After Hours: OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTY

Through how many tableaux of bad behavior have we suffered over the last several years? And I’m talking of only the party movie kind. The slow-mo drinking and dancing. The messy floors. The pounding dance music. The people making out or throwing up or swinging punches. The appliances hurled out windows. The drugs splayed out on tables, smoked up in clouds, or dusted over crowds. The bottles broken, syrup spilled, clothes flung, cars crashed, and animals wandering. We’ve seen this in basically every other R-rated comedy of the past decade or so. It no longer has much in the way of shock value, and is only a fun party by proxy if the mix of naughty to nice is exactly right. (Think more Sisters than Project X.) By now it’s a predictable and hyperbolic version of the lampshades on heads or pizzas on turntables of yesteryear. Now here’s Office Christmas Party, the latest excuse to stage the same wild party behavior.

Proficiently and competently directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck (of similarly sturdy slight comedies Blades of Glory and The Switch) the whole thing contrives a reason to get rowdy. Set almost exclusively on a couple floors in a Chicago skyscraper, where a tech company (an old-school kind, more Dell than Uber) has its annual Christmas party cancelled. The CEO (Jennifer Aniston) threatens cuts, but her brother (T.J. Miller), as head of this branch, goes behind her back to throw the biggest bash yet. It’s a last ditch effort to pitch an older businessman (Courtney B. Vance) on signing a new contract, the only thing that’ll keep layoffs out of the picture for the next quarter. This leaves decent middle managers (like Jason Bateman and Olivia Munn) scrambling to make sure the wild night saves everyone’s jobs. The stage is set for a commentary on good people trapped in a debased culture – between ruthless profiteering on the one hand, total anarchic largess on the other. But the movie mostly throws that overboard in hopes we’ll root for the corporation.

There are some funny ideas here: a huge company run like a family squabble, markets driven by a rapacious need for constant growth, employees listless and only motivated by fear of firings, society a mindless rabble willing to throw off bounds of decorum at the first opportunity. There’s something perceptive under the surface. Tip the whole thing five or ten degrees in perspective and tone and you’d have a vicious satire of modern America. Alas, it’s just another glossy spread of dumb sitcom excess and juvenile antics dressed up as cutting loose and living it up with no connection to any reality. Watch Miller’s rich dope spend money on a living nativity, huge Christmas trees, a DJ, endless booze, profane ice sculptures, and let the vibrantly devolving bacchanal begin. It’s like Wolf of Wall Street without the bite or wit. Instead we’re just supposed to find it amusing, as wish fulfillment or vicarious thrill. How sad if this is any fantasy earnestly harbored. Worse still the implications in letting quiet, dull, dutiful good-behaving office parties be the enemy. What’s wrong with a simple cheese plate and a non-alcoholic beverage between polite work acquaintances and assorted colleagues?

In some ways, it makes more sense as a disaster movie. Like The Towering Inferno it gathers a lot of characters in a tower and introduces them all with an emotional or professional loose end that’ll be tidily resolved in chaos to come. But that movie had the good decency not to ask us to be primarily invested in whether or not the company that built the structure would be able to make money off the madness. Office Christmas Party is smartly cast down to the smallest role with fun scene-stealers – Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, Rob Corddry, Vanessa Bayer, Randall Park, Sam Richardson, Karan Soni, Jamie Chung, Abbey Lee, Andrew Leeds, Matt Walsh, and many more recognizable to anyone who has seen a comedy or two lately. They’re just given routine sitcom plots to enact through the party – a guy who tries to hire an escort to act like his fake girlfriend; a guy who doesn’t tell his boss he has a better job offer; a woman trying to avoid a co-worker after learning something embarrassing about him. They wring some pleasant entertainment, personalities and a brisk pace papering over the fundamental emptiness at its core: a bland celebration of a vulgar holiday spirit, with capitalism and commercialism for all.

Things That GOOSEBUMPS In The Night

Goosebumps, an energetic kid-friendly monster movie using R.L. Stein’s long-running series of young reader horror books as inspiration, is the best Joe Dante movie Joe Dante didn’t make. Sure, it doesn’t have his wicked satire (a la Small Soldiers or the Gremlins movies), but it shares with his sensibilities an expression of movie love, indebted to B-movie creature features and giddy with manic matinee action. It finds a small Delaware town overrun with cartoony beasts ripped straight from the pages of Stein’s books. That’s not just an expression in this case. Screenwriters Darren Lemke, Scott Alexander, and Larry Laraszewski’s conceit is that the author himself conjured these evil creatures with a magical typewriter, trapping them within the pages of his manuscripts. When a series of unfortunate accidents send his library fluttering to the wind, it’s a mad dash to save the day. The author of these nightmares is the only one who can wrangle them.

Jack Black plays Stein in a performance amusing for its oddball stillness, projecting light gravitas from behind thick glasses and deliberate movements. He clamps down his natural unrestrained comic charisma here, using a theatrical clipped voice that’s Vincent Price adjacent, ending up projecting a funny self-seriousness. I especially liked a running joke about his feelings of inferiority to Stephen King. We meet him as a standoffish neighbor who glowers at a teenager (Dylan Minnette) and his mom (Amy Ryan) who’ve just moved in next door. The boy strikes up a flirtation with Stein’s daughter (Odeya Rush), who we soon learn is forced to stay inside so as not to let her father’s dangerous literary secret out. But of course the boy’s suspicious of this arrangement, and totally crushing on the girl, so he calls a new nerdy friend (Ryan Lee) to help him investigate. Then, of course, the aforementioned accidents lead to a whole nutty chain of events and monsters everywhere.

As Stein and the teens scramble to make things right, the town is destroyed in a carnival funhouse of light frights and sprightly action, springing giggling good monster movie jumps and laughs with each new sequence. Confrontations with werewolves, zombies, towering bugs, nasty gnomes, wicked aliens, laser-wielding robots, an invisible boy, and more careen through a progressively more battered downtown, eventually converging, as all teen-centric films must, at the Big School Dance. Along the way, they encounter inattentive and ineffective authority figures entirely unprepared to help in such a strange situation. There are silly cops (Timothy Simons and Amanda Lund), a goofy aunt (Jillian Bell), and doofus teachers (Ken Marino), an ensemble fully stocked with ace comic character actors who are a little underutilized, but at least don’t wear out their welcome.

Fast-paced and sometimes inventive, the action sequences make good use of several typical horror movie locations: a locked house, an abandoned store, a cemetery, a school. The speed to the incidents and slapstick approach to unreal violence cackles along, making this less a scary story, more a rollicking adventure. A maniacal ventriloquist dummy named Slappy (voiced by Black, twisting his speech into a Joker’s howl) leads the various beasties in an attack on their creator, making for a fine villain to chase and flee, and eventually confront in a satisfying climax. The characters remain thin types – the hero, the tortured creator, the coward, the girl – but the quartet have funny chemistry, and fly through the film’s mostly sturdy construction. They hold their own against a flurry of effects and effectively staged stunts, including some nifty flipped vehicles. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe makes bright, colorful images dusted in a layer of mildly menacing atmosphere, creating a pleasant fall chill to the sparkling fun, with Danny Elfman’s bouncy score animating its gentle macabre spirit.

Director Rob Letterman, formerly of DreamWorks Animation, keeps the movie hopping along nicely with a slick, smooth approach that makes it all seem just the right kind of dangerous. It’s safe enough to be only fun, but chaotic enough to get carried away with its light popcorn thrills. It’s fast, funny, and enjoyable, pinned in only by its token emotional journey for the lead boy, who gets a deeply weird romantic payoff, and a struggle with grief that’s quickly dropped. Goosebumps is too busy having fun with its horror mash-up to stop for such mushy stuff, I guess. That’s just as well. It’s a fine evocation of the books (there are now nearly 200 of them) that were all the rage when I was in elementary school and continue to be popular amongst some kids these days, a movie mixing and matching its monsters to find appealing kid-friendly action. It’s not millennial nostalgia or children’s pap. It’s sweet crowd-pleasing entertainment with cross-generational appeal, casually expressing a terrific and, oddly enough, uncommon kid’s movie lesson: writing is great, reading is fun, and cultivating your imagination saves the day.

Do It All Again: 22 JUMP STREET

Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s 21 Jump Street reboot knew you’d be skeptical. The 2012 comedy based on the late-80’s TV series has an early scene in which the police captain (Nick Offerman) tells his new undercover cops (Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum) that the department is out of ideas and is recycling old ones in the hope no one really cares. Once again, two young cops will go undercover in a high school. From there, Lord and Miller surprised with a movie that’s funnier and smarter than you’d expect. It didn’t care too much for its detective plot, which is transparently simple and resolved too bloodily for laughs. But it was a fun movie with some funny lines, a perfect pair of cameos, smart observation about how quickly high school changes as you leave it behind, and a charming buddy-cop pairing in Hill and Tatum. That’s the kind of short/tall, chubby/fit, motormouth/lunkhead pairing that sounds like it might work on paper, and then wildly exceeds expectations on screen. Together they were better than either would’ve been alone. It was a pleasant surprise.

And now here’s 22 Jump Street, a sequel fully aware that sequels are usually inevitably worse than the first, especially when it comes to comedies. It has Offerman state the problem right off the bat. He wants his undercover cops to team up and infiltrate a new school, a college this time, and root out the source of a deadly new designer drug. He wants them to just do what they did last time. And so the movie sets out to skewer blockbuster sequels’ competing tendencies to A.) go bigger, louder, longer, and more spectacular, and B.) repeat everything that worked the first time around. The plot literalizes this dilemma by having Hill and Tatum’s direct superior (Ice Cube) show off their flashier, more expensive – “for no reason” – resources while telling them to do what they did before. Like Gremlins 2 and Ocean's Twelve, this is a movie that makes its sequel struggle part of the narrative in amusing ways.

Nerdy Hill and jock Tatum are again posing as brothers, now pretending to be college freshmen. Hill gets drawn into the art students’ circle while Tatum pledges at a fraternity and wants to join the football team. Though they became best friends and good partners last time, here they’re drawn apart, only to rediscover and reaffirm what a great team they make together. In between are parties, petty jealousies, a drug trip, slapstick, dirty jokes, homosocial bonding, a couple great cameos, and a token amount of police work. The screenplay by Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel, and Rodney Rothman lays out the pitfalls of sequels repeating the same character beats and riffing on similar scenarios right up front and then does them anyway, winking at its self-referential tendencies. Do it just like last time, our heroes are told. That’s what keeps people happy.

Hill and Tatum’s performances are sharp and consistently on-point. You have to be smart to play dumb so well and without losing audience sympathy. Improbably, in a film so silly and frivolous, I cared about their friendship and wanted them to catch the bad guys. They have great underdog chemistry, approaching the material from opposite directions and meeting expertly in the middle. They really do love each other and cherish their time together, holding back tears whenever they hash out the state of their friendship. It’s sweet. Hill and Tatum’s relationship feels more intense and charming even as the movie gets looser, goofier, and stranger as it steers into the skid, getting around sequel traps by playing them up. They’re terrific anchors for the silliness in which they find themselves. Because the central duo has such considerable charm, Lord and Miller are free to experiment around them.

The directors have clear movie love, an inside-out understanding of how blockbusters work and what makes their tropes so ridiculous(ly charming). Their hugely enjoyable, hard-working films - the Jump Streets, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie - are so packed with imaginative jokes and concepts that you can almost hear them snickering behind the camera, “Can you believe we get to make a movie!?” What makes 22 Jump Street so funny is the filmmaking breaking the fourth wall without quite letting its characters get through. The movie starts with a rapid-fire “Previously On” montage that somehow manages to reference Annie Hall, then hurtles through its self-aware sequel plotting, ending up in end credits that imagine the franchise’s future in a series of jokes so fast and dense I need to see the movie again just to catch them all.

Lord and Miller, with a more accomplished visual style that gets close to the visual density of their superior animated efforts, shoot the action in a Hot Fuzz-style parody of the Michael Bay style (minus most of his uglier tendencies). With explicit nods to Bad Boys specifically, this movie has low-angle hero shots, emphatic circling cameras, and saturated magic-hour lighting. Then they throw in a dash of split-screen foolishness, like Looney Tunes directed by DePalma, that doubles down on the doubling effect of sequels, a motif carried through by two sets of twins in the supporting cast. (“Twins again?” Tatum groans late in the picture.)

Meanwhile, the college plots are shot and played as typical collegiate comedy, with everything from soft-focus campus romance and vulgar hazing. There are funny scenes with an earnest art major (Amber Stevens), her sarcastic insult-comic of a roommate (scene-stealer Jillian Bell), and a doofy frat boy football player (Wyatt Russell). The movie is constantly drawing attention to its own implausibilities, but the various genre elements in the plot are played somewhat straight, allowing plenty of room for the inherent humor of a goofy pair of undercover cops trying desperately to blend in and solve a crime while working through their own problems.

All of that is complicated and made funnier by the mystery plot always lingering in the back of our leads’ minds. It’s more smoothly threaded through the comedy than last time. There’s a literal red herring symbol. A car chase is sped up as the vehicles zip around the “Benjamin Hill Department of Film Studies.”  It’s somehow thrilling and silly, thrillingly silly. Everything is both serious and a joke. It’s a messy mockery of the same formulaic arcs just barely holding it all together, like a Marx Brothers movie where the very structure of the plot itself is the chaos accelerant.

The film manages to be wild, raucous, self-critical, and often very funny. It has a handful of scenes that had me laughing the hard, short-of-breath, aching-sides laughter that can’t be denied. 22 can’t have the surprise of its first outing, but the filmmakers more than make up for it by energetically and excitingly goofing around the very struggle of doing a sequel. It’s bigger, louder, longer, with meta tricks that start clever, get too clever, and then circle back around again. In the process, the filmmakers made a sequel that captures a different sense of surprise. It’s sloppily satisfying.