Suzume (Nanoka Hara) and her companion, Souta (Hokuto Matsumura) - a dreamboat who, hilariously, spends most of his time magically transformed into a three-legged chair - cross the country trying to close up portals that open in areas that have been abandoned because of disasters or the shrinking population, as though patching up the tears in a social fabric that’s wearing thin all over. But despite featuring both a mysterious love interest and a talking cat, Suzume is a more pensive affair than it first appears, one that reflects what it means to come of age when the future feels so uncertain.
Makoto Shinkai’s latest is another of the openhearted romantic fantasies he’s so good at, a road-trip adventure about an orphaned teenage girl who helps save Japan from a mythical worm whose intrusions into our world cause massive earthquakes. Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Quasi and a transcript of Vulture Festival’s Broken Lizard panel. They keep making cult movies so that when you watch them, you feel as if you were there when they made them. They’re always winking at us because they know theirs is a fundamentally participatory style of comedy the process is part of the joke. One can easily imagine a version of this movie where the plot is handled with urgency, authenticity, and suspense, but then what would you be left with? The Broken Lizard guys understand that their brand of handmade, good-natured humor doesn’t really work with tighter storytelling or sharper acting, and they’ve honed their approach well over the years. Steve Lemme plays Quasimodo, a torture-chamber employee who gets caught in a petty but murderous tiff between the pope and the king. A riff on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasi may be their first period piece, but it’s basically the same vibes-based silliness. Their work still feels like a group of amiable stoners from across the hall came up with a bunch of dumb, funny ideas to put into a movie and then filmed it all the following morning. The comedy troupe Broken Lizard met at Colgate back in 1989 and never spiritually left college.
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