Movie Box Review

We live in a pop culture where the recent Emmy Award nominees are so clearly superior to the films up for this past year's Oscar that it's not even worth arguing about. (Mad Men vs The Artist?  Game of Thrones vs The Help?  Modern Family vs War Horse?  Seriously?)  So the days when one could look down at a movie comedy by calling it "sitcom" are pretty much done--comparing a movie to Parks & Recreation, Louie or New Girl is, if anything, high praise.

Calling Jennifer Westfeldt's FRIENDS WITH KIDS akin to a sitcom, then, is more descriptive than critical.  The romantic-comedy-drama involves the inter-group relationships of 6 old friends who live in and around a major city (New York in this case), much as Happy Endings and How I Met Your Mother do.  The group includes 2 married couples:  Leslie and Alex (Maya Rudolph and Chris O'Dowd), and Ben and Missy (Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig).  The story centers, though, on the 2 who are single:  best buddies Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott), who have been inseparable since college, but never romantically involved.  (They love each other unreservedly, but aren't physically attracted.) 

The movie's title has double meanings, and the first is that as the story begins, Julie and Jason are feeling like the odd friends out, since both married couples are raising babies and/or toddlers, changing the dynamics of their marriages and the group in general.  Both Julie and Jason want children, but as they watch what parenthood is doing to their friends, and with each of them so far unable to find "the one" with whom they want to have it all, they eventually come to the title's second meaning:  they decide to have a baby together, just as friends (outside dating encouraged), with responsibility and custody split down the middle and no change, they vow, in their own relationship.

You don't need to have watched Ross and Rachel for all the years of Friends to figure out very quickly where all this is going to end up.  Nature may abhor a vacuum, but that's nothing compared to the way romantic-comedy feels about 2 good-looking unattached pals who've considered romances with everyone on earth except each other.  The issue with a movie like Friends With Kids is just how enjoyable and insightful the journey to that destination is.

This is where Westfeldt, making her directing debut (she previously wrote Kissing Jessica Stein and Ira & Abby) acquits herself well.  Her script may be glib and, in the end, predictable, but it's also marked by some sharp, bawdy humor, and later in the proceedings by more than a little surprisingly searing drama.  (A New Year's Eve gathering for the group prompts a particularly scorching monologue from Hamm, who in his day job is not unacquainted with characters who bare dark undersides.)

It's tempting but misleading to label Friends With Kids as trendily influenced by Bridesmaids, featuring as it does the same kind of 4-letter humor--much of it from the women characters--and half the same cast, but as it happens, Friends debuted at Toronto last fall, shortly after Bridesmaids hit theatres.  The similarities are superficial anyway, since Friends mostly eschews wacky slapstick for more of a concentration on relationships.  But the overlap in casts is all to the good, because these actors continue to be great together.  As for the newcomers:  Scott, who has been very dark indeed in indie movies like The Vicious Kind, brings a little of that edge to a less idealized romantic role than the one he plays in his own day job on Parks & Recreation.  Westfeldt makes a marvelous, funny pair with him, although one wishes that as a writer she'd resisted the cliche of having Julie be the sensitive one who's the first to become overwhelmed with true emotion.  In the smaller roles of Julie and Jason's significant romantic interests (think of them as the guest stars brought in for sweeps), Edward Burns effectively turns on the charm, and the much-maligned Megan Fox deserves some credit for completely holding her own with this high-powered ensemble.  

Friends With Kids isn't any kind of cinematic event--in terms of sheer quality, it's not better than 2 hours of TV's best comedies--but it provides the kind of self-contained 2-hour satisfaction that isn't TV's stock in trade (along with the kind of sex jokes confined to HBO and Showtime).  If you've been sitting on your couch long enough and want a smart, sophisticated and sometimes moving comedy on a bigger screen, this is the right movie to see.

We're not on the tabloid beat at SHOWBUZZDAILY, but when Lindsay Lohan put herself in front of the cameras tonight on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, she made herself fair game.  It would be heartwarming to be able to report that with tonight's appearance, she's finally taken the first real step of her professional rehabilitation, but sadly that wasn't the case.

It's impossible not to notice that Lohan only vaguely resembles the young woman from just a few years ago, both in terms of her affect and her very appearance.  Either her hair or wig is bleached blonde, and whether her current face is the result of chemical or surgical changes (to untutored eyes, her cheeks certainly appear to be augmented), or just the aftereffect of some very hard years, she's currently unable to move her features in a natural way, and thus appears disturbingly frozen.  This is a problem for someone who needs to be able to express emotions nonverbally as part of her everyday work.

It was obvious that Lorne Michaels (who's known Lohan since he produced Mean Girls) and the SNL writing staff went out of their way all evening to take it as easy on Lohan as they possibly could.  She never took the lead in any sketch, usually delivering just a few lines in bits featuring others.  So she was an ensemble member on "Real Housewives of Disney," one of the background dancers in a sketch with Fred Armisen in drag, a sidekick in a radio DJ bit, the house-sitter watching Kristen Wiig as her employer go crazy, and so on.  In this week's installment of "Scared Straight," she played herself, but Kenan Thompson as her co-convict had the bulk of the lines.  Even her monologue was dominated by the other cast members, while she played straight woman.  Lohan only took part in one of the pretaped segments, not appearing at all in the SNL Digital Short.

Even so, it was clear she was having problems keeping up.  Lohan's eyes were glued to the cue-cards (which didn't keep her from blowing her lines), and you could see her at times looking to someone off-camera, seemingly giving her stage directions.  All of this combined for a performance that wasn't very funny.  (Jon Hamm got more laughs from his 30 seconds of cameo appearances than Lohan did for the whole show.)

It didn't help, to be sure, that this was one of the most woeful SNLs of the season.  Usually election years are great for the series, but SNL seems to be about as excited by Mitt Romney as most Republicans are, and the political sketches have been dragging SNL down all year.  Other skits featured the umpteenth return of "James Carville" and "Snooki," as well as a "Psychic Awards" sketch where--well, you've already guessed the joke.  Apart from a general lack of wit, things seemed to be going less than smoothly backstage:  the show, which usually only reruns taped bits when absolutely necessary, needed to do it twice tonight, and another segment that was clearly intended as a Jason Sudeikis "runner" (a recurring bit that airs intermittently throughout the episode) ended up with both its segments airing back-to-back.  . 

A mediocre or worse SNL is hardly news, though.  This was meant to be the night when Lindsay Lohan started to claw her way back up from the pit in which she's dug herself, but while it's good news that she got through the evening without any notable disaster, she's still got a long, long way to shovel.