As someone who grew up loving ’80s movies, I can’t help but wonder if we’ll ever hear about ’80s movies. Yes, many of them were good. Many of them were also great. You could make both statements about any decade in the past 120 years. (Let’s take a look at 19th-century movies—you’re still discovering them.) When, oh, when filmmakers finally get around to facing each other, and just for a change of pace, they’ll write some cinematic love letters to the summer. “Were they released from the Spanish league, ‘Cavalheiros Extraordinários’ and ‘From Justin to Kelly’?”
The page isn’t, that’s right. “The 4:30 Movie” is a nostalgic throwback to the summer of 1986, when teenagers religiously attended freestyle games, made ludicrous predictions about the Mets never winning the World Series and went through a day when everything in the movie theater went from theater to theater. It’s simple: Buy a ticket to a movie rated G, PG or PG-13 and then enter all the sex comedies and R-rated horror movies you can find.
The 4:30 Movie stars Austin Zagor (Clerks III) as Brian David, a media student and major film geek who has just invited his sophomore girlfriend, Melody (Sienna Agudong, Resident Evil ), to see The 4:30 Movie. Censored. Comedy “Bucklick.” In case you were wondering, “Bucklick” is about a funny detective who… oh, he's “Fletch,” okay? You see a fake version of “Fletch.”
Anyway, Melody can't leave work until the afternoon, but she says she'll meet Brian at—wait for it—the movie at 4:30 p.m.
Brian, his idiot friend Billy (Reid Northup) and his friend Burnie (Nicholas Cirillo) go to the theater and plan to see three movies in one day: Backlash, Escola de Odontologia, and Belheteria's biggest hit of the year, Astroblaster and the Beavermen (essas são as piadas). What should have been a typical day of going to the movies is repeatedly discriminated against by the theater manager, Mike (Ken Jeong), who keeps throwing one or more of them out. Sometimes, for sexual offenses.
“O Filme 4:30” is, to be fair, a pretty good idea for a movie. It’s a bad comedy about best friends in a unique place, shooting guns, yearning for love, and making pop culture jokes as one thing goes wrong. Kevin Smith helped invent the genre with “Clerks” and “Mallrats.” Taking the scene to a movie theater in a ridiculous moment in the past and celebrating a cinematic experience—it has to be a preparation. Or what could possibly go wrong?
Oh my god, that typo means a lot, it's not… Very bad both ways.
A simpler observation is that “O Filme 4:30” simply isn’t funny — it has laughs and looks back, one of which was during the credits. The most important observations are about why it’s not funny. For one thing, Smith’s character is seriously lacking in the ginger department (someone says he’ll never make a “Star Wars” prequel, and again, those are very religious). Smith doesn’t generate laughs with long-winded noises, and he doesn’t push our boundaries with moments of shock. The characters aren’t insightful or hilariously unbalanced. They just have faces that talk about things.
So, again, “The 4:30 Movie” doesn’t set these characters up to be happy in the first place. Smith sticks to the movie’s premise and undercuts it, rarely overdoing it in a bad way, so the stakes always feel low, even for his heroes. He’s trying to outwit old boss Mike, but he has no energy in his antics and no power in his antagonism. They just sit in their seats or stand around waiting for Melody to catch up for most of the movie, and when something “funny” happens, they stand like bullets. Junior Mints doesn’t fund the box they’ve frozen together and they don’t fund it. They want out.
Smith's editing is more concerned with capturing the mood of a pre-summer day than with conveying comedy or drama. Anything else is meaningless. So, without a tight plot, a tangible conflict, or any kind of energy, there's not much to understand, no expectations to subvert, and therefore, no Ika-Ika.
I don't want to say that Smith's latest news is a complete lie. The young actors have understood the task, but only the textbooks are wrong. Zajur has a wonderful quality of homem comum, Cirillo fears all the arrogance that the arrogant teacher can define, and Agudong looks effortlessly charming. He is happy.
Smith also seems to enjoy making fake trailers for his fake movies, with misleading titles like “Sugarwalls Nun,” and won't ruin the rest because there are only three. Unfortunately, I'd rather watch any two of Smith's fake movies than 4:30 , because at least they look funnily weird.
The weird thing is that Smith puts a real effort into making the fake trailers look period-worthy, but when we get to dinner “Astroblaster” it’s a timid, green-canvas experience written on meta, without the retro flair. This is, after all, an ode to cinema, so why isn’t there the biggest blockbuster of the summer? And how come no one seems to notice or care, not even our obsessive movie heroes?
“The 4:30 Movie” is, like all of Smith's late-era films, a movie that seems like it's fun to make. This time that joy doesn't extend to us in the audience, but it's impossible to deny that Smith's friendly nature comes through. It's not a particularly good movie, or even a good one, but it just seems like you can't handle it. It's a little too late. And too late.
