One of the more interesting pandemic-era film narratives to emerge, Jeff Baena’s Showtime series “Cinema Toast,” reconditions classic film footage from the public domain, overlaying new dialogue and situations to create new hybrid shorts, landing somewhere between “Mystery Science 3000” and the early 2000s show “MXC.” Produced by The Duplass Brothers, and featuring a host of famous indie directors – including Baena, Alex Ross Perry, David Lowery, Kris Rey, Aubrey Plaza, among others – “Cinema Toast” is fascinating, but oftentimes hit or miss, as each episode wildly careens through interests, genres, and even forms with decidedly mixed results and no episode-to-episode continuity.
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Like all such anthology series, “Cinema Toast” features a few stand-out episodes, mainly the ones directed by Perry, Jay Duplass, Plaza, and Marta Cunningham, as well as some middling entries, including the introductory “Familiesgiving” directed by Baena. Yet while mileage may vary on the particular episodes, “Cinema Toast” is nevertheless a fascinating diversion that allows more than a few famous directors to stretch out and often get a little weird.
Employing a rotating cast of famous actors – including Nick Offerman, Alison Brie, Nicole Byer, Colman Domingo, Chloe Fineman, Gillian Jacobs, and Christopher Meloni, among an almost endless list of others – Baena’s series is almost impossible to summarize, as each episode is so oddly discrete from what comes before or after it. The aforementioned “Familiesgiving” repurposes the 1939 Jimmy Stewart film “Made for Each Other” as a story about a couple that is forced to invite their overbearing mother to their friendsgiving. Alternatively, Alex Ross Perry’s second episode “Report of the Canine Auto-Mechanical Soviet Threat” takes Soviet-era propaganda films to tell a wild story about sentient Russian operative cars and canines that have infiltrated America. Jay Duplass’ fifth episode, “The Cowboy President,” uses old Ronald Reagan films to tell a story about two cowboys who travel to the White House to determine if Reagan is mentally unfit. Yet, the standout episode is, perhaps, Martha Cunningham’s “Attack of the Karens,” which reimagines “Night of the Living Dead” as a modern horror film in which the zombies are a bunch of “Clints” and “Karens” with a host of things to complain about.
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In all, “Cinema Toast” is odd, absurd and, mostly, hysterical, though a few episodes, including Aubrey Plaza’s “Quiet Illness,” which serves as her directorial debut, is a more melancholy affair, splicing together footage from Loretta Young films to create a story about a woman grappling with her overbearing husband. Similarly, Nurma Perrier’s “Kiss, Marry, Kill” skews more towards horror, as a young woman is tempted by a sorcerer to repeatedly throw herself off a high diving board to body-shift into any person that she wants. While I found myself gravitating towards the more surreal episodes, there really is no unifying narrative between the episodes, allowing for a pretty pure distillation of each auteur’s aesthetic and narrative interests. Not all of them work, including Lowery’s noirish “The Gunshot Heard ‘Round the World,” which ends the series and takes one too many narrative leaps, but each episode is distinct enough that if one doesn’t elicit interest, there’s always another coming up, often with a jarring switch in tone.
With such a fractured approach, “Cinema Toast” is somewhat the opposite of bingeable, with each episode better treated as a self-contained short film, united only in the series overarching formal approach. Further, all of the episodes don’t work, including at least three of the episodes that are sluggish to the point that they are almost unwatchable. But, the other seven range from good to pretty great, which is a pretty decent batting average, overall. If one episode doesn’t catch your interest, the next one up probably will. For fans of these filmmakers, “Cinema Toast” is an enjoyable lark, and one of the better pandemic-inspired projects to emerge. [B]
“Cinema Toast” is available now on Showtime.