{"id":217697,"date":"2025-09-11T08:18:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T08:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/217697\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T08:18:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T08:18:11","slug":"aziz-ansaris-high-concept-directing-debut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/217697\/","title":{"rendered":"Aziz Ansari’s High-Concept Directing Debut"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt wasn\u2019t meant as a joke when a Hollywood studio cast Nicolas Cage as an emo angel who risks his wings to save Meg Ryan, a mortal with dark thoughts and great hair. But Aziz Ansari<\/a> must have been smiling when he chose Keanu Reeves<\/a> to play a similar character \u2014 an angel named Gabriel who oversteps his duties with a \u201clost soul\u201d \u2014 in his feature directing debut, \u201cGood Fortune<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s a fun idea, whether or not Gen Z audiences know \u201cCity of Angels,\u201d the late-\u201990s remake of \u201cWings of Desire,\u201d or the even earlier John Landis classic \u201cTrading Places.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn what amounts to a slightly ironic but mostly sincere homage to late-20th-century high-concept studio movies (the body-swap comedy in particular), Ansari plays Arj, a gig economy worker with an exasperated view of life in Los Angeles. Running errands for rich people on Taskrabbit, he barely earns enough to eat, and lacks the self-confidence to flirt with Elena (Keke Palmer), a formidably idealistic co-worker at his Home Depot-style second job.<\/p>\n

\n\tArj wonders why he went to college as he spends most nights sleeping in his beat-up car, which eventually gets towed for too many unpaid parking tickets. For Gabriel, Arj\u2019s many humiliations add up to someone badly in need of his help. And besides, Gabriel\u2019s bored with his low-ranking angel duties, which amount to stopping Angelenos from texting and driving (he doesn\u2019t realize just how many lives he\u2019s saving).<\/p>\n

\n\tCoaching the L.A. angels, Gabriel\u2019s boss (Sandra Oh) warns him that he has no business intervening, but Gabriel\u2019s not so bright \u2014 Reeves plays the character with much the same blank stare he brought to \u201cBill and Ted\u2019s Excellent Adventure\u201d all those years back \u2014 and appears before Arj anyway. (No one else can see him.) When Arj doesn\u2019t seem thrilled by brief visions of what his life has in store, Gabriel lets him temporarily trade places with Jeff (Seth Rogen), a rich tech bro he\u2019d met a few days earlier.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s just one problem: Arj doesn\u2019t want to go back. Would you, if offered the choice between scraping by and planning parties from the private sauna of your Hollywood Hills mansion?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s funny that Gabriel didn\u2019t anticipate this problem \u2014 that Arj might not agree \u201chow superficial a life of wealth and success really is\u201d \u2014 and funnier still when you see Gabriel\u2019s incredulous expression. No question that Reeves, who has made self-aware cameos in everything from \u201cToy Story 4\u201d to \u201cAlways Be My Maybe\u201d of late, is this movie\u2019s MVP. The surest sign of the good-sport star\u2019s intelligence is his willingness ow endearingly he can play a \u201cdum-dum.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnsari understands that the whole angel thing was corny back when Warren Beatty and John Travolta tried it (in \u201cHeaven Can Wait\u201d and \u201cMichael,\u201d respectively), but uses it the way a \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d sketch might, as shorthand for the point he really wants to make: Beneath the jokes, \u201cGood Fortune\u201d serves as a working-class critique of contemporary capitalism, as seen from the perspective of those juggling various side hustles to make ends meet. The comedian might not be this generation\u2019s Frank Capra, but it\u2019s still nice to see a celebrity who recognizes what normal folks are going through and uses his platform to address it (\u00e0 la Cheech Marin\u2019s newly relevant \u201cBorn in East L.A.\u201d).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe rules of how Arj and Jeff change places, and what it\u2019ll take to switch back, are sort of a moving target in \u201cGood Fortune,\u201d which gives Rogen\u2019s character an Ebenezer Scrooge-like crash course in how to be a better billionaire by forcing him to work for his own food-delivery app. But after making the joke that Arj kinda likes being rich, Ansari\u2019s screenplay never really presents a convincing reason why this selfish guy would return to how things were before \u2014 unless you count Palmer\u2019s union-organizer love interest, whose texting-and-driving mishap Gabriel was somehow supposed to prevent (one of several plot holes).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie features a weird mix of acting styles, from Rogen\u2019s appropriately showboat-y performance (his character is privilege personified, then is made relatable as he\u2019s forced to break into his own home) to Ansari\u2019s weirdly self-conscious character, who looks uncomfortable on camera, whether Arj is rich or poor. And then there\u2019s Reeves\u2019 amusingly stiff take on Gabriel, who starts to relax once he\u2019s fired from angel duty and forced to get a dishwashing job on Earth.<\/p>\n

\n\tGabriel discovers the little things other people take for granted \u2014 namely, cigarettes, dancing and \u201cchicken nuggies\u201d \u2014 but it\u2019s street tacos he\u2019ll miss most if he ever gets his wings back. Even though it\u2019s fairly obvious where \u201cGood Fortune\u201d is headed, Ansari manages to surprise in how he gets there. Like his character, the writer-director-producer-star seems to be juggling one too many jobs here, and yet, it\u2019s that very connection to overworked, undercompensated Americans that makes his movie so right for this moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It wasn\u2019t meant as a joke when a Hollywood studio cast Nicolas Cage as an emo angel who…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":217698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[114374,171,114377,26534,53,77123,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-217697","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-aziz-ansari","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-good-fortune","11":"tag-keanu-reeves","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-toronto-film-festival","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115184684569310261","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}