The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood30 Maalis 2024

Bringing 'Lousy Carter' to Life

This week I was thrilled to chat with star David Krumholtz and writer-director Bob Byington about their new movie, Lousy Carter. It’s a wide-ranging conversation, touching on topics from shooting during the age of Covid to where Krumholtz was when he got the call to audition for Oppenheimer, and I hope you find it as fun to listen to as it was for me to conduct. If you enjoyed it, I hope you share it with a friend.

A little extra this week: I hope you check out both Lousy Carter and Byington’s body of work. Everyone says they’re tired of the same old mush at the multiplex; well, here’s a chance to dive into a body of work you may not be familiar with. Some highlights:

Byington and Krumholtz previously worked together on Frances Ferguson, which you can watch for free on Amazon Prime; it is charmingly dry and occasionally cutting without coming across as meanspirited. Star Kaley Wheless gives a realistic and somewhat complicated performance as the substitute teacher convicted of sleeping with an (of-legal-age) student, while Krumholtz’s turn at the end as a group therapist is both humorous and humane.
Somebody Up There Likes Me (available for free on Peacock and for rental elsewhere) is an amusing look at a slacker floating through life starring Nick Offerman and Keith Poulson, and the framing device—we skip ahead five years each sequence, giving us 35 years in the life of Poulson’s character—is weirdly affecting. The passage of time comes for us all, or some such.
Infinity Baby (streaming on Kanopy and Amazon) is probably the oddest of these four films: set in the not-too-distant future, Kieran Culkin’s Ben works for a pharmaceutical company that accidentally made babies that never grow older. He’s interesting as a free-floating cad—and Culkin is an absolutely magnetic screen presence—but I think the best performance belongs to Martin Starr (Silicon Valley, Party Down). He’s playing slightly against type here: rather than a sure-of-himself-know-it-all, he’s a little more fidgety, a little unsteady. And that unsteadiness pays off in the film’s closing moments, as we see the results of an unexpected responsibility.

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