Best of the bunch, Frosted over and another Hot Docs misstep

Some of the better films I've watched on Netflix lately have been the Argentinian film Rest in Peace, the French film Nothing to Hide and the US flick The Rewrite. In Sebastián Borensztein’s Rest in Peace (2024) a businessman is caught in a massive debt crisis and has to do something to save himself from the mob. What he does becomes an existential crisis for both him and his family. The film has taut acting and good pacing, shot in Argentina and Paraguay. In Nothing to Hide, this “dramady” is more drama than comedy if only because of what it reveals about the duplicitous character of human nature. The 2018 film by Fred Cavayé uses the metaphor of a full lunar eclipse for the evening of a dinner party, when a group of friends play a game that cuts too deeply into their psyches. (Interesting how even with dubbing rather than subtitles some foreign films can be better than American ones.) In 2014’s The Rewrite (Marc Lawrence) Hugh Grant teams up with Marisa Tomei in a college-setting comedy. I’d forgotten how enjoyable Grant is to watch, one of those actors you never want to miss a movie he’s been in. And he’s great here, the charming, witty and self-denigrating Brit who winds up in a job he never wanted in a backwater town he’d never heard of. Tomei, also a personal fave, plays off him equally, undermining his professional arrogance and giving him the comeuppance he deserves. 

But this film shouldn’t have been released. Jerry Seinfeld’s directorial debut, Unfrosted, came out this month on Netflix. The comedy, starring, again, Hugh Grant,  with Amy Schumer, Jim Gaffigan and Melissa McCarthy, is laughable alright but you’re laughing at it not with it. It’s a Baby Boomer’s delight as a fictional version of how Kellogg’s created everyone’s favorite breakfast joke, Pop Tarts. The entire film has the look of a cartoon. That's part of the point with all those breakfast cartoon characters, interesting how they so appropriately went together during Saturday morning TV cartoons. And while some of the sets are faithfully nostalgic, this flick just tries too be hard to be funny. (Ok, it’s Pop Tarts – we get it!) I felt sorry for Seinfeld with what amounts to a hokey premise and script with the look of a bad college stage play. Likely, all these good actors, their payday made, are trying to put this thing behind them.

Two things occurred to me when watching films from about 10 or 15 years ago, such as The Rewrite and Morning Glory (Roger Michell 2010). One is how better or more professionally dressed people were even that recent time ago. In offices suits and formal wear abound. Nowadays pretty much anything goes, often the uglier the better. The second is age. Many of those actors probably have gray hair now, nor likely dressed as well! And two dead giveaways for films that might seem recent but are many years old are the types of cellphones and desktop computers in scenes, especially those of the heavy boxy look.

Hot Docs, the long running Toronto documentary film festival, not only is in major debt and has suffered a management crisis where some employees walked last year calling the operation a  “toxic” work environment. But it had – just had - to come out and make a statement about the Israel-Hamas War. Of course it was biased to the pro-Palestinian side, the natural position of leftists, and the arts community is made up of plenty of them. According to Honest Reporting Canada, the fest “expressed sympathy for ‘the Palestinian people’ while failing to mention Israel or Hamas, the genocidal terrorist group which started the war, a single time. Equally bad, the statement falsely claimed that Israel is holding Palestinians hostage, a claim without any merit.” Hot Docs has never recovered from the pandemic with audiences down 40 per cent since 2019.