Palm Springs (2020)
Directed by Max Barbakow
When carefree Nyles and reluctant maid of honor Sarah have a chance encounter at a Palm Springs wedding, things get complicated when they find themselves unable to escape the venue, themselves, or each other.
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What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There are obvious Groundhog Day vibes here, but Palm Springs does a great job of balancing the romance with the existential and adding just the right amount of goofiness.
The other thing it does to freshen up the formula is to pull a second character into the loop, which ends up providing a new variable for Siara to play with, and it also helps solve maybe the biggest single problem with Groundhog Day : this functions properly as a romantic comedy.
The premise is a lot like “Groundhog Day.”
If you too are having a deja vu experience, it is because this screenplay is very similar to the movie Groundhog Day .
[SPOILER WARNING] The twist of a Groundhog Day-esque time loop is a welcome addition and played to a hilarious, never cheesy, effect.
That’s the fateful loop Nyles ( Andy Samberg ) finds himself stuck in in director Max Barbakow’s surreal Sundance sensation, a sort of sun-baked metaphysical rom-com and millennial Groundhog Day rolled into one.
She’s the bride’s difficult sister, maybe not quite as toxic as Anne Hathaway’s character in “Rachel Getting Married,” but on that continuum.
It isn’t until the movie gets a little bit of a Rachel Getting Married vibe, by way of Cristin Milioti, that things get interesting .
A few recent efforts—Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day, Netflix’s Russian Doll—have proven worthwhile stepchildren nonetheless.
It knows its target audience has likely seen “Groundhog Day” a few dozen times and may have a passing familiarity with more recent infinite-time-loop stories like “Edge of Tomorrow,” “Before I Fall” and the dazzlingly intricate Netflix series “Russian Doll.”
There's also the recent Netflix series "Russian Doll." " Edge of Tomorrow " is an extremely entertaining version of two characters stuck in a loop, adjusting their behavior as they make the same mistakes over and over again, trying to get things right.
Groundhog Day didn’t invent the temporal loop, but it did cement the concept in American pop culture as a multipurpose limbo, and the idea of a character who improves by being passed repeatedly through the same stretch of time, like water through a Brita filter, has turned out to be a malleable one: Natasha Lyonne was taught the value of human connection after countless birthdays in Russian Doll ; Tom Cruise learned to be a better action hero by rerunning battles and dying over and over again in Edge of Tomorrow .
The story may be familiar, at least for those who either grew up with Groundhog Day, or caught modern riffs like Edge of Tomorrow or Happy Death Day.
To put it another way: Palm Springs has designed itself so that it could fast-forward through the very good first hour of Happy Death Day in order to arrive at the slightly boring last half hour sooner.
About the Groundhog Day parallels: There are those who know how to pay high-style homage to that 1993 Bill Murray classic (see Natasha Lyonne’s Russian Doll ) and others who just crudely rip it off (that’s you, Happy Death Day).
A few recent efforts—Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day, Netflix’s Russian Doll—have proven worthwhile stepchildren nonetheless.
Out of the Loop: We’re all familiar with the Groundhog Day formula and its accompanying tropes, which have been wrung through every conceivable genre ( Edge of Tomorrow for big-budget sci-fi action, the Happy Death Day movies for slashers).
The story may be familiar, at least for those who either grew up with Groundhog Day, or caught modern riffs like Edge of Tomorrow or Happy Death Day.
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You may recall her in “ The Wolf of Wall Street ” (2013), yelling at Leonardo DiCaprio as he spills out of a limousine in front of Trump Tower, and the yells persist, in the early scenes of “Palm Springs,” with Sarah exclaiming, “What the fuck?,” for want of anything wittier.
Milioti — who memorably played Leonardo DiCaprio’s first wife in The Wolf of Wall Street; the mother in How I Met Your Mother; and was a Tony nominee for the Broadway musical Once — can nail a laugh line (“Suck my dick, Officer Bitch”) and then break your heart before you know what hit you.
Consider Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant flinging vicious verbal barbs at one another in "His Girl Friday," all while being sucked into each others' orbit.
When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle (practically anything Meg Ryan has starred in) invented the smart-aleck romantic prospects that are jaded when it comes to love.
Less overt than something like “The Good Place,” but playing in the same arena of seriocomic pop-losophy; less weighty and immense than “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” but similarly concerned with the value of romantic partnership, “Palm Springs” offers a novel way to explore why the decision to share your life with someone can be more than just a band-aid placed atop a gaping wound of loneliness.
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But “Palm Springs” is to time-loop movies as “Zombieland” was to the undead genre: It’s an irreverent take on a form where earlier iterations were obliged to take themselves seriously.
(For example, Click and Shallow Hal ).