Kind, optimistic comedies have been having a (prolonged) moment. Far too much pixelated ink has already been spilled on why, even more on the idea that all this niceness and brightness is a bit immature, and still more on the counter-claim that it’s actually progressive and revolutionary, and you could not possibly want to know my opinions on this, because even typing this paragraph was boring.
What doesn’t come up often enough is that it’s very hard to do this kind of thing well. If a creator’s control of their material slips, niceness overwhelms the plot, comedy, and point of view, and then—as a final twist of the knife—bland, saccharine sweetness overwhelms the niceness. A soufflé is a hard thing to make.
Jessica Yu’s Quiz Lady is a damn good soufflé. This is an upbeat and emotionally generous film where almost everything works, and it works because Yu and her team have great technique and great specificity.
Awkwafina stars as introverted nerd Anne Yum, who grew from a shy, closed-off child to a shy, closed-off woman without ever really expanding her life or taking any risks. She has two great loves: the long-running trivia show Can’t Stop the Quiz (she never misses an episode), and her elderly pug, Mr. Linguini.
Then Anne’s elderly mother high-tails it to Macao, leaving behind an eighty grand gambling debt to loan shark Ken (Jon “Dumbfoundead” Park). Ken is charming, and you’re instantly happy to have him on the screen, but Park also invests his early scenes with a funny-but-electric sense of tension. He masters a tone-flip in between sentences when Anne tells him she doesn’t have $80,000: “Neither do I! And that’s the problem.” First part: amiable, almost commiserating. Second part: danger. Ken snatches Linguini, holding him hostage until Anne can make the payoff.
Her only ally in all this is her irresponsible whirlwind of an older sister, Jenny (Sandra Oh), and you can see Anne doesn’t find that reassuring. (The costuming here is both obvious and delightful: Anne is all buttoned-up neutrals, and Jenny is a riot of color and provocation.) Jenny’s been living on the fringes for years, sleeping in her car, coasting from dream to dream, and staging messy emotional breakdowns just so restaurants will give her French fries at breakfast. She has a breezy shamelessness, the perfect trait for bluffing, blustering, and bullshitting her way through life. Naturally, she’s the one who maneuvers the self-conscious, risk-averse Anne into finally auditioning for Can’t Stop the Quiz, where a winning streak could bring in enough prize money to save Mr. Linguini.
Of course the two sisters are both an enjoyable odd couple and essentially soulmates. Of course Anne will make it onto the show, facing down smarmy reigning champion Ron (Jason Schwartzman) and finally meeting host Terry McTeer (Will Ferrell). Of course Mr. Linguini will come home.
But how all that plays out—and how funnily and (yes) sincerely it plays out—is all in the execution, and the execution is mostly terrific. (I rarely find over-the-top “this character is high out of their mind” fantasias all that funny, and this one is, alas, no exception, although hey, Harry Styles’s “Watermelon Sugar” is a pretty good song.) Quiz Lady makes the smart choice to keep its universe relatively restrained but also always have things about two degrees weirder than they “need” to be. That creates both great comedic setups, like a Ben Franklin-themed inn where Tony Hale’s cosplaying desk clerk loathes breaking character, and great key story points, like a pivotal shit in a moonlit backyard.
The movie also knows when to play its elements straight. Can’t Stop the Quiz is timeless and wholesome and not at all believable as a still-running TV show in the 2020s—but Quiz Lady absolutely makes the right call in letting it be and piling up details until it achieves plausibility despite itself. Its outdated sets, cheesy gimmicks, and host’s sincere corniness and quiet good humor are all very winning. It’s like Jessica Yu created Anne’s lifelong happy place as thoroughly and lovingly as possible and then asked: what it would mean for Anne to get there and be changed by it? When you see your values and heroes in action, how can you best respond to that? It’s an unreal situation, but it’s a real question, and Quiz Lady gives it a real and meaningful answer where Anne gets to make a real and meaningful decision.
And, as a final grace note, the performances are terrific. I love the core cast—I want Oh and Awkwafina to make at least half-a-dozen other buddy movies, thanks, especially if they have this combination of humor and rough, awkward emotionalism—but even the most minor players here sometimes get big laughs. (Casting Angela Trimbur of The Final Girls as nursing home assistant Marge was an inspired touch.) The ensemble winds up being so endearing that the film completely earns its cheeky “where are they now?” wrap-up, which it nails with some particularly hilarious captions. I went out smiling, and I’m still smiling now when I think about it. That’s what happens when niceness meets craft and charisma.
Quiz Lady is streaming on Hulu.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Dan Duryea gets a shave and a second chance.
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Department of
Conversation
I also really enjoyed this. I agree that most sequences of characters being blessed out don’t land for me, but I liked this one because of Awkwafina’s performance. The way her eyes get wide and her entire clumping and closed-off mien opens up really sold it for me.
What did we watch?
High Potential, Season One, Episode Two, “Dancers In The Dark
Hacks issues are a problem to be solved next week, so I watched this instead. It’s become clear that I’m not watching this under ideal circumstances: sitting on the couch with at least one loved one, doing something else (like drawing) while they’re actually watching it. It’s not dense enough to really hold my attention, and in fact a big chunk of the episode is lame cliches (I scoffed at “You see a cleaning lady. I see something more.” I mean, for Christ’s sake.).
But there is some potential here. The procedural aspect is, outside the funny hypothesis sequences, the weakest part (watching someone wow everyone with a few facts and some common sense is not dramatically compelling to me), but the chemistry between the actors is revving up. Kaitlin Oslon is by far the best part of this, outside her outfits, and it’s really great when we see her calculating before speaking, and she’s creating sparks for everyone else to work off, especially Daniel Sunjata. My favourite moment of the episode was her getting in the trunk and asking them to close it, and Karadec closing it midsentence – an old gag, but delivered well.
Karadec is warming up to Morgan, becoming more patient with her quirks as he understands them and even becoming amused by her better qualities. We see more of her actual intelligence and charm here, which separates her from other Oslon characters in a nice way. That’s mainly what’s pushing me through, aside from trust in Nath at this point.
Haha, that cleaning lady line. It feels like the show is deliberately trying to stay in comfort-food territory rather than shooting for prestige which I’m finding partly refreshing and partly… well, you get lines like that, and some flat supporting performances. But I’m definitely finding it decent turn-yer-brain-off TV which definitely has its pleasures.
I wouldn’t really say the show takes a leap into becoming something Greater, if that’s what you’re waiting for. It mostly comes down to whether you enjoy a show like this (and find the cases twisty enough to be engaging but not to stretch plausibility) and Olson’s performance.
I don’t like the sound of these “Hacks issues”…
It’s that both my legal and extra-legal ways of watching Hacks have been failing me, and hopefully I’ll be able to deal with it next week.
In Dog Years — a short documentary about one of the greatest AV Club comments ever made *finger to earpiece* I’m getting word this is actually a short documentary about ten old dogs that are about to die and how their owners are coping with that. Sophy Romvari has the great conceit of straightforwardly filming talking heads but putting the camera on the dogs and not the heads of those speaking, the dogs are on laps or couches or the floor, getting scratches and looking tired and sometimes apparently listening to their owners, all of whom are honest about where this is going and what their dogs have meant to them. This could probably not last longer than 10 minutes without massive audience depression, as it is the film is heavy yet graceful. On Criterion.
Dead Calm — but emotional underseen Canadian short films are not why we have Criterion, we have Criterion for 80s/90s trash! This opens with a child’s corpse being hucked through a windshield, mainstream entertainment was a lot different back in the day. And for some reason I thought this was more of an erotic thriller instead of Billy Zane’s sea hobo (or sobo) straight up menacing Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman — the middle of this is very muddled as Kidman is for some reason not trying to just murder this fucking guy and looking up at the source material (almost adapted by Orson Welles!) suggests the adaptation leaving off parts of Zane’s character while keeping the actions those parts caused. Luckily the rest of the movie is much better, great survival filmmaking of Kidman trying to deal with Zane and Neill trying to deal with a sinking boat and at one point all three of them are locked in different life-threatening situations, Philip Noyce may have been a journeyman but he knows his shit here. The much-mocked ending is actually pretty creepy at the start (and frankly it is silly that Kidman would’ve just put Zane back on the sobo bum otherwise) until the absolutely hilarious death blow, that’s American studio interference for you.
A Perfect World — on the other hand, American studios made this. There’s a scene where young TJ Lowther messes something up for Kevin Costner and asks if Costner is mad; Costner says he is not mad and he is not saying this while purposefully letting Lowther understand he is mad, and he is not saying no but lying, he is honest because he has made the decision not to be mad. Partially because it is not Lowther’s fault but mostly because Costner does not want to be a person who is mad at a child and so he isn’t. I never would’ve thought Costner had this in him (and Lowther matches him the whole movie). And this makes the scene at the farmhouse later on all the more horrifying, because it is the flip side of who Costner does get mad at and the why of it. The movie opens with the ending and it’s pretty clear it will not be a happy one but Eastwood and writer John Lee Hancock let things amble quite a bit, shades of wonderfully relaxed stuff like Cry Macho, while still leaving jagged moments to point to where Costner will go. Ebert’s review points out the movie elides multiple people getting shot but never fails to capture someone hitting a child and that is where the violence is, and Eastwood’s Texas Ranger is a guy who wants to avoid violence but has used the state to perpetuate it anyway, it’s initially Classic Crotchety Clint that reveals something trickier and sadder. Not that his sadness does Costner much good. What I started thinking of more and more as the movie moves to its close, holding back from what it knows is going to happen, was how my dad was a couple years older than Lowther’s character is at the time this movie takes place, and how his dad would hit him for being left-handed or because he was mad or for whatever reason a person wants to beat a child, and how my dad could get very mad with us but didn’t strike out. How casual the violence in A Perfect World is and what it means to move beyond that. A lot of people can’t. Eastwood might not know a damn thing but he knew enough to lay the story out here and let it speak for itself, and if it bombed in the U.S. it apparently made more than its money back overseas and the French named it the best film of 1993. I’m not saying they’re wrong.
Saw A Perfect World in the theater, and I remember being generally impressed as well as depressed. Possibly the first time I took Costner seriously as a dramatic actor.
I’ve long defended relaxed and casual Costner and he has a bit of that vibe here, but he’s never approached this since from what I can tell. EDIT: He did Waterworld almost immediately after this!
I don’t know if this is Costner’s best film acting wise and I don’t think this would work with a lesser kid actor. There’s quite a few scenes in this where Costner is 100% the movie star effortlessly owning the screen. He and Eastwood are lucky that Eastwood found a kid actor with such great chemistry with his lead. They bounce off each other so well. The ending wouldn’t have worked as well if you didn’t buy the kid’s affection for Costner ultimately outweighing his fear of Costner. The ending reminds me of the ending in Shane – very dramatic, a bit square with the kid pleading for the not quite bad bad guy not to leave him. Not exactly the same but they feel similar to me.
Lowther has precisely one moment of Culkinism and is without precocity otherwise. He and Costner have a lot by themselves and are so good together.
A Perfect World is so quietly, unshowily fantastic. It infuriates me that so much of the U.S. at the time completely missed how great it is, but at least the French knew what they were looking at.
Some of the smarter reviewers of the time picked up on how APW is in conversation with the prior year’s Unforgiven and it really does play like that crossed with Cry Macho in a lot of ways. What’s really interesting is that makes Eastwood in APW the equivalent of Hackman in Unforgiven, the man of law and order finding out hard truths about culpability.
The Bigamist – Ida Lupino directs and stars in this surprisingly mature story about, you guessed it, a bigamist. Nothing sensational here, just an examination of human emotions and failings, with some interesting thoughts about love, sex, marriage, women in the workforce, infertility, and double standards, with a hint that maybe the solution to everything might be polyamory. Edmond O’Brien is solid as the title character. Lupino the director straddles the line between pure noir and melodrama and keeps things together well.
Frasier, “Fortysomething” – Frasier starts to feel the beginnings of middle age at 41, and finds himself tempted to go on a date with a 22 year old. The denouement, with Frasier being surprisingly honest with the young woman and with himself, is really well done. This episode also might be a counterpoint, intended or not, to several seasons of Cheers where Sam Malone spent far too much time chasing 20 year olds.
NBA on TNT, Celts at Cavs – An abysmal first quarter made it impossible for the Cavs to gain much traction in a game that was only occasionally close and fitfully entertaining. And get used to the Celts, America, as they are pn prime again tomorrow and Saturday.
Ha, I’m 32 and already feeling like “I can’t date a 20 year old, what the hell would we talk about?” This makes those Cheers episodes indeed feel grosser than they probably were in the 80s.
High Potential, episode 3 – didn’t quite do it for me like episodes one and two, but this is still solid entertainment. Enjoying the use of Garret Dillahunt. Now I’ve caught up to UK release schedules and don’t get another episode until… oh, tomorrow.
One of Them Days – First, this got huge laughs at my theater crowd, which is primarily Black, so the movie won! My opinions are irrelevant, though I did roll my eyes at some of the self-worth/opportunity text that got wedged into Keke Palmer and SZA’s really funny, expressive mouths. (SZA is a natural in kind of the Chris Tucker in Friday role, but a spacey artist magnetically drawn to what’s not so cunningly hiding in fuckboi Keshawn boxer’s shorts.) Still a good time and I can imagine having this easy rewatch value – you’re hanging out with the magnetic Keke Palmer and SZA and a bunch of scene-stealers, FFS, including the great Katt Williams, Keyla Monterroso Mejia, Maude Apatow as the new white neighbor introduced with a massive beam of light, and one rapper whose cameo I don’t wanna spoil.
Best way to enjoy this movie, with an appreciative crowd (probably second best: hungover on Comedy Central). Not as strong in the comedy as today’s featured film – good at funny setups, less so with funny payoffs – but in a similar vein of big characters having to jump through increasingly crazy hoops to pay off a debt.
The timeline titles changing eventually to “Until Certain Death” made everyone howl.
SATURDAY
Three Colors: Blue
All three Colors were leaving Mubi so I decided to see them all over the weekend. All three are pretty brilliant, sharing some common elements and structure while diverging greatly in what they’re about and how they go about it. In that sense you could say that this is the most straightforward one -“Juliette Binoche processes the death of her husband and chile through working on his unfinished symphony” is a technically correct but woefully incomplete summary-, but it doesn’t feel like that when watching it, as Binoche’s journey is full of emotional up and down and interpersonal upheavals, all anchored in her performance. She’s grieving the whole time as you’d expect, but there’s space in her for compasion, and fleeting moments of happiness, for sex, and for discovery: the vignettes involving her mother’s alzheimer’s, her sex worker neighbor and her husband’s mistress all have a great maturity and impressive humanity to them. All the while the musical gears are turning somewhere in her soul, with the filmmaking slowly clueing us into the symphony being finished. I must admit that the ending sneaked up on me here, as I expected a performance of the piece rather than the poetic ending we get. I though it was abrupt at first but it’s really a beautiful and apt conclusion, and I’m glat that it disabused me of expected, conventional beats going forward to the rest of the trilogy.
Three Colors: White
A rather brilliant mix of crime drama, film noir, political history and fairy tale. This could definitely pass as a Kusturica movie if it wasn’t way more restrained and subtle than its plot suggests. I mean, this is still a vicious dramedy about a couple that loves and hates each other at heart but it sneaks up at you rather than announce every twist of the knife. The couple is key here, and Zbigniew Zamachowski as Karolo is brilliant at conveying a hangdog demeanor and slowly transforming it into a quiet conviction that allows him to flee Paris back to Warsaw and becoming an unexpected mogul, then masterminding the ultimate divorce revenge (SPOILER again, “you will believe what a divorced man will do to make his ex-wife orgasm” is a correct summary up to a point but there’s way more to it SPOILER). On the other end, Julie Delpy has the opposite journey, starting as an icy angel concealing a limitless capacity for hurting (a Delpy specialty) and ending as just vulnerable enough to love again and fall hard. They really deserve each other.
Big props to every bit of Karol’s relationship to Mikolaj, the most delicate and compassionate part of this movie and one that could have failed if not for both actors nailing it and the incredible writing.
SUNDAY
Three Colors: Red
The most opened-ended of the three, subtly allowing for more than one story being told here and lackadaisically sneaking into the main crux of the relationship between Irene Jacob’s runway model Valentine (you don’t get redder than that) and Jean-Louis Trintignant’s Joseph retired, neighbor-spying judge. It’s a curious relationship that defines the movie, as both characters are genuinely caring and curious for each other despite not fully approving of each other. The movie also succeeds at giving Valentine great interiority and personal fascination to Valentine outside of her relationship to Joseph: it’s not just that she’s stunning, but that she’s clearly at a personal crossroads that she’s doing the best she can to navigate. And then there’s the secondary plot, which sneakily grows parallels to Joseph’s past and implying that time might be fluid and the past is sneaking up on the present. This is never explained and I had to overcome the desire to make connections that made sense on a “factual” basis, going with the flow and understanding that it’s all rooted on the state of mind of these characters in this moment, and really Europe at large. I’m not fully convinced by the ending, and especially the connections it makes to the other two movies, but this one is really all about the journey taking you there. Also, great movie dog. I’d believe it you told me that Amores Perros owes at least 50% of its aesthetic and structure to this trilogy, and this movie in particular.
And as final note, there really is nothing like this trilogy to put oneself in the immediate post-Cold War era for Europe, the kind of End of History years where the collapse of the old order left way for both uncertainty and hope. In time I think uncertainty won out, but this particular trilogy is a deeply human testament to the creating spirit of the time.
I didn’t like the Three Colors trilogy as much as I hoped. Red was the only one that fully worked for me, until that tacked on ending, which I think is awful.
Funny movie, and how refreshing to see a new comedy with actual performances instead of cameos (Hey! it’s Tony Hale = meh – but Hey! Tony Hale is an innkeeper who tries to take payment without acknowledging modern technology = now we’ve got something). Love the commitment to the characters, you can see them just in Awkwafina and Oh’s postures, perpetual spine slump versus always on. Especially fun since we’ve seen them both in the opposite modes – absolutely the right call to switch the roles from the expected (and to ignore the age gap between the actresses irl). But maybe most embodied by Ferrell, once a king of the Apatow/McKay Improv Olympic-style movie, who maintains a character despite ample opportunity to riff outside the lines. There’s some Ferrell-isms, but he’s serving the movie instead of aiming for the most outrageous punchline every time.
For the doc heads out there, this is directed by the same Jessica Yu who did In the Realms of the Unreal twenty years ago – quite the career.
Ferrell really does exercise a lot of control here, and it helps keep his character low-key, which is exactly right for the kind of pseudo-father figure that Anne would have found so comforting for all these years.
I’m going to have to check out In the Realms of the Unreal now.
Least annoying Will Ferrel performance since Wedding Crashers!
Hey, you know what else is on Hulu as of yesterday and would make a fun subject for a Streaming Shuffle column? Let’s Start a Cult!
I have been meaning to stockpile some Streaming Shuffle viewing over the next few days ….
I feel like as long as it’s solely my recommendation, it’s going to be widely ignored… But we need a return to getting more of this kind of lower-budget, confident-idiot comedy back in theaters! So I want to get some opinions from people less biased toward the genre / creatives here than I.
Tell me more!
Well, as per my other comment, it’s low-budget dumb-funny comedy, so keep that in mind.
Anyway, the main driver of the project is Stavros Halkias, a standup comedian who was on one of Patreon’s most successful comedy podcasts (with a title I don’t want to repeat) for six years. After leaving in ’22 to focus on his standup, his career’s really blown up. He is a large, cartoonish-looking man, if you’re not familiar.
Anyway, the thrust is, he plays Chip, a loser man-child and fuckup who’s left home to join a cult, and the rest of the cult finds him so obnoxious that when it’s time for their mass suicide and ascension or whatever, they send him on a bullshit errand (which he still fucks up) so they can do it without him. A few months later, after he’s living at home again and directionless and doing a bad job working for his family’s gravel company… he sees a news report on TV that the cult house has been discovered, and it’s one dead body short. Chip realizes the cult leader Wes is still alive, and tracks him down to blackmail him into starting another cult.
I wrote a longer review at the time over on the Solute, and without going back to look that up, the biggest things I can tell you are, that it is definitely low-budget in a visible way (and maybe they didn’t have a ton of takes on some of the scenes) and shaggy in a first-film way, but it is quite funny. Even for an early work, Halkias has nailed down the essence of this Baltimore loudmouth-idiot-manchild character, much the same way Danny McBride and Jody Hill already had the essential Carolina blustery wannabe alpha male nailed down in The Foot Fist Way (even as they would make much better works on the theme). And Chip, despite being an obnoxious idiot and perpetual fuckup, is surprisingly easy to root for: He’s not malicious, he’s lonely and looking for meaning and acceptance, and that’s really what the movie and his drive to try a cult again is about. (I do remember saying at the time, “The heart of a cult isn’t in the mass suicide; it’s in the found family.”)
It’s not highbrow, but it is really funny, with some very funny supporting performances around Halkias, too. And it’s dumb comedy, but not made by dumb people. Fans of Billy Madison and MacGruber should like it; I’d also say touches of that Hill/McBride work, 00s Will Ferrell comedies, and even Napoleon Dynamite are in its DNA.
Fuck it, I had to look up something from my original review, so I’ll just post it in full here again (and probably yet again if Lauren does feature it):
The new film from the mind of Stavros Halkias, a comedian you probably have heard me mention many times but I’m still not sure any of you actually know. Halkias co-wrote this with director Ben Kitnick and co-star Wes Haney.
Starting in August 2000 with camcorder footage of the cult recording their last testimony before their mass suicide, Haney plays the cult leader William; Stavvy is Chip, a boorish, immature, loudmouth loser who everyone else in the cult gets so sick of they decide to conduct their mass suicide without him. A dismayed, alone Chip returns home to his parents and brother, who are not fuckups, and tries to work at their gravel company. Then a few months later he sees a news report where the authorities have found the now-abandoned cult house… and William’s body isn’t there. Chip tracks him down and convinces/blackmails him into starting a new cult, and from there they start getting recruits: Tyler, a dimwitted Army reject; Diane, a woman angry at the judge who took away custody of her son, and “Jim Smith,” an apparently Eastern European hitchhiker. And on we go from there.
Look, it’s definitely a dumb funny movie, and the shagginess is evident. There are a few things that could have been developed better with a little more time, like the bonding among the new cult, and a few places where it feels like Stav is rushing his lines to get them out. But Stav also has the comic persona and voice of this confident idiot loser character nailed down, and the supporting cast is great and all get some incredibly funny, specific lines as well. (I cracked up nearly every time Tyler spoke, and Jim Smith gets an insane monologue toward the end of the film that’s brilliant. There’s also a very funny one-scene performance from two house painters, playing total idiots completely in sync like Mark McKinney might have done with Bruce McCulloch or Scott Thompson on The Kids in the Hall.) There’s a very funny sex scene, naturally– with setup and fallout that’s possibly even funnier.
The influences are evident: There’s a touch of Napoleon Dynamite, in that Chip’s excuse to his family as to where he was for five years is at “I spent it with my uncle in Alaska hunting wolverines” levels of delusional and unbelievable. (Also, the fact that the loser does get a happy ending.) Adam Sandler’s loud idiots are another touchstone, perhaps most specifically Billy Madison in its deliberate stupidity and protagonist manchild who mildly rises to the occasion. The ending where-are-they-now montage is quite funny, both in its Billy Madison-esque disproportionate retribution for Chip’s enemies, and that it seems like the ending Chip would have written for himself and his friends.
The work of Danny McBride / Jody Hill / Sometimes David Gordon Green is most notable, and why I’ve been thinking about The Foot Fist Way as a comparison point to this film. They’re both first films and reflect that in certain aspects that will be tightened up with experience and refinement, but there’s also a comic voice and persona that the lead/writer already has nailed: Much like McBride’s blustery southern wannabe alpha male voice is already in place in that film, Stav really has his Baltimore confident idiot loser character down pat, including the specific word choices and ways of behaving. (And, to be honest, I think I found this funnier than The Foot Fist Way— Hill/McBride were better at some of the technical aspects of filmmaking, but this is just funnier overall and lands more often– so if I’m right, this bodes for a promising trajectory for Halkias’ future work.)
It is funny and a good time, and while I might not go so far as to call it sweet, there is something sweet in Chip: He’s a loser who keeps making bad decisions because he’s pretty stupid, but at his core he’s a lonely soul looking for meaning and belonging, and it’s his gifts for recognizing other lonely souls and seeing the best in them that ultimately brings this group together. And that’s the real lesson of the film: The heart of a cult isn’t in the mass suicide, it’s in the found family.
I myself have been consoled with hot chips while having an emotional breakdown at a restaurant – I can attest that it is a gambit with almost guaranteed success. The added benefit is that if the breakdown is genuine, the combo of heat, carbohydrates and salt in hot chips is also something of a miracle cure.
You’re right that that level of positivity can be hard to make work, so it’s always exciting to see it pulled off. (It’s one of the reasons I roll my eyes when the ‘you just can’t handle the toughness of the world’ crowd comes out. You’re just afraid of the challenge!)