Dubbed an “anti-hate satire,” Jojo Rabbit starts off strong enough, with our hero (?) Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) on his way to a Hitler Youth camp, the strains of The Beatles’ Germanic variation of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the soundtrack. After that somewhat enthusiastic intro, however, the film starts its downhill slide into pointed mediocrity, one from which it never fully recovers.

I guess what I’m saying is that, fully based on Taika Waititi’s comedic output, I fully expected to love Jojo Rabbit, but ended up shrugging my shoulders in a very Teutonic “meh.”

Young Jojo wants to be a good Nazi, so much so that Hitler himself is his goose-stepping imaginary friend. Attending the camp — with a mildly surprising array of guest stars including Sam Rockwell and Rebel Wilson, acting their broadest — Jojo is ostracized harshly because he won’t defend German ideals by snapping the neck of a rabbit.

Despite this, he does his best to conform to der Führer’s rule of law, one that gets a slight bit harder to do when he discovers that his mother (Scarlett Johansson) has been hiding a young Jewish girl in his deceased sister’s room. Jojo does his best to serve the cause while maintaining a tenuous friendship with the girl, mostly succeeding.

While Waititi’s film is full of many comfortable laughs masquerading as uncomfortable jokes, the film eventually breaks with the dark-comedy aspect all together, oftentimes threatening to topple over on its own self-imposed self-importance.

While Davis is serviceable as young Jojo, Waititi is at his comical best as the faux Hitler, speaking with anachronistic beatnik phrasings, getting gentle guffaws out of his imposing terribleness. Perhaps, though, it’s the casting of chubby little Archie Yates as Jojo’s pal Yorki as the surprising comedic presence that gets the film’s continually funniest scenes.

That being said, Jojo Rabbit is still worth a viewing, granted that you know what a disjointed book-burning of a movie you’re going into; it’s not angry enough to be a dark comedy and too silly to be a truly moving experience. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Many people consider Pink Flamingos or Female Trouble to be John Waters’ bad-taste masterpieces, but I rudely disagree and instead offer the soap opera parody Polyester as the true mark of his dirty genius.

With this 1981 comedy, Waters reached a mainstream high-point with the casting of former teen idol Tab Hunter, but the actor (actress?) who truly stands out is, of course, Divine, as overly sympathetic housewife Francine Fishpaw. She’s a typically put-upon and long-suffering woman, constantly taken advantage of by her no-good family: porn theater-owning husband Elmer, foot-stomping son Dexter and table-dancing daughter Lu-Lu.

When the sleazy hubby is caught cheating with his skanky secretary, Francine spirals into a comical abyss of exaggerated alcoholism and lugubrious smells, with her only remaining friend being cleaning lady turned upper-class socialite Cuddles (Edith Massey), who routinely shows up to take her shopping at swanky Baltimore joints only the nouveau riche can truly love.

Things begin looking up, however, when Francine finds lusty love with handsome hunk Todd Tomorrow (Hunter) and all of the carnal pleasures that he brings the plus-size paramour; of course, being a Waters film, it won’t be long until the violently outrageous finale with a happy ending that only a Baltimorean (or Baltimorean at heart) could wish for and truly love.

Complete with an Odorama card that allows audience members to smell bad pizza, stinky sneakers and far, far worse — it’s better than 3-D! — the ludicrous one-liners come fast and furious, matched only by the odious plot that pays homage to both Douglas Sirk and William Castle. Forty years later, Polyester is still a riotous film that satirically peels back the rotten onion that is the nuclear American household.  —Louis Fowler

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When committing to a viewing of Greener Grass, it’s important to know what you’re in for: Not even four minutes in, the lead character gives her baby away to her admiring best friend. This on-a-whim ceding of parental rights is played for laughs.

If you don’t find any humor in that (much less the incontinent grade schooler to come), I offer these irrefutable, inconvenient truths:
1. Greener Grass is most decidedly not for you.
2. You are wrong.

Expanded for the better from its creators’ 2015 short, Greener Grass is not only the funniest film of the year thus far, but destined to grow in estimation as the right audiences find it (versus the other way around) and a fervent cult forms. Much like David Byrne’s initially ignored, now-celebrated True Stories, its loose vignettes form an absurdist whole that redefines deadpan.

Written and directed by its stars, Upright Citizens Brigade alum Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, this satire of the suburbs posits an upper-middle-class middle America covered in a puke of pastels — a neighborhood where golf carts have replaced cars, children bear names like Citronella, and all the adults wear braces on their teeth. Those smiles may be forced, but the movie’s humor isn’t. Lines such as “Do people like my peas?” aren’t read as jokes, because the cast — including current Saturday Night Live utility player Beck Bennett — exudes confidence in knowing viewers attuned to Grass’ admittedly narrow wavelength of peculiarity will catch them.

The ostensible plot — a yoga-teacher neighbor is murdered by the local grocery store bagger — is, much like the characters DeBoer and Luebbe so skillfully skewer, just for show. That both ladies very much look the part makes their pic all the more deliciously subversive. —Rod Lott

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Since having a stroke over a year ago, I’ve lost close to 200 pounds. And, even though I’m considerably older than the titular Brittany in Brittany Runs a Marathon, how the world’s opinion changes — for good and bad — when you drastically change yourself is so honestly depicted here that, unless you’ve been through it, you’ll probably never understand.

Good-time girl Brittany (Jillian Bell, Rough Night) is an overweight party animal who lives primarily on Adderall, self-deprecation and random hook-ups, which, as you’d imagine, depresses the hell out of her. When a doctor advises her to lose 50 pounds, she attempts to get her shit together and starts running around New York with her recently divorced uppity neighbor and a gay dad trying to earn the respect of his son.

The tribulations that Brittany goes through to get to the marathon, from dealing with random food binges to mysterious leg pains to an Instagram roommate who tells her she be fat again soon, is an earnest account of an unhealthy person trying to change not only her outer self, but her inner self as well. That being said, it is also dramatically funny at times when it doesn’t intrinsically hurt.

Bell does a good job channeling these massive insecurities with a fully acerbic wit, but the whole romantic subplot with slacker dog-sitter Jern (Utkarsh Ambudkar, Freaks of Nature) feels a bit shoehorned in, at times threatening to turn Brittany into a stereotypical rom-com; thankfully, director Paul Downs Colaizzo always pulls back when venturing in that territory and returning the focus to Brittany and her own self-improvement.

Of course, I’ve gone through my own journey alone, so maybe I’m just bitter in that regard. —Louis Fowler

Of all the movies from the 1980s loosely based on an Oingo Boingo tune, Weird Science still remains the breast — uh, I mean best – of the lot.

Coming off his back-to-back directorial triumphs of Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, even John Hughes was seemingly tired of all the laid-thick teen pathos; for his next film, he opted for a raunchy teen sex comedy where, instead of having what I feel would have been a full weekend of absolutely incredible lovemaking with Kelly LeBrock, the youngsters learn about themselves and each other. Good for them, I guess.

Gary and Wyatt (Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith, respectively) are two teen-movie approved geeks repeatedly picked on by their horrible mulleted classmates. Instead of making a Terminator-like killing machine to wreak cold-blooded revenge on them, using their highly advanced (even for 1985) computer, they break into the Pentagon’s data files and invariably create The Woman in Red, seemingly just to stare at from afar.

Lisa (LeBrock) is not only a gorgeous mature sexpot, but also has cyber-enhanced powers, warping time and space to fit whatever mood she’s in; great for us (but sadly for the impoverished children of the world), those powers mostly go into throwing the wildest party this side of the ’80s, complete with nuclear missiles, a piano getting sucked through the chimney and an appearance by The Road Warrior’s Vernon Wells as a post-apocalyptic biker.

LeBrock was perfectly cast in an icon-making role, but that’s not to say Hall or Mitchell-Smith are by any means shabby in their archetypical nerd roles that defined a generation of dorks for HBO-obsessed youths; that being said, a special lifetime achievement award of some sort should have gone to Bill Paxton for the role of the meathead older bro Chet, mostly for introducing the phrase “You’re stewed, buttwad!” to the lexicon.

The gorgeous Arrow Video release of Weird Science not only delivers a 4K restoration, but both the theatrical and television versions of the flick are present, the latter of which is twice as funny for its barely legible curse-word redubs, which is especially great for the story where the girl of Gary’s dreams kicks him in the “guts” and calls him a “braggart” in front of everyone. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.