Geraldine Viswanathan Archives | Deep Focus Review

Oh, Hi!

Brian Eggert — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 21:17:54 +0000

“I did a thing,” confesses Molly Gordon’s Iris, the sympathetic if somewhat unhinged protagonist of Oh, Hi!, a familiar, convoluted rom-com that escalates into bad-sitcom level absurdity. When Iris and Isaac (Logan Lerman) escape to a picturesque farmhouse—singing the Dolly Parton-Kenny Rogers duet “Islands in the Stream” in the car like an old married couple—their weekend trip brings some details about their relationship status to light. The “thing” she admits to over the phone, speaking to her best friend Max (Geraldine Viswanathan), is that she has chained Isaac to the headboard and refuses to release him. It started as playful bondage and good sex, until he remarked that he didn’t consider them boyfriend-girlfriend. “I’m not really looking for a relationship,” he says, after four months of dating. And so, Iris has resolved to leave him there, hoping that he might come around after twelve hours or so. This twisted look at modern dating from writer-director Sophie Brooks is the kind of insufferable movie where, if the characters just had a quick conversation to clarify their feelings, they could have avoided everything that follows. But then, of course, there wouldn’t be a movie—meaning Oh, Hi! exists to perpetuate itself. Brooks lays […]

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Thunderbolts*

Brian Eggert — Fri, 02 May 2025 16:53:59 +0000

In the opening frames of Thunderbolts*, the Marvel Studios logo—usually awash in red and silver—appears shrouded in opaque black. Then Yelena, the former Russian assassin, vibrantly played by Florence Pugh, speaks: “There’s something wrong with me, an emptiness… a void.” Dispatched to Malaysia by her CIA handler and tasked with cleaning up a botched experiment, Yelena admits she’s “without purpose” and “drifting.” She’s haunted by the horrible things she did as a child in the same Soviet program that trained her late sister, Black Widow—not to mention the awful things she has done in the years since. Eventually, she’s faced with a living embodiment of her psychological state—a character with an all-consuming dark side whom she’s desperate to save. Indeed, here’s an entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that isn’t about saving the multiverse, the planet, or even a city from destruction. It’s about helping your friends deal with their destructive side and, by extension, the throes of bipolar disorder. That’s not just subtext or a theme; it’s part of the central narrative, making this the most human entry in the MCU and easily one of its best and most compelling offerings in recent years. From the marketing campaign that […]

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You’re Cordially Invited

Brian Eggert — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 03:59:00 +0000

The minimum requirement of any comedy: It should make you laugh. All the usual critical considerations of form, content, and performance come secondary. If the movie accomplishes this basic expectation, a comedy will have fulfilled its primary purpose. Some comedies endure beyond a single viewing because their laughs are timeless. Others rely on shock-based humor and have little rewatchability as a result. I think back to Meet the Parents (2000), a high-anxiety yarn where Ben Stiller must impress his fiancée’s family, particularly his future father-in-law, Robert De Niro. It made me laugh plenty, even though most of its humor was rooted in over-the-top situations that, once seen, don’t play with the same energy on a second watch. Despite never wanting to revisit Meet the Parents for this reason, I remember it fondly enough, and that’s how it should remain. Regardless, the extent to which I can watch a comedy a second time and laugh just as hard factors into my assessment. With You’re Cordially Invited, writer-director Nicholas Stoller’s wedding comedy about two parties booked for the same exclusive venue on the same day, I thought about what makes a worthwhile comedy while writing this review. Much like Meet the Parents, […]

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Drive-Away Dolls

Brian Eggert — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 18:07:17 +0000

With brothers Joel and Ethan Coen exploring solo projects in recent years, it raises speculation about what each sibling brings to their collaborations in terms of narrative, philosophy, and aesthetics. Joel’s first directorial effort alone, the stark adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), shot in black-and-white photography and using minimalist sets, deploys a lean but expressive approach to Shakespeare. Ethan Coen’s new film, Drive-Away Dolls, is a lesbian crime romp bursting with Almodóvarian color and bawdy humor. This follows his first documentary feature, 2022’s Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind. From these examples, are we to assume that Joel is the serious brother and Ethan is the fun-loving brother? Is the former more responsible for Barton Fink (1991) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), while the latter contributed more to Raising Arizona (1987) and The Big Lebowski (1998)? Doubtlessly, any such attribution is reductive and doesn’t consider the myriad complexities of each individual or the Coens’ distinct process, which is famously mysterious given their reluctance to talk to journalists about their partnership with any meaningful specificity. Moreover, Drive-Away Dolls isn’t merely Ethan Coen’s first solo directorial effort of a narrative feature; it’s also his first film alongside Tricia Cooke, […]

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The Beanie Bubble

Brian Eggert — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 19:00:44 +0000

Economic bubbles occur when investors become so fanatical that demand rises beyond sustainable limits, causing the marketplace to correct itself by bursting. Bubbles range from the dot-com stock market in the late 1990s to Japan’s economy in the 1980s. Perhaps the most perfect example is Tulip Mania, which struck the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. With the arrival of tulips in Europe from the Ottoman Empire, the Dutch tulip market began charging increasingly exorbitant amounts for these rare flowers, with unique colors fetching the equivalent of a year’s salary in some cases—all for a commodity that would inevitably wilt and die. The Beanie Bubble tells the story of another fleeting economy that lasted a few years in the mid-1990s, concerning the bizarre secondary market of collectors who paid thousands for Ty, Inc.’s line of small stuffed animals, popularized by the newly formed online auction site eBay. But the movie’s half-hearted investment in its characters and its surface-level capitalistic critique tell a story that would have been better served by a documentary. The Beanie Bubble is the latest in 2023’s curious string of brand biopics that play on our nostalgia for products, which either remain favorites or were short-lived oddities. In […]

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