"Everything is as it should be."

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No Hard Feelings: A Review - An Impotent Sex Comedy in the Age of Political Correctness

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A sexless sex comedy that fails to be funny.

No Hard Feelings, a much-hyped comedy starring Jennifer Lawrence, hit theaters back on June 23rd, but I, like most people, didn’t trek out to the theatres to see it then. But it is now available on Netflix and I finally got a chance to check it out.

The film tells the tale of Maddie Barker (Lawrence), a 32-year-old working class Uber driver and bartender living amongst wealthy elites in her hometown of Montauk in the Hamptons.

Maddie lives in a modest home in the otherwise tony Hamptons left to her by her mother when she died. Despite her house being paid off, Maddie cannot afford the local property taxes and must hustle to make ends meet. The town repossesses her car due to unpaid taxes and therefore Maddie is unable to do her Uber side hustle and faces the loss of her home.

She then stumbles upon an ad placed by a wealthy couple who want to socialize their helicopter-parented, nerdy, shy, reclusive 18-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) for the summer before he goes off to Princeton. In return for Maddie “dating” their son they will give her a used Buick Regal…as long as Percy never finds out about the arrangement.

The deal is made and then comedy is supposed to happen but never really does.

No Hard Feelings, which is written and directed by Gene Stupinsky, a writer/director/producer of the American version of The Office, was supposed to be a glorious renaissance for the raunchy comedies of the first decade of the 21st Century – like 40-Year-Old Virgin and Wedding Crashers. Unfortunately, the renaissance of raunchy comedy will have to wait as No Hard Feelings falls as flat as a shit pancake and never even manages to muster a minimal chuckle.

The film’s comedic beats are all a bit off and never land with any rhythm or power. Stupinsky’s direction is shoddy as performances are uneven and many scenes feature continuity errors that speak to a less than sturdy hand at the directing wheel.

Stupinsky’s script is even worse than his direction as a big part of the reason why the film stumbles from sub-par scene to sub-par scene is that the story is unnecessarily complicated.

For instance, the twists and turns of Maddie needing to get a car so she can then work as an Uber driver in order to earn enough to pay off her taxes, is convoluted and dilutes any narrative momentum. Why not just simplify and say Maddie needs $20,000 to pay off her taxes and these rich parents will pay her that to date their teenage son? That approach would streamline the story and allow the characters and their relationship to develop instead of wasting time setting up a premise that doesn’t work.

As charming as Jennifer Lawrence can sometimes be, and she can be extremely charming at times, her performance here is an unruly mess that never coalesces.

For example, Lawrence does a very courageous full frontal nude scene in the film that is played entirely for laughs, but it’s so poorly executed and so tonally and narratively obtuse that it just feels uncomfortably stupid instead of ballsy and bold…and I say that as someone who wholly encourages Jennifer Lawrence, and any actress really, to do as many full-frontal nude scenes as possible. Needless to say, this particular full-frontal nude scene isn’t even remotely funny, never mind the least bit titillating.

Andrew Barth Feldman plays the neurotic Percy and is as charismatic and interesting as a stray tumbleweed. Feldman brings no inner life to his character and so Percy is just a walking, lifeless prop who loiters on screen. To call Feldman’s performance flimsy would be generous.

Percy’s parents are played by Laura Benanti and a ghastly looking Matthew Broderick. Benanti is quite good in the small role as the overbearing, self-conscious mother. Broderick, on the other hand, looks like he ate two Ferris Buellers and is auditioning for the role of the corpse in a stage revival of Weekend at Bernie’s at a dinner theatre just off the interstate in Dayton, Ohio.

Broderick is a perfect example of Stupinsky’s weakness as a director, as his line readings are so flat that he monotonously misses the rhythm and beat of every joke in every scene.

No Hard Feelings was hyped quite a bit back in June when it hit theatres, as it was held up as a sort of rebirth of the raunchy sex comedy but from a female perspective. This approach was novel but ultimately fell short of expectations as the film only made $87 million on a $45 million budget.

Of course, if No Hard Feelings had switched the genders and had a 32-year-old man trying to bang a nerdy 18-year-old girl, it may have created a nuclear meltdown and caused its creators to be sent to the gulag by woke culture warrior Torquemadas for atomic levels of toxic masculinity and cultural problematicity.

The truth is that the traits that made 40-Year-Old Virgin and Wedding Crashers funny, and remarkably successful and popular, namely their raunchy, risqué and randy nature, are verboten in our painfully tight-assed current culture. And so, when a film like No Hard Feelings comes along and tries to emulate that previous era’s comedic tone, but only within very stringent creative and comedic, politically correct limits, it’s neutered before it starts and stands barely a chance to be successful on any level, be it creatively, comedically or financially.

No Hard Feelings is aware of the woke hurdle it must overcome and even tries to chide the suffocating political correctness of this era in a sequence at a high school party, but it, like every other sequence in the film, falls flat and feels decidedly flaccid.

The ceiling for No Hard Feelings was that it could’ve been mildly amusing…but it needed the script to be sharper and the direction to be more precise for that to happen as it would’ve given a chance for Jennifer Lawrence to shine. But the egregious limitations of our current cultural age upon comedy, and the glaring skill and talent limitations of Gene Stupinsky as a writer/director, scuttled the possibility of No Hard Feelings being even average before it ever got going.

If you missed No Hard Feelings back when it was in theatres in June, you dodged a bullet. The truth is No Hard Feelings is too bland and dull to even elicit hard feelings from me…only indifference. This movie represents much of what is wrong with the current state of film comedies…so trust me when I tell you there’s no need to waste your time on this sub-par, unfunny, toothless comedy.

©2023

New HBO Max Teen Comedy UNpregnant Seems to Suggest Abortion is Nothing but a Barrel of Laughs

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 24 seconds

UNpregnant appears to ignore the moral complexity of abortion in favor of promoting an insidious amorality on the issue. 

UNpregnant is the controversial new abortion buddy comedy movie set to premiere on HBO Max on September 10th.

The film, based on the novel of the same name, tells the story of Veronica, a pregnant 17 year-old girl, and her friend Bailey, as they go on a wild and whacky road trip from Missouri to New Mexico so that Veronica can get an abortion.

In its trailer, UNpregnant sells itself as a zany road picture where hilarity ensues when a goofy odd couple of teenage girls steal a car and try to hop a train on their epic odyssey down the yellow brick road to abortionland.

The road picture narrative is a long time Hollywood staple, think Bing Crosby and Bob Hope with their numerous “road to” musical comedies of the ‘40’s and ‘50’s…except in UNpregnant, Crosby and Hope are teenage girls crossing state lines to get an abortion. Hilarious!

It is easy to see why pro-life advocates are up in arms over UNpregnant as the trailer makes the film appear to be a piece of pro-abortion agitprop specifically designed to antagonize them by making light of abortion and demonizing Veronica’s Catholic parents as “Jesus freaks”.

2020 has been a banner year for decidedly pro-abortion films with UNpregnant, the critically acclaimed drama Sometimes, Always, Never, Rarely, and the indie dramedy Saint Frances, which all have an amoral attitude toward abortion, all being released.

Notice I described these films as pro-abortion and not pro-choice, that is because pro-choice implies a grappling with the moral gravity of the abortion decision, whereas pro-abortion removes any moral dimensions at all, and reduces abortion to being akin to getting a nose piercing.

This amoral approach to abortion is perfectly summed up by Kelly O’Sullivan, writer and star of Saint Frances, who told Time magazine, “I wanted to write a story where it’s a non-traumatic depiction of abortion. It’s ordinary and light and sometimes funny…”

Yes, because if abortion is anything it is ordinary, light and sometimes funny.

Hollywood has not always been so devoid of nuance in its depiction of the extraordinarily complex issue of abortion.

In 2007, Juno, Knocked Up and Waitress all portrayed their female protagonists wrestling with an unwanted pregnancy and highlighting the choice part of the pro-choice position, with each ultimately choosing to not have an abortion.

These films were wildly successful, with Juno and Knocked Up raking in $231 million and $219 million respectively, and Waitress pulling in a respectable $22 million with just a $1.5 budget.

Juno also garnered four Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, while winning for Best Original Screenplay.

The commercial and critical success of these films was a result of their mirroring American’s extremely conflicted feelings on the subject of abortion.

Polling shows that a majority of Americans are pro-choice in some form, but as Barbara Carvalho of Marist Poll told NPR, “People do see the issue as very complicated, very complex. Their positions don't fall along one side or the other. ... The debate is about the extremes, and that's not where the public is."

In the thirteen years since Juno, Knocked Up and Waitress hit big screens Hollywood has abandoned the nuance and dramatic complexity of American’s view of abortion in favor of the extremist pro-abortion message of UNpregnant.

Tinsel Town is no longer interested in connecting with as wide an audience as possible but rather prefers to signal their self-professed virtue with cultural propaganda that directly targets underage girls while preaching to the minority of pro-abortion zealots in their midst.

Most troubling for movie lovers is that internal moral conflicts are what make for the most interesting drama and comedy, and to ignore them in favor of self-aggrandizing political posturing is self-defeating for both artists and the movie industry.

An example of a mainstream filmmaker successfully embracing morally complex issues, including abortion, is Knocked Up director Judd Apatow, who has made a career of wrapping moral debates in his signature raunchy humor.

Apatow’s films, which include 40 Year Old Virgin, This is 40, Funny People and Trainwreck, are “conservative” comedies where adult protagonists face moral dilemmas and though tempted to make the libertine choice, eventually make the difficult but responsible one instead.

As Hollywood’s cultural politics become ever more strident, Apatow’s formula, which has made him a gazillionaire, will become anathema in the movie industry and “get woke, go broke” will most assuredly be made manifest in La La Land.

The UNpregnant trailer, which boasts such cringe-worthy dialogue as “it’s my life, my choice” and the insipid tag line “when life gets off track, forge your own path”, makes clear the popular 2007 approach of entertaining adults with moral complexity is now abandoned in favor of indoctrinating kids with extremist agitprop.

Maybe when UNpregnant comes out we’ll discover that it’s a terrific film and more morally complex than its trailer suggests…or maybe it is the canary in the cultural coalmine reflective of how the new, grotesquely woke Hollywood is desperate for its cancer of vapid amorality and decadent depravity to metastasize to the next generation of girls and young women. My bet is on the latter.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020