Bedtime Stories: THE BFG

It’s hard not to see something of director Steven Spielberg in the humble craftsman at the center of his lovely adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. He’s a big friendly giant who hears all the hopes and fears of mankind, harvests magic from a land of imagination, and mixes them together lovingly into dreams and nightmares. He keeps them bottled up, stored in his workshop for safekeeping. Then, in the middle of the night, he gingerly steps out of giant country and into our world, toting his spells to send our slumbering minds drifting into tailor-made dreamlands. He, like Spielberg, knows how to cast the right spells for the just the right effects, speaking directly to our hearts and minds with a purity of intention and skill. He’s a master at what he does, and when his art starts to glow before our eyes, we know we’re in good hands. Here is a movie of such prodigious filmmaking skill deployed so gently and so casually that the trick is how easy it looks. Spielberg’s enchanting approach to family filmmaking is to allow the story to unfold at its own pace and tone, inviting empathy and letting magic appear without overly insisting on itself.

As the movie begins the towering BFG (a digital creation soulfully embodied with a sweet melancholy in Mark Rylance’s performance) encounters Sophie, a little girl (Ruby Barnhill). A precocious child, she spends her nights unhappily roaming the halls of her orphanage. She has insomnia, she’ll solemnly report, explaining her habits as well as her unfamiliarity with dreaming. Obviously it’s quite a scary thing to see a lumbering giant outside your bedroom window in the dark stillness of three o’clock in the morning. Scarier still is the moment when a hand the size of Sophie’s entire body slides in past the curtains and picks her up, spiriting the poor girl away to a hidden realm where she cowers behind enormous everyday objects. There’s a moment of unease at the initial kidnapping, but the girl quickly sees there’s nothing threatening about this gigantic man. He’s harmless, shrugging as he explains he had no choice but to take her with him. Can’t risk being reported and hunted by “human beans,” the linguistically tangled chap says.

This is a potentially worrisome situation, but Spielberg is quick to comfort the audience by revealing the BFG to be the runt of giant land. A scrawny, lanky sweetheart with twitchy big ears and a goofy grin, he’s much shorter than the others of his kind. He is picked on by the other giants (voiced by Jemaine Clement, Bill Hader, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, and others) for being a vegetarian instead of a cold-hearted cannibal gobbling up human beans three meals a day. Their diet is only implied, but certainly puts our Friendly Giant in a position of sympathy. He just wants to work his magic in peace, but the bullies push him around, hector him about “vegi-terribles,” and start sniffing around when they smell the scent of a girl-sized snack. Sophie sees in him a loneliness she recognizes, and quickly comes to trust him. The thrust of the plot sees her protected by him, and brought into the secret dream factory he’s made his life’s work. They become buddies, trusting one another to do what’s best. There’s charming storybook logic here – surely it’s no coincidence Sophie is reading with a flashlight under the covers when he appears – as two kindred spirits bond over a desire to enjoy a life of peace, kindness, and friendship.

It’s a pleasure to exist in this movie’s world, unhurried and relaxed, allowing long dialogue scenes between the very tall man and the small girl to stretch out, the awe of the fantastical interaction seeming simply normal while seesawing in pleasing tongue-twister tangles of eccentric giant jargon and childlike innocence. Giant Country is a fantasy drawn in convincing and warm detail of delightful picture book simplicity and appeal. Spielberg is always adept at integrating effects and live action with a brilliant eye. Here he allows the digital space to create a light floating camera, and a sense of space for real emotional rapport. It’s not easy to generate a relationship between characters who only share the frame through trickery, but here he draws it out perfectly. The world itself – a humble hovel, a cave of dreams, a field of grumpy giants, swirling clouds, a glowing tree in an upside-down reflecting pool – is striking and comforting, representing the most primary colors cinematographer Janusz Kaminski has ever had in a single shot. It sparkles with pop-up book confidence.

Spielberg, and the wonderful screenplay by Melissa Mathison (the late, great writer of E.T., The Black Stallion, and Kundun), respects children’s capacity for comprehension, their ability to put together visual puzzle pieces of plot and follow a story’s imagination. The movie unfolds with a dreamlike trust in its fantasy’s power to carry away all who are receptive to it. There’s conflict, yes, as the mean giants need to be stopped before they become a deadly danger to Sophie. But the real core of conflict is found in two lonely people who make a connection, a fragile, unsustainable friendship that might as well be imaginary, but has the potential to leave them both more confident and self-sufficient individuals. It’s moving, but not condescending. The avuncular BFG (Rylance’s non-threatening eyes twinkling behind the effects) and the adorable Sophie (Barnhill the sweetest orphan this side of Annie) need only figure out the right dream – assembled in a Kinetoscope blender casting flickering shadows on the dream factory wall like Plato’s cave – to explain the situation to someone who can help. What a perfect metaphor for storytelling, and a gentle child’s-eye-view to conflict resolution.

Eventually the film reaches a poignant resolution through quietly magisterial whimsy that flips the fish-out-of-water scenario, bringing the BFG to new people and places. (It’s great fun watching surprising characters interact with his enormity, including struggling to make him feel at home in the human world, culminating in, no joke, one of the best instances of flatulence in cinema history.) But there’s no cruelty here, or in the eventual solutions to everyone’s problems. The movie’s gentility is a much-needed tonic for a cruel and cynical world. Spielberg’s masterful use of the moviemaking tools at his disposal is at once classical restraint and clear-eyed use of the cutting-edge. The result is a film of genuine absorbing, heartwarming magic. Refreshingly tender and thoughtful – like a giant gingerly moving a child’s tiny glasses to safety – the movie is soothingly composed and playfully imaginative. It’s welcome respite from all those family entertainments, good and bad alike, operating with manic panic of allowing downtime. The BFG has patience, the visual poise to play out in long takes and to treat its digital creations as wonders instead of routine spectacle. Best of all, it has the confidence to let small, delicate feelings animate a production so big and strong.

Monster House: WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS

If you think there’s nothing new a vampire movie or a mockumentary could do, you might be right. The last 10 to 15 years of pop culture – from Christopher Guest and The Office to True Blood and Twilight – have certainly wrung just about all the novelty from those subgenres. But What We Do in the Shadows combines the two and finds the result an amiable and enjoyable 90 minutes. Written and directed by stars Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, two of the creative forces behind such cult comedy classics as Flight of the Conchords, create a deadpan doc inquiry into the lives of modern vampires in New Zealand. For a horror comedy, it’s neither laugh-out-loud funny nor edge-of-the-seat scary. It simply slides between mild smiles and mild chills with an even-keeled sense of comfortably dry silliness.

It imagines an almost entirely off-screen documentary crew getting the chance to hang out with vampire roommates for a few months, leading up to Wellington’s foremost supernatural ball, the highlight of the monsters’ social calendar. We spend most of our time with the vamps at home in a crumbling old building with blackout curtains, coffins in the bedrooms, and the occasional blood splatter on the walls. Viago (Waititi) is only a couple hundred years old, a fastidious rule follower, responsible for managing the domicile’s upkeep and calling for house meetings. Older is Deacon (Jonathan Brugh), who was a Nazi vampire and fled Europe in the war’s aftermath. There’s also pompous Vladislav (Clement), who once was a more medieval presence – his violent temper earned him the nickname “Vladislav the Poker” – but now he mopes around. Petyr (Ben Fransham) is their oldest roomie, a Nosferatu recluse who lives in the basement.

Clement and Waititi take the familiar details of vampire lore and think through comical modern day implications. It finds vampires not as mysterious old predators or monstrous heartthrobs, but as vaguely pathetic, average dudes. They sleep all day, argue over chores, reminisce about old times, and prowl the streets at night looking for mortal women to prey upon. They’re not so different from any group of guys bumbling around the world. The exception is, when they invite someone over for a drink, they’re the only ones sipping. There’s a droll wit to the matter-of-fact violence – one vampire accidentally bites into an artery, forcing him to drink from a victim like a water fountain.

If that sounds funny to you, then you’re the target audience for this clever blend of horror violence and improvisatory mockumentary amiability. It finds its humor in making vampire tropes, like asking to be let in, allergies to sun and wooden stakes, turning into bats, hypnotizing victims, and hating werewolves, quotidian. After all, these guys have been doing this for centuries. It’s not new to them. When a heated argument over who has to do the dishes results in two vamps floating mid-air hissing at each other, there’s an amusing sense of here-we-go-again from everyone involved. Later, we meet a young convert (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer), mild-mannered human helpers (Jackie van Beek and Stuart Rutherford), and an agreeable werewolf alpha-dog (Rhys Darby). Everyone greets monster madness with unsurprised shrugs.

It’s a terrifically underplayed high concept, all the better for never seeming to push too hard to achieve its charm. The cast has excellent, expert timing across the board, making details of their characters alternately sad, silly, and scary. Hilarious performances mix convincingly with terrific stunt work, ghoulish makeup, and seamless(ish) special effects. There’s not too much to sink your teeth into, but it’s bloody enjoyable while it lasts. It’d make a good double feature with either of the other fine recent indie vampire efforts, Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. 

For the Birds: RIO 2

Three years out from Blue Sky Animation’s Rio, the only thing I can remember is the vague sense of surprised enjoyment I had with the film’s pleasantly colorful, vibrantly musical nature. The story wasn’t much. It followed the world’s last male blue macaw (Jesse Eisenberg) as he was taken from wintry Minnesota to mid-Carnival Rio de Janeiro to meet the world’s last female blue macaw (Anne Hathaway). Fish-out-of-water – or is that bird-out-of-something? – antics ensued. It was cute and amiable, but what elevated it to minor noteworthiness is the charm and novelty in its Brazilian setting and mood, communicated with a sense of authenticity. Director and co-writer Carlos Saldanha was born in Rio, so the delight in its locale felt genuine. The movie was a big hit, so here’s the inevitable Rio 2 in which Saldanha takes those birds on a logical plot progression. The first movie was about the last two blue macaws. What the sequel presupposes is, what if they aren’t the last?

The goofy birder scientists from the first film (Leslie Mann and Rodrigo Santoro) are off on an expedition in the middle of the Amazon when they think they’ve spotted a hidden nest of blue macaws. This excites Anne Hathaway’s bird, so Jesse Eisenberg’s bird (Jesse Eisenbird, if you will) agrees to pack up their three little kids (Rachel Crow is the only voice that stands out) and fly off to meet up with others of their species. Of course, these city birds aren’t used to jungle living, so much time is spent on the expected culture clash. Some food chain related violence leads to some bits of dark humor that’s cute sometimes. I liked the singing capybara that gets swallowed by a predator and then keeps on singing. Later, some capybaras are rapidly eaten down to the bone by piranhas for no other reason than a quick sight gag. I laughed then, too.

Once our protagonists meet the wild flock’s gruff patriarch (Andy Garcia), his dotty sister (Rita Moreno), and a strong, handsome alpha-male (Bruno Mars), the story really gets going. Hathaway takes flight with this flock, fitting in right away. They’re her long-lost family! Eisenbird grumbles, pouts, and stubbornly wants to head back to the city. He bristles when the wild birds mock him, saying he’s just a “pet.” Which he is, but never mind that I guess. Built out of plot points and conflicts that are instantly familiar to anyone who has seen a Hollywood animated film in the last thirty years, Rio 2 is entirely devoid of surprise. Every subplot resolves precisely like you’d guess, lending the time spent getting there a sense of thinness slowly stretched to fill space. It even trots out the old accidentally-shoot-the-winning-goal-into-the-other-team’s-net trick. Originality is not high on the agenda here.

The narrative splinters, unfocused, with little momentum. Characters from the first movie are dutifully roped into this one. Two little musical birds with the voices of will.i.am and Jamie Foxx tag along to the Amazon to look for fresh talent for their animals-only Carnival talent show. At least it gives them something to do, which is more than can be said for comic relief toucan George Lopez, who joins the trip and is basically forgotten. Also lurking around is the mad cockatoo voiced by Jemaine Clement. This time he has two sidekicks: a poisonous frog (Kristin Chenoweth, who gets a chance to sing, of course) and a silent anteater. They’re superfluous villains, as the movie builds a far more tangible threat in the form of illegal loggers threatening to imperil the blue macaws’ habitat. Essentially a group version of George C. Scott’s poacher from The Rescuers Down Under, these guys menace our kindly scientists with chainsaws and machetes and eventually plan to dynamite the macaws’ gorgeous jungle oasis. So what’s the big deal about a maniacal cockatoo in the face of all that?

At least Rio 2 still finds reasons to sing and dance, where the movie’s color and sound really get to stretch their wings. I lost interest in the plot and found the characters – Eisenbird, especially – grating in their repetitive predictability. But when those birds take flight in Busby Berkeley formations to a syncopated Brazilian/hip-hop beat, it provides fleeting satisfaction. Its best is the short opening number by Janelle Monae, worth hearing on its own. The version on the soundtrack album is better, anyway. Plus, that way you don’t have to sit through the rest of the movie. As a whole it is big, empty, and generally pleasant. I just wish it could’ve told a story worth telling or figured out how to make the characters interesting on any level. Maybe kids will like this, but it certainly lacks the depth and invention better family films can provide. At least it’s better than any of Blue Sky’s Ice Age sequels.

Together Again, Again: MUPPETS MOST WANTED

Muppets Most Wanted finds Jim Henson’s loveable felt-and-fur goofballs up to their usual good-natured meta trickiness and bountiful warm-hearted silliness. Writer-director James Bobin, co-writer Nicholas Stoller, and songwriter Bret McKenzie, who revived the franchise in 2011 with the surprisingly nostalgic and emotional – but no less gut-bustingly funny – The Muppets, are upfront about what their new picture is. It’s a sequel with the Muppets fresh off the success of their last movie setting off on a European tour where they cross paths with a jewel heist in progress. If that sounds partly like a riff on 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper, the original Muppet sequel, it is and the movie owns up to it, winking right from the start. The opening musical number is “We’re Doing a Sequel,” a song full of funny barbs at the business of Hollywood and a clear tip of the hat to Caper’s curtain raiser “Hey, a Movie!” It’s a movie that loves movies, but loves the Muppets even more. And that’s irresistible.

In their opening number, which starts right after the closing number in the last movie, the gang sings about being a “viable franchise” and preparing what’s technically their “seventh sequel,” warning that means it’s “not quite as good.” The Muppets are perpetual optimistic underdogs, lovable misfits who scramble around with manic showbiz energy, eager to tell you that the show must go on. Their personalities are so agreeably constant, chaos and order held in perfect, immutable manic amusement. It’s fun to see them, as performed here by Steve Whitmire, Eric Jacobson, Dave Goelz, Bill Barretta, David Rudman, Matt Vogel, and Peter Linz, bounce off of each other in the old ways. Fearless leader Kermit the Frog, exasperated, is always wrangling Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Animal, and all the others, competing egos and eccentricities that constantly threaten to derail their variety shows.

As usual, story exists mainly to provide a rigid genre form for the Muppets to push against, moving through charmingly near-slapdash sequences of jokes and songs. Most Wanted’s plot involves the world’s greatest criminal mastermind, a Kermit-lookalike frog named Constantine. He plots to swap places with the showbiz icon and use the cover of the Muppet tour to burgle museums at every stop. Most of the movie finds the fake Kermit faking his way through interactions with the characters we know and love, while the real Kermit plots to escape a goofy Siberian gulag. Tina Fey plays the warden, snarling, but softhearted underneath. Fellow prisoners include Ray Liotta and Jemaine Clement with thick Russian accents and Danny Trejo playing himself. (His description of his “triple threat” attributes is priceless.) At least the guards and the prisoners can agree on something, when they sing a song about how their prison is the best state-funded hotel in all of Russia. Kermit just wants out of there.

The Muppets gang moves along unaware of the switch for a while, though some grow suspicious about the changes in their old pal Kermit. He talks with a gargling vaguely foreign accent now, but their new tour manager Dominic Badguy (Ricky Gervais, playing up his shiftiness) assures them their friend just has a cold. They continue with their plan to stage Muppet Shows in a collection of European cities, every place an occasion for good culturally specific jokes. In Berlin, the theater marquee reads “Die Muppets.” Seeing this, Statler and Waldorf wryly wonder if the reviews are in already or if that’s the suggestion box. Meanwhile, a French INTERPOL agent (Ty Burrell, with a chewy Clouseau accent) and Sam the Eagle bumblingly investigate the robberies that seem to be following the Muppets around.

The impostor storyline allows the franchise a level on which to comment upon its own evolution. Once more Bobin, Stoller, and McKenzie prove their love for the Muppets. Their version of these characters is not an exact recreation. How could it be? The Muppets haven’t been exactly the same since Jim Henson died, and later when Frank Oz stepped away. No matter how good, Bobin and his crew are impersonators. But Most Wanted, like The Muppets before it, is filled with such affection for the characters and the smart silliness of Henson’s original vision, we’re better off with these films than none at all, or, worse yet, soulless profit-driven corporate property perpetuation. It’s a movie that knows what made the Muppets most lovable and sets out recreating it as best it can, with love and care. The filmmakers are true to the Muppet spirit without suffocating their own comic sensibilities in an effort to recreate the work of the irreplaceable original Muppet artists. The film’s story is resolved because Muppets are true to themselves and to each other. I’m glad to see their new stewards are as well.

Muppets Most Wanted is very good entertainment, loaded up with smart references and broad craziness. It’s a satisfyingly warm and inviting brand of inspired high/low comedy, a barrage of puns, vaudeville sketches, dry asides, sloppy slapstick, and cornball dad humor, with wall-to-wall witty musical numbers, lovable homage, and tickling satire. There’s also a fleet of random and inspired cameos, a good half of which kids today won’t get and most are sure to baffle kids of the future. In other words, it’s a Muppet movie. I had a smile on my face the whole way through. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Blast in the Past: MEN IN BLACK 3

Men in Black 3, like Men in Black and Men in Black II before it, grabs ahold of some ingenious science fiction concepts and proceeds to goof around with them for an hour-and-a-half. The main difference now is that it’s been ten years since we’ve last been inside the mysterious government agency to follow stoic Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) and motormouth Agent J (Will Smith) as they try to keep track of alien immigrants to our planet and make sure that they aren’t causing any kind of intergalactic ruckus. That’s twice as long as the time between the first film and its sequel. Has twice as much changed? Not really. They’re still out there, just one partnership in the Men in Black, out to clean up extraterrestrial messes and preserve the secrets of the universe from the unwashed masses.

This franchise is essentially a procedural, a feature film version of one of those cop shows that seem to run for season after season, the kind you might forget about for a while and then one day turn on your TV and find that the likable characters are still up to the same old same old. A Men in Black movie starts with a big bad alien villain, this time a creepy assassin played by a black-eyed, monstrously toothy Jemaine Clement with wild, scruffy hair, who gets to Earth intent on wreaking some havoc. Cut to K and J as they finish mopping up their latest case, inevitably having to scramble some pedestrians’ short-term memories in order to implant their cover story. Soon enough, the villain’s trail of destruction winds its way to Men in Black headquarters where heavy exposition is dumped on the agents, and the audience, by the head of the organization. (This time it’s Emma Thompson filling in quite nicely for Rip Torn.)

If the rule of making a satisfying sequel is to do the same thing, but different, then Men in Black 3 is the best of the bunch, or at least the best since the first. It takes the charming premise of the first film, which rests entirely on the wondrously kooky alien designs by Rick Baker (bulging brains, fish faces, wiggling antennas, prehensile tongues, and slinking tentacles all accounted for) and the off-kilter buddy cop chemistry between Smith and Jones, and scrambles it around a little bit. Men in Black II was too interested in rehashing instead of reinventing, spending a good chunk of its runtime resetting the plotting instead of expanding. There’s not much expanding going on here either, but the plot doubles back on itself in enjoyable ways and smartly puts its focus largely on the relationship between Smith and Jones. The story is all about time travel, a risky idea to introduce into any film, let alone a sequel, but here it helps shake things up.

The villainous alien starts the movie escaping from a lunar prison vowing revenge on K, the agent who put him away forty years earlier. Once he gets back to Earth, he finagles his way back in time and kills K, which sets off the course of events in the future that brings J into the past. It’s 1969, to be exact, which gives the bulk of the film the slightest feeling of being a very-special alien spin-off episode of Mad Men. (Was Jon Hamm or John Slattery not available to cameo?) There’s a groovy retro-futurism going on here, which gives Bo Welch’s production design room to give us the same but different. (I especially liked how the portable mind-scramblers worked back in the day.) The villain is roaring around on a motorcycle like he roared in from Easy Rider, while the film enjoys the opportunity to show off some notable 60’s elements, like papering the background with news reports of the impending moon launch and finding reason for the agents to visit Andy Warhol (Bill Hader).

Speaking of the same, but different, K is played in 1969, not by Jones through some computer-trickery, but by Josh Brolin, who does an impression so dead-on accurate it’s a wonder that no one’s thought of doing something like this before. He gets Jones’s unflappable squint, easy drawl, and the sly bemusement teasing about the corners of his eyes. But, since he’s playing a younger version of K, he has a bit more looseness and fun in his investigative technique (not much, but it’s noticeable). He’s a dapper man in black who’s so dedicated to his job that when a man comes frantically crashing into his life claiming to come from the future, he’s not too fazed by it. K and J go zipping around New York City and the movie is just like old times, except technically, for K at least, this is the first time.

I don’t quite know who to credit with all of these smart ideas. With straight-faced silliness, director Barry Sonnenfeld’s clearly the auteur of the series (that and Rick Baker’s alien designs are most consistent between the three pictures), but this particular script has a notoriously messy past, what with filming starting before its completion. The final product is credited to Etan Cohen, David Koepp, Jeff Nathanson, and Michael Soccio, and there’s surely plenty of uncredited input from countless others as well. It’s just that kind of movie. That the messiness of its creation hardly shows in the film itself, aside from some clunky scenes here and there, is a nice surprise. And whoever wrote into the film the major supporting character of a fifth-dimensional being who lives in all possible futures at the same time (a terrific sci-fi idea) deserves much praise. You know who you are, I guess. Even better, the great Michael Stuhlbarg plays him with a spaced-out, out-of-this-world speech pattern. He’s the film’s best creation.

Like its predecessors, Men in Black 3 is a movie with goofy gross-out creature moments, like the villain’s slimy, spike-shooting hand, and grinningly juvenile gags, including implicating several celebrities as secret aliens. It’s all so brightly lit and colorful. This has always been a series closer in spirit to Ghostbusters than X-Files. They’re big-budget, effects-driven larks. This one in particular is just so pleased with itself and relaxed. Despite world-ending stakes it’s all so laidback. You’d think there’d be more momentum, but each picture in the series has gotten increasingly slack. Still, that’s all part of the charm. I have affection for these movies, and I suspect that most who do will leave the theater satisfied. It brings the series something like full circle and the concluding moments contain a surprising note of sweetness and earned emotional payoff between K and J that retroactively gives their relationship an added dimension that’s actually rather moving. It’s always a nice surprise to find a late-arriving sequel that manages to justify its own existence.

Quick Look: RIO

Rio is a solid B-level CG animation effort from Blue Sky, best known for its Ice Age from all the way back in 2002 and which was, for my money, its only satisfying feature. (Even those Ice Age sequels were mostly mediocre). But now with Rio, a musical, warm-hearted animated comedy, the company has finally bested its best-known feature. It only took them a decade of lesser efforts. (Robots, anyone?) This film is cute, colorful, toothless fun. It’s safe, but not without its charms. It’s about the last two blue macaws on Earth, one a neurotic flightless house pet from Minnesota (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg) and the other a super-confident jungle bird from Brazil (voiced by Anne Hathaway). A scientist (Rodrigo Santoro) and a Minnesotan (Leslie Mann) agree to mate their birds and meet in Rio de Janeiro to do so. Luckily, this isn’t simply a story driven by the need for two birds to mate. That’s a bit on the creepy side for a decidedly kid-centric feature. Instead, the G-rated thrust of it all is a chase with an impressive sense of place, courtesy of director Carlos Saldanha, who has Rio as a hometown. Bird smugglers steal the birds and its up to the scientist and the American tourist to get them back. The birds, for their part, escape the smugglers (especially a nasty cockatoo with the voice of Jemaine Clement) and try to get help from a toucan (George Lopez), two hip-hop birds (Jamie Foxx and will.i.am), and a very slobbery bulldog (Tracy Morgan). The various characters race through the streets of Rio and get into all kinds of vibrant, tuneful trouble. The film never feels wholly original – it feels at times like its been cobbled together from good ideas that have been used in countless other animated films – but its never dull. It has a nice sense of pacing and location and never wears out its welcome. Even the 3D is used to nice, if mostly unobtrusive, effect. I won’t deny that the movie put a smile on my face. I can’t say Rio is great, but it sure is swell.

Quick Look: DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS

With a fun high concept and, with Paul Rudd and Steve Carell, two of the most consistently funny comedic actors working today, it would be easy to assume Jay Roach’s Dinner for Schmucks (based on The Dinner Game, a 1998 French film) would be at the very least a serviceable comedy. That assumption would be wrong. This is a flat movie with no flow. It proceeds in awkward, ill-fitting chunks of plot. There are funny lines sprinkled here and there, but none achieve any real lift in the movie’s overall atmosphere. This is dismal, unfunny stuff: awkwardly placed broad shtick mingling freely with uncomfortable sentimentality. Rudd is asked by his boss (Bruce Greenwood), as part of a vetting process for a promotion, to find an idiot to bring to the company’s regular secret dinner where the execs make fun of the goofier side of the populace. Naturally, Rudd decides to bring Carell, a dim, amiable amateur taxidermist, after they meet in a traffic incident. The movie never goes too mean in its humor; neither the schmucks nor the ones planning on mocking them come under much withering comedic fire. The movie is watchable and pleasant, in an inoffensive way that would play best on TV late at night while everyone watching is half-asleep or passed out. That way the small smiles it sometimes inspires would feel a smidge more welcome, especially if you woke up in time to see one of the small, slightly funny moments given to someone like Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Schaal or Jemaine Clement. The movie bumbles along for far too long (nearly two hours!), coasting all the way on the talents of its leads while giving them very little chance to excel. There’s a sense of genuine camaraderie and chemistry between the two men that the movie never really gets around to exploiting, instead choosing to focus on funny voices and stupid misunderstandings. It could have been an updated Odd Couple, but is really just another one of those movies with the funniest bits in the commercials.