An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn ** (2018, Aubrey Plaza, Jemaine Clement, Emile Hirsch, Craig Robinson, Matt Berry) – Movie Review

Hooray for another memorably awful movie from British film director Jim Hosking, whose first feature film The Greasy Strangler premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 22 January 2016. Desperate, tacky, and body fascist and vaguely homophobic, An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn is the pitiful humour of the self-loathing.

It has a very home-made, gleefully amateurish feel to it, intentionally so of course, like they were making it all up as they went along, after a few too many beers. I expect it’s actually carefully script and soberly made. The film premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival on 20 January 2018.

Hosking has a very good cast to try to make the very, very weird An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn work: Aubrey Plaza, Jemaine Clement, Emile Hirsch, Craig Robinson, and Matt Berry. And all of them go for it, full on, the only way to go, succeeding pretty well.

Aubrey Plaza stars as the centre of the storm, Lulu Danger, unhappily married to Shane Danger (Emile Hirsch), manager of the burger joint where she works. He fires her, she steals money with the help of crazy Colin (Jemaine Clement). he is crazy and he’s crazy about her too. And then Lulu discovers that Beverly Luff Linn (Craig Robinson),  a weird man she is still in love with from her past, is coming to town to perform An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn; For One Magical Night Only, accompanied by his loving manager ‘friend’ Rodney Von Donkensteiger (Matt Berry). Lulu wants to reconnect.

Plaza scores nicely, she is kind of sweet and sour, appealing and funny, and Clement and Robinson have the right stuff, the comedy chops to make their gross stuff work. Only Hirsch seems out of place in this kind of comedy, a bit awkward, and he’s stuck in an unsympathetic main role (as if any of the roles are sympathetic!) that peters out. Sky Elobar from The Greasy Strangler plays Carl Ronk, Maria Bamford plays The Elegant Woman and Michael D Cohen plays Mitch Stemp.

This pointless, cheap and cheerful, throw-away, throw in anything for a possible laugh, comedy can be viewed as a guilty pleasure, just about, maybe. But some of it is very rancid. Shamefully, perhaps, I confess that I laughed quite a lot, or rather chuckled, but the laughs are all desperate and pathetic. It’s all very early John Waters.

Can a comedy be funny and dreadful at the same time? Yes, apparently so. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn is. Film Four and the BFI have backed it, and the Sundance Film Festival supported it. You’d have thought they’d have learnt their lesson with The Greasy Strangler. But no!

Jim Hosking.

It sure helps that Jim Hosking and his co-writer David Wike certainly have the courage of their convictions. I’m guessing that An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn took a lot of courage. Alas, however, sometimes fortune doesn’t favour the brave. I don’t want to stop Hosking making movies, though. He’s a brilliant one-off. I’m already looking forward to the next one from him. Anybody who can come up with the title The Greasy Strangler gets my vote. 

It says a lot that, of all the brilliant movies at Sundance in 2016, the only one I actually remember off-hand is The Greasy Strangler. I’d never want to see it twice though. Ditto An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn.

An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn is directed by Jim Hosking, runs 108 minutes, is written by Jim Hosking and David Wike, is made by Park Pictures, Wigwam Films, Film4 Productions, British Film Institute and Rook Films, is released by Universal Pictures, and is shot by Nanu Segal.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com