Work Out: THE BUBBLE and RIEN À FOUTRE

Wasn’t it stupid to try to make a big movie during a pandemic? So says Judd Apatow’s The Bubble, a big Netflix movie made during the pandemic. Aside from that central uneasy irony, the whole thing’s a bust. It’s a long, loosely-structured would-be comedy with really only the animating anxious confusion of life during COVID and free-floating anger at a flailing studio system hanging the shambles together. The picture takes place in a palatial hotel in the English countryside in the pre-vaccine phase of our current crisis. How strange to see that time so far in the rearview already, and yet still we muddle on. Nonetheless, it forces the fictional studio in this movie, in the midst of mounting the $100 million-budgeted production of the too-chintzy-to-believe Cliff Beasts 6, to lock its cast and crew in an isolation bubble. There’s a lot of wincing goofiness at the top as the cast assembles in masks for temperature tests, nasal swabs, and a two-week quarantine. And then they’re off, with sequences alternating between broad goofs on Hollywood egos and studio politics in front or behind the scenes, and even broader chafing against the COVID protocols on the other.

There’s much silliness made out of clashing actors—pompous leading men (David Duchovny), mumbling self-serious thespians (Pedro Pascal), ditzy leading ladies (Leslie Mann), lifestyle-brand floggers (Keegan-Michael Key), flailing aged ingenues (Karen Gillan), and a social media star (Iris Apatow). That last one has to be the funniest, with Apatow’s younger daughter nailing the spacey cadence and passionless dancing of a zoned-out TikTok influencer. (That her manager mom is played by the equally zonked-out, wide-eyed Maria Bamford makes perfect sense, and made me wish the she was in the movie more than her fleeting appearance. Maybe the whole movie should’ve just been about them? Hey, still could do a spin-off, right?) There’s also Fred Armisen as an indie director failing in a franchise, Peter Serafinowicz as the harried producer, Kate McKinnon as the heartless executive, and a host of other bit roles filled out by interesting or amusing presences like Maria Bakalova, Rob Delaney, and Daisy Ridley. Much is made out of safety zones, face shields, and positive tests, but just as much tepid farce about cooped up celebrities and harried crew members falling into hook ups and drug use and so on. Any sense of life outside this bubble fades fast, leaving the wasn’t-that-a-time material stale and distant and empty.

Apatow is always at his best with character portraits—Knocked Up, Trainwreck, The King of Staten Island—and less adept at the problems of the rich—This is 40. Yet strangely he’s done a great look at showbiz loneliness before in his best film—Funny People. Maybe it helped that it was set in the world of comedy, from stand-ups to writers to movie stars. He understood how to communicate the loneliness of life in this kind of success, and the yearning for a big break from those on the lower rungs. Here, in The Bubble, there’s no such understanding of how these enormous spectacles are actually made—scenes in the green screen spaces or with special effects handlers are weird guesstimates, scenes of the movies-within-the-movie don’t even rise to the level of convincing satire. and there are few attempts to make the characters people instead of caricatures. That leaves the movie with empty farce that does nothing but remind you that there’s still a novel virus tearing through our world and an unfunny movie about the problems of a bunch of fake people in rarified circumstances isn’t making the comments it thinks it is.

That’s not to say it’d be too early to make fun of Hollywood excesses against the backdrop of a global pandemic that’s still killing thousands a day. But the movie’s too scattershot to land its punches with any verve, and the screenplay is so dramatically inert and tepidly shot that it’s two pretty flat hours that crawl by. Besides, the characters are so excruciatingly thinly drawn that there’s nowhere for it to go, anyway. When the leading lady has her hand shot off by an overzealous security guard, well, I guess that’s just par for the course. There’s no sense of escalation to the silliness, so by the time we get there, it’s just one more thing. I don’t doubt Apatow’s genuine dissatisfaction with the soulless Hollywood machinery churning out stupider product in the midst of a fraught time. However, the movie isn’t built to bolster that claim, instead finding at most mild amusement as his cast of personalities bounce off of each other, and then frittering away any attempt to add it all up. This manages to make Apatow’s movie simultaneously a howl of frustration and a whine of privilege. The extent to which the movie’s aware of that fact is dialed up and down seemingly at random. How frustrating. It asks: how dare a studio give these people a lot of money to make something this stupid at a time like this? Ditto.

A new streaming movie that’s actually about what it feels like to work for a living these days is Belgium’s small, well-observed flight attendant drama, Rien à foutre, which can be translated as Zero Fucks Given. With a title like that, and the copious stories lately about belligerent passengers refusing to, say, wear a mask to prevent the spread of disease, you’d think the movie would be a wild, vulgar affair. Going in I was thinking it’d be something like Pedro Almodovar’s deliriously fizzy airplane comedy I’m So Excited by way of Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging’s pandemic satire. But the movie is actually a sensitive little character study about a lost young woman, adrift in the air and on the ground alike as she tries to make do. It’s mostly a pre-pandemic story—though everyone’s in masks in the final scene, a bittersweet way of marking time, to be sure. Its consistent mood of now-what? is spot on.

The focus is simply on sketching the contours of one woman’s life, and finds no build to any false conflict or cheap revelations. No Sundance sentiment or workplace sitcom here. There’s something real and lived-in at the center of the picture. The flight attendant works for a budget airline and is lost to a grinding routine—airports, drinks, clubs, and one-night stands, dating apps and Instagram. She’s making enough money to get by, and she dreams of someday getting better routes to more glamorous destinations, even as she smiles and sells drinks and manages passengers and tries to hit her quotas. She’s not unambitious, but she’s uninterested or unable to achieve liftoff. Even when her supervisor essentially forces her to apply for a promotion, she’s a little put off. She’s happy the way she is. Or, maybe not happy, but it’s what she knows. Even the corporate hoops are mere inconvenience, until they’re not. There are moments where her face fills the frame as a smile passes subtly, slowly from genuine to fake, and you feel her world shift underneath her.

Credit star Adèle Exarchopoulos, then, for keeping the movie aloft. Though filmmakers Julie Lecoustre and Emmanuel Marre, working from a screenplay they wrote in collaborations with Mariette Désert, bring a ring of specificity to attendants’ shifts and downtime alike, it’s the lead who lifts it to the level of engaging throughout. Fittingly, they keep the camera in tight close-ups and medium shots on her expressive face and body language, precise and casual, beautiful and troubled. Exarchopoulos, who made such a memorable presence as a hungry teenager in the lesbian coming-of-age drama Blue is the Warmest Color nearly a decade ago, here again makes a compelling center of attention. She appears to be good at her job—she listens, she’s polite, she endures demands and insults with some grace. But she also drinks—sometimes too close to flights—and has no interest in maintaining relationships. Friendships are restricted to her co-workers and seem to last just the duration of any given stay. Romances are ordered up on apps for a few hours at a time. Eventually, she ends up back home with some family for a while, and we get some added insight into reasons why she feels particularly at a loss to move on. There’s real sadness there. But also love.

And it’s not like she’s only miserable, exactly. Here’s a movie that understands the complicated feelings many young people have today about their work and their seemingly stalled pathways forward. She seems to get pleasures from her lifestyle, and can like her job from time to time, but there’s also that indescribable sense that there’s no clear way to get more out of it, or to escape these cycles. Exarchopoulos, enlivening a quiet charisma sinking under a facade of pleasantries or a layer of sleepy depression, knits these details together into one convincing portrait. By the end, she feels like a real person we’ve gotten to know, and the movie’s lack of resolution or even easy ambiguity feels like we’ve just left her, she and we still wondering what’s next. In a time when employees are looking for work to give them not only meaning and money, but dignity, too, here’s a movie about a woman slowly realizing she’s worth more than they, or she, might think.

On the Road Again: VACATION

At least Vacation, the Harold Ramis-directed/John Hughes-scripted movie from 1983, started with a simple comic premise lampooning bad family car trips. By the time we reach the new combination remake/sequel Vacation, coming after three theatrical sequels and a direct-to-video spinoff, it starts to seem less like a relatable goof and more like a cruel punishment. Every member of the Griswold family is apparently doomed to a life of horrible vacations. If you have one terrible trip, you’ve had a terrible trip. But if you only have terrible trips, it must be you. At least a straightforward remake could’ve regained the original concept’s small charms. Maybe instead of this two-in-one reboot, what we really need is a prequel in which we finally learn how patriarch Gus Griswold insulted whichever warlock gave his family this curse.

The new Vacation is a podgy road trip swollen with an uneven collection of pit stops. The story goes like this. Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms) remembers fondly the great vacation his parents (Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo) took him on 32 years ago. So he wants to recreate it with his wife (Christina Applegate) and sons (Skyler Gisondo and Steele Stebbins). Misadventures ensue on their way from Illinois to California where Wally World awaits. It’s both the same, and different, making it the Jurassic World of comedies, right down to the endless repetition of the original’s main theme, unimpressive special effects, and characters who have an odd affection for decades-old events that within their world would’ve been inescapably scarring.

But that’s nothing that couldn’t be overcome with good jokes. I should have known writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein, the screenwriters behind last year’s execrable Horrible Bosses 2, might not be up to the task. At least it’s not that bad. Every stop on the trip heads straight into cameos, in which funny people step into the picture for a brief moment and make it almost watchable. You can’t throw Keegan-Michael Key, Regina Hall, Leslie Mann, Chris Hemsworth, and Charlie Day into a movie and not have at least a few smile-worthy moments. Of the main cast, only Applegate got a laugh out of me. It’s supposed to be funny that the Griswolds are mostly oblivious, a bit rude, gullible, prone to bad decisions and saying awkward things, like when they mistakenly think slang for a sex act means a chaste kiss. A little of this family goes a long way.

Some scenes are mildly amusing, like their car’s confusing features, a man who doesn’t know there’s a rat on his shoulder, and a territorial dispute among police officers at the Four Corners Monument. But many scenes are consistently misjudged. Its dirtiness feels crass, dark humor plays sour, slapstick is just unpleasant, and gross out gags are only gross. If you think the idea of a grown woman face down in a puddle of vomit on a sorority house lawn, or a family mistaking a lagoon of human waste for a hot spring, a steer munching on gory cow viscera, or a woman in a convertible killed in a head on collision with a semi are funny ideas, go for it. There’s a lot more where those came from. It’s not actively hateful like the worst R-rated comedies, but there’s a low-level grinding lazy nastiness that leaves a bad taste. Worst, though, is the way it’s just regurgitated garbage, a copy of a copy of a copy of an original that was merely half-decent to begin with.

Once, Twice, Three Times a Cheater: THE OTHER WOMAN

The Other Woman is a light and amiable wish-fulfillment revenge comedy with all the tonal mismanagement that pile-up of descriptors suggests. Getting off to a good start, the film introduces us to a high-powered New York City lawyer (Cameron Diaz) head-over-heels for her new rich, handsome boyfriend (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). He’s her first serious relationship in many years. Too bad, then, that he’s married. When she finds out she’s understandably hurt, but not as much as his wife (Leslie Mann) is. He doesn’t know they know, and certainly doesn’t know they then spied on him and uncovered a second unsuspecting mistress (Kate Upton). From there the three women team up to get revenge on this no-good sleazeball. At first they play pranks, like putting a laxative in his water or estrogen in his power shake. But they don’t just want him humiliated. They want him to hurt. So they target his most vulnerable part: his wallet.

Totally uninterested in making this a dark or biting comedy, the screenplay by Melissa Stack finds fizzy complications that are treated as a lark. This leads to some gross-out gags like a defecating dog or a man in a fancy restaurant having an urgent bowel movement (what is it with this movie and poop?) that are certainly gross and might even make you gag, but I didn’t find them too funny. Okay, that second one was a little funny, but seems out of place, because elsewhere the emotions of the women are triangulated for comedy and light drama. Their common goal includes shifting desires and expectations for each of them at different points. They’ve certainly become friends under unusual circumstances, so it makes sense they wouldn’t always be on the same page. The wife, especially, has her doubts. Sure, he was cheating, but she wonders if that’s reason enough to throw away their marriage?

That’s an interesting question, or at least could be. But Stack’s script isn’t interested in exploring that. It’s too busy alternating between bubbly and goofy. Director Nick Cassavetes (of The Notebook and My Sister’s Keeper) shoots the film glossily. Everything is brightly lit and gleaming. The surroundings are as rich and white as the characters – big glass-covered offices, spacious high-rise apartments, and gorgeous beach houses. But I suppose that’s part of the wish-fulfillment of it all. Not only do we get to watch three beautiful women plot against an awful chauvinist, but we also get to see fancy clothes and nice architecture while they do it. Everyone’s so well off they can drop everything and go to the Hamptons or the Bahamas on a stakeout. Must be nice. I mean, aside from the whole finding out you’re all being cheated on thing.

What keeps this sloppy script and sparkling studio airiness watchable and even at times enjoyable is the strength of the cast. The three women at the center of the plot hold it down with their likable chemistry and funny personalities. They’re all clearly in their acting comfort zones, relaxed and capable of wringing laughs out of the sometimes lame material. One of them actually sells the old looking-through-the-wrong-end-of-binoculars sight gag. That’s no small feat. Leslie Mann is appealing as a tightly wound housewife who increasingly spirals into a manic panic over her husband’s infidelities before finding the clarifying purpose of plotting revenge. Cameron Diaz is fizzy and sarcastic, able to whip up a plan of action and have fun doing it. And Kate Upton is awfully good at selling ditziness, even if her character remains only a happy, curvaceous blank-slate. Seriously, what does she even do? Where does she go when she’s not on screen? We’ll never know.

They aren’t exactly the second coming of 9 to 5, the three-women-take-down-dumb-guy revenge comedy The Other Woman occasionally resembles, but that’s not entirely their fault. Get these three characters in a scene together, trading lines with one another, and it’s all pleasantly enjoyable. Mann’s flighty worry bounces nicely off of Diaz’s wry cynicism and Upton’s airheaded charm proves a fine glue to hold the trio together. But the movie has less to say about female empowerment than you’d hope, keeping the ladies firmly in their stereotypes. The tone wobbles all the way to the end, mixing broad slapstick and blunt innuendo right up to the climax in which the comeuppance we’ve been waiting for is a bit too eagerly vindictive. The movie doesn’t seem to think very highly of any of its characters, even the side characters like a small role for Nicki Minaj that dilutes the snap of her rap persona. That's a factor in the mishandled mood and empty point of view - are we supposed to root for them or view it all at a satiric remove? - that make for a hard movie to embrace. I didn’t mind it too much, laughing at times and smiling a few more, but it’s so slight and forgettable it’ll probably play even better in the middle of a weekend afternoon on TBS.

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.

A Dog and His Boy: MR. PEABODY & SHERMAN

Mr. Peabody (Ty Burrell) is far and away the smartest dog in the world. I’m not just talking smart like Snoopy, or even smart like Stan the talking, blogging dog of Dog with a Blog. Mr. Peabody is a genius. He’s an inventor, a scholar, a scientist, and the founder and C.E.O. of Peabody Industries. For his contributions to the pursuit of knowledge, he’s been awarded a Nobel Prize. That’s some dog. But perhaps his most notable achievement is his win in the historic court case for his right to adopt a human child. The judge decided that someone as accomplished as Mr. Peabody could surely be trusted with such a task and so the bespectacled beagle is awarded custody of Sherman (Max Charles), a red-haired, big-eyed infant orphan eager to learn and grow. They make a good pair and have for many years. Seeing as Mr. Peabody & Sherman opens with the boy as a seven-year-old, this intelligent canine has clearly discovered the secret to expanding dog lives. I wouldn’t put it past him.

These cartoon characters have been around since the late 1950s when they debuted on TV with Ted Key's Peabody’s Improbable History, part of Jay Ward’s Rocky and Bullwinkle. Their new feature length reboot comes courtesy of DreamWorks Animation, director Rob Minkoff (The Lion King, Stuart Little) outfitting them with a bright primary color world full of soft and shiny CGI of appealing rubberiness. Now, as then, their story hinges on Mr. Peabody’s most amazing invention, one he keeps secret out of necessity. It’s a time machine. He uses it to teach Sherman about history by letting him observe it in action. They call it the WABAC Machine (say it out loud if you don’t get it). Since the rules of time travel movies dictate that time must be put in disarray, the better to send our protagonists lost in time desperate to fix mistakes, you know the first time you see the spinning red vehicle bleeping its way through wormholes that something will go wrong soon.

But you might not expect to see a film that takes the father/son relationship seriously, especially taking into consideration the canine factor. Sherman gets into a fight with a snooty girl at school (Ariel Winter) and, in a moment of frustration, bites her. In storms a towering social worker (Allison Janney), glaring at Mr. Peabody and sniffing that such behavior is to be expected letting a dog raise a child. It’s a fine stand-in for knee-jerk condemnation of unconventional family structures. Even better is the film’s insistence that getting to know people melts away prejudices. Why, that super-smart dog is not so different from us after all! Peabody invites the bitten girl and her parents (Stephen Colbert and Leslie Mann) over for a dinner party in the hopes of smoothing the conflict and preventing the social worker from deciding to take Sherman away. 

But, even before the first course, the kids end up sneaking into the WABAC and rocketing into the past. Told you that time machine would cause some trouble. What follows is a mashup of famous times and faces as the kids bounce into Ancient Egypt, running into King Tut (Zach Callison) before dashing away, desperate for Peabody’s help. So it’s two kids and a dog racing through time, interrupting an Egyptian wedding ceremony, Leonardo Da Vinci (Stanley Tucci) in the middle of painting Mona Lisa (Lake Bell), and Agamemnon (Patrick Warburton) and his army huddled in a giant wooden horse. The movie moves at a fast, but never frantic, pace as it finds pleasantly elastic history. A mix of brisk caricature and actual interest in facts, the script by Craig Wright (with additional dialogue by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon) finds amusing little details and gigglingly over-the-top accents at each stop. There’s an Egyptian who is way too excited about the mummification process. Mona Lisa is too tired from sitting around all day to smile. And I especially liked the portrayal of Odysseus as not exactly the sharpest guy around. I mean, it’ll take him long enough to get home, right?

In its brisk, colorful cartooniness, Mr. Peabody & Sherman is often funny. It leans heavily on gags and puns – when a mummy loses an arm, the dog quips, “That’s disarming” – with a welcome emphasis on clever silliness. And yet there is rubbery rigor in the time travel mechanics, enough to tickle my inner timeline nerdiness without leaping beyond the understanding of its target audience. It’s entertaining, but never taxing. Part of what makes it so comfortable are the warm and appealing voice performances, especially Burrell’s Peabody, quaint and inviting with a pinched ivory tower voice sparkling with a love of learning and of wordplay. He was never adopted as a puppy because he was too sarcastic. Aw. It’s fun to fly through history with him as a guide.

As with so many modern animated family films, through all the bouncy movement, sly references, and quick slapstick, everything hinges on the emotional state of the family. It is as if adults who go to these with children need reassurance that they’re doing okay. In this film, the father/son relationship is movingly developed, from an early montage of backstory set to John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” to the key climactic moment that’s nothing more than a show of familial solidarity, the dénouement an exchange of fatherly “I love you.” It may be just a silly time travel comedy about a dog and his boy, but a father’s love for his son (and son for father) outlasting all the tribulations of all time is a lovely thought.

Scenes from a Marriage: THIS IS 40

Audiences first met Pete and Debbie (Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann) in Judd Apatow’s hit 2007 comedy Knocked Up. They were the harried couple in their mid-30s with two young kids, a family that was both a source of hope and a cautionary tale to the film’s leads, expectant parents played by Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl. Pete and Debbie were in some ways the best parts of that movie, memorable and with some exaggerated truth about them. You might remember Pete warning, “Marriage is like a tense, unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond. Only it doesn't last 22 minutes. It lasts forever.” Now Apatow has plucked these characters from his earlier hit to create a spin-off with This is 40, a movie that proves Pete’s line about marriage correct. This is a sort of epic, R-rated sitcom episode, right down to the sunny bland visual sense, unfunny in large patches and lasting seemingly forever. It’s a shaggy, uneven film with some small, incidental pleasures that from time to time nearly make up for the production’s overarching solipsism.

The film takes place in the days before Pete and Debbie’s fortieth birthdays, a fine hook on which to hang a plot of personal reflection perched on the precipice of potential midlife crises exacerbated by pressures from outside the marriage. In true sitcom fashion, each half of this couple is hiding or minimizing important information from the other. Pete, when he’s not secretly scarfing cupcakes, has been giving money to his freeloading dad (Albert Brooks), which couldn’t be more inconvenient since his indie record label is on the brink of collapse and he’s missed a few mortgage payments. Debbie is also having trouble with her dad, an aloof, awkward, distant parent (John Lithgow), and money problems that need her to find out which one of her employees (either Megan Fox or Charlene Yi) is stealing from her boutique clothing store.

These are the main threads of anxiety that run through the picture, which are certainly fine impetuses for stress. It’s a shame that the film follows its characters right down a tunnel of self-absorption, with two characters locked in marital conflict in petty, grating ways. They bicker about diets, sex, childrearing, habits, money, vacations, and schedules. Over the course of 134 minutes, the film has plot elements that dead-end or take a cul-de-sac in a loose, rambling structure that allows foibles and miscommunications to escalate, pile up, fade away, come roaring back, shift priorities, and resolve, or not, in sometimes enjoyable fashion. Rudd and Mann are very good performers and are here, but the film is ultimately so repetitive an irritant, circling around the same emotional problems, relationship conflicts, and thematic concerns with increasingly less to say, that in the end I cared about the side characters far more than the couple at the center of it all.

Take, for example, the great Melissa McCarthy, an Oscar nominee last year for her work in the very good comedy Bridesmaids, who here plays a mom of one of Pete and Debbie’s daughter’s classmates. Following a terrible scene in which Debbie, thinking she’s sticking up for her daughter, cruelly berates the poor kid, the parents are called into the principal’s office. In a painfully uncomfortable scene, Debbie simply denies the encounter, which leads to McCarthy getting increasingly agitated. In the end, she’s the one who gets in trouble with the principal, coming across as a crazy person simply because Pete and Debbie present such a united front of deceit. (Well, McCarthy's character's a little crazy too, but still.) Beats me why we’re supposed to like this sort of thing. All this really did was cut off any lingering affection I had for the main characters.

Besides, all the stuff even approaching funny is happening with characters sitting on the sidelines with undernourished subplots, a fact that’s some sort of astonishing in a film this indulgent. For starters, there are Apatow’s daughters, Maude and Iris, playing Pete and Debbie’s daughters through convincing and cute character traits, the older newly adolescent and moody, the younger awfully precocious in a good way. I liked their relationship with each other as well, which leads to the film’s best off-handedly sweet moments. Brooks and Lithgow, as the flailing grandfathers, are fun as well, but never more than when they get a chance to play a scene opposite each other. Fox and Yi are amusing as two diametrically opposite employees, each quick to accuse the other of being the thief. Then there’s the terrific supporting cast filled with people like Chris O’Dowd, Jason Segel, and Lena Dunham, who have a handful of mildly funny lines, if that, each.

The determined self-centered absorption at the film’s center ends up dragging down all of its more admirable qualities, which are scattered about the film with no real central drive or organization. If we are to care about the couple at the middle of it all, it’s made all the more difficult by their selfishness wherein a great deal of their problems would disappear by simply speaking to one another honestly or thinking about the feelings and motivations of others. If we are not suppose to care about this couple, than the least the movie could do is offer up sharper character studies instead of unconvincing types stuck crosswise in three or four Idiot Plots at once. Perhaps Apatow really does believe that marriage is a tense, unfunny, formless, endless sitcom episode, but he didn’t have to go and make one, did he?

He Sees Dead People: PARANORMAN

The creative people at Laika, the stop-motion animation company that first brought us Henry “Nightmare Before Christmas” Selick’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, are back with a first-rate family-friendly horror movie called ParaNorman. It’s the story of Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee), an 11-year-old boy who can see ghosts and though it’s scary, it’s not too scary. The film may have more in common stylistically with Poltergeist and Halloween than Scooby Doo, but its heart is all R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps books and Gil Kenan’s underappreciated Monster House, yet another horror movie for kids. ParaNorman is the safe, fun kind of creepy scary that wraps up the danger and suspense in heaping helpings of humor, slapstick, and life lessons.  I’ll bet brave and precocious kids will happily, if maybe a bit uneasily, gobble it up, mostly because I know I would’ve done so when I was 11-years-old, as I did now.

Written and co-directed by debut filmmaker Chris Butler (his co-director is animation veteran Sam Fell, who previously helmed Aardman’s Flushed Away and Universal’s Tale of Despereaux) the film opens with Norman having a good chat with his grandmother (Elaine Stritch) who just happens to be dead. In fact, most of his social interaction happens with these floating ghosts who inhabit this small, sleepy Massachusetts town. Of course, no one believes him. The poor kid is surrounded by people who just don’t understand: his parents (Leslie Mann and Jeff Garlin), his older cheerleader sister (Anna Kendrick), and the school bully (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). He’s a loner who only has a semi-clueless chubby kid (Tucker Albrizzi) to talk to, even though they’ve only just met.

The town’s getting ready to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the town’s claim to fame: the Puritans’ hanging of a girl they declared a witch who, before she died, is said to have cursed the judge and jury to walk the earth as zombies. But, that hasn’t happened in all this time, so the town has grabbed onto the historical anecdote and made it their main reason for existence. On the eve of this anniversary, as the school kids prepare to put on a reenactment – complete with their children’s choir rendition of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” – the town’s resident crazy guy (John Goodman) runs up to Norman and urges him to use his powers of communicating with the dead to stop the witch’s ghost (Jodelle Ferland) from returning to exact revenge by activating her curse.

Wouldn’t you know it? That’s exactly what happens and now it’s up to Norman to avoid the zombies shuffling through town, find a way to break the witch’s curse and stop it all from tearing the town apart. It might be too late. The zombies – shambling corpses with green skin hanging loosely off of fragile bones – are already causing quite a bit of chaos. Unfortunately, when the night grew dark and stormy and the curse came whirling into action, Norman was stuck with his sister, the bully, the chubby kid, and that kid’s older brother (Casey Affleck). They aren’t exactly much help. At one point Norman grumbles that if he’d known what breaking the curse entailed, he’d have “gotten stuck with a different group of people who hate me.”

What keeps the potential intensity of it all manageable is the way Butler, Fell and their crew of technicians keep the nice handcrafted feeling – the textures of the sets and figures are so intricate, vivid and tactile – animating the macabre dollhouse aesthetic while heading off into two pleasantly surprising parallel avenues of attack. Firstly, the film is proudly funny, with all manner of coy references, chipper dialogue, and sight gags jumping right along, puncturing scenes before they get overwhelmingly scary and sliding instead into pleasantly creepy, gorgeously animated, territory. The zombies themselves, initially only great jump-scares and slow-moving threats, are used for both their menace and their inherent goofy physical properties, losing limbs that continue to crawl around and staring agape at the strange modern world around them. They’re as confused as they are dangerous. After all, they’re from 1712.

Secondly, the film finds some unexpected depth in its story of a kid bullied because he’s different, eventually drawing some nice parallels with the town’s violent history. I’d never have guessed that ParaNorman would become, even casually and in an unemphatic, and all the more powerful for it, way, a film about how a town’s history informs its present, about how bullying is a sad fact of human nature, about how retrograde fears and mob mentalities never really go away, they just return in newer, modern iterations. By the end, the striking visuals and creepy fun plot add up to some good lessons and sweet, moving emotional resolution.

From the movie’s opening scratchy, faux-retro studio logos that fade into a cheesy zombie movie that is revealed to be what Norman and his ghost grandma are watching on TV, I knew I was in for something special. This is a movie made with great care and attention to detail, bursting in every frame with imagination and creativity. It’s clear that the filmmakers love this genre and love their characters. And that’s contagious. This is a terrific entertainment that hurtles forward with atmosphere and energy, a fun ride to a satisfying destination.

Change We Can't Believe In: THE CHANGE-UP

David “Wedding Crashers” Dobkin’s The Change-Up is a rancid pit filled with the putrid remains of offensive, outdated mindsets and regressive stereotypes. It’s a lame body switch comedy that is relentlessly cruel and crude and uses its time on screen to do little more than insult every character and denigrate every lifestyle choice they represent. The worst insult of the film is quite possibly leveled at the audience that is assumed to be ready to eat this up. What ugly, unfunny rot.

The idea of two people switching bodies and then being forced to comically live out the other’s life is a fun hook. It’s all too rarely produced a good film, but you can’t win them all. In any case, it’s usually a chance for two actors to have fun with the other’s style of line readings and typical body language. In 2003’s Freaky Friday remake, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan put in genuinely great performances post-switch, believably becoming the other. Nicolas Cage and John Travolta pull off a similar feat in John Woo’s underrated 1997 action flick Face/Off. Despite the patchy track record – for every solid effort there’s a Vice Versa and Like Father, Like Son to set teeth to cringing – the subgenre seems perpetually ripe for a new positive example.

But I haven’t actually talked about The Change-Up much yet, have I? If you’ll excuse the above digression, I’ll get around to telling you that this truly abysmal movie stars Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds as the victims of a switcheroo. Bateman is an ambitious lawyer on the brink of being named a partner in his firm. He has a lovely wife and three young kids. Of course the film makes him miserable. He just can’t appreciate what he has because he’s too focused on the fact that his wife (poor Leslie Mann) wants to actually talk to him and his babies cry a lot. As for Reynolds, he’s a pothead, a failed actor, and a particularly egregious overgrown man-child who is also somehow a ladies’ man. He’s miserable too. As written, both men are so extremely off-putting that no amount of inherent charm from the actors can overcome it.

One night the two guys, who happen to be friends despite the fact that they don’t have anything in common, admit that they wish they had the other’s life. Yeah, right. Here’s a movie with a low opinion of all mankind, that says being married crushes a man’s freedom, ‘cause ladies, you know how they are. Then it turns around and says, left to their own devices, men would live like horrible slobs mindlessly pursuing their basest desires, ‘cause men, you know how they are. It’s such a pessimistic and creatively bankrupt way to approach human relationships. Of course the two guys will wreak havoc in the other’s lives before getting in touch with another part of themselves and switching back as marginally better people. But there’s no sense that either has anything to learn from the life of the other. The whole world of the film has a kind of mean-spirited retrograde opinion of gender roles, interpersonal dynamics, race, class, men, women, and children. It’s downright nasty.

Written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the same guys who recently brought you The Hangover Part II, this film can join it at the very bottom of this year’s, or any year’s, barrel of comedies. It’s a film that treats its cast, down to the lowliest extra, as nothing more than vulgar fleshy puppets to be trotted out on display for an audience to laugh at. There’s nothing to identify with in this feature, no spark of life or wit or imagination. It’s the kind of comedy that whips out the four-letter words with a dull repetitiveness, and yanks on its gross-out gags with a tiresome insistence that they’re shocking when they’re nothing more than desperate. The movie opens with a baby projectile defecating into Jason Bateman’s mouth and only goes downhill from there.

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.

Funny People (2009)

With Funny People, his third film as director, Judd Apatow, the most prolific peddler of the modern R-rated comedy, has brought more ambition and less restraint, creating the type of generously textured, yet also turbulently messy, film that is precisely the type of film that deserves to be debated. It vibrates with a sense of vitality that at times makes up for the flaws. This isn’t exactly a masterpiece – I don’t like it quite enough to make that claim – but it’s the kind of interestingly tangled work – at once confidently controlled and dangerously personal – that a filmmaker can sometimes create that will inspire passionate, and justified, feelings both against and in defense. I will defend the film, for despite the genital-centered jokes that appear with inordinate frequency, as is the Apatow standard, this is a subtle and adult work, delving headfirst into tricky themes and remaining mostly unscathed.

The film stars Adam Sandler, in an oddly self-reflexive role, as successful comedian George Simmons, who has long since graduated from stand-up to land in the big-bucks studio comedies of precisely the kind in which Sandler has been known to appear. He’s the classic case of a man with everything he ever wanted, yet nothing that truly matters. As the film opens, we follow Simmons as he walks through a public space, stopping to take pictures or sign autographs for adoring fans. We end up with him in an examining room where he is told that he has a rare form of leukemia and only an eight-percent chance of surviving. We then follow him back into the world fully expecting, having been conditioned by countless disease-of-the-week dramas, for Simmons to grow and change, learning life lessons while battling the disease. This doesn’t happen, or at least, not exactly.

This is where we meet Ira Wright, a struggling stand-up comedian played by Seth Rogen. He lives with roommates, also comedians, one (Jonah Hill) his colleague in the amateur stand-up world, the other (Jason Schwartzman) relishing his glimmer of success with a mildly successful, if mostly derided, NBC sitcom. It is at the improv where George sees Ira’s act and later calls him and offers him a job as a joke writer. The film then follows George and Ira through an odd relationship, positioned somewhere between personal and professional, with interesting emotional pushes and pulls, naturally arising conflicts with uneasy resolutions. Apatow is unafraid to follow his characters down tangents in plot while in pursuit of emotional truth. In fact, the whole third act of the film could be considered a tangent, dealing with characters who, by that point, have been unseen (Eric Bana) or half-glimpsed (Apatow’s loveably cute daughters) and foregrounding a romance subplot involving Leslie Mann that is arguably unnecessary, but I went with it.

The movie is lumpy and misshapen, I won’t argue that point, but it rarely feels like it steps wrong. Even distracting cameos from real-world celebrities are easily ignored in the flow of the feelings the film evokes, in the rich texture of supporting roles like Aubrey Plaza, Aziz Ansari, and RZA who, though given few scenes, create fully realized characters that weave in to the greater tapestry. The film is not about plot. Instead, this is a film about character and emotion, tone and mood. Apatow, working with the great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, has crafted a movie with understated beauty in the images and rhythm. How often can that be said about a big studio summer comedy? This isn’t just a comedy, but it’s also unfair to label it a dramedy, as some are quick to do. This is a drama, pure and simple. The characters happen to be quick-witted individuals who crack jokes as a default when dealing with any situation. These are funny people, no doubt about it, but they are living the same dramatic lives as any other set of people. Since Apatow started as a stand-up before becoming the success that he is now, it seems that Apatow sees himself in his two leads: Ira is who he was; George is who he all too easily could have become.

This is a film, in ways both subtle and sweet, about lives in transition. The arcs the characters travel never feel predetermined, they never creak with convention. Everyone knows by now that comedians are rarely the happiest members of humanity, and Apatow wisely avoids making this the theme of his film. Nor does he merely use the central question of disease and mortality to show us once again how confronting the abyss of death can cause radical change within an individual. With Funny People, Apatow isn’t content to restate. He’s interested in exploring the trickier, subtler terrain where people change in small, not big, ways. In doing so, though this is far from a perfect film, it casts a spell that only messy, tricky, passionately personal films can.

17 Again (2009)

We have heard a lot recently about Zac Efron and whether or not he’s a movie star. On the basis of 17 Again, I would say he certainly is. The movie’s a teen comedy, moving him out of the pre-teen musical land, and will probably surprise parents of young kids with some of the more suggestive humor. It’s a comfortable, sturdy, mid-sized star vehicle all his own, and it doesn't hurt that the camera loves him. He harkens back to the young leading men of the mid-eighties with a little Michael J. Fox here, a little Kevin Bacon there, a little Tom Hanks here, a little Tom Cruise there. That’s not to say he’s a great actor, but he does solid work here as a thirty-seven-year-old man (at the start, Matthew Perry) who gets transformed by a magical janitor (played by Brian Doyle-Murray, Bill Murray’s brother) into his seventeen-year-old self. Efron’s charming, likable, and manages to convey the situation fairly well. I was surprised by the emotion he could convey in scenes such as the one when he describes holding his daughter for the first time.

His daughter, of course, is no longer a baby. She’s in high school (and played by Michelle Trachtenberg) along with her brother (Sterling Knight). Both young actors do a fine job here, but the real heavy lifting goes to the supporting cast of adults. Leslie Mann (delightful as the leads’ soon to be ex-wife), Thomas Lennon, and Melora Hardin (along with Jim Gaffigan and Margaret Cho in very small roles) sell even the dumbest lines. Pay close attention to a date between Thomas Lennon, as Perry/Efron’s best friend, and Melora Hardin, as the school principal. As I watched it I found myself thinking: if this isn’t funny, why am I smiling?

The whole movie’s like that. There’s not a moment I couldn’t see coming (there’s even a use of the old cliché of a character vehemently, repeatedly, opposed to doing something immediately followed by a cut to the character doing it) and yet I was improbably entertained, or at least distracted. This isn’t a particularly involving movie, but it sure goes down easy. The hook of the movie is a fairly generic body-shift comedy. It’s never surprising but it’s puzzlingly entertaining. Director Burr Steers has created the kind of glossy, unchallenging entertainment that Hollywood can grind out from time to time. As far as recent body-shift comedies go, 17 Again is more fun than 13 Going On 30 but not quite as fun as the latest Freaky Friday.

It’s the commitment of the actors who help tip the movie over the edge. Even though they have surely seen all the same movies we have, they appear invested in it, which in turn helps sell it back to us. When Efron dances with Mann, it’s not a teenager dancing with an older woman. It plays like a husband and wife, a feat that could only be accomplished by good acting. Of course, Mann doesn’t know that Efron’s her husband and the two of them inject some unexpected nuance into the relationship.

Earth Day was this week. Why not see a recycled film? It takes junky movies like Vice Versa and Like Father Like Son, mixes in just a dash of Big and 18 Again and ends up with a competent result. Every once in a while, particularly a scene involving Efron spinning a basketball while insulting a bully, a scene comes across as awkwardly written but for the most part this is simple, unchallenging entertainment. And I must confess, when the big clunky cliched moment of revelation comes, I was satisfied. Twinkle those eyes, Mr. Murray! Run, Mr. Perry! There's a movie to conclude.