"Tripping Balls" with "The Studio; the "Brutal Confirmation of Silence" in "Untamed"

"They're vampires," says Seth Rogen's Matt Remick early on in the splendiferously exploding  farce  that is "Cinemacon," the ninth of ten episodes in AppleTV+'s  "The Studio." 

The relentlessly sweaty Matt has just heard some very bad news in his role as the newly installed head of production at Continental Studios, a sclerotic, marginalized company that's desperate for some saleable IP. (Cue a wanna-be blockbuster called "Kool-Aid Man.”) 

What Matt anticipated as a game-changing franchise picture announcement at the big industry hoedown of the episode's title has been put on shaky ground by a warning  from the top dog that  Amazon has a plan to snap up Matt's faltering bailiwick. (Much as Amazon  did in 2021, engulfing and devouring MGM, with the attendant layoffs and a strategic rethink.)  

Matt has just laid the news on his close work cohort, and they're, well, panicking. Whatever happens to the fictitious studio, we viewers must earnestly hope that the cast members of the show's dysfunctional team are reunited by Apple for the upcoming production of their recently confirmed second season. Season 1's bunch are deservedly riding a raft of Emmy noms, including Best actor (Rogen), Best Supporting actor (Ike Barinholtz), Best Supporting actress (Kathryn Hahn AND Catherine O'Hara), Guest Actress (Zoey Kravitz), Best Director of  A Comedy Series (Rogen and Seth Goldberg), Best Writing for Comedy Series (Rogen and Goldberg), and resoundingly, a five-pack of nominees for  Guest Actor in a Comedy Series. 

Yes, that's five nominated guest actors, including Dave Franco, Ron Howard, Anthony Mackie and Martin Scorsese, all in top satirical form. But even in that august company, a fifth nominee stands out—i.e., the comic flash-bang that is Bryan Cranston as company CEO Griffin Mill. (Yep, his name is a reference to "The Player" by this Rogen et al's's movies-besotted creative team.) 

May we spout off with a seasonal sports metaphor? If Cranson's competition is lacing ringing doubles off the wall, Cranston has homered deep into the seats in the ninth inning of game seven of a World Series. As wild and crazy and physically Olympian as his performance is, the real magic lies in how the acting ensemble rises to meet his many and varied comic haymakers. With the entire bunch triggered into hallucinogenic madness, via accidental shroom (etc.) overdoses, they cluster around Mill to first plead, then wrestle and wrangle, their nearly zombie-fied but somehow still randomly staggering superior.   The key exec-suite squaddies under Matt's lapsing command are themselves half-helplessly "tripping balls" (if we may appropriate the language from the headline of The Ringer's s thoroughly amusing oral history of the first season's shoot) but manage to show a desperate team ethic in their devoted efforts to fix the boss, and themselves, amidst the whole psychedelic, kaleidoscopic, boisterous mess. 

The beauty of the farce unfolding (driven by the group's imploding) derives from what we've learned about these now-addled characters who began the series as canny corporate back-biters; but under the influence, they can fall stupidly agog at, for example, an ersatz abstract painting on the wall of the hotel suite where Matt has staged a party featuring an "old school Hollywood buffet" (i.e., drugs).

It's not often one sees such a comic-actor elite turned loose so thoroughly. The show's creators name-check such inspirations as "Go" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," but the hijinks are also staged as somewhat "Hangover"-adjacent (that's a compliment here in Dogtown). Each performer is in top form but somehow set even more deliriously loose by embracing whatever muse is guiding Cranston's exultantly physical and shamelessly tripped-out standard. To compare him to the rest is almost unfair. It recalls what Branford Marsalis said to Terence Blanchard when that trumpeter got a call from the legendary sax man Sonny Rollins, inviting him to a gig to trade licks: "Go get your ass kicked like everybody else."

This is not to undermine how the surrounding ensemble shows out, with Rogen so steadily unsteady at its center. "CinemaCon" commences queasily with Matt fidgeting through a lunch with his mom (Rhea Perlman, proactively disappointed). Matt's already unnerved as he feels the evening's big event rushing towards him, and must nip out to score, with geeky zeal, the shrooms. With his usual anxious obtuseness, he gains but poor mathematical command of just what the right dosage of the "party favors" might be. 

Barinholtz's Sal, as Matt's key deputy (they have nasty kompromat on each other that enforces their friendship), shows every reflex and tic such ambitious movie bros traditionally sport. On July 23 came word Barinholtz is "in talks" to to play Elon Musk in Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI Film ‘Artificial.’ ) Sal asserts a vicious sanity--he is the first to get happy thanks to deploying the "actual pharmaceutical-grade cocaine, like the Keith Richards--shit" that will freeze his face and spawn lurid attitudinal yawps throughout the long night's proceedings.

There's a kind of thespian-teamwork genius in how Barinholtz, always with an edge of the expert industry schmoozer's tradecraft, slips in Sal's now-paranoid, now-barkingly antagonistic yawps. He does this even as he's ducking in and out of the same freewheeling improv lane as Kathryn Hahn, who's playing marketing zealot Maya. Rather than push the envelope, Hahn ever so watchably shreds it, perhaps never more so than when Maya plants an aggressive lip-lock onto Matt—a bug-out that summons up their sometime fuck-buddy status. Because the show hews to the continuous takes epitomized by Episode 2, "The Oner," you dare not look away for even a second. 

Chase Sui Wonders as Quinn is smart enough to play second fiddle to the big dogs—she's the spiritual sister of the terrific Lolly Adefope as Dag, third assistant director and acerbic truth-teller of "The Franchise"'s filmmaking crew in HBO's 2024 series. Wrecking ball Zoey Kravitz arrives late to the party, with her eye-catching unstudied glamor, about to scarf chocolates bearing an accidental shroom overdose. Kravitz plays a haywire variant of herself, owning scenes as the team dreads what she may do later onstage when her turn comes to introduce action character Blackwing in the big event room. At one point, she tucks herself under a bed, as she zig-zags from an aggravated movie star to a hallucinating hippie.

Dave Franco steps up with manic glee in playing himself (psyilocybin, etc.-enhanced). He's the star fronting Ron Howard's "Alphabet City," and Mill's first wing man. We'd met Mill as a crusty, aging studio head showing a certain canniness, but the party's barely jumped off when he starts acting up, alternately bleary and zesty. His every move ushers in the team's career panic.

All manner of plot points spark up in the madness. We watch Catherine O'Hara's post-successful but still striving producer type seek to wreak sneaky vengeance on Mill while various blasé civilians busy with their own lives more or less ignore this completely trashed apparition in a dickey, girdle, panties, garters and a dildo-topped hat. Loose on the verandas, he enacts madman physical humor that follows the "Weekend of Bernie's" template and makes "The Jerk" look like a somber ballet rehearsal. "My legs are--asssssholes," Mill complains at one point. (I swear I will Simoniz Cranston's car if that's his ad lib). Still, we also have the directors and editor to thank for a reveal of Griffin with one foot on a dock and another on a gondola gunwale in the canals at the Venetian.

So, instead of "Encino Man," "Mannequin," or "Summer School'—Matt's idea of classics that seem to come, Quinn speculates, "from your childhood VHS collection." Any yet, for all the misappropriations of Matt claiming to make "art," this is a show about Hope, with the capital `H'—hope for the movie business, hope for friendships forged in competition but proven in industry combat. 

The old-line movie reviewers used to advise their readers to "just go!" so they might appreciate some movie in which, say, a dog finds its way home to a loving household. Today, thanks to streaming, all you have to do is flick on the channel, and you may soon be fighting off spit-take laughs while savoring that mezcal/rocks balanced on your chest. (But don't eat nachos--I warned you.)

II.

This newsletter is often single-topic, but briefly, let's take a look at the No. 2 show on Netflix this week, "Untamed." If you're an Eric Bana stan like me, you may cleave to his  taciturn, not to say borderline mute, portrayal of series hero Kyle Turner. (Yep, it's a stock name that oater- AI might have proffered for this mostly entertaining and virtuous script, co-authored by Mark L. Smith ("The Revenant, "American Primeval") and daughter Elle Smith.

Having spoken with Bana on the sets of "Black Hawk Down" (in Morocco), "Troy" (Mexico), and "The Hulk" (the Universal lot), I know him as a thoughtful worker who brings a particular depth to strong and silent roles. (Unintuitively, his start as a stand-up in Australia seems to yield smart dramatic choices.) 

The critics have groaned about the six-parter's raft of both Western and mystery-plot tropes,  including the salty detective breaking in the female rookie (a deft and winning Lily Santiago). But even as the  plot densities multiply,  Rosemarie  Dewitt does a nice job  showing the rigors of drawing Kyle, her ex with a scarring shared back story, into sifting through their remaining emotional damage. Bana, as always able to do much with nuanced restraint, barely shifts his tensed body language,  leaving her, as she mourns their history,  with only "the brutal confirmation of your silence."

Perhaps the strong showing that "Untamed" is scoring with the Netflix audience will bring a second, if still unannounced season. If so, with several thorny plot twists resolved, Bana can simply do Bana as a for now unhorsed, but thankfully more socialized, investigator. 

Meanwhile, however, don't get it twisted—the first of these two shows to see is "The Studio".   Somebody’s got to hold off the vampires.