Video review: "About Last Night"

“About Last Night” is self-consciously different from the Rob Lowe/Demi Moore romantic comedy/drama from nearly 30 years (!) ago. The locale has moved from Chicago to L.A., and the white cast has been transposed with a black one. But fundamentally it’s still the same story.

It’s about lonely people who hook up for a brief fling and unexpectedly find it turning into a real relationship. By virtue of the fact that one of the stars is hyperactive funnyman Kevin Hart, this remake is infused with a lot more humor than the original.

There are enough laugh-out-loud moments to make it worth a rental. And if the somber moments don’t exactly carry much emotional heft, they at least don’t slow things down so much it saps energy from the funny stuff.

Hart plays Bernie, a motormouth charmer who has recently hooked up with a Joan (Regina Hall), an out-there personality with a quiet mouse of a roommate, Debbie (Joy Bryant). They fix her up with Bernie’s best friend Danny (Michael Ealy), and the two couples spend the next year falling in and out of love.

“About Last Night” may not offer any great insights into the modern dating game. But it’s the rare remake that doesn’t sully the name of the original.

Video extras are rather slim. The DVD comes with only a single featurette, “An Un-Romantic Comedy.” Upgrade to the Blu-ray edition and you add three more featurettes: “About Last Night Advice,” “I Love You?” and “Word on the Street.”

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Review: "About Last Night"

 There's a moment in "About Last Night" in which the characters are actually watching a video of the 1986 film with Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, and argue about whether it's a chick flick or a guy's movie. It's a tacit but still brave acknowledgement that yes, this is a remake of a seminal '80s movie, which in turn was based on a play by David Mamet.

The new movie is funnier than the original, while still engaging in plenty of heavy moments as we explore two sets of best friends who hook up with one another on a one-night stand, and then spend the next year negotiating the treacherous territory that comes with being in a relationship -- and even debating whether they're in one.

The leading cast is gorgeous and engaging, and they're also all black, whereas the '86 cast was Caucasians. The movie uses this to its advantage without ever really getting hung up on the change in skin tone. Just as the characters quarrel fruitlessly about whether the original was primarily intended for men or women, it's wrongheaded to think of this as a "black movie," even if African-Americans are the primary targeted audience.

It's much the same way the film has switched scenery from Chicago to Los Angeles. Even though the original conception was very much about the Midwest metropolis -- Mamet's play was called "Sexuality Perversity in Chicago," after all -- the 2014 iteration gets its mood and groove from L.A.

The four main characters are all at that stage of life where they believe in working hard and playing harder, when going out to bars every night is seen as a duty, and the thought of being tied down by entanglement is anathema. It is, in other words, the life of many people in their early- to mid-20s, which Lowe and Moore were back in 1986. Here the actors are closer to 40, so their antics have a whiff of desperation about them.

Kevin Hart is seemingly everywhere these days, including riding the box office wave of "Ride Along" from just a few weeks ago. Here he's relegated to the wingman role of Bernie, an uber-confident chattermouth. His best bud is Danny (Michael Ealy), a quiet type who Bernie jokes is too good-looking to appreciate the women a guy like him has to work hard to turn into conquests.

Bernie has just landed another, Joan (Regina Hall), a bigger-than-life woman with an outsized personality and mood swings. Her roommate is Debbie (Joy Bryant), a smart businesswoman who's seemingly opted out of the romantic game. Pushed by Bernie and Joan, Danny and Debbie soon become a couple, much to the consternation of their friends, who chide them for rushing into anything serious.

The story plays out in a series of vignettes spread over the seasons -- who says "I love you" first, moving in together, holiday events blown up by jealousy, temptations from old lovers, etc. A subplot follows Danny in quitting the sales job he hates, only to end up bartending at the place owned by his deceased dad's best friend (Christopher McDonald).

This movie is sweet and cute, buoyed by Hart's frantic comedic persona. The screenplay by Leslye Headland is reminiscent of "(500) Days of Summer," and director Steve Pink keeps things loose and easy. The more dramatic sections slide in and out readily, not carrying a whole lot of emotional freight but never weighing down the proceedings too much.

Maybe in another 28 years, another remake of "About Last Night" will come, perhaps centering on Latinos in Miami, and they'll watch a snippet of this movie, and the memory will not be an unpleasant one.

Review: "Wanderlust"

"Wanderlust" has some wonderful casting, starting with Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston as George and Linda Gurgenblatt, a pair of hapless New Yorkers who find themselves homeless and bunking down with a commune of modern-day hippies. Both actors just exude an aura of niceness and likability, even when their characters are behaving like twits, which is often.

I also liked Justin Theroux as Seth, the ostensible leader of the commune. He's sort of the Burt Reynolds of hippies, exuding a cheesy machismo that's potent but comes with a short shelf life. He talks dismissively about the technology and trappings of the world he left behind, but his references are all antiquated -- laserdiscs and Nintendo, etc. Even though he looks fairly young, we wonder exactly how long it's been since Seth last did anything besides strum a guitar in the woods.

And Ken Marino is a hoot as Rick, George's aggressively upper-middle-class brother from Atlanta who gives him a job after George's company is shut down by federal investigators. Rick makes a nice income selling porta-potties, drives a garish overpriced SUV, and owns a mini-mansion that seems to have a flatscreen television in every single room. His wife walks around in a daily fog of prescription medicine and veiled resentment.

"What did Mom do to you that she didn't do to me?" George asks after one of Rick's more egregious eruptions of assholery.

Other standouts are Alan Alda as the old lion of the commune he co-established 40 years ago; Kathryn Hahn as one of the more strident members, who seems to absolutely loathe George but desperately wants to share their free-love philosophy with him; Kerri Kenney as a babbling bother; and Joe Lo Truglio as Wayne, the commune's sole nudist, winemaker and wannabe author of political thriller novels.

(I should add that Truglio bravely attacks the revealing role in a, shall we say, direct manner. Although apparently he has nothing to hide, since he's blessed in the Michael Fassbender mode of Swinging Thespianism.)

There's so much good stuff happening in "Wanderlust" that it takes awhile to realize the moments that are generally funny are few and far between. This is the quintessential hit-and-miss comedy -- though when the movie is hitting, it packs a pretty potent laugh punch.

Rudd in particular gets to milk several scenes where he's just standing there reacting to the looneyness around him, pulling double- and triple-takes like a champion. His reactions are more engaging than most actors' actions. The sequence where George faces increasing sexual temptation from Eva (Malin Akerman) is like a master course in comedic tension.

Alas, as good as these pieces are, there just aren't enough strung together to recommend the movie.

"Wanderlust" is from the Judd Apatow movement, which seems to be taking over American film comedy with Borg-like inevitability. (Apatow serves here as executive producer.) David Wain directed and co-wrote the movie (with Marino). Wain is most known for "Wet Hot American Summer," an obscure 2001 movie that is regarded in today's Hollywood as some sort of Magda Carta of Funny. I tried watching it once, and wore out the fast-forward button on my remote before giving up.

I'm sure actors really like performing in these movies, because there's so much emphasis on ad-libbing dialogue and zany characterizations. Making this film was probably a blast, but that entertainment value got drained during the transition to the audience.

2 stars out of four

Review: "Paul"

"Paul" is quite possibly the first extraterrestrial stoner comedy. At least, I couldn't think of any others offhand. I Googled "movies in which aliens get stoned" and got zippo. Maybe I should've used Bing.

The alien and his human cohorts do not actually spend the entire movie getting high, but this film definitely has a crunchy road-trip vibe. Think "Cheech & Chong" meets "Starman," with some "Shaun of the Dead"-type genre spoofing. This latter flavor is not surprising, considering that "Shaun" collaborators Simon Pegg and Nick Frost wrote the screenplay and star in "Paul."

The title character, a buggy-eyed protagonist who can turn invisible and heal people and animals with a touch, is voiced by Seth Rogen in his blowsy, cool-dude mode. We get the distinct impression that on his world, he's the Jeff Spicoli. At least, we hope he is. Paul (a nickname, and later we discover how he got it) crashed his spaceship in the desert more than 60 years ago, and seems to have little ambition or direction in life.

He's been the guest-slash-prisoner of the U.S. government ever since, and would've been content to stay there until he recently learned that he's outlived his usefulness. He goes on the lam, smashes his stolen car and gets a lift from Graeme and Clive (Pegg and Frost), a pair of British nerds taking a tour of Area 51 and other alien-themed hot spots in a rented RV.

There's a lot of funny in-jokes about why all aliens in pop culture have the same general resemblance as Paul. He tells them the government disseminated those images so in case more of Paul's folks show up, people will at least have a frame of reference and not totally freak out. There's even a hilarious flashback where Paul gives Steven Spielberg the idea for E.T.'s glowing magic finger.

Hot on his trail is Zoil (Jason Bateman), a Secret Service agent who's really serious about his job, and seems impervious to humor. He takes orders from a female boss we only hear over the phone, and has to deal with a pair of nitwit rookies (Joe Lo Truglio and Bill Hader) assigned to help.

Paul, Graeme and Clive hide out in a trailer park, where they bump into Ruth (Kristen Wiig), the daughter of a Bible-thumper. She wears those odd glasses with one frame blacked out to conceal an eye condition, and it doesn't take special powers to guess Paul will have something to say about it.

His intervention helps her cling a little less bitterly to her religion, and soon Ruth is tagging along, determined to try out some new swear words and maybe break a few commandments. It's a charming, cheeky and funny role, and underlines the burning necessity that Hollywood give Wiig her own star vehicle, now.

"Paul" is directed by Greg Mottola, who helmed the ridiculously overrated "Superbad," but also the criminally ignored "Adventureland." Together with Frost and Pegg's script, they manag to find a loose, entertaining groove that's way funnier than "Pineapple Express." The humor is generally in well-traveled terrain with a generous helping of dick jokes, but somehow having it coming out of the mouth of a little green man makes it fresh and ironic.

3 stars out of four