Every week on Cinebuds sponsored by Joe Wilde Garage Doors, Kristopher Pollard from Milwaukee Film and Radio Milwaukee’s Dori Zori review movies, tell you which ones are showing in our city and talk with the people who help bring them to the big screen.
To make a good movie, you can take something expected (your standard romantic comedy, good vs. evil, etc.) and execute it at a high level, or you can take a familiar situation and keep tossing unexpected things at the audience to keep them on their toes.
With that second scenario, it’s still necessary — and arguably more difficult — to do it well, which is what Olivia Wilde seems to have pulled off with her third directorial effort, The Invite.
The nature of the project almost required Wilde and the cast (including herself) to tap into their crazier creative impulses. The setting is a single location. The centerpiece is a couples dinner party, which most grown-ups will tell you isn’t the place to go mining for high-quality entertainment. That all gets turned on its head pretty quickly, when the dinner-party invitation is reciprocated with a sex-party invitation.
As you’ll hear Dori and Kpolly discuss in this episode, the very adventurous offer is only the start of what makes The Invite such a good watch. The tension shifts throughout, as discomfort ventures into curiosity. The single-location setting demands inventive cinematography that bounces shots off mirrors and uses clever camera angles to capture the action.
And, yes, there is action — just not the shoot-em-up variety. The dialogue is sharp and paced in such a way that it manages to get your adrenaline pumping by building tension and then letting it release as the quartet of characters navigate a night that doesn’t go quite how anyone expected.
The four-person cast hit just right, too, even though the original stars (including Amy Adams, Paul Rudd and Tessa Thompson) wound up giving way as the project was stuck in a holding pattern for a couple years. The on-screen group of Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton fit together nicely, aided by touches like Rogen’s improv and the serious backstory Norton gave his character.
Maybe the most unexpected thing that Dori and Kpolly found was the heart interlaced throughout the film, which balanced what could’ve been an uncomfortable snark-fest. You can hear them talk about all of that in the full episode available via the player at the top of the page.
