Given how many L.A. people are here, it’s no surprise two crowd-pleasers are comedies taking aim at SoCal puffery — one set in our age of Instagram, the other infused with a more timeless appeal. Both are pretty great, but I’ll give the edge to “L.A. Times,” a comedy of manners from first-time feature director Michelle Morgan, who also wrote and stars. Morgan writes dialogue at a pace to rival “Gilmore Girls,” with a haughty vocabulary that evokes the best of Whit Stillman and laugh-out-loud zingers so frequent, I couldn’t scribble them down fast enough.
Both “L.A. Times” and “Ingrid Goes West” center around the notion of performing happiness; in the former, Morgan’s character Annette leaves her longtime boyfriend Elliott (Jorma Taccone of The Lonely Island), a writer on a hilariously “Game of Thrones”-esque show, mainly because she thinks they don’t measure up to the supposedly constant bliss enjoyed by other couples they know. But Elliott likes Annette the kvetchy way she is — so much so that he pays a prostitute (Margarita Levieva) to dress up like Annette and complain about minutiae. Annette’s interior-decorator friend Baker (Dree Hemingway) is single and searching, secretly hooking up with a petulant older client (Tate Donovan) and waiting for her cousin (Kentucker Audley) to set her up with a mysterious friend who never seems to appear. Morgan delights in making all of her characters equally flawed, often downright dislikable, and is hyper-fluent in passive aggression: “Well, if that’s how you feel … then those are your feelings.” As a sharp, funny take on modern romance in L.A., this might just be the female answer to “Swingers.”
An early scene in “Ingrid Goes West,” from director Matt Spicer, echoes a recent episode of “Black Mirror”: Aubrey Plaza’s character, Ingrid, shows up dirty and bedraggled to a wedding party, then maces the bride in the face for not inviting her. Ingrid, we learn, has a major hangup: She lives her life through Instagram, where a kind word from a stranger with an attractive life is all she needs to consider them a bestie-to-be. Soon she’s setting out for L.A. with designs on friending Taylor (Elizabeth Olsen), who curates her life through photos into a faux-casual bohemian paradise: “Another day, another avocado toast!” (I think we all know a person like this.) Ingrid’s pursuit of Taylor is both funny and unsettling — occasionally it had me feeling a little guilty for joining in on the guffaws about stalking and mental illness, and I couldn’t help wondering if any actors in attendance, who might have been stalked themselves, might have felt a little icky about it too.
But “Ingrid” has a secret weapon, and it’s O’Shea Jackson Jr. Ice Cube’s son, so fierce in “Straight Outta Compton,” shows off comic chops as Ingrid’s landlord, an aspiring screenwriter who’s totally obsessed with Batman and a little bit with his tenant; he’s the only one in her life who sees her weirdness and is OK with it.
Like “L.A. Times,” this one’s at its best when skewering New Agey pretension: “What’s your biggest emotional wound?” a waiter chirps to Ingrid. “That’s our question of the day!” Taylor’s husband (Wyatt Russell, also of “Black Mirror”) is a “painter” whose work consists of landscapes with “SQUAD GOALS” or “#NOFILTER” emblazoned over them. And Olsen nails it as Taylor, who speaks almost exclusively in superlatives: “Ohmygod, you’re my favorite person I’ve ever met!” As Plaza — who also produced — drinks in the praise, you can almost see her winking at the audience. She’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to an eyeroll personified.