Babes, 2024.

Directed by Pamela Adlon.
Starring Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau, John Carroll Lynch, Oliver Platt, Sandra Bernhard, Stephan James, Hasan Minhaj, Keith Lucas, Kenneth Lucas, Caleb Mermelstein-Knox, Elena Ouspenskaia, Crystal Finn, and Whoopi Goldberg.

SYNOPSIS:

It tells the story of Eden who becomes pregnant from a one-night-stand and leans on her married best friend and mother of two to guide her.

From director Pamela Adlon and the screenwriting team of star Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz, Babes is fittingly gross in its comedic exploration of the messy, torturous process of pregnancy and childbirth. The great trick pulled off here is that the filmmakers accomplish this primarily through side-splitting dialogue and observations about the transformation of a woman’s body rather than taking the cheap route and crossing into something more pointlessly graphic. There is a balancing act to gross-out humor and one that is also easy to appreciate here, as much of this material hasn’t necessarily been mined for laughs yet. And if it has, it probably didn’t have fearless women collaborators steering the ship to find something authentic and moving inside all the jokes.

Eden (Ilana Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau) are childhood best friends, now living four subway rides apart, with the former making that trek every Thanksgiving to hang out. Michelle, now married to her supportive husband Marty (Hasan Minhaj), already has one child and is expecting another baby when they reunite. They decide to see a movie, with Michelle moving from seat to seat, exclaiming that they are all wet, amusingly unaware that her water is breaking or on the verge of breaking. Suddenly, Michelle is crawling out of that building in a scene reminiscent of and physically funny in the same manner as Leonardo DiCaprio on Quaaludes trying to reach the front door in The Wolf of Wall Street.

That’s the idea of the comedy here, which leaves no stone unturned, diving into every stage of pregnancy, as Eden finds herself with child after a one-night stand with Claude (Stephan James), making the most of a small role and establishing believable chemistry together. For reasons I won’t reveal, although I will say it’s nothing cruel, Claude is out of the picture, leaving Eden set to be a single mom, looking to the already overstressed and exhausted Michelle (who also has a job and further career ambitions beyond parenting) for guidance and support.

There is a tender, quietly devastating moment when Eden asks Michelle if she really thinks she can do this. Michelle’s facial expressions read no, but she is physically unable to tell her best friend that she doesn’t believe in her or that she has no idea what she is getting into.  Part of Michelle’s arc also involves the assumption of being ready to have a second child and the feeling she has had since she got through pregnancy. The early stages of infancy find before everything will be fine and possibly easier next time, when, if anything, it might turn out to be more nightmarish, even if that nightmare does come with a bundle of joy.

Even when Babes is speeding full-throttle through jokes about morning sickness, crazy horniness, amniotic fluids, frighteningly long needles being inserted you know where, or something out-of-left-field silly like Eden wanting a prom-themed childbirth, it’s grounding that comedy into a raw story of a tested best friendship. The situation only becomes more taxing on Michelle, whereas Eden might be planning to lean too much on her for support. The point is that even when the inevitable comedy cliché of fighting best friends arrives, it works here through cutting dialogue and real emotions vented.

Despite maintaining tight control over that characterization, Babes does lose steam as it goes on. This is also not helped by some of the bigger comedic set pieces being dragged out slightly longer than necessary. It’s also almost too convenient for the story that Eden has no one else to turn to for support, although her estranged father does appear for a moving scene. There is also the feeling that, aside from the compelling friendship drama, one has seen everything the jokes have to offer roughly an hour in. Still, when Babes is funny, it is howlingly hilarious and treads new ground, unfiltered and full of infectious, crass energy. 

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com

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The country artist known simply as Ernest is a couple of cocktails deep on a recent afternoon in the rooftop garden of West Hollywood’s Soho House, a diamond pendant the size of a AA battery nestled within the open neck of his blue western shirt.

The pendant, which reads DANGEROUS, is one of three matching pieces he commissioned from a jeweler in Orange County — one for Ernest, one for Hardy, one for Morgan Wallen — as a memento of the trio’s time writing songs together for Wallen’s six-times-platinum “Dangerous: The Double Album.” The western shirt, meanwhile, reflects Ernest’s love of Ralph Lauren. The designer’s career in fashion, as depicted in the 2019 documentary “Very Ralph,” “changed my life,” Ernest says. “Seriously. I watched it three or four years ago and shortly after cleaned out my closet and started shopping Double RL.” Ernest’s mood board for the cover of his new album, “Nashville, Tennessee,” contained a picture of Lauren leaning against a barn with an American flag in the background.

“We shot the cover in my barn,” he says of he and his wife, Delaney Royer, who handles Ernest’s visual content. “But we made the mood board before we even bought our farm.”

The rare Nashville native in country music, Ernest, 32, has always been interested in clothes, even if he lacked the wherewithal to indulge his passion. “High school was Sperrys, khakis and a school polo,” he says. Now, though — thanks to No. 1 country hits he’s penned for Sam Hunt (“Breaking Up Was Easy in the 90s”), Kane Brown (“One Mississippi”) and especially Wallen, with whom he wrote nearly two dozen songs across “Dangerous” and Wallen’s 2023 blockbuster “One Thing at a Time” — he’s got plenty of dough to splurge on more imaginative threads.

“I’m here for like 48 hours and I brought five outfits,” he says with a laugh at Soho House, where he’s spending part of a quick trip to L.A. before heading to Dodger Stadium to watch his childhood friend Mookie Betts battle the Giants. (Thus, perhaps, his choice of blue.)

As a songwriter, Ernest specializes in creating melodies and vocal lines that adapt a rapper’s flow patterns to the cadences of country music; his tunes embody the casual hybridity of a generation that grew up in the overlapping shadows of Garth Brooks and Snoop Dogg. His latest hit, “I Had Some Help” by the duo of Post Malone and Wallen, dropped Friday and rocketed over the weekend to the top of Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart with more than 13 million streams.

“Ernest is one of the most magical songwriters in Nashville,” says Jelly Roll, the Southern rapper turned country singer who wrote his chart-topping “Son of a Sinner” with Ernest. “When we look back at the 2020s, he’ll be one of the names remembered for bringing an entire sound to this decade.”

Yet as an artist he’s trying something slightly different on “Nashville, Tennessee,” his second LP under his own name after 2022’s “Flower Shops (The Album).” It’s a sprawling 26-track collection that reaches back to an old-fashioned country-music sensibility, with rip-roaring honky-tonk jams up against finely detailed string-band excursions and handsome tear-in-your-beer ballads. Among Ernest’s goals for the project is introducing these traditional styles to the younger listeners tuned into his more modern work.

“If you like how this feels,” he says, “go check out Vern Gosdin or Roger Miller or go listen to Ray Charles’ ‘Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.’”

At the same time, he’s eager to broaden the minds of older folks potentially predisposed to write off the likes of Wallen or Hardy. “Some of the songs I’ve written for other artists definitely fall into the that-ain’t-country category,” he says. “It’s easy for somebody to say that because they’ve got 808s or trap beats or whatnot. But that’s coming from the same hands that wrote a song on my album like ‘Ain’t as Easy,’” he adds, referring to a sumptuous weeper draped in pedal steel.

Ernest, left, Morgan Wallen and Hardy at the Academy of Country Music Honors in Nashville in 2022.

(Terry Wyatt / Getty Images for ACM)

The result has a kind of musicological sweep that not only honors the cultural breadth of Ernest’s hometown — a city he loves enough that his and Royer’s 3-year-old son is named Ryman after Nashville’s storied Ryman Auditorium — but also evokes ideas of lineage and inheritance.

“Ernest is a real student of country music, and I think he’s on track to becoming a master of his craft,” says Lukas Nelson, who joins Ernest for a duet in the jumping western swing number “Why Dallas.” “He’s already had commercial success, but I think he and I would agree that mastery has nothing to do with that. Mastery is more about the depth of your artistry.”

Indeed, you can look at Ernest’s ambitions with “Nashville, Tennessee” as his way of spending some of the music-biz capital he accrued over the last few years. “That’s what I did with ‘A Star Is Born,’” says Nelson, who views the songs he wrote for the 2018 Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga blockbuster as “a vehicle to further fuel my creativity.”

“I want this album to live beyond just being a hot, sizzling record right now,” Ernest says. “That’s secondary to the importance of it being one of those albums we’re talking about down the road.”

He might end up getting it both ways: Last month, Ernest had a plum main-stage performance spot at Indio’s Stagecoach festival, where he also put in cameos with Wallen and with Nelson and Nelson’s 90-year-old legend of a dad, Willie. And he’s up for two prizes at this week’s Academy of Country Music Awards with nods for new male artist of the year and artist-songwriter of the year.

Before he turned seriously to music, Ernest (whose last name is Smith) grew up playing baseball. He’s known Betts, a fellow Nashville native, since he was 8 and competed both alongside and against him until the two graduated high school. “Mookie struck out one time his senior year, and it was off me,” he says today with a grin.

As a kid, his “holy trinity” of musicians were Eminem, John Mayer and George Strait; after dropping out of college, he made a short-lived go at being a rapper but eventually refocused on country songwriting. Hunt’s 2014 debut “Montevallo” — on which the former college football player struck an elegant blend of country, hip-hop and R&B — was a crucial inspiration. “It had everybody scrambling,” Ernest says. His first big moment as an artist came in 2021 with his song “Flower Shops,” a duet with Wallen that cracked the top 20 of Billboard’s country chart and led to a profile-boosting gig as Wallen’s opening act on the road.

For the new album, which opens with a funny (and true) two-hander with Jelly Roll called “I Went to College / I Went to Jail,” Ernest and his producer, Joey Moi, instituted what they called “the Opry filter.” That meant that every arrangement had to be playable by the live band at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry — no samples or programmed beats allowed.

“We did everything as authentically as possible,” says Moi, who also produces Wallen’s and Hardy’s records. “All the Nashville players — these guys who’ve been around for two, three, four decades — they’re all obsessed with Ernest. They’re like, ‘Oh, my God — finally.’”

Ernest performs at April’s Stagecoach festival.

(Evan Schaben / For The Times)

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Yet Ernest hardly maintains a gatekeeper’s mindset regarding country music. “I think the genre is wide open right now in the best way ever,” he says as he orders another drink — a bee’s knees, to be exact — from a server. Asked what he thinks about the handful of pop stars — among them Malone, Beyoncé and Lana Del Rey — making country moves lately, he says, “It just means there’s more eyes on country music. I think Beyoncé is gonna do for the genre what Taylor Swift did for the NFL. I’m honored to get to have an album drop and be living in the same world as the queen.”

Does he have a favorite track from Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter”? “Spaghettii,” he replies. “I love that she’s talking her s—. You can tell she did her homework, and I appreciate that.” Ernest says he’s heard Del Rey’s “Lasso,” the title track from an album she’s said is coming later this year, and that it’s good; he also says he’s written “a bunch of songs” with Malone beyond “I Had Some Help.”

He’s just as enthused about Zach Bryan, the raw, rootsy singer-songwriter from Oklahoma who’s irritated some in the Nashville record industry by building an enormous audience without relying on the help of country radio. “I f— with how much he doesn’t give a f—,” Ernest says. “Things can be so pretty and so careful. What he does is refreshing. People say his records sound like he recorded in a bedroom or a basement. But guess what? Most people are listening to it in a bedroom or a basement.”

As Ernest prepares to spend the summer on tour with Brooks & Dunn, does he ever think back to his early days as a rapper? “Oh yeah — that all pulses through my DNA as a creator,” he says. His favorite part of rapping was freestyling, he adds; he’s got videos on his phone of he and Jelly Roll going back and forth on a tour bus for an hour at a time.

“Now when I pick up a guitar, it feels like the world’s moving slow,” he says. “The thoughts are coming way faster than I have the time to say them.”

We checked out Tarot to see if it’s better than the trailers suggested, and surprisingly the answer is yes.

*warning: minor spoilers for Tarot

I need to start this review with total honesty: my expectations for Tarot going in were pretty low. In fact the only reason I went to see it is because tarot cards were heavily featured in the plot and I wanted to see what they were doing with it.

The plot follows a group of friends who decide to mess around with a mysterious deck of tarot cards after finding them at a house they’re renting for the weekend. It’s all fun and games until the predictions start coming true in the most gruesome way possible.

To my surprise, Tarot was actually fun to watch. To be fair, how the characters get into this mess is still predictably idiotic, but really a bit of stupidity from the characters is usually required for most horror films to work. Once the story is set in motion though, it plays very well. The writers put some thought into the “why” of how this story works and it shows in the final result. I’m sure real practitioners of tarot would roll their eyes at several aspects of this story, but I really think what the writers came up with worked for the sake of the overall story.

One thing Tarot does very well is with the jump scares, of which there are many. It becomes a bit predictable towards the end, but this doesn’t make them any less scary. The main enemy of this story, who will remain nameless for spoiler reasons, is very terrifying with how they’re presented. It would be interesting to see this character explored more deeply in another story. While the ending of the film seemed quite final, it wouldn’t be the first time a story has been reworked to let a monster reappear in another entry. I’m not sure if that will happen with Tarot, but I wouldn’t mind if it did.

Tarot also did a good job with its characters. A lot of times in films of this genre, most of the characters are barely fleshed out, with only the final girl and maybe the penultimate survivor getting the most development. That’s not the case here though. Enough time is spent with the characters before terrible things begin to happen that the audience develops a bond, albeit a slim one, with all of them. This makes their horrific fates all the harder to watch, especially toward the end of the film.

I will say that Tarot didn’t quite stick the landing. For a minor spoiler, there’s a last second twist that, while funny, also takes the audience right out of the dramatic moment that just finished. I commend the writers for sticking so closely to the story’s premise, but there was surely a better way to go about it.

All in all, while not the most original story, Tarot is good spooky fun. Check it out if you have a free afternoon, you might be surprised at how much you enjoy it.