Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner in One Night Only
ONE NIGHT ONLY
There's nothing much wrong with director Will Gluck's romantic comedy One Night Only that couldn't have been fixed by ditching its leading man, leaning into its premise about 10 times harder, and turning it into a musical. Granted, we're talking about it being a different movie altogether. But I'd certainly have been on-board with those changes, because the movie we're stuck with largely sucks.
I should mention up front that none of the film's blatant problems are the fault of the fantastic Monica Barbaro, who's still a new-enough screen presence that everything she says and does is winning and surprising, reminding me of Sandra Bullock in While You Were Sleeping – a rom-com charmer that landed not long after the star's Speed breakthrough. Although Barbaro was one of the pilots in Top Gun: Maverick, the 36-year-old didn't make a sizable impression until she played Joan Baez in (and scored an Oscar nomination for) A Complete Unknown, which debuted a mere 20 months ago. That means we're still in our getting-to-know-you honeymoon period with Barbaro, and I, for one, am digging the discoveries. Underused but spiky and endearing in this past February's Crime 101, she's sensational here whenever Gluck and screenwriter Travis Braun can refrain from humiliating her. Yet even when enduring narrative stupidity, dopey slapstick, and that ambulatory block of wood Callum Turner, Barbaro is intensely charismatic, giving savvy, ironic spins to her laugh lines, throwing herself into the physical comedy full force, and – hallelujah! – spending not-insignificant screen time singing. (She also looks absolutely stunning in an emerald-green mini-dress that might be the reason God invented double-sided tape.) Barbaro is fabulous. She's still unable to save the mess she's currently in.
And a mess it was all but destined to be, considering the film's chief inspiration doesn't appear to be a Hollywood rom-com classic so much as The Purge. Honest to God. The America of Gluck's latest is an America that, three years ago, enacted legislation that made premarital sex a crime. (We'll unpack the hell out of this scenario eventually, but for the moment, just go with it.) With every unmarried adult outfitted with a wrist tattoo that alerts authorities when they get too horned up – but only in the presence of another consenting adult, as masturbation is legal (I know, I know … keep going with it … ) – there's now just a 12-hour stretch in the calendar year in which unwed couples can get down without the cops getting involved. As the Manhattan-set movie opens, this is that one night only, and needless to say, practically every single New Yorker is planning to take advantage, including Barbaro's commercial-jingle chanteuse Allie, who's hoping to meet Mr. Right, and Turner's pizzeria proprietor Owen, who's anticipating his annual fling with live-in girlfriend Malika (Maya Hawke). But Allie gets ditched by her wingwoman within minutes of them hitting a singles' bar, and Owen's plans are thwarted when Malika informs him that, this year, she's gonna sleep with their handsome neighbor instead. Could our stars maybe, possibly, perhaps find their ways to each other, and can they do it before the 12-hour grace period passes?
That's the conceit behind One Night Only, and if you have a brain in your head, this fascist setup probably inspires about a zillion questions, some of which I'm able to answer. How did this sex embargo initially come about? Apparently, it was an idea posed by a conservative congressman running on a “family values” platform, and Congress narrowly passed it, and then the Senate passed it, and it became law. Are the American people okay with this? Some of them are, yes. Married folks have no reason to complain, and we're told that teen pregnancy is way down and STDs are nearly nonexistent, as your 12-hour get-out-of-jail-free cards are only in effect if you use condoms. Other citizens, however, are clearly angry, as evidenced by the “F—- THE MANDATE!!!” graffiti on walls citywide … though there doesn't appear to have been any actual uprising against the legislation. This is (mildly future) America. We bitch about unfairness and tyranny and the erosion of our personal liberties all the time but don't actually do anything about it.
At least, that's the idea you get from One Night Only, which clearly doesn't want us to spend much (if any) time considering its uncomfortable, even horrifying implications. But how can you not?! I'll readily buy that Gluck and Braun were simply looking for an original way to keep two fated romantic partners apart for 100 minutes – some contrivance, or a bunch of them, that would prevent Allie and Owen from becoming soul mates until their final clinch at the requisite Happy Ending. This narrative, though, is unignorable, and if the movie were ever going to truly succeed, it needed to fully acknowledge and embrace its grim, dystopian, vaguely sci-fi scenario; it needed to suggest Being John Malkovich, not Gluck's Anyone but You.
Why, in the America as imagined here, do interested parties who want to have sex not simply get married and divorced over and over? Why would a couple such as Owen and Malika voluntarily live together but not get married? Are their other 364 days of the year devoted strictly to cold showers and long walks in the park and book club? Why are no forms of birth control beyond condoms allowed? How did the government get every single American adult to submit to the tattooing process when a full fifth of our population refused a COVID vaccine? Why are gay couples evidently exempt from the enforced edict – is it simple because they can't physically procreate? And not to get too gross about things, but theoretically, as the police are only notified when two sets of wrist tattoos light up, wouldn't there be a huge increase in statutory rape? Wouldn't there maybe be more teen pregnancy, given that kids ages 17 and under know they're only allowed a few years of sexual activity before the cops get involved? I swear, these are questions I do not want to be asking in my rom-coms. But One Night Only all but forces your mind to go there, partly because its storyline is so flabbergasting, and partly because the rom-com element is so underwhelming, Callum Turner being among the smarmiest, most deathly boring ciphers ever to co-headline one of these things.
I know that Turner, better known nowadays as Mr. Dua Lipa, is a native of Great Britain. How quickly can we send him back? Honestly, I don't understand what people see in the guy. He isn't funny, he isn't magnetic, he isn't mysterious, he isn't intense, he doesn't display discernible personality of any sort … . He can pull off an American accent, fine; name a Brit who can't. Not to be (more) rude, but he isn't even that attractive, no matter how much the movies are trying to convince us otherwise. Roughly half the dialogue referencing his bartender in last fall's Eternity centered on how handsome he was, and here, characters keep going out of their way to swoon at Turner's looks – even, in a cameo, Pete Davidson. (In that particular face-off, Pete would get my vote as the better-looking of the two. Pete. Davidson.) The majority of One Night Only finds Allie and Owen deliberately not getting together for reasons both contrived and entirely understandable, and if the no-sex mandate is the movie's most dispiriting element, the fact that the couple's union is preordained is easily its second-most. I kept waiting for Allie to find a valid excuse to ditch this lunkhead once and for all … and what's depressing, especially if you really like the performer, is that Monica Barbaro also looks infinitely happier when Turner isn't around.
Which brings us to what might've ultimately saved Gluck's film if someone else – maybe someone else in the cast – had been given a crack at the Owen role: a complete swerve into musical territory. Hear me out. Thanks to A Complete Unknown, we know Barbaro can sing, and sing well. Happily, she gets to croon several times here, too – hawking the joys of psoriasis medication and vaginal cream via pharmaceutical jingles, and going to town on Yaz's “Only You” in a beauty of a nightclub sequence. But we're also treated to a brief, hilarious role for Charlie Gillespie as an uncouth rock icon who serenades Allie while dancing in his tighty-whiteys. And the film's hands-down-finest scene finds downbeat Allie approached by a piano player named Max (Andrew Burnap), who initially seems like the answer to all of the woman's romantic dreams. He's scruffily gorgeous, considerate, offhandedly funny, as bemused about the Sex Purge as she is, and, most enticing of all, a fellow singer, as he proves when he convinces Allie to join him at the piano for a lovely, flirtatious duet on Air Supply's “All Out of Love.” I grinned from ear to ear. Better still, Barbaro grinned from ear to ear.
Despite my multitude of complaints, there are a number of sweet fringe touches in Gluck's rom-com: the unexpectedly inspired pairing of Molly Ringwald (as Owen's mom) and LeVar Burton (as her new beau); Nicholas Braun as a dorky financial planner who, while hitting on Allie, explains why his company is more interested in wrist tats than curing dementia; the running gag of NYC movies and commercials being filmed everywhere because directors know fewer onlookers will be present. But for a few glorious minutes, in the relaxed and frisky interplay between Allie and Max, you see how One Night Only could've bypassed nearly all its issues simply by giving the role of Owen to Andrew Burnap, and giving him and Barbaro and whomever else two hours to sing and dance their hearts out. We buy crackpot scenarios in musicals all the time and never ask questions! And just 60 seconds of Barbaro's and Burnap's low-key harmonizing – their shared smiles radiating utter delight in one another's company – is more pleasure than you'll find in the film's other 99 minutes combined. I hated knowing the movie was gonna come up with some moronic excuse for Allie to not be with Max, and it comes up with a doozy that involves theft, fraud, parole violation, and criminal disregard of the no-sex policy. In literally every way, Max is still preferable to Owen.
I WANT YOUR SEX
Sure, with their two-fer of Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey, Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jon Bernthal are having quite the summer. As a major fan, though, I'm more thrilled for the season Olivia Wilde is having, her exceptional comic performance in The Invite (which she also directed) now followed by her equally hysterical yet tonally opposite portrayal in Gregg Araki's I Want Your Sex. Over 15 years and change, Wilde has always seemed thisclose to genuine stardom without entirely getting there, and I'm not sure if either of her latest projects – even taken as a collective – are big-enough deals for A-list stardom to happen now, either. But Wilde has long been doing riskier, more satisfying comedic work than any of her contemporaries outside of Emma Stone, and indie stalwart Araki's first feature in a dozen years suggests that its female lead might've been a Barbara-Stanwyck-level femme fatale, and a funny one, during Hollywood's Golden Age had she been born a few decades earlier. And, you know, if Stanwyck were allowed to penetrate Fred MacMurray with an eight-inch rubber dildo.
The MacMurray type here is played, kind of inevitably, by Cooper Hoffman, whose lumpy sad sack Elliot becomes personal assistant to, and eventual sex slave of, Wilde's avant-garde artist Erika Tracy. As the movie starts, though, you don't get MacMurray vibes from Hoffman so much as William Holden ones, considering that the opener doesn't immediately suggest Double Indemnity, but rather Sunset Boulevard – if it were Norma Desmond who was face-down in the swimming pool. Elliot's discovery of his boss' floating, naked body leads to a “9 ½ Weeks Earlier” title card (the time jump an unmistakable nod to Adrian Lyne's 1986 soft-core with Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger), which leads to a mostly light, frisky lark in which a young man realizes his calling to be a submissive to an especially demanding dominant. It's a hetero Pillion; a gender-swapped Secretary. It's also, before the question of Erika's fate comes to the fore, a terrific amount of raunchy fun, the laughs broad and the bitchiness sharp and cinematographer Tucker Korle's astoundingly bright canvas of competing hues making the whole picture look like an explosion in a Skittles factory.
Cooper Hoffman will probably never not be compared to his late father, the wholly singular acting god Philip Seymour Hoffman, and as the years go on, that won't do any favors to Cooper's performance cred. Hoffman the younger is already quite good. He's just not his dad, and won't ever be. But I enjoy being reminded of PSH when Cooper is on-screen. The 23-year-old exudes a similar bone-deep kindness, and like Philip Seymour, as this role proves, he's game for anything. I imagine few young performers of note would have posed for the I Want Your Sex poster, let alone agree to co-star in the movie. And while Hoffman may overdo his orgasmic faces (albeit in ways that match the film's style), he's sensationally sweet and empathetic throughout, sharing a number of wonderful scenes with Mason Gooding as Elliot's sardonic co-worker, Chase Sui Wonders as Elliot's roommate bestie, and Charlie XCX as Elliot's girlfriend whose ultimate nightmare, it's hinted, is sex with her beau.
Still, and with Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho adding incredulous kick as interrogation-room detectives, this is Olivia Wilde's movie all the way. Clad in a series of outrageous wardrobe selections (when she's clad at all) and delivering the most eyebrow-raising directives in the most blasé voice imaginable, Araki's star is an unfailing riot, which makes it all the more devastating when an actual human being appears to slip through Erika's carefully maintained facade. The miracle of Wilde's portrayal in The Invite is that she always seems to be an inch away from a nervous breakdown yet never fully crumbles. In Araki's movie, Erika seems controlled to the point of inhumanity until she's forced to recognize herself as a genuine person, and then the breakdown just comes. Wilde has long been a master of high-wire comedy – her dinner scene with Joaquin Phoenix in Her remains an all-timer in the big-screen history of disastrous first dates – and I Want Your Sex gives its female lead a powerful showcase for her particular brand of emotional-tightrope acting. I very much want Olivia Wilde to be a massive star. It feels like, at long last, we might be getting somewhere.
ICE CREAM MAN
Heaven help me: I enjoyed Ice Cream Man. I enjoyed it despite the unrated splatter-fest being directed and co-written by Eli Roth, whose works I generally can't stand. I enjoyed it despite the many, many sequences of demonically possessed middle-schoolers tearing their parents and teachers apart like they were hand-held piñatas. I enjoyed it despite the ludicrousness of the premise, a sort of half-assed Nightmare on Elm Street situation with Freddy Krueger re-cast as a voiceless confections supplier who resembles John Waters. I enjoyed it despite its too-soon similarity to Weapons. I enjoyed it despite its über-gory sequences set in a church and a cemetery, Roth seeming to raise an obnoxious middle finger to acknowledged standards of decent behavior. I enjoyed it despite Roth himself, who's traditionally a blight on everything he acts in, giving himself a significant speaking role. (He's actually pretty great!) Would I classify Ice Cream Man as a good movie? Hell no. Would I classify it as a fun movie, at least if you have a high tolerance for viscera, outré shocks, and the most sadistic of nihilist endings? Hellz yeah.
In truth, had I seen a trailer for the movie – or even visited its Wikipedia page – before my Sunday-morning (8:30 a.m.!) viewing, I might've skipped Roth's latest entirely, because few directors instill in me such a feeling of “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” But Roth's name, if not his physical presence, is absent from the film until the end credits, and beyond that … I was laughing! Right away! Before a quiet town's children are turned into sociopathic minions through their consumption of frozen treats, the movie's introductory scene is set in a playground so bucolic and wholesome that kids are skipping rope and performing cartwheels and, as God is my witness, playing pin the tail on the donkey. It was like the opening to a slasher-flick Blue Velvet. I was instantly in B-movie paradise, and audibly laughed when our focus shifted to a nearby little-league baseball game, the catcher telling the ump how much he enjoyed the guy's acting-class take on Alec Baldwin's Glengarry Glen Ross monologue. WTF!?, I thought. There are David Mamet jokes! In Ice Cream Man!
Maybe it was merely a case of lowered expectations. In this particular case, pathetically low expectations. But amid all the expected wincing at the truly heinous (if too-gruesome-to-be-taken-seriously) violence that erupted, I grinned or outright guffawed throughout the film's entire, ideally brisk 85-running length. I was taken with the comic chutzpah of young lead Charlie Zeltzer and his brazen sidekick Shiloh O'reilly. I giggled at the shameless parody of Hitchock's The Birds – a better-executed gag than Mel Brooks delivered in High Anxiety – and at the schoolyard post-massacre, the kids playing tether ball with a human head. I marveled at Sarah Abott performing Leonardo DiCaprio's Wolf of Wall Street quaaludes routine for a longer time, and possibly with more finesse, than DiCaprio did.
I shivered, while smiling, at the creepy, broken-Jack-in-the-box melody that indicated the ice cream truck's arrival. I chuckled at Dylan Hawco's dufus with the heart of gold. I giggled at the inevitable exposition dump revealing how Art Miller's ice cream man could be killed, considering it climaxed with directives so specific and complicated that no one could make sense of them. And I loved what made Zeltzer's Jared the film's hero in the first place: The kid didn't sample the evil one's hidden potion, given that he was lactose intolerant. Because of course. From beginning to end, and for all its surface stupidity and undeniable vileness, Ice Cream Man is meaner, wittier, and funnier than it has any right to be, and will eventually be ideal late-night viewing with similarly deranged friends – possibly under the influence of controlled substances, though you didn't hear that from me. You may wanna go easy on the snacks.
