Broadway Rhythm: WONKA and THE COLOR PURPLE

Those drawing connections between the current ongoing collapse of box office for big-budget Hollywood efforts in overfamiliar genres and the similar moment in the late-1960s might be chuffed to find Warner Brothers looking around at properties they own and asking: can we make that a musical? If we really are in a late stage for the current studio system, like 60 years ago, it should be little surprise to see the return of the big, corny backlot song-and-dance show. The modern twist is that it’s not in and of itself representative of said bloated, over-tapped genres, but instead harkening back. They’re simultaneously reviving old forms of showbiz while wringing more material out of old ideas the studio owns—plunging into their vaults to re-exploit old hits, making new ones while driving some business into catalog titles, too.

So it goes with Wonka, a prequel to Roald Dahl’s classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That book tells how reclusive chocolatier Willy Wonka lets a group of children tour his fantastical factory—and watches as their obvious personality defects lead them one by one to ruin. That book, with its wicked dark humor and vivid imagination, has already been adapted twice over—in 1971 starring a mercurial Gene Wilder dripping with droll Dahl dialogue, and in 2005 starring a pasty Johnny Depp in a full Tim Burton spectacle. This new movie puts twiggy it-boy Timothée Chalamet in the title role as a dewey-eyed dreamer who hopes to open a chocolate factory. That the fact he will is a forgone conclusion does little to dim the movie’s underdog spirit is due to his off-kilter charm. He never quite settles comfortably into the singing and dancing required of him, but squint a little and the boyish discomfort—the hey-that-jock-isn’t-so-bad-in-the-school-play attitude—goes a long way to charm.

The movie around him is working overtime to sell the high-spirited whimsy, too. Writer-director Paul King, he of the agreeably twee Paddington pictures, has a suitably British style that fusses with the magic and mischief in a perfectly puffed-up sense of its own twinkling wryness. There’s a discount Dickens to the setup, as Wonka finds himself in preposterous debt to transparently scamming boarding house proprietors named Scrubitt and Bleacher (Olivia Colman and Tom Davis). And he can’t pay them back by selling his marvelous, scrumptious magic chocolates because of the city’s cruel candy cartel and their ruthless rules. (Crooked cops (Keegan-Michael Key) and priests (Rowan Atkinson) keep the shops in line.) This is all fine and funny, and King keeps the plates spinning with a game supporting cast (Jim Carter! Natasha Rothwell! Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa!) giving swell theatrical performances. It has a bit of the cruel-and-clever blend you’d expect from a knockoff Dahl (for the real deal you’d have to go to Wes Anderson’s brilliant short film short story adaptations, dumped unceremoniously on Netflix). But Wonka’s makers can’t help but mix that bitterness with heaps of sugary sentimentality that lets you know it’ll be all right. The look is primary colors and rounded edges, fake snow and smiles, even when businessmen plot murder and pay off police with pallets of chocolates. The knowingly fake stages and pleasant melodies and soft choreography all adds up to something sweet enough to pass the time.

Warner Brothers also has a bright, backlot-looking musical of The Color Purple in theaters now. It naturally shares its plot’s structure and events with Alice Walker’s novel, and the 1985 Steven Spielberg drama that made Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey stars. This new film version is not nearly as powerful, but it has some merit. It takes the Broadway adaptation as inspiration, and it is admirably tough material from which to draw such danceable exuberance. The story follows an impoverished young black woman in early-20th century southern America as she’s separated from her sister by her cruel husband. As the decades pass, she learns about her own interests and desires and is slowly able to assert herself against the tides of abuse her family and her society push upon her. This is strong stuff about sisterly bonds and the triumph of the human spirit, and, by the end, a kind of radical forgiveness. I am not made of stone; tears welled up in my eyes during the final communal energy of a cast clad in white, raising their hands to the heavens, declaring a moral and spiritual victory as one. It makes its case loudly and broadly, with little of the nuance of a more sensitive drama, but all the obvious stage power of a big, belting one.

The story is too good for a phony sheen to stop it entirely. The performances here overflow with energy, through pain and pleasure alike. Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson, and Danielle Brooks are a formidable trio of voices and personality, emoting through each note with huge melodic crescendoes and propelling each spoken line with the expression to carry it to the back row of the highest balcony. (The skilled supporting players here—from Colman Domingo to Halle Bailey—pop with the same sharp shorthand dramatics.) It helps, I suppose, that Marcus Gardley’s screenplay is generally averse to subtext—it’s all right on the surface. That makes it a good match for the obvious emotional exposition of the musical numbers faithfully recreated as stage-bound, even in flight of dream ballet fancy. Director Blitz Bazawule cuts cleanly and stages with broad blocking. Every shot, in songs and straight scenes alike, is a posed snippet of theatrical choreography. And it’s all so brightly, evenly lit in images scrubbed an uncanny digital shine, that it sparkles with its fakery even as its story works hard to sell the darkest realism. That mix of the deep and shallow, the smooth and the tough, makes it an uneven 140 minutes. But the story itself has such undeniable force that the whole movie gets pulled toward tears anyway.

Bad Cop: COFFEE & KAREEM

I know a bad movie is the least of anyone’s problems these days. It’s even less of a problem, in fact, now that new releases are confined to streaming where ending your misery in a bad choice of a movie is as easy as clicking away or smashing that fast forward button. This weekend, Netflix has served up Coffee & Kareem, a truly execrable cop action comedy. That it’s directed by Michael Dowse, whose similar mismatched buddy actioner Stuber flopped hard in wide release last summer, makes it an even more apt reflection of the state of current cinema. At least Stuber was filled with charming personalities, sending Kumail Nanjiani as a hapless Uber driver criss-crossing town with Dave Bautista as a growling cop who must desperately catch a criminal despite just having laser eye surgery. It’s not great, but it has all the good bones of a Hollywood action comedy: decent action sequences, fine bantering chemistry, and agreeable supporting turns by fun character actors. It gets the job done, and fit the big screen well. Even though it was a good time at the movies, exactly what was advertised on the tin, it’s apparently the kind of movie audiences don’t really see anymore, at least not in the numbers that justify a full theatrical release. So here we are, firing up the latest Netflix Original and finding once again that they’re just not up to par. The good original movies they produce or purchase — from the auteur efforts to the rare enjoyable B-pictures — are the outliers.

This new one is just dire. At first I was willing to give Coffee & Kareem points for a punny title. It introduces a mild-mannered Detroit police officer (Ed Helms) whose girlfriend (Taraji P. Henson) has a profane, standoffish tween son named Kareem (Terrence Little Gardenhigh). So it’s like a cop comedy. So: cops like donuts. Donuts and coffee. Coffee and cream. Coffee and Kareem. Ha. Kinda cute. But then we see the badge. He’s officer Coffee. That’s his name. Okay. We’re pushing it. So the movie’s a bit full of its own tricks. But then the cavalcade of nastiness begins, with thinly sketched caricatures and cliches veering quickly into a loud shuffle of stereotypes across every scene. There are motormouthed precocious vulgar inner city school kids, swaggeringly stupid gangsters, a mother who is as often a prop as not, and a gruff chief with transparently maniacal crooked cops. There are cluttered action scenes and flippant gun violence interspersed with constant references to police shootings and irreverent joshing about race (or, failing that, child abuse) that spins back in retrograde essentialism. It never transcends the tropes and assumptions baked into something so stumblebum about its content. Some of the performers are doing what they can with this material. Betty Gilpin, for one, is spinning something like interesting out of a mediocre script for the second time in just a few weeks — it makes The Hunt look better by comparison. The picture is badly calibrated from the first scenes, like an early one in which Kareem talks about his member while eating candy on the toilet in a public restroom, then a scene later he describes which acts he’d like to perform. The whole thing’s just sad when it's not unpleasant. It’s pitched at a high level of annoyance, with grating performances and the kind of flop sweat second hand embarrassment that settles in as you see actors flailing in a movie that’s giving them less than nothing for their efforts. It may be a throwback to 80’s action comedies, though it can’t muster their aesthetic or narrative or comedic appeal, and only has the ugly attitudes down pat. It’s not entertaining; it’s depressing. Rent Stuber instead.

No Surprise: NO GOOD DEED

No Good Deed is a movie about a woman trapped in her own home with a stranger she slowly realizes is a terrorizing psychopath. More accurately, it’s a movie about two great actors stuck in a lousy thriller. Taraji P. Henson plays the woman. Idris Elba plays the psychopath. These are talented, charismatic actors, who have done great work in the past and surely will again. But the movie is thin, obvious, empty, and gives them characters with one-note dynamics and little of interest to do. They’re producers on this picture, so you can’t feel too sorry for them, but if this is the best material they could find, they deserve better.

It’s a rote, unsurprising and straightforward woman in danger movie that hauls out all the old tropes we’ve seen many times before. Even the Surprise Twist, which is really more of a mildly intriguing development or a new piece of evidence, isn’t too surprising. Henson, a well-off former prosecutor, is home with her two small children on a dark and stormy night while her lawyer husband (Henry Simmons) is away. Elba’s a working class murderer who escapes from prison after being turned down for parole, stops to kill his ex-girlfriend (Kate del Castillo), and then crashes his stolen car. He walks to Henson’s house, where she lets him use her phone and her first aid kit. That’s her good deed. It does not go unpunished.

At first he’s nice, sipping tea, making small talk with a flirtatious neighbor (Leslie Bibb), and complimenting the kids on their cuteness. But soon enough he’s maneuvered the situation into something far more dangerous. He’s cut the phone lines. (No cell phones?) He’s hidden the knives. (No blunt objects?) He glowers and stalks while Henson pleads and plans. Aimee Lagos’s script plays out more or less how you’d think, with Henson scheming to protect her kids and alert the authorities, while Elba cuts off escape routes and heightens the tension until the climactic violent act brings it all to an end.

All the while it’s uninvolving and obvious, alternating between uncomfortably brutally menacing and totally dull. An intrusive score hammers crescendos of clattering strings and brassy bass with every moderately startling burst of anger or violence. Director Sam Miller, who worked with Elba on their BBC show Luther, can’t even trust the audience to remember something from a few minutes earlier, layering benign dialogue with flashbulb flashbacks into scenes plenty off-kilter to begin with. We remember Elba strangled, and then bludgeoned, his ex. That’s what makes his intrusion in the nice woman’s home so scary. We don’t need to be reminded.

On the surface of this setup is fairly obvious potential. The movie could easily have said something heightened and interesting about gender, or class, or race, or domestic violence, but it can’t even muster up the energy for low genre pleasures, let alone anything loftier. The movie has two overqualified leads, a sturdy premise, and proceeds to do nothing. Thinking back over the plotting, I not only picked out the plot holes, but I found myself marveling at how little happens, and how little I cared about what did manage to appear. This is not good. It appeals to the same impulse of interest a junk paperback in a grocery store spinner engenders, along with the same hollow disappointment when it fails to provide even fleeting empty-calorie distraction.

Quick Looks: ARBITRAGE, THE GOOD DOCTOR, and SLEEPWALK WITH ME

In Arbitrage, Richard Gere plays a hugely wealthy banker in some serious trouble. He’s become embroiled in a complicated financial deal that’s threatening to sink his company if the funds don’t get moved around quickly enough to cover his assets. And that’s not even the worst of it. He sneaks away from his wife (Susan Sarandon) to drive upstate with his mistress (Laetitia Casta) and ends up flipping the car. When he comes to, he sees that his mistress is dead in the passenger seat so he flees the scene of the accident. (The pointed intent couldn’t be clearer: the rich flee catastrophe on instinct.) So he’s dealing with financial trouble and legal trouble, skulking around large boardrooms, spacious offices, and fancy apartments, trying to avoid the consequences of his actions.

Writer-director Nicholas Jarecki has created a phony fantasy of a character study that feels altogether too calculated a guesstimate of how the one-percent lives. (Not that I have any experience with that income bracket, but it can’t be as simple as it’s made to seem here.) To put such material in a standard thriller (the kind with dramatic turns that make it play like an episode of Law & Order from the suspect’s point-of-view) only cheapens what was sparsely drawn to begin with. It should be juicier and with more of a bite; it’s all strangely toothless. That said, Gere gives a persuasive performance of a man crumbling under the burden of keeping up appearances. I also appreciated the work of Nate Parker, as a working-class man Gere debates scapegoating, and Tim Roth, as the investigator who is frustrated that the legal system seems rigged in favor the rich. Would that these performances were in a movie that would be able to better show them off.

Director Lance Daly’s The Good Doctor is a squirmy thriller about a lonely young doctor (Orlando Bloom) who falls in love (no, obsession) with a pretty patient (Riley Keough). He decides to tweak her medication in order to keep her in the hospital under his care. The script by John Enborn follows this situation to its predictable conclusion and the talented supporting cast (including Taraji P. Henson, Michael Peña, and J.K. Simmons) fills out the plot convincingly enough. It’s a shame, then, that the whole experience is just a sad, slow circle down the drain, completely without tension and devoid of emotional interest. This is a thinly imagined thriller that manages nothing more than a queasy feeling once or twice. It’s most unfulfilling in its flat visual style and ploddingly obvious script. As someone who sort of enjoyed Daly’s similarly slight first feature, the kids-in-puppy-love romance Kisses, I’m especially disappointed to see that this is where he’s gone next. He’s a director of potential and maybe someday he’ll live up to it.

Stand-up comedian Mike Birbiglia has told the same – very funny – story in several mediums now. If you’re anything like me, you may have managed to hear several times over (in his stand-up, on This American Life, in his memoir) about his intense sleepwalking problem that caused him to, say, dream about a jackal intruding in his bedroom, which would result in him fast asleep shouting at a hamper, fully convinced he was confronting a wild animal. This is obviously a problem, but his career seemed to be taking off and his relationship with his girlfriend was growing complicated and one thing leads to another and he’s in a deep sleep while jumping out a second-story hotel window.

This story’s latest telling takes movie form in Sleepwalk with Me and it’s perfectly fine, though I did wonder if it would have worked better on me if the novelty was still there. Birbiglia, here the writer, director and star, has a loose, casual style that pumps up dream sequences with off-hand discombobulation that is undercut with silly shifts to reality. To fill out the rest of the semi-autobiographical movie, it follows Birbiglia’s relationship with his girlfriend (played by Lauren Ambrose) as well as his growing stand-up career that takes him from hotel to hotel, crummy gig to crummy gig. Altogether it plays like Woody Allen lite, warm and sweetly small. This is a minor, but often charming movie, mostly because Birbiglia is so likable. But the thing of it is, you’d have just as good a time listening to the original monologue, so I have a hard time recommending this movie outright. 

Think For Yourself: THINK LIKE A MAN

It’s strange to suddenly realize we live in a world where based-on-a-self-help-book is a real subgenre of the romantic comedy. Sure, we had He’s Just Not That Into You back in 2009, but that felt like more of a fluke offshoot of the Love Actually school of ensemble rom-coms. (And, of course, there was Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask all the way back in 1972, but that’s really more of a collection of shorts and hardly a romantic comedy, so we may as well leave it out of this particular conversation). But with What to Expect When You’re Expecting coming out next month and Think Like a Man (based on Steve Harvey’s bestselling Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man) being the film in question here today, it’s become almost natural that a self help book be converted into a framework for an ensemble to fall in and out of love.

Harvey’s book is a relationship guide for women that claims to unlock the mysteries of the modern man’s mind. These so-called mysteries can then be used to find and win the heart of the types of men these women would prefer to be dating. In practice, the book’s worldview is one of rigid gender roles and insulting stereotypes for both men and women. And maybe it’s just me, but somehow the introduction of psychological warfare by way of hack standup routines seems to be at or near the opposite of romance and the foundation of a happy, healthy, adult relationship. The problem of Think Like a Man isn’t that it’s based off of a lame book, or even that it uses the book’s premises as cheap frames for its plotlines (introductory titles like “The Player” and “Mama’s Boy vs. Single Mom” spell out each couple’s “types” and central conflicts for us). The problem of this film is that it’s so often in the business of selling us the book.

Who should appear not once, not twice, but several times on TVs in the background or, even worse, talking right to the camera or in smug voice over? Steve Harvey as himself. Copies of the book are prominently displayed, bought, read, highlighted, and discussed in many a scene. An important plot twist develops around who knows who has been reading the book. At one point, during an otherwise reasonably entertaining conversation between two characters, one holds up a copy of the book, positioning the cover towards the camera almost as if she was plugging it on a talk show or revealing it as the next item on The Price is Right. Every time the book is hauled, literally or thematically, into the movie, it wrenches away interest from the characters by foregrounding the artificiality of it all.

Like any ensemble romantic comedy you’ve ever seen, this script by Keith Merryman and David A. Newman introduces a set of male characters and a set of female characters and proceeds to see them comically thrown together in separate but intertwining plots that click right along from the Meet Cutes to the false crisises, to the romantic revaluations and the eventual forgiving embraces. Director Tim Story jumps between plots and scenes with a bit of clumsiness that inhibits momentum, but sometimes it’s all pleasant enough, even, at times, vaguely amusing.  What makes this particular movie so pleasant is the cast. They’re so much better than the script requires that, when the formula fades away to some extent, it’s entirely their talent that causes it to do so.

As the men, we have dreamer Michael Ealy, man-child Jerry Ferrara, divorced Kevin Hart, mama’s boy Terrence Jenkins, and player Romany Malco. Hart and Malco are especially good here as the more explicitly comedic characters. They’ve been putting in good work, usually on the margins, in films and TV shows for years, so it’s nice to see them grab more of the spotlight. Where the cast really lights up is with the women. It’ll be tough for any other film this year to match it in the number underappreciated and underutilized actresses in the cast. Playing career women are Meagan Good, Taraji P. Henson, and Gabrielle Union, with Regina Hall as the single mom. They are so very good here that they serve to upend the film’s assumptions about the female mind. They’re lovely; they can be tough and vulnerable and are perfectly capable of being funny without becoming clowns. In the end, the film’s on their side.

Ideally, having a looser structure based around life lessons (of a sort) would allow the self-help rom-com to slip out of the boy-meets-girl, loses-girl, gets-girl grind, but here it just serves to multiply the predictability. Think Like a Man’s biggest problem is its hard sell approach to its hack ideas and stale gender role commentary. The movie lines up a pretty good cast and, when it can gain some real momentum away from Harvey’s book, it can be a fairly decent, if still underwhelming, picture. But that doesn’t happen often enough and by the end I was more disappointed than I thought I’d be. Flashes of promise make ultimate mediocrity hurt just a little bit more than usual.

Special Education: LARRY CROWNE

The most dispiriting aspect of Larry Crowne, a dismal new comedy co-written and directed by Tom Hanks, who also takes the titular role, is the way it strides forward, places its finger on the pulse of modern America and then scurries away, never to contemplate such resonance again. This one well-pitched moment comes, fittingly enough, right at the film’s opening that introduces us to Larry Crowne. He’s a nine-time employee-of-the-month at U-Mart, a fitting string of commendations for a man who spent twenty years as a Navy cook. Called into the break room by his boss, fully expecting to be awarded yet again, Larry is dismayed to find that, due to his lack of a college education, he has been deemed insufficiently upwardly mobile within the corporation and therefore must be fired.

In a time of high unemployment, rampant corporate malfeasance, and an identity crisis within a certain section of the lower middle class demographic that has found well-paying jobs increasingly unavailable without college, the premise of Larry Crowne could not be timelier. Unable to find a new job Crowne sets off for the local community college, at the suggestion of his neighbors played by Cedric the Entertainer and Taraji P. Henson, and settles down, like so many of his real-life counterparts, to try to learn his way back into the job force.

Unlike the wild, experimental, and unexpectedly moving sitcom Community, one of my favorite current TV shows, which often achieves its impact ironically or through surprising detours, Larry Crowne is poised to use the terrain of community college for simple good old fashioned Capra-esque uplift. There’s the sad teacher (Julia Roberts) who just needs to pull her messy personal life together to, doggone it, inspire her students. There’s the strict teacher (George Takai) who has his students’ best interests at heart. There’s the hip gang of scooter commuters (led by Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Wilmer Valderrama) who are all too ready to embrace a middle-aged doofus like Larry and selflessly help him turn his life around and get back on his feet. This is the kind of cast that could be airlifted out and placed in a great movie. Instead, they’re stuck here.

The movie is awfully cutesy and wispy, to the point where each and every scene feels like a digression, scenes that start nowhere and in their flat, unremarkable visual style, work backwards to irrelevance. The characters are so simply, clumsily drawn by Hanks and his co-writer, the one-hit-wonder behind 2002’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding Nia Vardalos, that it feels hard to find any reason to care about these people or even believe that they would interact in the ways that they do. Friendship, respect, and romance all seem to be forced upon them by the screenplay. It’s as if Hanks and Vardalos came up with a great idea, sketched out a rough first draft and then decided to film it without further development. This is a loose and flabby picture that, despite being so earnest, is utterly devoid of backbone.

Quick Look: THE KARATE KID (2010)

The Karate Kid is simultaneously a remake of the 1984 film and a two-and-a-half hour tourism commercial for China. In fact, the location shift from the original’s California seems to be the only tangible reason for this remake. Don’t get me wrong, director Harald Zwart has made a slick product that’s somewhat exciting and perfectly respectful. It has nice lessons, admirable patience, and impressive cinematography by Roger Pratt. But as our kid who must learn to fight the bullies through the power of martial arts, Jaden Smith, despite his likability, (I never thought I’d write the following phrase) is no Ralph Macchio. Faring better is Jackie Chan, who makes a perfectly fine Mr. Miyagi (even though he’s called Mr. Han), but the characterization still suffers from cheap, magical Orientalism. As the kid’s mother, Taraji P. Henson isn’t called to do much, but she’s such a good actress that it’s always good to see her anyways. I’m not anti-remake, and I’m especially not opposed to a new take on this particular material, but this faithful, plain, and sleepy remake is a retread with very little new or interesting to say.

DATE NIGHT: It's a Date!

Date Night is what we tell ourselves Hollywood used to create more consistently. It’s a high concept blockbuster with big stars and a big budget. It’s an action-comedy that’s genuinely exciting and more than a little funny. It moves at a fast pace with a light touch. It’s a perfectly enjoyable night at the movies, even though, as it was winding down, I found myself mildly disappointed that it wasn’t just a little bit better.

After all, the movie stars two of the funniest people working today. Steve Carell and Tina Fey play a married couple whose weekly date night takes a screwball turn when a case of mistaken identity turns their night into a wacky and dangerous race through New York City in order to stay alive and clear up the misunderstandings. Their madcap adventure contains plenty of capably staged action and plenty of laughs. They come into contact with a host of funny characters who are played by a host of funny, talented performers. There’s a hunky security expert (Mark Wahlberg), a mob boss (Ray Liotta), a policewoman (Taraji P. Henson), two shady tough-guys (Common and Jimmi Simpson), and a couple of goofy lowlifes (James Franco and Mila Kunis) who are the real couple that should be at the center of the mess. Needless to say, Carell and Fey are far removed from their suburban-family existence and their circle of friends (which include the always welcome Kristen Wiig and Mark Ruffalo).

Carell and Fey have enjoyable presences on funny sitcoms (The Office and 30 Rock, respectively) and here create an easy rapport. They seem like a real married couple. They have complications and frustrations, sure, but they seem to truly love each other. And when the action movie kicks in, they don’t discover hidden depths in each other, or suddenly become butt-kicking action superstars. Their relationship is a little touching and sweet as their characters remain consistent throughout: likable and relatable. With lesser leads, the movie would be nowhere near as good, even with the excellent supporting cast that has been assembled.

Certainly, the story would not be as memorable if it weren’t for the people acting it out. The plot keeps a lot of thriller and screwball elements in the air, and there’s a feeling that it doesn’t ever develop the ideas more than the plot requires. But what a plot! I’m sure there are plot holes. It’s not complicated, or even particularly distinguished, but it’s certainly enjoyable and involving as it sends the characters racing through ridiculous scenarios and it managed to keep me smiling and chuckling for almost the entire run time. Sure, it retroactively bothers me that the underlying theme about marriage is never fully explored and that the great supporting cast is seriously underused. But the movie was fun enough at the time.

The director is Shawn Levy who ruinously remade The Pink Panther and wasted a perfectly good premise in not one but two Night at the Museum movies. Here, he finally makes a movie that works all the way through. It’s a film that’s energetic without seeming manic while funny without seeming to stretch for laughs. The timing is excellent, the leads are well-deployed, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. In fact, it all seems to resolve too easily and quickly. If anything, I wanted the movie to go on a little longer. There needs to be just one more turn of the screw, one more unexpected complication. The plot resolves a bit too quickly and easily. Then again, I should be careful what I wish for. This is just an easy, uncomplicated, and enjoyable experience. It's a fun, slick entertainment that’s, at the risk of sounding too willing to be quoted, just right for date night.