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.

Romantic comedies that are actually romantic and comic are so rare these days, it doesn't matter so much that WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER? is in many ways thoroughly second-rate.  It delivers some laughs and a likable couple to root for, and as you're watching it, the part of your mind objectively noting all the flaws and sloppiness is gradually eclipsed by the part that shrugs and says "Awww."

It would be impossible, for example, to defend the very premise of the movie, which stems from a novel by Karyn Bosnak, adapted by Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden.  Anna Faris plays Ally Darling ("Darling"?  Really, was that necessary?), a young woman whose younger sister Daisy Darling (Ari Graynor) is getting married, and in the way of women in romantic comedies, this makes Ally borderline insane about the need to be settled down.  She's particularly distressed when she realizes that her count of lovers has reached just about 20, and some study in Marie-Claire says that any woman who's slept with that many men will never find a husband.  So, obsessed with not exceeding her allotment, Ally decides to track down her 20 men in the hope that one of them will have morphed into her Prince Charming.  

So far, so hypocritically pretending to be sexually liberated while actually being completely morally retro.  But wait:  across the hall from Ally lives a dissolute, womanizing, good-looking and frequently unclothed aspiring musician named Colin (Chris Evans), who agrees to help Ally find her exes in exchange for getting refuge in her apartment from his own one-night stands.  Do you really need me to say who turns out to be the perfect man for Ally?  Who cleans up his own act and and is the only one who appreciates Ally for the woman she really is?  And that just as this is becoming clear, Ally will find herself pursued by a man who is, in every superficial way, Perfect, meaning that she'll have to make A Choice?

I mean, ugh.  Absolutely.  And yet... The script has some snap and off-hand surprises, and more importantly, it has Faris and Evans.  Faris has been waiting to be the Next Big Thing for so long that it feels like a broken record, and it looked like The House Bunny was going to be her ticket--but even though that movie was a hit, she's still not A Name.  She's even better in Number than she was in Bunny, because she gets to be smart instead of Judy Hollidayish dumb-yet-wise.  And Evans, who seems to be trying to prove himself in every genre at once this year, from the action heroics of Captain America to the serious drama of Puncture, does a softer version of the sleazy-guy-who-turns-sensitive that Gerard Butler's been playing in movies like The Ugly Truth and The Bounty Hunter, and it works.  He and Faris have a real comic rapport that's sexy and comfortable, and it makes them a pleasure to watch together.

The movie also has an unusually strong supporting cast, with people like Blythe Danner as Ally's disapproving mother, Eliza Coupe and Heather Burns as two of her friends, Andy Samberg, Chris Pratt, Anthony Mackie, Joel McHale and Martin Freeman as some of the exes, and Dave Annable as Mr. Perfect. Mark Mylod, who's been a house director on Entourage, keeps things moving briskly toward the predetermined ending and lets Faris and Evans do their stuff. 

It's more than a little uncool to admit enjoying What's Your Number? because every step of the way, it would be perfectly fair to characterize the movie as cliched, predictable and as subtle as a CG robot battle.  But a little wit and charm go a long way in this genre, and while Number isn't--well, it certainly isn't Crazy Stupid Love--it's an enjoyable piece of undemanding fluff.

Here's what's wrong with BBCAmerica.

Don't get me wrong:  it's marvelous that BBCA exists to bring us shows like Luther, the original (and superior) Torchwood, the also original (and even more superior) Being Human, and now THE HOUR.  The problem is that a BBC "1-hour" show actually does run for almost a full hour, unlike the 40-45 minutes that US networks (other than pay-cable) call an "hour" once commercials are removed.  If, like BBCA, you're a network that airs commercials and also wants to rebroadcast these series, you have 3 choices, none of them ideal:  you can edit 10-15 minutes from each episode, put them in awkward 75-minute timeslots, or pad 90-minute slots with "extras" to fill out the surplus of time. 

BBCA's solution is an odd compromise.  The initial 2 airings of each episode (east coast and west coast on the same night) run 75 minutes and are uncut, but all repeats after that are brutally edited down to fit a 1-hour slot.  So when I tell you that The Hour is the best new show to hit the air since Game of Thrones, and that you should catch up with the first episode on Saturday and get yourself hooked before next Wednesday's chapter, all you'll be able to watch is the truncated version.  (You may want to check your cable or satellite system to see if the longer cut is available On Demand.)  This is too bad, because The Hour hardly has lulls that would lend themselves to editing.  One of the show's pleasures is its crackling pace of Abi Morgan's script (she has 2 major films upcoming, the Margaret Thatcher biography The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep, and the Michael Fassbinder/Carey Mulligan drama Shame). Still, better to live with a subpar version of the first episode than to miss The Hour entirely.

People seem determined to compare The Hour to Mad Men, but a better way of describing it is Broadcast News as a period murder mystery.  The time is the mid-1950s, and the place is the BBC itself, which is ready to launch itself out of stodgy airings of newsreel footage and start reporting the news seriously.  The vehicle for this new commitment to news is a series called "The Hour," and our protagonists square up nicely with James L. Brooks' main characters.  The Albert Brooks figure is Freddie Lyon, a brilliant, passionately committed newsman who unfortunately lacks camera-ready charisma and tact; he has an unrequited love for Bel Rowley (Romola Garai), the equally brilliant but also beautiful and politic producer of "The Hour," and the show's stand-in for Holly Hunter.  She, of course, finds herself falling for the piece's William Hurt, in this case Hector Madden (Dominic West), the endlessly charming, somewhat superficial and very married anchor ("presenter" in BBC parlance) of the new show.    Freddie and Bel have effortless best-friend banter--even when they're furious with each other, they can't bear to be apart--but Hector has star quality.

Meanwhile, there's been a mysterious murder in a London tube station, and MI:6 is all too interested in the corpse; the death has something to do with Freddie's socialite friend Ruth, who's torn apart by it even as she's announcing her engagement.  Freddie, of course, is determined to get to the bottom of the crime even if no one else cares, and much intrigue is clearly on the way.

The Hour is a thriller, a romantic comedy and a drama about politics and the news business, at a time when most TV series would be happy to succeed at any one of those.  The three leads are terrific:  Whishaw is much more grounded and likable than he's been in indie pictures like I'm Not There, Perfume and Bright Star; Garai (she was the older version of Saoirse Ronan's character in Atonement) has the air of a Hollywood screwball comedy star; and West, well, West was McNulty on The Wire, and consequently will never have to prove anything ever again.  And naturally there's an A-level British ensemble cast behind them, with people like Anton Lesser, Juliet Stevenson, Anna Chancellor and Burn Gorman (late of Torchwood) everywhere you look.  The production design is impeccable, and the first episode's direction by Coky Giedroyc is fleet and tense.

FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS - Worth A Ticket:  Almost Great

For about an hour, as you watch his new FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS, you could be forgiven for thinking that writer-director Will Gluck is the future of Hollywood romantic comedy.  Gluck came out of TV with the very underrated Fired Up, about a pair of college guys who dress up as female cheerleaders to get girls (I'm serious--watch it on video), and then he had his break-out with last year's terrific Easy A.  Friends With Benefits seems to be well on its way to building on this with an unusually smart, funny romance--until it isn't.

As everyone knows by now, Friends shares its premise with No Strings Attached, the very lame comedy that rode Natalie Portman's concurrent Black Swan stardom to a $71M gross ($148M worldwide) earlier this year.  In both, a couple that isn't romantically involved decides for the sake of convenience to get together for sex, with the idea that they'll be able to keep it separate from any emotional entanglement.  Of course, in both cases that's not the way it plays out.

The dreary thing--OK, one of the dreary things--about Strings was that it never really honored its own premise:  from the start, it was clear that Ashton Kutcher's character had a puppydog crush on Portman's, so the story became a matter of waiting for Portman to be willing to accept emotional commitment and open herself to Kutcher's love.  The script had to come up with psychological issues for Portman to triumph over, and there was hardly any fun to be had in the movie at all.  (Not to mention that it was almost stubbornly devoid of laughs.)

Friends With Benefits, in contrast, delivers on its initial idea.  Dylan (Justin Timberlake) is a magazine designer from LA headhunted for a NY job by Jamie (Mila Kunis).  He's new in town, they're both busy people who've recently been dumped, and they strike up a friendship--then decide that the sensible thing to do is add purely physical sex to the equation, since neither wants to be in a real relationship.  Of course, even while they're denouncing the cliches of romantic comedy (Kunis has a great bit attacking Katherine Heigl movies, and there's even a film-within-the-film that features Jason Segal and Rashida Jones), the two of them are falling for each other, and it doesn't take a prophet to figure out where it's going to end up.  What makes Friends work for quite a while is the very quirky, genial, appealing script by Gluck, Keith Merryman and David A. Newman, which has the kind of old-fashioned snappy banter that nowadays is rare outside of an Aaron Sorkin project. 

It also helps that Timberlake and Kunis actually seem to like each other, and they have real screen chemistry together; it's a relief to watch a big-screen romance where neither of the characters is an idiot, a doofus or a selfish creep with a heart of gold.  Timberlake's been kicking around with his film career for several years now, and he was excellent in The Social Network, but Friends is his first genuine leading man role, and he handles it like a veteran, smoothly hitting all the laughs and carrying off the more dramatic moments.  Kunis, too, has been on the brink of breaking out since she moved over from TV, and she makes a hugely appealing, sexy and often hilarious lead.  Gluck is a casting whiz, and like Easy A, Friends is also loaded with fabulous supporting actors:  Woody Harrelson, Andy Samberg, Richard Jenkins, Jenna Elfman, and Easy A's own Emma Stone and Patricia Clarkson all make appearances.  

So how does it all go wrong?  Gluck and his co-writers can't manage to stick the landing.  After being intelligent and witty and charming for more than an hour, easily convincing us that these two smart people would ultimately figure out that they're made for each other and fall into each other's arms, the script invents melodramatic and unnecessary plot turns to push them together, then break them up, and of course reunite them.  The last reel is cluttered with "call-backs" that repeat scenes and motifs from earlier in the movie in a grindingly obvious way.  Jenkins is forced to more or less replay his role from Dear John, as the movie recycles one of the lousiest recent movie cliches:  the Alzheimer's patient who manages to reach lucidity just long enough to impart some parental wisdom.  Timberlake and Kunis suddenly act in ways inconsistent with their behavior earlier in the movie, just to keep the plot's wheels turning.  By pandering to exactly the same rom-com conventions they ridiculed earlier, Gluck and his team drive their project straight into a wall.

It's sad to watch, because once you're on a movie's side, the last thing you want is to have the filmmakers wrench it away.  And even with its missteps, Friends With Benefits is still worth seeing, the first two-thirds are the most likable comedy of the summer.  It's jsut that when things get bogged down, you might want to consider checking out the next auditorium at the multiplex and watching the giant robots destroy Chicago; it's less painful than watching Friends With Benefits destroy itself.

Let's put off talking about ZOOKEEPER--it's terrible, for those with no time to spare--by mentioning the trailer for Adam Sandler's upcoming Jack & Jill that's attached to it (both movies are produced by Sandler's production company Happy Madison and released by Sony).  While it's naturally unfair to judge a picture that won't be opening until November based on 2 minutes of footage, the trailer was created for the express purpose of generating audience enthusiasm, so it's not completely out of place to say that Jack & Jill, in which Sandler plays twins--one of them female--and thus shares the screen with himself in drag, looks like one of the worst movies ever made.  Actually, it's more specific than that:  Jack & Jill resembles nothing so much as one of the "Sandler" parodies that dotted Judd Apatow's Funny People; it even has in-joke celebrity cameos by Katie Holmes and Al Pacino.  Watching that trailer is the Razzie equivalent of seeing the previews for a movie like The King's Speech:  even as it's playing, you think How is this movie not winning awards?

But I digress.   And I'll continue to do so by noting the marketing campaign for Zookeeper, which has itself been very curious.  The movie is basically A Night At the Museum meets Hitch:  the titular zoo employee (Kevin James) discovers that when no one is looking, the animals in his care become an all-star cast of celebrity voices, and they band together to help improve his inept dating life.  You'd expect a picture like this to be sold to kids and their mothers, but as anyone who watches sports on TV (or goes to websites like espn.com) knows, Sony has been massively selling it to guys, with ads blanketing the NBA playoffs and other broadcasts.  Was James' Paul Blart a magnet for male audiences?  Is it the Sandler connection?  No one will question the strategy if the movie does a big number this weekend (Mitch Metcalf's prediction is $24M), but it's an interesting approach.

OK, fine:  time to talk about the movie.  Zookeeper is directed by Frank Coraci, one of Happy Madison's 2 house directors (Dennis Dugan, who handled Jack & Jill, is the other).  His pictures for the label include The Wedding Singer, The Waterboy and Click, all of them hits (Wedding Singer was even pretty good) but none exactly a showcase for the Auteur Theory.  It's written by a conglomerate of screenwriters:  James, Nick Bakay, Rock Reuben, Jay Scherick and David Ronn, who between them couldn't come up with better than a collection of witless animal gags and cliched rom-com storylines (James is pathetically in love with WASPy Leslie Bibb and doesn't even notice the adorable Rosario Dawson, as a zoo vet, under his nose).

Coraci doesn't seem capable of composing an interesting shot, but he also doesn't seem to care.  He's there to make sure the CG and animatronic animals work, which they mostly do, and to let James milk his lovable schlemiel persona.  Most of the animals (Cher, Jon Favreau, Maya Rudolph, Jim Breuer, Don Rickles and Judd Apatow himself) are there for quips only, the exceptions being Sylvester Stallone, wry as the local lion; Sandler, who contributes his high-pitched Old Jewish Man voice as a monkey; and especially Nick Nolte, as a gorilla who becomes James' sidekick and has a storyline that comes to include one of the most blatant product placements in film history and unfortunately also some jarring physical mistreatment of the animals (parents, take note).

There's little charm and less laughter in all this.  James showed real skill in Hitch and a fumbling Everyman quality in Paul Blart, but Happy Madison isn't a place for moderation, so his character quickly becomes strained and overly silly here (when he takes Dawson to his brother's wedding to make Bibb jealous, it's not long before he's splitting his pants, knocking over an ice sculpture and doing a gorilla imitation).  Dawson and Bibb have different extremes of thankless roles, although there's the occasional moment between James and Dawson that suggests they could have had romantic chemistry in a movie with a half-decent script.  The other humans are barely present, and the plotting is awful and twelfth-hand:  yes, James has to chase down the love of his life on her way to the airport.

Parents who are tempted to bring their kids to Zookeeper should also be aware that there are long stretches when those cute talking animals are off screen, and the movie is a relatively straight (and not very good) romantic comedy.  Sports fans:  you're on your own, but ESPN Classic must be airing some 10-year old college football bowl game that'd be more fun to watch.  Say this for Zookeeper, though--it's not Jack & Jill.

(ZOOKEEPER - Sony/MGM - PG - 103 minutes - Director:  Frank Coraci - Script:  Nick Bakay, Kevin James, Rock Reuben, Jay Scherick, David Ronn - Cast:  Kevin James, Rosario Dawson, Leslie Bibb, Donnie Wahlberg, Nick Nolte, Sylvester Stallone, Adam Sandler, Cher, Jon Favreau, Judd Apatow - Wide Release)