Cinema Toast
In the inaugural season of Cinema Toast, Jay Duplass (Cyrus) and Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell) understood the assignment. David Lowery (The Old Man and the Gun), Aubrey Plaza, and many others did not.
Such inconsistency is perhaps to be expected under the leadership of series creator Jeff Baena (The Little Hours; Horse Girl), whose track record of middlingly executing great ideas remains intact with this postmodern experiment.
For each episode, a different director is invited to takes clips from visual works in the public domain, edit them in a new context, and recruit actors to record freshly written dialogue. It’s a terrific premise and an inspired means of encouraging remote collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic — and also one that seemingly best lends itself to a wacky, wise-cracking approach in the vein of its no-doubt forebear, Mystery Science Theater 3000.
This potential reaches its gonzo peak with Duplass’ “The Cowboy President,” which blends the 1951 Burt Lancaster/Robert Walker western Vengeance Valley — with gender-bending vocal casting — and scenes from multiple Ronald Reagan films to present a comically skewed mix of rugged frontier adventure and 1980s moralism, creating a wild kind of fever dream that may well be the perfect psychological portrait of the 40th President.
Nearly as insanely brilliant, Perry’s “Report on the Canine Auto-Mechanical Soviet Threat” makes intelligent use of a nutty PSA and bizarre lab footage to craft his own Cold War warning. And Baena’s own “Familiesgiving” nicely reappropriates the Jimmy Stewart/Carole Lombard film Made for Each Other (1939) into an awkward Trump-era holiday comedy, with major vocal assists from Alison Brie, Megan Mullally, and Nick Offerman.
But while the series mastermind’s opening installment just barely sustains viewer attention across 25 minutes — a quarter hour or less might have been a more successful parameter for most episodes — other comedic attempts fare far poorer. Both Kris Rey’s hybrid women’s prison thriller and pseudo-Amazon commentary “Warehouse Friends,” and Jordan Firstman’s failed homophobe-skewering “One Gay Wedding and a Thousand Funerals” commit to a rickety central joke early and run it into the ground, making for two of Cinema Toast’s longest sits.
Elsewhere, the melodramatic entries — Plaza’s “Quiet Illness,” featuring a liberated former illusionist’s assistant struggling with domestic life, and Numa Perrier’s “Kiss, Marry, Kill,” which follows a young Black woman wishing away her unfulfilling life for something more exciting — attempt to relay potent contemporary feminist messages while also being zany, but their more serious contexts strain the humor and dilute whatever takeaway each director intended.
Faring even worse, however, are Cinema Toast’s genre-heavy entries. Mel Eslyn’s “After the End” turns the schlocky horror of a ski expedition that meets a spidery monster into a snooze-fest; Lowery’s overly serious and thematically empty “The Gunshot Heard ‘Round the World” simply plays like a condensed version of his chosen films; and the episode with the richest potential, Marta Cunningham’s “Attack of the Karens,” fails to say much of note about modern toxic white privilege while using would-be slam dunk Night of the Living Dead as her core text.
Though amusing moments arise within each of the 10 episodes, the losses far outweigh the victories in this first go-round — but across the hits and misses, perhaps other filmmakers will feel inspired to see what they can do with the format and more fully realize Baena’s vision.
Grade: C. Rated TV-MA. Available to stream via Showtime Anytime
(Photo: Showtime)
