Popcorn Kernels: Ladies Doing It For Themselves

In which we review three female-led comedies I saw in theaters, again during a time I didn't have my computer readily available, so we'll do some short ones to catch up.

Life of the Party

Year: 2018

Director: Ben Falcone

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Gillian Jacobs

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

After her husband leaves her, a suburban mom returns to college to finish her senior year at the same time as her daughter.

So, I can completely understand why, but Ben Falcone keeps making movies with his wife Melissa McCarthy. On paper, that's a really sweet thing to do, but considering the quality of the movies they make together and how unjustly violent the physical humor within them tends to be, I can't help but worry that he might actually hate her with a burning passion.

Although this movie tones down the hardcore slapstick of their previous collaboration The Boss (she isn't falling down concrete flights of stairs in this one), there is a full three minute scene slammed right into the middle of Life of the Party's run time where we're meant to rejoice in her character sweating and flailing through an oral presentation while the camera coldly and impassively judges her every move. It's so uncomfortable and out of tone with the rest of the film that it's frankly repulsive.

That said, Melissa McCarthy is good at what she does, at always, though the material here really isn't serving her. The movie doesn't play with the fish-out-of-water nature of her character archetype nearly as much as it promises, instead packing the corners of this movie with cartoonishly wacky characters that don't really have anything to do with the premise. Don't get me wrong, these people are actually the highlights of the movie, but it's conceptually broken in a way that doesn't lend to it being a satisfying whole (literally, the character of her daughter vanishes for twenty minutes at a time, and we're meant to have any emotional reaction to their drama at the end of the movie).

These aforementioned cartoon characters include the delightful Gillian Jacobs as an older student who has just woken up from a coma and has no small amount of notoriety which she exploits to no end. We also get recent SNL standout Heidi Gardner as a spectacularly ill-conceived character that somehow works because she holds it all together with the duct tape of being f**king hilarious. Her character is named Linor, a name nobody can pronounce because they apparently never had a Poe unit in English class, and she's meant to be emo or goth in some way even though that character type is a decade old and she just dresses like a normal human being. It's confusing but I wouldn't trade her for the world.

And then there's Maya Rudolph as the best friend, who drops in every twenty minutes or so like a neutron bomb of comedy, ripping open the fabric of the movie for some bone-disolvingly hilarious broad humor that doesn't really have anything to do with the story we're actually watching. But honestly, any distraction from the blandness this movie traffics in is very welcome.

Life of the Party vacillates back and forth between decency and mediocrity more times than I can count, but overall I think its net value is positive. McCarthy's too-young love interest Luke Benworth is cute and delightfully earnest, there are more jokes than groans, and it didn't super overstay its welcome like most of the worst vehicles for this particular actress. So... don't go see it I guess. But if it ends up on Netflix and you need to kill time while folding laundry, why not click it on?

Rating: 6/10

Book Club

Year: 2018

Director: Bill Holderman

Cast: Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen

Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Four old ladies read Fifty Shades of Grey and get real horny.

The way Diane Keaton folds the back cover of a book so far back that it wraps almost all the way around to the front again is a crime against nature that makes me wonder if she's ever used her hands to do anything in her entire life, or maybe recently got her bones replaced with adamantium and is having trouble adjusting. Honestly, I could end the review there, but I probably shouldn't.

Book Club is one of those pictures where a bunch of famous people get together for three scenes and then split off to have their own mini romantic stories, Valentine's Day style. It's nice that women of a certain age are being given material like this, but if only the material was any good at all. If I knew I had to choose between Candice Bergen making jokes about Internet dating that were old in 2002, Jane Fonda being a Samantha all over Don Johnson, Mary Steenburgen trying real hard to get railed by Craig T. Nelson mostly by tap dancing, or Diane Keaton pretending that Andy Garcia's character isn't an abusive asshole who literally threatens to crash a plane and murder her if she doesn't agree to go to coffee with him, I'd have chosen to see a different movie. 

The film briefly comes alive when the women get together and sit around preparing heaping piles of hors d'oeuvres that they never eat, but for the most part Book Club is an inglorious train wreck: The light, jazzy score is like an out of control kaiju rampaging through the film and crushing everyone beneath its giant feet. The jokes in the script are so gentle that they avoid having punch-lines, because punching sounds too violent. These veteran actresses perform like they've just taken an Ambien and are impatiently waiting for it to kick in. There's a beleaguered metaphor with a cat that is supposed to represent Candice Bergen's vagina. 

It's pleasant enough to sit through, like watching a mildly raunchy Claritin commercial, but these people deserve better, and that's just that.

Rating: 4/10

Tully

Year: 2018

Director: Jason Reitman

Cast: Charlize Theron, Mackenzie Davis, Mark Duplass 

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A downtrodden suburban mom hires a night nanny who changes her perspective on things.

So it turns out this is what happens when Diablo Cody stops making up ludicrous slang terms and starts getting real. A slow, almost neorealist journey through modern motherhood with almost a couple jokes that dissolves into a deeply weird third act that negates all the character development of the first two before tying on a bow that could have happened without any of that nonsense.

Tully seems to want desperately to be an art film, given the abortive mermaid metaphor they keep jamming in at random places that goes absolutely nowhere, but it just ends up being an even more punishing version of the slow, unyielding beats of the previous collaboration between this actress, writer, and director, Young Adult.

Much like Book Club, the only place Tully shines is in the chemistry between its two leads, the consistently powerhouse-y Charlize Theron and the bright young ingenue Mackenzie Davis, who is cropping up more and more in movies and TV series that are very good and right on the fringes of actually being massively popular. But other than that, Tully is too relaxed to find any narrative thrust until it's way too late.

Honestly, the only thing I truly liked about it was that we get to spend a minute listening to snippets from the entire She's So Unusual album from Cyndi Lauper. I guess that makes it a recommend because that album is great, but otherwise don't waste your time on this one.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1291

I See You Shiva With Anticipation

Year: 2014

Director: Shawn Levy

Cast: Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Jane Fonda

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

There are three types of indie movies. 1) Films which showcase a brilliant artist who is given short shrift in Hollywood for no good reason. 2) Films which showcase a dreadful artist who is given short shrift in Hollywood for a very good reason. And 3) Films that attempt to be indie and meaningful because they know that's cool now, but they're directed by the guy who did Real Steel and Cheaper by the Dozen.

Guess which category This Is Where I Leave You falls under. 

Now I'm not saying that director Shawn Levy is a terrible artist. No way no how. I'm just saying that his pedigree (which also includes The Internship and all three Night at the Museum films) in no way prepares him to treat this film's material with the delicacy that its demanding tonal shifts deserve. It would take a lot of skill to finesse the low key dramedy of Jonathan Tropper's source novel into even mildly diverting cinema, and Levy just doesn't have the practice.

Well, I guess Ben Stiller and his museum buddies are KIND of like a dysfunctional Jewish family.

This Is Where I Leave You tells the story of the Altman family, which is brought together by the death of a patriarch. His last wish was his wife and kids to sit shiva, forcing them to remain in proximity with one another for the first time in years. 

The most important member of this family (in terms of screen time, not interest) is Judd Altman (Jason Bateman), a bitter man who just discovered that his wife was cheating on him with his boss. This causes some super indie problems for him, because he has exactly followed his plan for how his life should be, but it isn't bringing him happiness. A chance encounter with Penny (Rose Byrne), an old flame, reminds him that sometimes love can be messy, especially if you're in a movie that premiered at TIFF.

The rest of his family includes Wendy (Tina Fey), who has a kid and is married to a neglectful businessman despite the fact that she's in love with a brain-damaged neighbor inexplicably named Horry (Timothy Olyphant); Paul (Corey Stoll), who is a straight-laced square failing to have a baby with his wife Annie (Kathryn Hahn); Phillip (Adam Driver), who is the baby of the family, a hopeless lothario, and a perennial screwup who somehow convinced a beautiful psychiatrist named Tracy (Connie Britton) to fall in love with him; and their mother Hillary (Jane Fonda), who just got a boob job. 

Yay! Isn't it gross when old people show interest in sex? Judd certainly seems to think so, according to the immense amount of screentime spent on him staring at his mother's chest in revulsion.

Them old broads be crazy, amirite?

It's certainly exciting to see a depiction of the interactions and customs of a Jewish family in the modern, secular world. But it would be more exciting if most of them were actually Jewish or gave half a flying Pop-Tart about the implications of their minority faith on the subtext. 

There's a smattering of funny, charming moments, largely thanks to the abundance of funny, charming actors. And the drama is handily handled (to coin a nifty phrase), especially by Fey and Bateman, who have the heaviest of burdens on their shoulders. But despite the best efforts of the cast (all of whom are genuinely enjoyable save for Driver's perplexing emphasis on shouting his lines and Byrne's hard swallowing of her natural Australian accent), This Is Where I Leave You falls flat as a pancake.

In all fairness to Rose Byrne, who I love, her character is so indie vanilla that I can't imagine what else there would be to do other than babble lines in half-cocked American. You gotta make things enjoyable for yourself.

The biggest problem with the film is that it has no idea what to do with its prodigious cast. The performers are all proven talents with mid-level star power just dripping off of them, but the plot only has the attention span for at most three protagonists. The sprawling number of celebrities in the background steals focus from the characters that we're supposed to care about, and the imbalanced plot threads prevent us from caring about them in the first place. It's a lose-lose situation. 

Basically, this film is what would have happened if, instead of Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, The Skeleton Twins had cast the entire line-up of Saturday Night Live. There are so many balls being juggled here that some of them just roll away without anybody noticing.

Characters twirl in and out of existence, vanishing from this dimension until they're needed for the next forced plot point. Several of the siblings' significant others are banished to purgatory early on, only to be trotted out on special occasions. And I'm pretty sure Connie Britton's character died of neglect, locked in an upstairs closet. The only consistent presence is a potty-training toddler, who is incidentally the most compelling of the bunch.

This isn't even a third of the cast of this tiny tiny film.

Overall, This Is Where I Leave You is just too generic to be worth the hassle. There's endless heavy-handed exposition laced conversations, routine characterizations, and nothing new to say about the state of the American family. Been there, done that. There is one great sequence where the siblings repeat a series of cordial platitudes to guests at a funeral that highlights the repetitive dullness and constant lying that these types of polite gatherings require.

But beyond that, the film doesn't attempt to do anything more than exist as a piece of disposable cinema. Miss this film, and don't bother calling it on its birthday.

TL;DR: This Is Where I Leave You is dull and generic, but has a decently sized slate of charming actors.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1005