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‘Stress Positions’ Review: Where So Many Have Failed, This Team Delivers a Hilarious Pandemic Comedy
Filmmaker Theda Hammel skewers contemporary Brooklynite hipsters and gifts her frequent collaborator John Early with his funniest screen role yet.
To add historical context to these fraught inter-relationships, Hammel uses voiceover in a unique way: Instead of one narrator, there are several, and they don’t tell just their view of the story but the emotional entanglements that drive them and shape how they are behaving in the present. As a writer of quips and jokes, Hammel is unmatched, consistently hitting the bullseye with so many memorable lines, like calling gay mecca Fire Island “a beach retreat for the children of Sodom.” He finds laughter even in the most mundane of dialogue lines: “I slipped on a chicken.” When Terry talks of his hatred and contempt for someone — something he does a lot — Early telegraphs his disdain with such comic intensity, there’s no recourse but to love the performance while side-eyeing the character with utter repugnance.
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