One of Those Days: ALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY

Judith Viorst’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is a classic picture book funny and smart in capturing the feel of a bad day from the point of view of a little boy. It cleverly portrays how a series of quotidian bummers – not getting the seat you like, or a prize in your cereal, or the dinner you’d hoped for – can snowball, making you grumpier by the minute until by bedtime you’re entirely wrung out. But the book’s only 32 pages, so in making a feature length live action adaptation screenwriter Rob Lieber has expanded a slim and simple idea into a widescreen sitcom plot, giving Alexander’s whole family a horrible, no good, etcetera, day, the better to make it through with a smile because of their love for each other.

It’s a nice message. The movie is a bright, sunny, largely inoffensive kids comedy that’s short – 81 minutes, including credits – sweet, and never particularly funny but at least agreeable in the way better live action Disney comedies can be. It’s broad, cute, and nice enough, idealized squeaky clean family foibles and slightly sharper frustrations around the edges. I suspect kids will enjoy the main character, who has been turned into a Wimpy Kid knockoff. Alexander (Ed Oxenbould, with awkward hair and a face stuck at the exact midpoint between child and teen) is a 12-year-old kid who is perpetually frazzled, scuffed, mussed, scattered. He’s well-intentioned but clumsy and easily frustrated with his lot in life. Things just don’t go his way. It’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days for him. And he’s sympathetic because of it.

The target audience is unlikely to read any reviews, let alone this one. And they certainly won’t care that it’s directed by Miguel Arteta who, with work on relationship semi-comedies like Cedar Rapids, Youth in Revolt, Chuck & Buck, and HBO’s gone-too-soon Enlightened, knows a thing or two about quickly and charmingly sketching relationships and histories between characters. He does his unassuming, pleasant thing here, quickly filling out the ranks of the family so that we feel we’re joining a fairly normal, busy, loving, upper-middle-class life in progress. There’s the stay-at-home dad (Steve Carell), children’s book editor mom (Jennifer Garner), cocky older brother (Dylan Minnette), drama queen sister (Kerris Dorsey), and infant brother (Elise and Zoey Vargas). We get the dynamics immediately. The way the family operates is clear, and, though they mean well, it’s easy to see how Alexander’s struggles can get lost in the shuffle.

He always seems to be having a bad day. Popular kids pick on him. He feels stupid next to his crush. His family members have successes to share around the dinner table while he just mopes and complains. He wishes they knew what it was like to have everything go wrong. Well, they soon do. Car troubles, job crises, medical emergencies, school issues, romantic confusion, scheduling difficulties, wild animals, and a variety of scatological concerns plague the family as the movie clunks through their day from one snag to the next. It’s never zany or farcical, just one fairly ordinary stumbling block after the next played up a notch and a half past normal. The escalating series of events is almost what you'd expect out of a bad day, but a bit more juvenile and movie-ish. The family gets to share the bad day feeling, and only grow closer together because of it.

I kept waiting for the movie to kick into a higher gear, generate a sustained funny sequence or string a few clever lines together. Nope. It’s at a modest even keel beginning to end. The cast is likable and makes a cute family unit. Every once in a while they’re joined by a funny actor (Megan Mullally, Jennifer Coolidge, Dick Van Dyke) who can deliver a half dozen so-so lines in a way that makes them mildly humorous. That’s nice, too. I mean, the whole thing’s sweet enough with only a few spiky moments of borderline off-color humor pinned in by the PG rating. (At one point Carell sighs, "Daddy wishes he could swear right now.") There’s genuine love and camaraderie in this family, and it’s the rare kids movie that acknowledges grown-up feelings and concerns, even if the movie’s too slight and minor to do anything with Carell and Garner's warm, comfortable performances. So it’s not a great comedy, but it has plenty of smiles and good vibes and will fit in perfectly between Dog with a Blog reruns some future weekend on the Disney Channel.

Quick Look: CEDAR RAPIDS

Cedar Rapids, from director Miguel Arteta, is a small, amiable comedy about a tremendously naïve small-town insurance agent, played with likable innocence by Ed Helms, who heads off to the titular city for an insurance convention. The convention itself is an excuse to gather up characters with clashing personalities and let them bounce off of each other in funny ways. The focus of the comedy is a trio of insurance agents that befriend Helms, introducing him to the faster-paced life of mild debauchery and bars that stay open past 10 pm. This group includes a sweet but boring guy (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), a seemingly cold blonde with plenty of pantsuit allure (Anne Heche), and a boisterous, crude oaf (John C. Reilly). The friendship that develops between the four characters is sweetly handled and the actors, to their credit, don’t operate solely on the level of surface silliness. They find some of the deeper pain and inner struggles in their characters, especially Reilly who brings his usual expressive likability to a character that, in lesser hands, would be confined to simply playing the comic relief. Instead, the comic relief of the movie is the protagonist and Helms, though nice and amusing, can’t quite sell the character arc. (To be fair the script by Phil Johnston gives him very little chance to do so). Though it contains plenty of laughs, there’s never really a sense of comedic crescendo. The fast pace and light touch keep things moving along and the actors make for nice company, but with all of the talent involved I can’t help but be slightly disappointed that the end result seems less than vital. It’s an enjoyable night at the movies, and will make for nice future late-night television programming, but it doesn’t stick in mind the way better comedies do.

He Gives Love a Bad Name: YOUTH IN REVOLT

The amount of enjoyment you get out of director Miguel Arteta’s Youth in Revolt, based on the cult novel by C.D. Payne, may hinge on how tired you are of Michael Cera. After all, this is yet another one of his stammering-teen performances like the ones he’s given in Arrested Development, Superbad, Juno, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Year One. There are, however, slight variations in his screen persona from character to character, and I, for one, am not yet tired of his way of delivering jokes by sometimes shyly slipping lines past or throwing lines away, muttering them under his breath, and then other times, asserting lines with painfully earnest intent but deeply strange delivery. I still have to smile when I think of Paulie Bleaker telling Juno that she’d “be the meanest wife ever.” He’s funny precisely because he doesn’t seem to be.

In Youth in Revolt, Cera is given yet another funny character in Nick Twisp, a mopey teen who lives with his mom (Jean Smart) and her live-in boyfriend (Zach Galifianakis). He’s repulsed by them, but an escape to see his dad (Steve Buscemi) and his dad’s much-younger girlfriend (Ari Graynor) doesn’t do much to relieve his constant state of self-pity. He’s surrounded by people in love, or something like it, and yet is cursed to remain vaguely lovesick. That is, at least until that vagueness is sharpened and focused on one girl he meets over the summer while vacationing in a trailer park. That girl is Sheeni Saunders, a cute and funny young woman whose capacity for affected anomie matches only Twisp’s. Saunders is played by relative newcomer Portia Doubleday, a great find and a fine match for Cera. They make a relaxed and cutesy couple. Doubleday shares with Cera a sly way of delivering punchlines without seeming to realize how funny she is.

After leaving the trailer park containing his mother’s boyfriend’s summer home, Twisp creates what he calls a “supplementary persona” in the form of the mustache-wearing, cigarette-smoking, bad boy Francois Dillinger. A revoltingly suave youth, Dillinger will occasionally appear and give Twisp very bad advice. Of course, he’s only in Twisp’s mind, but he gives him the courage to act (sort of) wild in an attempt to be sent away to be closer to Sheeni. He takes to spitting, tipping bowls of cereal, and, naturally, starting a massive fire. Cera has fun with this dual role; if he’s mostly unconvincing - he is - I suppose that could be the mildly clever point.

It’s a good thing that most of the humor arises out of the chemistry between Cera and Doubleday (and between Cera and Cera), though, because the movie feels awfully raggedy. Good performers like Fred Willard, Ray Liotta and Justin Long (in addition to Smart, Galifianakis, and Buscemi) are tragically underused in extremely underdeveloped supporting roles. Subplots start nowhere and then never get going while the plot itself starts strong, hitting a few funny notes, and then consists of nothing more than slight, and slightly worse, variations on those same few notes. It’s lumpy and episodic with a snarky tone that gets wearying, especially when it asks us to care more deeply about its characters. That said, this is a gently crude, yet still hard-R, teen comedy that’s kind of enjoyable, in a scrappy sort of way. Cera and Doubleday make it worthwhile.