Post by StevePulaski on Aug 31, 2017 12:10:09 GMT -5
Addicted to Fresno (2015)
Directed by: Jamie Babbit
Directed by: Jamie Babbit
Natasha Lyonne and Judy Greer in Addicted to Fresno.
Rating: ★★
Director Jamie Babbit has an eclectic, sporadic filmography for someone that stormed on the scene and made a name for Natasha Lyonne in 1999 with But I'm a Cheerleader. Following the low-key success, she went on to make the moody drama The Quiet with Camilla Belle and Elisha Cuthbert - two actresses you don't hear from at all ten years later - and the radical feminist drama Itty Bitty Titty Committee that looked like an anarchist film student project. Now, Babbit makes her most marketable movie in years, Addicted to Fresno, with a great claim to infamy by featuring Natasha Lyonne on the film's cover clutching a large, transparent pink dildo. At quick glance, the sex toy looks like a phone, which is perhaps why I'm not sure Wal-Mart knows what movies they're carrying.
Other than that risque attribute on the film's cover, Addicted to Fresno is a bargain bin vulgarian comedy, overloaded with f-bombs and mean-spirited humor, but also a pleasantly subversive take on our relationships with our siblings We learn from an opening monologue by Martha (Lyonne) that sisters are often known to stick together, but this is a story of how one sister sunk the other. She's speaking of her own blood-relative Shannon (Judy Greer), a recovering sex addict who is getting her life back on track in a half-assed manner by working with Martha as a housekeeper at a hotel in Fresno. Like all terrible relatives, Shannon takes advantage of her sis' kindness and charity, landing the two in hot-water when she decides to have sex with a goofball staying at the hotel and then accidentally kills him when Martha finds out, passing it off as rape.
Upon being blackmailed by local cemetery owners (Fred Armisen and Allison Tolman, who, along with her role in The House, has become consistent at playing the role of a woman caught up in shady or illegal business) for hush money, Martha and Shannon decide to make the $25,000 they need by selling dildos to a convention of lesbians. One of the convention's attendants happens to be Kelly (Aubrey Plaza), Martha's gymnast with an insatiable crush on her since the day they met, while Shannon also tries to manage the marital situation of a man (Ron Livingston) she has been having sex with on the side under the nose of his wife.
If sitcoms could feature an onslaught of dildos with more life and realism than the characters in their shows, on top of having the privilege of utilizing all of George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words," they would look an awful lot like Addicted to Fresno, which is why we should be grateful for the FCC. Written by Community and Portlandia writer Karey Dornetto (whose other claim to fame was her book called 101 Ways to Shave Your Ass), her first feature-length written film falls drearily short of the satirical, raunchy edge of her resume, and Babbit can't step in and turn a belligerent comedy into a charming gay love story without a lot of incredulity added. Let's just say, the two make an admirable attempt at overload.
Addicted to Fresno wastes perfectly good performances, particularly by Lyonne and Plaza, who don't come around as often as they should. Plaza, still stuck in the post-Parks & Recreations crux of doing lackluster raunchy comedies presumably in order to get the clout and finances to fully commit to riskier, independent ventures, loans her witty and bug-eyed aura to a character oversimplified and unworthy of her disarming talents. Greer, on the other-hand, is the most frequently funny, with her highlight being a scene where she teaches a woman she tormented in high school (Jessica St. Clair) how to properly give a fellatio to a man that she slept with while the two were dating.
Babbit and Dornetto's collaboration is an exercise in bad taste, with a proclivity for bad laughs over good ones. It runs amok with race, sex, gender, and penis jokes to the point where you wish everyone involved in the creative and writing process would shower off and do better, especially Lyonne, who we already don't see enough of outside of Orange is the New Black to passively accept Addicted to Fresno as some kind of a treat regardless of quality.
Starring: Natasha Lyonne, Judy Greer, Aubrey Plaza, Ron Livingston, Molly Shannon, Jessica St. Clair, Fred Armisen, and Allison Tolman. Directed by: Jamie Babbit.