that. For me, the movie itself felt more like a series of vignettes as Linda goes from one situation to the next.  There’s a reason the film was not nominated for any writing awards.  Having the movie filmed with dark palette does not help. 

But what does help is Bronstein’s decision to hide the daughter’s face until the end of the movie. We are seeing everything through Linda’s eyes. The tight closeups on Linda’s face throughout the film confirm this. And everything she has to deal with — from her daughter’s illness to a runaway patient, to a pain in the ass parking attendant — is her burdens, her cross to bear. We are seeing everything through her lens of reality.  When we finally see the daughter’s face, there is hope that things may change.   

It’s a fever dream writ large with a cascade of emotions that in some respects feel hollow and not heavily emotional – almost exaggerated; and yet in other moments and in other respects, it feels very real.  

For me it’s all about Byrne and her meltdown, which is something spectacular to watch. Her Linda is not someone without problems who encounters difficulties and can’t cope. She’s a psychotherapist who has emotional difficulties and then a series of events just cause her downward spiral.  Linda’s outburst at the group therapy support group for parents of children going through the same illness is a thing of absolute perfection. Her confessions to her own therapist about her failings as a mother cause her to collapse.  

This is definitely a movie to WATCH but it’s not one of the best movies of the year. Given that Josh Safdie produced this, the anxiety level is high, although nowhere near Uncut Gems. 

WATCH IT! 

Rose Byrne – 6/5

The Movie – 4/5 

ELLA MCCAY (Hulu)

**

Ella McCay is the youngest Lieutenant Governor of her (unnamed) state. She is unpopular within her party because she is young, ambitious and too brash for them. Her boss, “Governor Bill,” is accepting a presidential cabinet post which makes her the acting governor for the next 24 months.

However, she has a crisis of her own: she’s had sex in a government office (which is against the law) and a reporter is trying to blackmail her.  And to top it off, her estranged dad shows up at the worst time. She basically has three people in her life — her secretary Estelle,  her husband Ryan (the guy she had sex with and who told the reporter!), and her overbearing and overemotional  Aunt Helen.  There’s also her security man, Trooper Nash, who she describes as “the only cheerful person around her.” 

When he was 47 years old, writer-producer-director James L. Brooks released the most prestige of workplace comedy-dramas, Broadcast News. I don’t think there is any movie that hit the same notes before or since, or had as perfect a pitch.  

So, nearly 40 years later, Brooks decided to evoke that nostalgia.   But, unfortunately, this movie is no Broadcast News, even with Albert Brooks in both films. 

Don’t get me wrong. There are some very funny moments in the film but it is far from sustained.  

I hate to be the one who does reviews by comparison … but Emma Mackey is no Holly Hunter. They were both 29 when their respective movies got released.  They are both detail-oriented control freaks in their jobs and a complete mess in their personal lives. But that is where the similarities end.  You can tell that as sure of the correctness of her positions she may be, Hunter had a bit of fallibility about her and she just pushed past that.  Mackey is absolutely convinced of the rightness of her positions, which makes her cold and there’s no warming up to her. 

And while Broadcast remained pretty much in the realm of workplace, this movie treads the line between workplace and family and the way Brooks draws this family is too much out of The Simpsons.  The characters just do not feel grounded in reality.  In addition, the character of her dumb husband and his mother’s Machiavellian whisperings in his ear, which do drive the plot, are simply too contrived.  And the storyline with the brother further detracts from the film.

Even Jamie Lee Curtis, who I have loved throughout her entire career – even in Perfect (not the movie, just her) and feel that she deserved the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2023 (although a win for True Lies would have been better) was so ingratiating she became cartoonish.  

Speaking of cartoonish, all of the dialogue appears shouted (more Simpsons again) and the emotional scenes really seem paper thin.  Contrast that with Albert Brooks pouring his heart out to Holly Hunter and ending up with “Because I love you. How do you like that? I buried the lede”.  A wholly different vibe emanates from this one. 

There’s a couple of  bright spots in this mess. One is Woody Harrelson as Ella’s estranged father who wants to mend fences.  He falls into the overacting category but with him it works.  He’s played shitheads before so what’s one more time.  In addition, Kumail Nanjiani is excellent as Gov. Ella’s State Trooper bodyguard. I wish he was given more to do. Albert Brooks is terrific as the former governor but, again, in too small a role — although he has his great Aaron Altman moment!  Similarly, Ayo Edebiri is woefully underused as Ella’s brother’s ex-girlfriend.  

Still, Brooks knows comedy and when a huge scandal erupts when Ella is in a “No Phones” meeting, the sight of everyone’s phone in a plastic bucket vibrating is really well done. But it’s a case of too little too late.  

I looked on IMDb and it doesn’t list any future projects for James L. Brooks. And, very sad to say, maybe that is a good thing.  

It’s a mess.

SKIP IT!

SPLITSVILLE (Hulu)

*** 1/2

Wife Ashley wants to give newlywed husband Carey a hummer in his Hummer while driving.  When they witness an automobile crash fatality, Ashley tells Carey she wants a divorce. He turns to his friends Julie and Paul who tell them that the secret of their successful marriage is that it is an open one. But when Carey has sex with Julie, it throws everything they all have into an uproar.  

This is a funny film. 

There is a terrific scene in the movie when Paul starts fighting with Carey when he finds out that Carey had sex with Julie. It lasts approximately 8 minutes and the stunts were done by the actors playing the two characters.  And we’re not talking about just some punching. We are talking about flips onto tables that break, throwing breakables at each other, and igniting a hairspray can — but which stops short when they both say “no knives.”

There is a laugh out loud scene on a rollercoaster, that I am sure PETA will take issue with — but I laughed. 

There is also a tremendous tracking shot where we see the passage of time as Carey’s ex, Ashley, takes on a variety of lovers — but they never leave and become friendly with each other.  

Michael Angelo Covino — who plays Paul — adeptly directs this from a script that he co-wrote with Kyle Marvin (Carey).  As both actors and creators of this film, Covino and Marvin are on fire.  This is a farce in the classic sense with fully exaggerated scenes to make a point. The comedy is broad, with a lot of physical humor. And there’s a lot of visual flair that shows that Covino is an excellent director. Also, they’ve been friends for a lot of years and that ease of friendship is evident, even when they are antagonistic to each other on screen. 

There are some nice comedic touches in the film. The black private school headmaster has a painting of himself on the wall behind his desk with similarly themed paintings of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr.  When Paul’s business fails and he gets sent to jail, Carey visits him and sees Paul’s black eye, he says “Isn’t this minimum security?” Paul replies, “Hey, it’s still prison and sometimes steer hockey games can get out of hand!”

Dakota Johnson (Julie) and Adria Arjona (Ashley) round out the main cast. And the four of them are terrific together. I especially liked Kyle Marvin who looks like Jason Clarke but has the sensibilities of John C. Reilly.  The great Nicholas Braun is woefully underused as a mentalist hired for Julie and Paul’s kid’s birthday party but in his limited screen time he is very funny. 

It’s a really fun film.  It’s not a great film, it’s not one of the best of the year but it is certainly one I was glad I watched. 

And you should be too – Oscar Wilde would love it. 

WATCH IT!

Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.

Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.