Video review: "The Addams Family"

File “The Addams Family” under “Reboots We Didn’t Need, But Aren’t Terrible.” At least they’re going in the opposite direction as Disney, which seems determined to do a live-action remake of every animated hit they’ve ever had -- even the crappy ones. (*Cough* *cough* “Mulan” *cough* *cough*.)

Here the 1990s comedies starring Raul Julia (may he rest in pieces) and Anjelica Huston, preceded by the 1960s television show, are revived as a kiddie cartoon flick.

It’s a good fit, since the premise is as cartoonish as it gets. A family of death-loving weirdos take up residence in the mansion on the hill, creeping out the neighbors with their 24/7/365 celebration of Halloween-esque themes.

Gomez (Oscar Isaac) is the smooth patriarch, though we get the sense his wife, austere Morticia (Charlize Theron), really runs the show. Son Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard) is an awkward people-pleaser, while dour daughter Wednesday (Chloe Grace Moretz) has a studied, detached air to her. Nick Kroll does the voice of bald, super-creepy Uncle Fester.

It’s a nice voice cast, though Moretz stands out for her slightly formal line readings. I chuckled every time Wednesday spoke.

The plot is some contrived claptrap about getting the entire Addams clan to gather from all over the globe for Pugsley’s coming-of-age ceremony. (Which involves deadly sharp sabers, of course.) Allison Janney provides the voice of their nemesis, television home improvement host Margaux, marshaling the forces of shiplap and bright hues.

There’s a lot of emphasis on boingy action and throwaway jokes, some of which work and some that deserved to be thrown away.

I mildly enjoyed “The Addams Family,” though my kids loved it and yours probably will, too -- unless they’re weirdos who like ponies and rainbows and life-affirming stories.

It’s coming out with some nice bonus features. My favorite is “Charades with Thing,” an interactive game in which the bodyless hand invites you to guess what he’s miming. There are also deleted and extended scenes, a storyboard-to-final evolution of a scene, a rogues gallery of character profiles featuring each voice actor, two music videos and a throwback feature to the previous film and TV versions.

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Review: "Troop Zero"

“Y’all will find life gets much easier if you don’t want so much.”
                    --Principal Massey

As a sucker for warmhearted, Southern-fried dramedies I wanted to like “Troop Zero” a lot more than I did.

It practically vibrates with authenticity, capturing life in 1977 Georgia in the fictional hamlet of Wiggly. It’s the sort of homespun place with one restaurant, Butte’s Chicken, where everybody knows everybody and nobody much has any money. Blacks and whites lived side-by-side long before integration because nobody here can understand that sort of foolishness and, again, there isn’t enough coin to have two of everything.

The bored librarian wears neon-blue eye shadow, children are pretty well left to their own devices and the town lawyer is a jolly cracker who can’t find his pants and keeps a toothbrush tucked behind one ear.

That would be Boss Man, daddy to the Boss, aka Christmas Flint, played by McKenna Grace. She was terrific in “Gifted” from a couple years ago playing a young genius, and here she’s playing a girl who’s not especially bright and a whole lot awkward.

Christmas lost her mom a year ago and is like a leftover puzzle piece, trying to figure out where she fits in the world.

She spends her evenings staring up at the stars, yearning to connect with life from outer space. On Earth, things are pretty glum, but Christmas has naïve innocence about her, all pigtails and goofy smiles.

Boss Man (Jim Gaffigan) is on the phone a lot or away helping clients who tend not to pay him, so Miss Rayleen (Viola Davis) ends up as her de facto guardian. She’s her dad’s secretary, but once harbored ambitions of her own toward going to law school and getting out of Wiggly.

Rayleen has a stern way about her, smoking and cussing, but we suspect there’s a lot of heart underneath. Mike Epps is Dwayne, the good-hearted neighbor/buddy/ex-con.

The story (screenplay by Lucy Alibar) gets kicked off by a visiting NASA scientist who is recording voices on a Golden Record that will be sent into space via satellite. The winners of the regional Birdie (think Girl) Scouts talent competition will get to be one of the voices, and obviously since Christmas is an alien nut it immediately becomes her quest.

This means getting past the school principal, “Nasty” Miss Massey (Allison Janney), who also doubles as the troop mother of the local Birdie troop, led by certified mean girl Piper (Ashley Brooke). So Christmas and Rayleen set about recruiting the dreggiest of dregs from the local kid populace. They include:

• “Hell-No” Price (Milan Ray), the local bully who believes firmly in collecting “taxes” from other students.
• Joseph (Charlie Shotwell), Christmas’ only true friend, who’s drawn more to musicals and costumes than football, and thus is nearly as much an outcast as her.
• Smash (Johanna Colón), who likes to do what her name implies and, as Christmas narrates, “is like the universe -- full of gas and mystery.”
• Anne-Claire (Bella Higginbotham), a wallflower who asks Jesus to help her decide everything, and wears a huge bandage on half of her glasses because of a missing eye.

Things fall into a fairly typical scrappy-underdogs-surprise-everyone type of plot, as Miss Massey and her troop of nasties throw up obstacles, while Troop Zero -- which they’re labeled because there are “no numbers left” -- overcome adversity and form unlikely friendships.

The movie is directed by director duo Amber Finlayson and Katie Ellwood (who go by Bert & Bertie, in an apparent bid to unseat McG for the title of Silliest Filmmaker Nickname). They seem to have the heart for this material but not a good notion what to do with it.

The kids’ interactions, which are the center of the movie, are a bit stilted and contrived. Davis and Janney are their usual magnificent selves, but the Oscar winners have one-note characters to work with.

“Troop Zero” is a little bit “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a little bit “Meatballs,” and not a little “Fried Green Tomatoes.” I love the ingredients but didn’t fall in love with the way they were put together. It needed some more time in the deep fryer to finish cooking through.

Review: "Bombshell"

If “Bombshell” looks like a bunch of Hollywood liberals teaming up for a vicious takedown of Fox News, the hated epitome of right-wing media, that’s because it is.

That doesn’t make it any less delicious or entertaining. And it’s as good a cinematic exploration aw I’ve seen of how sexual harassment is tolerated and even condoned.

Director Jay Roach’s last two films were a hagiography of lefty screenwriting icon Dalton Trumbo and a send-up of Republican congressional candidates. Screenwriter Charles Randolph won (deservedly) an Oscar for writing “The Big Short,” an angry and hilarious look at the housing lending crisis that set off the Great Recession.

They’re core members of the Liberal Hollywood Elite©.

And yet, “Bombshell” possesses layers and subtleties. It treats its characters as living, flesh-and-blood creatures full of complexities and contradictions. You may even be shocked to hear some of the Fox News women come out looking brave, even a little heroic.

You may have seen that freaky trailer where Margot Robbie, playing an ambitious up-and-comer at the network, is riding in an elevator. Then in walk Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson. They warily study each other through sidelong glances, the tension palpable, and you wonder how the hell the studio convinced Kelly and Carlson to portray themselves.

Except they didn’t. Kelly is played by Charlie Theron, and Carlson by Nicole Kidman. I’m not sure what kind of makeup or even possibly CGI effects were employed, but they look so much like the women they portray you’d swear there was some DNA swapping.

The voices are really good, too. Theron sounds so much like Kelly, with her upstate New York accent and odd word emphasis, it’s downright eerie. Kidman is great, too, though Carlson doesn’t have as distinct a speaking style to emulate.

These are showstopper performances that I’m sure will be remembered during the awards season.

The story follows along in 2016 during the last months of the tenure of Roger Ailes, the notorious political fixer-turned-news-mogul who ran Fox News from its inception. He’s played by John Lithgow in a naturalistic fat suit and facial prosthetics. You’d never call it a sympathetic portrait, but Lithgow manages to find the humanity inside the ogreish exterior.

Ailes believed in giving the audience what it wants, or at least what he’s convinced they wanted, which was right-wing opinion segments, short skirts and lots of yelling. He helped create Donald Trump as a viable candidate and then found himself tied to his yoke, as have so many others.

Robbie’s character, Kayla, is an amalgam of women used and abused by Ailes and a corporate culture that openly treated its on-air talent as sex objects. She begs Ailes for advice to launch her career, and they share a scene of pressure and submission that’s just devastating to watch.

Kate McKinnon plays Jess, a producer who befriends Kayla and has a brief romance with her. Jess is a liberal lesbian who hides her identity because she couldn’t get a job anywhere else but Fox News, and now no other network will hire her.

An excellent supporting cast includes Allison Janney, Connie Britton, Mark Duplass, Rob Delaney, Malcolm McDowell, Stephen Root and Liv Hewson.

The best part of the film is the middle section, where the word is out about Ailes’ disgusting behavior and the lawyers are circling. Rather than the walls closing in, the newsroom breaks down into a cheerleading squad led by Jeanine Pirro and a few others, handing out “Team Roger” T-shirts and insisting people wear them.

The #MeToo movement has sparked a lot of good things and also some predictable overreaching and backlash. This is basically the first mainstream movie to deal with the issue head-on, and it’s both chilling and exhilarating.

Many of us who haven’t been affected sit in our privileged perches and wonder how anyone could commit this kind of behavior, or why anyone puts up with it. “Bombshell” is a bravura portrait of how ambition, fear, lust and hypocrisy can combine in the most awful ways imaginable so that people feel trapped.

Review: "The Addams Family"

“The Addams Family” was a great concept for a TV show, with such vivid, off-kilter characters, but I can’t recall a single episode if pressed.

It was a one-joke show, and later one-joke live-action movies: the Addamses are death-obsessed freaks and monsters who love darkness and decay. They’re the mirrored opposite of the standard American family, openly trying to kill each other instead of pretending to adore one another.

They’re a Halloween clan. Instead of embracing creepy stuff one night a year, they live it 24/7.

The two Barry Sonnenfeld pictures were a hit, but after Raul Julia (as patriarch Gomez Addams) died young no one wanted to continue the franchise. Anjelica Huston (un-maternal Morticia), Christini Ricci (dour daughter Wednesday) and Christopher Lloyd (the other one) as ultra-creepy Uncle Fester all milked good roles.

A quarter-century later the Addams are back as an animated movie with voices by Oscar Isaac, Charlie Theron, Chloe Grace Moretz and Nick Kroll (respective to how they’re listed above).

It pretty much hits all the notes you expect: familiar reprises of the main characters with a few noticeable twists; amped-up action scenes courtesy of the endless possibilities that come with computer animation; and some rote life lessons about the importance of family... even a murderous one.

We get a little of the family backstory, which sounds astonishingly similar to the "Hotel Transylvania" flicks: the monstrous clan was chased out of its ancestral home by torch-bearing villagers and set up shop in a lonely cliffside mansion in the worse place possible: New Jersey.

Cut to 13 years later, and they've never stepped outside the grounds of their haunted house, formerly an asylum, which comes complete with an evil spirit constantly moaning "Get out!" and trying to sever fingers with slamming windows or whatnot.

First son Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard) is preparing for his ritual passage into manhood, known as a Mazurka -- think bar mitzvah but with deadly saber dance moves. Gomez is fearful that his offspring just doesn't have the family goods.

Meanwhile, Wednesday yearns to find out what's beyond their fence, and discovers that an entire town has sprung up in the valley below. A blowhard home-improvement TV maven named Margaux (Allison Janney) runs the show there, a pink-and-green wonderland of tackiness that's borrowed straight out of "Edward Scissorhands."

Wednesday decides to attend the junior high school in the city, called "Assimilation," in case anything's too subtle for ya. She befriends Margaux's daughter, Parker (Elsie Fisher). The two become friends and join in a rebellion going in opposite directions, with Parker adopting a goth look and Wednesday adding unicorns and color splashes to her family's signature B&W shtick.

"Everyone knows pink is a gateway color," Morticia frets.

Moretz is terrific as Wednesday, giving her just the right lilt and formality in her inflections to always render her lines funny. Theron is good too as Morticia, who has no visible feet and floats around in a skinny black dress that hides spiders and other creepy-crawlies.

I noticed most of the men are drawn with thick, chocky bodies while the women usually have cartoonish spindly limbs and torsos. The opening sequence shows Mortician literally bolting and screwing herself into her gown, and I wish the filmmakers had thought about this stuff beforehand.

Thing is here, the body-less hand bounding about in a helpful way. In this iteration he actually has a small eye at the wrist, which is either a new thing or something I'd never noticed before. In one of the film's funnier throwaway bits, we learn that Thing has something of a foot fetish, which kind of makes sense when you think about it.

Giant butler Lurch (Conrad Vernon, also one of the directors) groans and serves, though he's got a bit of an eye-roll thing and has some decidedly fancy side interests. Cousin It (Snoop Dogg) shows up pretty late in the game, big pimpin' in a Cadillac and still indecipherable under all that hair.

"The Addams Family" was directed by Vernon and Greg Tiernan, who made the much-overrated "Sausage Party" together, from a screenplay by Matt Lieberman. My kids enjoyed it well enough, but it's cookie-cutter disposable entertainment that tries just hard enough.

Review: "Ma"

Screenwriting legend William Goldman said there are only three kinds of movies: those that are meant to be good and are, those that are meant to be good and aren’t, and those that were never meant to be any good.

I’d like to humbly suggest a fourth category: obviously trashy movies that are aware of their own trashiness and have fun with it while still not really being all that good.

“Ma” reminds me of lots of bits and pieces of other movies. “Misery,” with a seemingly normal, unappreciated middle-aged woman who’s secretly bonkers and played by an Oscar-caliber actress -- in this case, Octavia Spencer.

“Carrie,” about a teen girl traumatized by her sexual humiliation at the hands of her classmates, which is due for a hard comeuppance. The usual motley assembly of comely teens from every horror movie ever who just want to party.

Spencer is obviously having a lot of fun with this role, playing the kray-kray baddie in a low-budget scare flick. She fake-smiles her way through interactions, passing as normal while staring daggers when backs are turned. She’s not the most physically imposing cinematic killer, but she is good at lulling people in for a good stab in the back.

She plays Sue Ann, a timid teen who grew into a resentful woman. She has a miserable job as an assistant for the world’s nastiest veterinarian (Allison Janney). When a group of teens beg her to buy booze for them, she tuts and frets about nobody drinking and driving, and then relents.

A few winks later and Sue Ann is now hosting a never-ending party in the basement of her house out in the sticks, passing out shots and dancing the night away in an attempt to recapture some of her stolen youth. Insisting the young’uns call her “Ma,” she pokes through their social media and worms her way into their lives.

Diana Silvers plays Maggie, the new kid who has just moved to town from San Diego and immediately falls in with the cool gang. In this rural enclave, that means getting buzzed and hanging out at “the rock piles,” a pasture full of rubble that has been a party spot for decades.

Juliette Lewis plays her mom, Erica, who’s been through some rough days and is working as a cashier at the local casino in hopes of graduating up to dealer. She loves Maggie and gives her too much rope to hang herself with, making noises about “making good choices” but always too busy to check up.

McKaley Miller is Haley, the brazen girl who likes to impress everyone with her brazenness; Corey Fogelmanis is Andy, a sweet-faced boy who makes moony eyes at Maggie; Dante Brown is the funny, smart black kid; Gianni Paolo is Chaz, the headstrong jock.

Luke Evans turns up as Ben, Andy’s dad, though they never have a scene together so we’re just taking the filmmakers’ word for it. Missi Pyle plays his nasty, drinky girlfriend, who knew Erica back in the day.

Actually, it turns out all the adult character knew each other in high school, leading to gauzy flashback scenes with child actors who don’t resemble the grownups in the slightest. Suffice it to say, Sue Ann craved to be part of the in crowd, who just played her off for jokes.

Director Tate Taylor has made some good flicks, including “The Help” and “Get on Up;” screenwriter Scotty Landes is a TV guy doing his first feature film script. Tonally “Ma” is all over the map, spooky edging into scary and passing through comedy along the way. This creates a lot of awkward transition periods where we’re not sure if we’re supposed to be cowering or cackling.

Some stuff just plain doesn’t work, like a shy girl in a wheelchair (Tanyell Waivers) who is tied into the game very late in the going. Without giving too much away, I’ll just say that she and Sue Ann’s relationship deserved a whole movie of its own, or to be cut out of this one.

I can’t really recommend “Ma,” though I did on some level enjoy it. It would be incorrect to say this movie isn’t trying very hard; rather it’s laboring mightily at unworthy things.

Video review: "The Girl on the Train"

The most important aspect of a potboiler movie is that the pot has to keep boiling, gaining in intensity rather than losing it. “The Girl on the Train,” despite having some strong story elements and a very good performance by Emily Blunt, loses steam to the point the plot congeals.

Blunt plays Rachel, a woman who’s seemingly lost everything -- her career, her marriage, her sobriety, her hopes of having a baby. She spends her days in an alcoholic stupor, riding the train into the city for the job she lost a while ago. This allows her to glide past her old house, where her ex-husband (Justin Theroux) has remarried to the woman he was cheating on her with, and they’ve just had a gorgeous baby girl.

While she’s pummeling herself with this vision of what could have been, Rachel also becomes curious about another couple living a couple of doors down (Haley Bennett and Luke Evans), who tend to have a very, um… vigorous romantic life, which they engage in without apparent regard to the trains passing by their very unobstructed windows.

When this woman goes missing, Rachel becomes a prime suspect, since she had one of her frequent blackouts on that day and woke up confused and bloody (not hers). Nonetheless she undertakes her own amateur investigation, befriending the grieving husband and signing up for therapy sessions with their shrink.

Slowly, she starts to emerge from her self-induced fog -- just as the dangers grow to confront her.

Based on the novel by Paula Hawkins (unread by me), “The Girl on the Train” loses momentum as it goes rather than gaining it. Director Tate Taylor and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson give us their own mediocre version of “Gone Girl,” which accomplished almost everything this film does not.

It’s too bad Blunt’s haunting performance got wasted with such inept plotting.

Bonus features are pretty good. They include deleted and extended scenes, a couple of making-of documentaries and a feature-length commentary track with director Taylor.

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Film review: "The Girl on the Train"

“The Girl on the Train” feels like it wants to be the next “Gone Girl,” but it doesn’t quite have the same twisted pretzel of emotional anguish and expertly boiling plot. That film constantly raised the stakes, but this one often wanders in a self-medicating daze like its heroine.

Did I say heroine? The best-selling novel by Paula Hawkins actually has three, all of whom share the first-person perspective at points. Emily Blunt is the clear star here, so director Tate Taylor and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson take the curious route of telling the story through her eyes, then pulling aside to reveal stuff she couldn’t possibly have seen or known.

The result is a confused and confusing psycho-sexual thriller that plays like a “Roshomon” that wanders deep into a thicket of shifting perspectives it can’t sort out itself. Then it rescues things through conventional plot devices it dusted off from other movies.

The movie’s one saving grace is Blunt, who goes deep into her character of Rachel, who’s an utter mess. Her marriage cratered because of her alcoholism and their inability to have a baby – not to mention her husband Tom’s (Justin Theroux) philandering. Now he’s married to the woman he was cheating on her with, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and they’ve just had a gorgeous daughter.

They’re living in Rachel’s old house next to the rail line in Ardsley, a quiet upstate New York commuter town. Every day, Rachel takes the train into the big city, ostensibly for her job but also so she can spy on them and dissolve into a pool of resentment and self-pity. Constantly sipping from a CamelBak water bottle she’s secretly filled with clear booze, Rachel is perpetually stumbling around and experiencing blackouts.

She’s also become fixated on another woman who lives two doors down, Megan (Haley Bennett), a blonde goddess with a hunk of a husband, Scott (Luke Evans), whose amorous attentions toward her are fervent. (Jeez, buy some window shades, folks.)

But there’s more to each woman’s tale than meets the eye, and the strain becomes more intense when Megan goes missing. The cops (Allison Janney plays the chief detective) come sniffing around Rachel, who seems like a top suspect. She had a blackout that day and doesn’t remember much, but was seen chasing Megan and shouting insults at her. And Rachel woke up that night covered in blood.

Blunt really grunges herself up for the role – hollow eyes, ragged lips, tangled hair, even a bit of mustache. She dresses one step up from a bag lady and talks about the twin delusions of rage and envy she has toward the other women. “She’s what I lost. She’s everything I want to be,” she says.

At least early on, much of the appeal of “The Girl on the Train” is exploring such a broken character and contemplating the prospect that she may actually be guilty of some horrendous crime. Flashbacks show her being capable of violence, and even once stole into Anna’s house while she was asleep and carried the baby off into the back yard.

But things spin sideways. We’re introduced to a therapist (Edgar Ramirez) who was treating Megan and may be complicit. Rachel undertakes an amateur Nancy Drew act, befriending Scott and then signing up for her own sessions with the therapist. Just when it feels like the story should be building toward something, it just seems to devolve.

I won’t belabor the clunky maneuvers of the plot, other than to say you’ll probably figure out the true villain long before they’re revealed. It’s never a good thing when the audience reaches the final stop far ahead of the train.

Review: "Minions"

I don't think there was a soul alive who watched the original "Despicable Me" and didn't think to themselves, "Man, they should give those goofy little yellow sidekicks their own movie."

So now they have, and "Minions" is exactly what it's cracked up to be: 91 minutes of CGI slapstack, sufferable cuteness and incomprehensible minion-babble. Though it might try the patience of parents here and there, it's colorful, fast-paced and amusing. It's got the formula for keeping kiddies entertained on a hot summer day down pat: three parts cartoonish violence, one part gratuitous adorableness, one and a half parts making fun of grownups, and a scoop of gastrointestinal humor.

Frankly, if your little kid isn't left giddy by this flick, you might want to keep an eye on him.

This is essentially the minions' origin story, aka the tale of their life pre-Gru, the nefarious, redeemable villain with the long schnoz and inexplicable Slavic accent voiced by Steve Carell in the "Despicable" movies. We learn that they are not, in fact, the laboratory concoction of a mad scientist, Gru or otherwise, but a natural life form that evolved long before man and whose entire evolutionary purpose is to find the biggest villain available and serve him/her/it.

A witty opening credit scroll shows them evolving from single cells to amoebas to sea critters and so forth, always latching on to something bigger and toothier to fawn over. Alas, their bumbling assistance tends to lead to the demise of whatever "big boss" they're currently serving, a fate that eventually leads them to a long, lonely existence languishing in a frozen cave.

Eventually, hero-myth candidate Kevin resolves to go out in the world and seek a new villain. He's joined by Bob, a young minion -- he still carries a teddy bear -- with more determination than skills, and Stuart, the resident guitar player and cool dude.

The running joke with the minions is that they're virtual carbon copies of each, with a pill-shaped yellow body, no detectible noses, ears or reproductive organs, a scattering of coarse black hair and one or more googly, goggled eyes. There's not a huge range in personality or intelligence, either, though they seem to have no trouble telling each other apart.

Anyway, the trio make their way to Orlando, Fla., for Villain-Con, an annual gathering of baddies, and encounter Scarlet Overkill, the greatest of them all, and become her henchmen on a trial basis. They're assigned to steal the crown of Queen Elizabeth, and various hijinks ensue.

I should mention this takes place in 1968 London, so everything's very Mod with tight pants, period rock music and an Austin Powers vibe.

Co-director Pierre Coffin helmed the "Despicable" films with Chris Renaud, who opted to go his own way with the forthcoming "The Secret Lives of Pets." Here Coffin is joined by apprentice Kyle Balda, with a screenplay by Brian Lynch.

Coffin also provides all the chirpy voices for the minions, with the help of some intricate sound mixing. As you'll recall they speak in their own distinctive, nonsensical language with a smattering of recognizable words in English, Spanish and French. This results in one scene where Bob, having been temporarily granted an auspicious perch, delivers a rousing speech to a huge crowd of Brits, who are completely bewildered, but pleased.

The rest of the voice cast is quite good, led by Sandra Bullock as Scarlett, who really stretches vocally to capture her character's high highs and dastardly lows. Jon Hamm plays her lackadaisical husband/hanger-on/gadget guy, Michael Keaton and Allison Janney voice a pair of familial robbers, Jennifer Saunders is the queen and Geoffrey Rush is our helpful narrator.

"Minions" isn't a particularly ambitious animated film, especially compared with superior fare like "Inside Out." It's forgettable, but fun, and I can think of worse ways to spend a little time and money.

Review: "Spy"

"Spy" is a one-joke movie, but it's a pretty decent joke. Schlubby, timid Susan is a CIA drone who finally gets a chance to go out in the field, and to the surprise of everyone she's a total badass -- if a frequently clumsy one.

Because this is a comedy, so thar be pratfalls galore.

Given that description, you know Melissa McCarthy is the star. She's come on like a tornado in just a few short years to become one of Hollywood's most consistently popular stars. Even last year's limp "Tammy" made bank.

McCarthy just has that natural ability to make audiences like her, even when her character is behaving over the top. We sense a vulnerability beneath the bombast. She's an everygal who projects intelligence and the endearing awkwardness of someone who didn't get any of the big breaks in life.

The woman is a pip.

Here she's reunited with writer/director Paul Feig, who made her a star in "Bridesmaids" and followed it up by pairing McCarthy up with Sandra Bullock in "The Heat." This time she's got a couple of suave, macho male co-stars, though they're supporting parts and she's clearly the main show.

Jude Law plays Bradley Fine, a classic debonair 007 type who can mow through a whole building of bad guys on his own. Of course, he's got Susan in his head to help -- literally. She monitors him from base, sees and hears what he does, and uses a bunch of impressive spy gizmos to give Fine a leg up.

But when Fine goes missing in the field, presumed dead, Susan steps forward to keep up the pursuit of their quarry: Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), an icy Bulgarian who has stolen a small nuclear device and is looking to sell it to terrorists. Susan's job is to track Rayna and report back, but of course she soon jumps into the muck.

There's pushback, of course, from the agency. The boss (Allison Janney) isn't sure Susan has the right stuff. And Jason Statham turns up, essentially playing Jason Statham. He's a brash agent who keeps warning Susan that she's in danger of screwing up the mission -- usually right before he screws up the mission.

The movie is fitfully entertaining. There are several terrific laugh-out-loud moments. One bit, where Susan makes her first kill and then... overreacts to it is a great rolling joke that just keeps building.

And there are a number of good throwaway gags. Statham's character wants to know why he can't just jump into "the 'Face/Off' machine" to change his identity, and has to be reminded it's not a real thing. And Susan keeps getting stuck with lame secret identities, divorced cat ladies and such, which is mostly an excuse for McCarthy to dress up in fright wigs and goofy outfits.

I was also glad to see that, unlike "Tammy," there isn't a raft of fat jokes. Though the movie certainly uses McCarthy's size to comic effect, it's more about a dowdy woman discovering she can move like a ninja when her dander is up.

It's a fun movie, but there are too many dull stretches, especially in the second half. There are even some fairly pulse-pounding action sequences, and for awhile it seems like "Spy" forgets that it's a spoof.

Review: "The DUFF"

High school movies are practically carbon copies of each other these days, but "The DUFF" is smarter, braver and more novel than the average bear. It follows a few of the conventions of the genre, but also ignores some, bends others or stands them on their head.

Yes, it's got the usual array of actors who are closer to 30 than 17, but that's about par for the course.

Mae Whitman is terrific as main character Bianca Piper, a smart, nervy girl who generally ignores the sort of ridiculous pressures teenage girls are subjected to: weight, clothes, popularity, boyfriends, etc. She writes for the school paper, favors denim coveralls, is kind and a bit kooky, loves horror flicks, and 25 years ago she would've been played by Winona Ryder.

Her two BFFs are Casey (Bianca Santos) and Jess (Skyler Samuels), who are super-cute and super popular. They are all warm and close with each other, but Bianca does notice that other people tend to either ignore her or talk to her about her friends rather than engaging with her. Meanwhile, she pines from afar for the blond, sensitive, guitar-strumming Toby (Nick Eversman).

The trio's foil is Madison (Bella Thorne), the bitchy "mean girl" who rules the popularity roost through intimidation and cyber-bullying. Her sometime boyfriend, Wesley (Robbie Amell), is captain of the football team -- and also Bianca's next-door neighbor and one-time childhood friend.

Things are going great until Wes casually observes to Bianca that she is her social clique's "DUFF" -- aka, Designated Ugly Fat Friend. Bianca is hardly ugly or fat, of course -- in the grand tradition of high school movies, she's a shlumpy swan just waiting for her transformation.

But Wes notes, in a joking but still somewhat mean way, that Bianca is the non-threatening, less attractive girl the others keep around to make themselves look good, and act as a social screen. He even points out that, among the football players, they use freshmen as their own DUFFs.

Needless to say, once the veil is lifted from her eyes Bianca's not too happy about her social status. She dumps Casey and Jess as friends, and begins a Eliza Doolittle-like transformation into a cool, self-reliant chick.

As her tutor she picks Wes because, despite his immature jocularity, he tells the truth and seems to instinctively grasp male-female electricity. They go shopping for clothes -- he advises her to dress "less like Wreck-It Ralph" --  talk about how to move in for the first kiss, share some jokes, and find out the other isn't as terrible as they thought.

If the Bianca-Wes pairing might seem out of left field, Whitman and Amell sell it well. He's solid as the guy who's spent so long playing the inconsiderate doofus that he can't immediately turn it off when genuine emotions intrude. And she is compelling as the girl who's convinced herself she's above all this petty stuff, until it starts to swallow her.

Director Ari Sandel won an Oscar for his short film a few years ago, and now makes his confident feature debut. Josh A. Cagan adapted the screenplay from the book by Kody Keplinger. The pacing and tone, two of the hardest things for young filmmakers to get right, are spot on.

The filmmakers keep things on a brisk, youthful level, with screen text and animation reflecting the way modern kids' lives are filtered through digital aids and social media. (When Toby flips his hair in slo-mo, Bianca mentally projects "Amazeballs" all over the image.)

Ken Jeong livens things up as Bianca's dippy-yet-demanding journalism teacher, and Allison Janney plays her distracted mom. I also enjoyed Chris Wylde as a snippy science teacher. ("When I was in high school in the '90s, we didn't have emoticons.")

"The DUFF" ends up more or less exactly where you expect it to, but the main characters actually seem to grow and gain a little insight about themselves and the world, rather than just competing to fall in love.

Video review: "Bad Words"

A lot of movies want to seem edgy and dark, but for the most part they’re pretenders, inching up to the line of actual rebelliousness and then backing away with a smirk. “Bad Words” is not one of them. It’s a pitch-black comedy that gleefully barrels into offensive territory, then dares you not to laugh.

It stars Jason Bateman -- who also makes his directing debut -- as Guy Trilby, a 40-year-old man who hoodwinks his way into the Golden Quill National Spelling Bee for eighth graders.

Competing against kids in the throes of awkward adolescence, he mocks, bullies and abuses them. He torments a heavy girl into quitting. He convinces another that he’s sleeping with the kid’s mother. He treats the parents and the adults running the competition with even greater contempt.

Guy is, in short, a tremendous jerk. Exactly how he got to be so and why he’s undertaking this strange mission are the central dynamic of this movie, which was written by Andrew Dodge.

What’s astonishing is that we end up caring about Guy, if not exactly endorsing his cryptic motivations. He even gets to show a poignant side in his relationship with a chirpy little Indian-American kid (Rohan Chand), which starts out with antagonism and morphs into something like tutelage.

If you’re up for a bracing film about the joys of being bad, this is it.

Video extras are short in quantity but long in quality. There are deleted and extended scenes, a making-of documentary titled “The Minds and Mouths Behind Bad Words,” and a feature-length commentary track supplied by Bateman.

Movie:

Extras:

Film review: "Tammy"

McCarthy Does Mumblecore.

That's my three-word review of Melissa McCarthy's new comedy "Tammy," an oft-turgid wallow in sentiment and icky embarrassing humor. It's still got some genuine laughs, and is buoyed by McCarthy's winning screen presence. It's not a long movie at 96 minutes, yet you could easily chop a half-hour out of it and have a winner.

Mumblecore, for those not into zero-budget indie films, is epitomized by rambling dialogue that has the appearance of being ad-libbed. Its influence on mainstream comedy is clear to see, though usually it's punky young guys -- think Jonah Hill or Michael Cera -- with the verbal diarrhea.

After an impressive string of hits including "The Heat" and "Identity Thief," McCarthy is currently sitting in the unlikely catbird's seat as Hollywood's most consistently bankable star over the last few years. She's running the show on her projects, and has decided to team up with her husband Ben Falcone, who co-wrote the screenplay with her and makes his directing debut.

He frequently turns up in her movies as her beau, though here he just has a bit part as the jerk boss at the Topper Jack's burger joint where she works.

The result of their collaboration is a raunchy road trip comedy starring McCarthy and Susan Sarandon as her grandmother. They have some fairly predictable misadventures, some romantic hook-ups, binge drinking and petty larceny.

In the end, we all Learn Something -- in this case, that McCarthy had better find some new material if she wants to keep her streak alive.

The story starts off with an epic bad day for Tammy. Living in tiny Murphysboro, Ill., she crashes her ancient Corolla into a deer on the way to work, then gets fired for being late. Arriving home unexpectedly early, she's surprised to find her husband (Nat Faxon) serving an elegant dinner to his mistress (Toni Collette). Tammy promptly packs her stuff and decamps to her parents' place, two doors down.

"You never cooked me dinner!" she shrieks. "And it smells good, too!"

But her mom, played by Allison Janney, is something of a pill. Tammy's grandmother Pearl (Sarandon) lives with her but has had enough, so the pair take off for an impromptu jaunt for parts unknown with $6,700 of grandma's cash as their stake.

It's sort of a Thelma & Louise thing, with a cross-generational twist.

The ages of the actresses don't exactly sync up, with less than a quarter-century dividing them all -- McCarthy is only 11 years younger than Janney, who in turn is only 13 years Sarandon's junior. It is rather strange to see Sarandon, whose potent sexual presence has lit up screens for four decades, doing the cranky oldster routine complete with puffy feet from diabetes.

The running joke is that Tammy is the hard-partying cutup of the family, but Granny Pearl is at least her equal despite her prim outward appearance. She's a nasty drunk, supplies teenagers with beer and boasts of having been an Allman Brothers groupie.

Kathy Bates and Sandra Oh turn up late in the game as wealthy lesbian friends of Pearl's, who help them out when they're on the lam from the law. Bates lights up her scenes, feisty yet down-to-earth, and has one emotional crescendo that feels like it belongs in another movie.

Actually, most of "Tammy" feels like it belongs in another flick. McCarthy may be all that as a screen comedienne, but she and her hubby needed to run their screenplay through the spin cycle a few more times.

Review: "Bad Words"

"So did your soul burst into flames?"

So asks Guy Trilby, the protagonist of "Bad Words," a pitch-black comedy in which there are no heroes. Jason Bateman, making his directorial debut, stars as a man seemingly without a good bone in his body. He is a racquetball wall of a man, returning contempt and abuse with equal or even greater force. To say he is unlikeable is to suggest that has ever contemplated the notion of seeking approval from others.

Guy is a cipher, a mystery man who appears seemingly from nowhere, 40 years old and untethered, taking a sabbatical from a dull job proofreading warranties to enter the Golden Quill National Spelling Bee. Of course, the $50,000 contest is for students eighth grade and below, but he exploits a loophole to force his way in, a middle-aged man among preadolescents.

And he does not just compete against cute kids, but dominates them, both emotionally and physically. He plays head games and cheats, taunting the heavyset contestants and convincing another that he has slept with his mother. Guy is, in other words, a colossal dick.

The fact that Bateman and screenwriter Andrew Dodge make Guy simply palatable as a main character is quite an achievement, and to say that we actually enjoy following along on his strange, dark journey is quite another.

Guy's exact reasons for taking on this challenge, absorbing untold abuse from parents and bee officials in the process, largely remain a mystery until near the end. Even then, his justification seems not to measure up to the ruckus he's caused, and I think he knows it, but he just wants to make a statement about who he is and how he got to be where he has arrived.

Philip Baker Hall and Allison Janney play the unctuous senior Golden Quill executives who are flummoxed to no end by the prospect of Guy hijacking their prestigious event on national television, and take steps to block his way to the championship.

Guy arrives at the national contest with a reporter in tow named Jenny (Kathryn Hahn), a flustered wreck who has plenty of issues of her own, starting with the fact that she keeps sleeping with the subject of her big story. Guy plays her just like he does the spelling bee, letting out only dribs and drabs of information.

The movie's most surprising turn is Guy's antagonism with an 11-year-old Indian-American boy named Chaitanya Chopra, played brilliantly by Rohan Chand. Chaitanya is chirpy and friendly, a geeky kid but a self-possessed one, who seems to take it as his own personal mission to befriend the middle-aged interloper, despite heaping helpings of politically incorrect insults directed his way. ("Point your curry hole back the other way," is one of the few riffs quotable in friendly company.)

There's more going on with Chaitanya than meets the eye, of course, foreshadowed by his volunteering that his favorite word is "subjugate." But things occur that are unexpected by both man and boy, a dizzy mix of hedonism and male bonding, that somehow feel just right.

Just so we're clear: this is a dark, dark film. It's often very funny, but in the sort of way where you feel bad right after you quit laughing. It's reminiscent in many ways of "Bad Santa" from a few years back, but it actually makes that film seem like a lighthearted romp by comparison.

(That query quoted at the beginning of this review is Guy's tutelage in the proper usage of expletives. Yes, not only do the adults in this movie curse in front of children, they elicit nasty words from the mouths of babes.)

As contests go, spelling bees rank somewhere just below the Westminster Dog Show in terms of the amount of attention given to something so profoundly useless and preposterous. Young students beat themselves to a pulp to learn to spell obscure words they will never employ in their entire lifetimes, at least not if they want to be understood by others.

(If inscrutability is indeed their goal, we save a few places in academia for them.)

In addition to his own poisonous personal reasons, Guy also seems to be pointing out to the world how ridiculous bees are, yet another way in which we push our children to be how we would like them to be rather than affording them the freedom to discover themselves.

That's a pretty sinister bit of subtext for a movie so deliciously good at making us feel bad, laughing all the way to the therapist.

Review: "The Way, Way Back"

Is there anything tougher than being a socially awkward 14-year-old? How about having your parents recently divorced, too? And being dragged off to an unwanted summer vacation with your mom’s vaguely hostile new boyfriend?

That’s the premise of “The Way, Way Back,” the insightful and charming new comedy-drama in the mode of “Little Miss Sunshine,” which also reunites two of its key stars, Steve Carell and Toni Collette.

That’s where the similarities end. Here Carell plays the jerk, Trent -- has there ever been a redeeming movie character named Trent? – who’s dating Pam (Collette), mother of Duncan (Liam James).

Trent is a real piece of work. A car salesman, he drives a beautifully refurbished 1970 Buick Estate Wagon, which as someone points out shows really poor taste in cars. Who puts their energy and money into restoring a vehicle that was considered uncool even when it was brand new?

Trent rides Duncan like a cruel jockey whipping a tired quarter horse. When we first meet them, Trent is demanding that Duncan rate himself on a scale of one to 10. After browbeating a “6” out of the hapless lad, Trent offers his own rating of “3,” saying he doesn’t see much effort from the introverted teen.
“Let’s try to get that score up, huh?” Trent concludes, thinking this is encouragement.

Pam is kind-hearted and loving, but is stuck between her excitement at new romance and wanting to protect her son. She soon gets lost in the whirlwind of drinking, dancing and clam bakes that consumes the adults on the unnamed coastal town where they spend the summer.

Other attendees in the ongoing party include Betty (Allison Janney), Trent’s boozy next-door divorcee, and married pals Kip (Rob Corddry) and Joan (Amanda Peet). As Betty’s smart, winsome daughter Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb) points out, these summer vacations are like “spring break for adults.”

(No attempt is ever made to explain how these people don’t have to work for weeks and months at a time.)

Trend has his own kid, a snobby girl named Steph (Zoe Levin) who’s a few years older than Duncan and wants nothing to do with him, taking him with her when forced to and ditching him as soon as possible. Susanna is also part of that crowd, though she seems none too thrilled about it, reads books instead of gossiping and appears to have an inner life. Perhaps inevitably, Duncan develops a crush on her.

Just when things look like they couldn’t possibly get worse for Duncan, he stumbles across the Water Wizz, a dilapidated water theme park run by a motley crew of fun-loving adults.

(From my childhood memories, water parks are exactly like regular amusement parks in that people will wait in line for 45 minutes for a two-minute ride, with the notable difference being that you’re standing there mostly naked while the sun broils your skin to a nice medium-well.)

Duncan gets recruited by the loquacious manager Owen, who actually lives above the Water Wizz central office like a debauched fallen demi-god. He’s got a co-manager he’s sweet on (Maya Rudolph), though his lack of responsibility is a constant roadblock.

Something unexpected happens and Duncan finds the mentor/protector he needs in Owen, who teaches him to loosen up, and stand up to Trent. Sam Rockwell is terrific as Owen, who’s all shtick on the outside but harbors dark recesses. One of the loveliest things about their relationship is Owen being utterly astonished that someone would look up to him.

Soon Duncan is ditching his seaside retreat to go fold towels and stack chairs every day, which escalates tensions with Trent. Here’s a hint if you’re dating someone with a teenage kid: if they’d rather go work a menial job than hang out with you during the summer, things aren’t going so well.

“The Way, Way Back” was written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, Oscar-winning screenwriters for “The Descendants” taking their first step behind the camera. They both also have key supporting roles as burnt-out Wizz workers.

It’s a knockout directorial debut, a feel-good picture about a kid who learns not to feel so bad about himself.

Video review: "The Help"

I would not be surprised to see "The Help" get a raft of Academy Award nominations. Viola Davis and Octavia Spence seem like locks in the Best Supporting Actress Category, playing African-American maids struggling with racism and oppression in 1960s Mississippi. And Bryce Dallas Howard might just slide in there, too, as the catty queen bee of the white social establishment.

Emma Stone has a shot at a Best Actress nomination too, playing "Skeeter" Phelan, the recently graduated college woman and aspiring journalist who takes it upon herself to write about "the help" -- black women who essentially raise the children of white well-to-do families, only to be rewarded with condescension and Jim Crow status quo when those young ones grow up into adults.

For that matter, writer/director Tate Taylor did a smart job translating the phenomenally popular book by Kathryn Stockett to the screen, taking syrupy chick flick material and turning it into a moving and surprisingly funny portrait of Southern womanhood, in all its gritty glory and brittle pettiness. An Oscar nomination might just be in his future, too.

Heck, for that matter, why not a Best Picture nod for "The Help"? How many other films have grabbed audiences this year like this one, leaving them rolling in the aisles and with tears on their cheeks? It's sure to be a big hit on video.

One disappointing note is that video extras are rather on the lean side. The DVD version comes only with a few deleted scenes and “The Living Proof” music video by Mary J. Blige.

Upgrade to the Blu-ray, and you add a few more deleted scenes, and two featurettes – a making-of documentary and a tribute to real-life maids of Mississippi.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 2 stars

Review: "The Help"

It's grown-up time. Summer has exhausted its silos of slo-mo explosions, CGI critters and second-rate super-heroes. So who's ready for a touching, serious film that should get attention come Oscar time?

"The Help," based on the popular book by Kathryn Stockett, is a look at the relationships between African-American maids in Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s and the white families they work for. Written and directed smartly by Tate Taylor, it's a movie in the mold of weepy chick flicks, but with more brains and gumptions than we're used to.

Yes, it's the sort of film that looks at the plight of oppressed black characters through the eyes of a white protagonist, who swoops in to save them -- or at least fortifies their bravery enough to stand up for themselves.

But I found it to be a touching journey that manages to make most of the black and white characters relatable. And "The Help" has a surprisingly funny streak, in that tried-and-true laughing-through-the-tears way.

Viola Davis gives a knockout performance as Aibileen, the long-suffering maid to the Leefolt family. Her duties include cooking and cleaning, but her primary task is tending to the clan's offspring. By her own reckoning, Aibileen has raised 17 children, but "they always turn out like their mommas."

The greatest strength of "The Help" is in examining the sclerotic entrapment of the Jim Crow South, where black maids were adored by the children to whom they had a closer affection than their own parents, but who grow up to enforce the unspoken codes of segregation and subjugation.

It's easy to talk about the illogical mindset of that time and place, where people were terrified to deviate from the social norm because "that's the way things have always been." This movie brings the contradictions of the pre-civil rights era to full, fleshy life.

Emma Stone, who between "Easy A," "Crazy, Stupid, Love." and this film is quickly establishing herself as the most ambitious actress of her generation, plays Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, recently graduated from Ole Miss with ambitions of becoming a writer. She tackles the cleaning advice column in the local paper, but soon hatches a plan to tell the stories of "the help," the gray-uniformed maids who silently serve as the ties that bind the community.

Skeeter is initially motivated by selfish reasons: she feels ostracized by the women her age who have all gotten married already, and the beloved maid who raised her, Constantine (Cicely Tyson, in convincing aging makeup), has abruptly ended her decades-long service with the family without any explanation from her brittle mother (Allison Janney).

Skeeter's mother is less than subtle about her wish that her daughter would give up this crazy notion of a career and find a husband: "Your eggs are dying. Would it kill you to go on a date?"

But as the civil rights movement finally makes its way to Jackson, Skeeter joins forces with Aibileen to tell their stories in hopes of changing things, or at least bringing them to light.

The third leg of their triad of strength is Minny, played by Octavia Spencer, a woman whose spirit is indomitable, and whose cooking is the best in Mississippi. Minny instructs her teen daughter not to sass the white folks, but doesn't take her own advice.

The heavy of the film is Bryce Dallas Howard, the angelic-looking red-headed actress who shows plenty of brimstone as Hilly Holbrook, the queen bee of the social set who rules with a velvet fist. Hilly thinks of herself as compassionate because she wants to maintain the current social arrangement as benevolently as possible -- such as mandating separate bathrooms in white homes for the help, because "they carry different diseases than we do."

Hilly has a run-in with Minny that compels the latter to take her revenge with an act she comes to dub The Terrible Awful. Minny asks God's forgiveness for her sin, but doesn't seem very regretful about it.

An unexpected character is Celia Foote, a spitfire blonde who lives on the edge of Jackson and can't break Hilly's vice grip over the Junior League set. She's played by Jessica Chastain in a role that seems breathy and girly at first, but she finds some pluck through a growing bond with Minny.

"The Help" is like a heaping helping of comfort food mixed with a nutritional social message delivered without preachiness or schmaltz. What satisfying cinematic meal.

3.5 stars out of four