Daddy's Home: ON THE ROCKS

Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks could be called a sitcom farce if it had some more pep in its step. As it is, it’s slow-drip farce, a low-key look at a middle-aged married woman with doubts (Rashida Jones) and her rascally womanizing father (Bill Murray) who flies into town and encourages her doubts in order to spend time with her. It’s sweet, sad, and sentimental as the two of them tool around New York City trying to figure out if her husband (Marlon Wayans) is cheating on her. Like a minor B-side to Coppola’s great father/daughter picture Somewhere—where there a womanizing movie star father is slowly, potentially, pulled out of his ennui by taking care of his daughter for a while—this new movie finds the push-and-pull of a warm but contentious familial relationship a source of strength and consternation. Coppola is such an astute observer of human behavior, and finds a dreamy specificity in her pin-prick precise production design, so perfectly right it looks tossed off and casual. Because of this, her airy and breezy approach to a situational comedy of this sort looks easy. It has the cheery rhythms of repartee at half speed, a lived-in prickly warmth between a charmingly disappointing —or disappointingly charming—father and his slightly stressed daughter, whose insecurities surely must come, in part, from her dad’s approach to women. “You can’t live without them,” he says, “but you don’t have to live with them.” He says it not like a punchline, but as a bromide the old fellow has surely dusted off one too many times before. The whole project balances on this sparkling smallness, on subtle turns of phrase and shifts of mood. Here’s a portrait of love, aging, and family that’s sweet and sad. Without pressing down too overtly, it becomes a deceptively light domestic drama hidden just under the quotidian daily routine and dilemmas—drop offs and pick-ups, lunches and dinners, RSVPs and random catch-ups, babysitters and cabs—and the naturally paced development about what lesser hands would escalate to unreal crescendos. Coppola’s a sharp filmmaker, and here finds a generously slight picture of uncomfortably comfortable middle age, its discontents, and its pleasures. No wonder a key recurring image is that of a gifted watch, for the older you get, the more you realize the greatest present you can give someone else is your time.

THE HEAT is On

If nothing else, the new buddy cop comedy The Heat proves that some standard movie formulas can still work if done well. Just reading the phrase “buddy cop comedy” probably already has you thinking it’ll have the tough boss who puts together two dissimilar police officers. The pair will, after initial tension and hurt feelings, learn how to work together and then even to like each other, maybe. There’ll be bonding and bullets and it’ll all get wrapped up with plenty of laughs along the way. Well, you’d be right. But The Heat does it all with plenty of likable energy, reasonably involving plotting, and two terrifically appealing lead performances. And the formula works once again.

To this typically masculine subgenre, director Paul Feig, of Bridesmaids, and screenwriter Katie Dippold, a writer for the terrific sitcom Parks & Recreation, bring a welcome pair of roles for women. Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy play the cops around which the story is built. They’re not only operating within the usual bounds of the good cop, bad cop positions, but are playing variations on their typical character types as well. Bullock plays one of her professional women who gradually loosen up and let others into her life without sacrificing the quality of her work. McCarthy plays one of her tornados of profanity and peculiarities, the goofball with hidden depths. These two hugely appealing actresses are good at playing these kinds of roles and here have fun chemistry with one another. They’re a natural pair. Their differences and similarities fit together nicely, operating on compatible wavelengths from which genuine warmth is formed. Bullock, tightly composed and snappily determined and McCarthy, confidently messy, make quite a pair.

Bullock’s character is an F.B.I. agent who arrives in Boston hot on the trail of a mysterious drug lord. McCarthy is the initially off-putting local detective who bristles at the thought of some outsider telling her how to do things in her town. Everything you need to know about the characters you can tell by their wardrobes. Bullock dresses exclusively in conservative pantsuits, while McCarthy wears ratty t-shirts and a well-worn vest. They couldn’t be more different, which makes their progression from initial antagonism to reluctant partners satisfying. Though there’s plenty of room around them for character actors to play cops (Demián Bichir, Marlon Wayans, Taran Killam), criminals (Spoken Reasons, Michael McDonald), and locals (Jane Curtin, Michael Rapaport, Bill Burr), it’s basically a two-woman show. Asides acknowledge the difficulty of being a woman in a typically male-driven profession, but that’s wisely kept subtextual. They’ve got a job to do, proving their capability with results.

What makes The Heat work so well is the way it looks like a cop movie, crisply barreling down an investigation that takes some satisfying twists and turns, but moves like a star-driven comedy. In scenes of interrogations, analysis of clues, and meetings over strategy, Feig’s direction and Dippold’s screenplay serve both cop and comedy sides of the film equally, ratcheting up the stakes and dumping exposition while letting their leads’ clearly-drawn personalities bounce off of each other in appealingly prickly confrontations. They throw their whole bodies into showing the other who’s the real boss of the situation, to the point of spending way too long trying to push each other out of a doorway for the small victory of being the first one to a suspect’s apartment. To compete with each other when they’re both equally driven to catch the drug lord is ridiculous and they know it, but they simply can’t help themselves. That’s what drives the comedy: irrepressible professional pride leading to surface level conflict that inevitably reveals the affection we knew all along they could find.

It all comes down to the inevitable stakeouts and shootouts the genre requires, but because it’s been such a pleasure to see these two cops snap at one another and grow close to one another while being, for the most part, good at their jobs, it’s easy to get involved in their plight. There are big splashy gross-out moments of stabbings and tense gun-wielding stalemates, but plenty of laughs as well. When Bullock and McCarthy flail about undercover in a nightclub, it’s more funny than tense, but later a scene that starts with an amusing buzzed night out and ends with the two barely escaping certain death is suddenly more dangerous than funny. (Though McCarthy gets a good laugh out of the moment as well.) The film keeps both plates spinning. It may be more or less exactly what you’d expect out of a buddy cop comedy, but we haven’t had a good one in some time. It is formula played in such a way that it doesn’t feel stale. And it’s not often that a Hollywood production is so nonchalant about telling the story of two women in the context of a formula picture, which makes it all the more refreshing.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

The storyline of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is so simple a four-year-old child could explain it to you. Lacking a four-year-old child, I will attempt to explain. You see, there are these elite military figures who work together in covert operations. They’re called the G.I. Joes. They’re the good guys. There are also these slimy scientists and weapons developers who are the bad guys. They want to use nanotechnology to, gee, I actually don’t know. Do they want to take over the world, or destroy the Joes, or impersonate the president (played here by Jonathan Pryce)? Maybe that four-year-old would know.

When I went to see the movie, I was handed a free starter pack of cards for a collectible card game called “Top Trumps” starring characters from the movie. I have these sitting next to my computer at the moment. Allow me to look at them and try to figure out what exactly is going on in this movie. As it played I could only tell that good people were fighting bad people and somehow that involved interchangeable nonsense names (like Ripcord and Snake-Eyes) and green super-missiles that release tiny metal-eating robots. I sure hope the cards help decode the film and I won’t have to Google my way to a G.I. Joe fan-site.

First up is General Hawk. He’s played by Dennis Quaid and I could tell he was the leader of the Joes. According to the card, he’s “infamous and inspirational” and also has “the skills and experience of a battle hardened warrior.” I couldn’t prove this by the evidence in the movie, but Quaid does talk with a commanding voice and often scowls.

Next, is something called Neo-Vipers. The card says these are super-soldiers. I remember now that they work for Cobra Commander (or is it just Cobra?) who’s played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Every time he came on screen, I would shake my head. What’s he doing? Collecting a paycheck, I suppose. Anyways, these Neo-Vipers are genetically modified. They’re the bad guys because they can’t feel pain or fear.

Now I’m looking at a card with a white-clad ninja and it looks like his name is Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee). He’s also a bad guy. In battle scenes, he’s usually paired up with Snake Eyes (Ray Park), a G.I. Joe who’s a black-clad ninja. Flashbacks tell us that they share a common history when they both – oh who am I kidding? I don’t care.

There’s a card for a G.I. Joe with the code name Covergirl. She dies early in the picture. Spoiler, I guess. There’s also a card for James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), a weapons developer who thinks he’s the main baddie. The movie starts in 1600s Scotland with one of his ancestors getting punished for selling weapons to both sides of a conflict. The card says McCullen wants revenge for this, but to the extent that I do understand the evil plot, I can’t see how it will accomplish that goal.

At last we arrive to a card with the main character, a new G.I. Joe recruit who goes by the name Duke. He’s played by Channing Tatum. His best friend and comedic relief is Ripcord (Marlon Wayons). He shares some past with the beautiful villainess played by Sienna Miller. He has a square jaw and, like Quaid, scowls his way through the picture. The card says he’s “the best of the best…or so he thinks.” I’ll take its word for it.

As you can see the movie’s fairly confusing, playing out like a bad cartoon, which is exactly what the movie becomes whenever the action sequences start. I’m not talking brilliantly cartoony, like Speed Racer; I’m talking terribly cartoony, the kind of cartoony that throws all logical plot construction out the window for the sake of pure noise and candy-colored blurs. Admittedly, G.I. Joe is a bit better than Transformers 2, but only because it didn’t give me a headache. It’s also marginally better to look at and, if I’m not mistaken, a little more understandable, if only because human beings with actual faces are easier to tell apart than moving junkyards. There’s an equal amount of cliché-chewing hooey to be found, though, from a plane that can only understand Celtic commands to an evil plot so simple yet so confusing (McCullen sells the missiles, then steals them back in order to shoot them at three major cities). At one point the president marvels that no demands have been made. Same here, buddy.

There was a time, early in the run time, where I thought the movie would actually turn out to be an agreeably goofy time with the kind of dumb fun that director Stephen Sommers has brought to his previous movies like The Mummy or even, yes, Van Helsing. The promise of a good time is there in a chase sequence through the streets of Paris that manages to be fun despite most of it having appeared in the previews. That one sequence is the only glimpse of the promise to be found amongst so much bland and sterile carbon copies of concepts from better popcorn movies, everything from X-Men to the Star Wars prequels. G.I. Joe isn’t exhilarating, it’s just exasperating.