Review: "Dolemite Is My Name"

I went into “Dolemite Is My Name” without any foreknowledge; I only knew that it starred Eddie Murphy and was set in the 1970s. It was not until the film’s end credits that I learned it’s a biopic of a real person, singer/actor/comedian Rudy Ray Moore.

I’m not familiar with Moore’s 1975 film, “Dolemite,” or the ones that followed. I confess I’ve never delved deep into the Blaxploitation genre, as the ones I’ve seen are pretty silly and/or icky.

Interestingly, that’s one of the key themes of the movie: how white and black audiences value different things in their cinematic tastes. For example, nobody depicted in this movie would ever use the word “cinematic.”

There’s a terrific scene where Rudy (Murphy) and his buddies go to see “The Front Page,” a 1974 comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthew as squabbling journalists. They peer around at the mostly white audience, laughing it up and enjoying the heck out of the picture, which they find completely unfunny and limp.

Where are the boobies, kung fu fighting and explosions? Rudy demands. That’s what black audiences want to see. So they set out to make their own movie for their own tribe.

It’s the best film role Eddie Murphy has had in years, playing an over-the-hill, 6th-rate comic who works in a record shop by day and does a lame emcee shtick at a local music club at night. He can’t even get the DJ (Snoop Dogg) of the little in-house radio station at the record store to play some of his old R&B 45s.

With an ample belly, thinning patch of hair that he covers with an afro wig and outlandish velour-and-polyester outfits, Murphy’s Rudy Ray Moore is a formerly cool guy grasping at the scraps of his youth. He moved to Los Angeles from his backwater home in Arkansas to make it big, and decades later he’s still small-time.

“I ain’t got nothin’ nobody wants,” he laments.

One day Rudy gets an idea to create a new act out of the boasting and jokes of the local “bums” -- using the parlance of the day – particularly their affinity for a mythological urban hero named Dolemite. His sex-and-braggadocio exploits are used as a common riff. Rudy pays them for their jokes, then assembles them to create the character of Dolemite for himself.

It’s an instant hit, and soon he’s touring the country doing the Dolemite act, cutting comedy records that inch their way up the Billboard charts, and even takes on a protégé in the form of Lady Reed (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a plus-sized woman who’s spent her life being put down.

Remember how Rudy’s gang was mystified by the white-people comedy? That’s how I felt about the Dolemite act. There don’t appear to be any real jokes, just a series of put-downs and relating of endless sexual exploits. But audiences at black clubs eat it up.

It’s a telling dichotomy: African-Americans, after centuries of degradation, crave loud and boisterous self-affirmation; while privileged whites like me cling to humility as the lost virtue, and find such displays crass.

Despite his success, Rudy decides that to truly be a big star he needs to make a movie. He scrapes together some money and recruits his friends, adds some UCLA film students and a smattering of white actors to play the heavies, and unofficially takes over an abandoned hotel as their studio.

Of course, none of them know what the hell what they’re doing. So D’Urville Martin, an actual name actor played by Wesley Snipes, is recruited to co-star in the picture. Effete and snobby, he initially refuses until he’s offered the director’s chair -- a position he seems to hold only titularly, spending most of his days on the set drinking, having to be prodded to say “Action” or “Cut.”

The rest of the cast includes Mike Epps, Craig Robinson, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chris Rock, Tituss Burgess, and a few other notables of black Hollywood. But the spotlight is clearly on Murphy here.

It’s an entertaining, thoroughly raunchy movie, directed by Craig Brewer from a screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. (All white guys, it should be noted.)

The movie also serves as an excellent time capsule of the cultural shift in the early- to mid-70s, a time when you could walk into a movie theater and see pornographic movies but record stores wouldn’t carry albums containing too much cursing.

“Dolemite Is My Name” is the story of a man whom popular culture had decided deserved to be a Lilliputian, but harbored gigantic ambitions that would not accept that judgment. Rudy Ray Moore willed himself into the star he felt he should be, despite not having any particular talent.

But he knew what his people wanted, and gave it to them. Whether what they wanted was worthy is above my pay grade.

Video review: "Toy Story 4"

I enjoyed “Toy Story 4,” though I’m not terribly happy they made it.

That may sound strange, but here’s why: “Toy Story 3” was a very conscious end to the animated franchise. In it the child Andy, now all grown into a young man, gave away his toys to little Bonnie, and quite literally rode off into the sunset.

Cowboy Woody (voice of Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen) and the rest of the toys, who come to life when humans aren’t around, had completed their life’s journey and started anew.

Watching them come back for another romp that’s fun but hardly up to the standards of the other movies is like going to see a favorite singer who’s now aged and can’t hold the notes anymore. You enjoy being around him, but can’t help thinking it would’ve been better for everyone if he’d hung it up.

In this story the toy gang finds themselves in a remote mountain village, where Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks) is the evil/warped toy du jour. She’s of roughly the same vintage as Woody, and resents that she never got a child of her own.

The big twist is the return of Bo Peep (Annie Potts), Woody’s former girlfriend who disappeared long ago. She’s now a free-living, adventure-seeking “lost toy” who embraces her independence.

As I said, I doubt anyone who likes these movies will fail to be entertained by “Toy Story 4.” But let’s put it this way: I had to look up my review of the movie from just three months ago, because the story and details had already faded from my memory.

That never happened with the other “Toy Story” movies. They stick in the mind and the heart.

Bonus features are pretty good. There’s an audio commentary track, six deleted scenes and the following documentary shorts: “Toy Stories,” “Woody & Buzz,” “Bo Rebooted,” “Toy Box” and “Let’s Ride With Ally Maki.”

Digital-only material includes one additional deleted scene and another featurette, “Anatomy of a Scene: Prologue.”

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Review: "Toy Story 4"

“Toy Story 4” is like one last rodeo with the old gang, an unexpected revival long after we thought they’d retired. It doesn’t have the energy or emotionality of any of the others, but it’s nice to see the old-timers back up to their old tricks.

A fourth feature for the cornerstone Pixar Animation franchise seems unnecessary. After all, the third one from nine years ago felt like a very conspicuous wrapping of the bow, as the little family of toys who come to life when people aren’t around were passed on from Andy, now all grown up, to adorable pre-K Bonnie.

And yet, here we are.

Not much time has passed since Bonnie became “their kid,” although a flashback to nine years earlier shows us how Bo Peep (Annie Potts), the love interest of Woody the cowboy sheriff (Tom Hanks), disappeared between the second and third movies. It seems she didn’t share Woody’s enthusiasm for “always being there” for their kid, so when Andy’s sister decided to pass Bo on to another child, she was ready to go.

She returns triumphantly, in a much more athletic iteration than we remember. Eschewing her modest shepherdess’ cape and laughing off a broken arm kept attached with tape, Bo swings and swoops all around using her hooked staff and a bottomless reserve of guts. She embraces her status as a “lost toy” free of human constraints.

She’s practically a toy superhero.

When Bonnie’s family goes on a road trip in an RV, it reveals fractures in the toy universe. Woody chafes at no longer being the head toy calling the shots. Even worse, he’s fallen out of Bonnie’s rotation of favored toys, often relegated to the back of the closet during playtime.

Still, his sense of loyalty remains true when Bonnie goes off to kindergarten and creates a toy of her own from a plastic spork and pipe cleaners. Woody and the gang are surprised when the creature springs to life, raising all sorts of metaphysical questions about the Toy Story universe.

Dubbed Forky (voice of Tony Hale), the new tribe member at first is very confused and self-endangering. Since he was made out of spare parts, he insists that he’s trash and keeps trying to escape to the nearest garbage bin, requiring repeated rescuing from Woody.

At first I thought this was an attempt to introduce a mentally challenged toy, which would’ve been an interesting development. But Forky gets wiser with time, and eventually grows to embrace the toy ethos.

Part of his tutelage comes at the knee of Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks), a vintage toy stuck in an antique shop in the mountain town of Grand Basin. She’s seemingly benevolent, but resents that she’s never had a kid to call her own. She blames it on her malfunctioning voice box, and sets her designs on claiming Woody’s.

Gabby is portrayed as more misguided than evil, though she employs a force of identical ventriloquist dolls who act as her muscle, and are as creepy as all get out.

Other new characters include Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves), a Canadian motorcycle daredevil who’s lost his nerve; Giggle McDimples (Ally Maki), a pint-sized police officer who acts as Bo’s shoulder-riding sidekick; and Bunny and Ducky (Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key), a pair of long-suffering plush toys stitched together hand-to-hand who’ve spent an eternity as the top prize at a malfunctioning carnival duck hunt arcade.

Directed by Josh Cooley from a screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Stephany Folsom, “Toy Story 4” is easily the weakest of the series, but it’s still a fun ride. It seems the sendoff was not their final bow, and they’re destined to keep collecting nostalgia curtain calls.

Review: "The Predator"

More than 30 years ago we had “Predator,” followed by its sequel, “Predator 2,” then “Alien vs. Predator” and its sequel, then the 2010 reboot, “Predators,” and now its sorta-sequel, “The Predator.”

Forget about whether any of these movies have been any good since the first one -- hint: they haven’t -- could we at least get some more interesting titles? What’s next, “A Predator?” “La Predator?”

The new one is directed by Shane Black, a longtime screenwriter of action movies who segued to directing a few years back. (A lot of people liked his “The Nice Guys,” but I didn’t.) With this movie, Black -- who co-wrote the script with Fred Dekker -- has achieved a level of discombobulation heretofore unseen in theaters.

Good luck following this story. The movie plays out as a bunch of people shouting a bunch of gibberish at each other, followed by shootouts and disembowelings, which somehow leads to more gibberish.

EveryonetalksreallyfastinthismoviehowfastOMGsofastit’sliketheactorswereplayingagameonsettoseewhocouldspitouttheirdialoguethequickest.

It seems the alien hunters with faces like a Venus fly trap and Rastafarian dreds are returning to Earth for the umpteenth time. A nasty quasi-governmental agency known as Project Stargazer wants to get their hands on the predator tech, which as you’ll recall can do things like turn you invisible or shoot lasers from a nifty little shoulder launcher.

A special forces dude named Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) helps capture a predator who has crash-landed in Mexico, yet for some reason this results in him being thrown into military prison by the Stargazer folks. But not before he ships the alien’s helmet and wrist controller to his P.O. Box in the States, which makes me think that when the post office worker tells me they may scan or inspect my packages that they’re just blowing a lot of smoke.

The tech ends up in the hands of his son, Rory (Jacob Tremblay), who is on the autism spectrum but is also brilliant. Quinn breaks out of prison with the help of a bunch of other military castoffs. Soon it turns into a big chase-chase-chase movie with the Stargazer goons chasing Quinn who’s running but also chasing the predator who’s chasing his son.

This is a really terrible movie with a really good and interesting cast. In addition to Tremblay (“The Room”), Keegan-Michael Key plays Coyle, one of the military misfits helping Quinn. Olivia Munn is the brilliant scientist who also knows how to shoot any kind of gun. Thomas Jane is Baxley, an unlikable mook with Tourette’s Syndrome.

Sterling K. Brown plays the Stargazer chief, who dresses very casually for a mastermind. He and Quinn can’t seem to decide if they hate each other or want to share beers and Bromance.

I also thought Gary Busey had turned up as a goofy scientist, but it’s actually his son Jake. I said this can’t be, that’s Gary Busey’s kid, but turns out Jake is creeping up on 50, and doesn’t that make us all feel old.

“Predators” is a very poorly staged action film. It looks as if Black directed the movie while looking in a mirror over his shoulder.

There’s a lot of gory violence, with intestines galore. And alien dogs that turn nice if you shoot them in just the right spot. I also learned that you can kill a predator with a bullet to the face, but something like 20,000 shots don’t hit him in the head until the one that does.

If you like a heaping helping of stupidity along with eviscerations, then this is your flick. As for me, I’m holding out for “Six Degrees of Separated Predator Heads.”

Review: "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"

An interesting idea that turned into a rehashed sequel that now is a bona fide animation franchise desperately in need of a stake through its cold, black heart, “Hotel Transylvania” is the undead visitor that arrives every third year for an unwanted visit, thrilling your kids but leaving you groaning.

Or, slumbering: I fell asleep during the screening. Several times. Not for long, I think, but propriety requires that I disclose this is a review of only about 96% of the movie.

You know the setup: Dracula (voice of Adam Sandler) has traded in blood-sucking for running a posh hotel for monsters, who have come out of the darkness to live (mostly) in harmony with humans. To wit: his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) has married goofy human Jonathan (Andy Samberg) and produced a half-vampire grandson, Dennis (Asher Blinkoff).

Tagging along are buds Frankenstein (Kevin James), Wayne the werewolf (Steve Buscemi), Murray the mummy (Keegan-Michael Key), and Griffin the invisible man (David Spade).

Things are pretty hectic running a hotel and watching over a passel of monsters, who come in sorts of shapes, colors and sizes. So Mavis decides the family needs a vacation aboard the Legacy, an ocean liner catering to their kind. Stops include an underwater volcano and Atlantis, which has risen from the sea in the form of a tawdry waterlogged version of Las Vegas.

Dracula soon finds himself directing his killer gaze at Ericka (Kathryn Hahn), the human captain of the ship. He’s been a widower for more than a century, but is surprised to find he can still “zing” -- the monster term for falling instantly in love.

But Ericka has some not-nice hidden motives, which are demonstrated by suddenly scowling while her face is underlit with red light that appears from nowhere to let you know she’s thinking evil thoughts.

Mel Brooks plays Drac’s dad Vlad, an old-schooler who eventually came around on not biting people. He gets some of the film’s best laughs strutting around in a tiny bathing suit, proudly flaunting his 500-year-old body. The gaggle of witches are appreciative, though.

The heavy is Van Helsing, Dracula’s old nemesis who is still kept alive through a steampunk contraption that animates his head and hands, along with a few struggling organs in jars. He’s voiced by Jim Gaffigan, doing his best impression of Bill Hader.

There’s a lot of colors, and boingy action, and spontaneous dancing. They even revive a couple of tunes from the last movie; I guess the filmmakers didn’t want to shell out for another songwriter. There’s even a DJ contest late in the game where they dust off “Macarena” as the epitome of all that is good and positive. Well.

Kids will probably enjoy “Transylvania 3,” but for anyone over the age of 10 it’s a sack of garlic, a beam of sunshine and a wooden cross all rolled into one.

Review: "Storks"

“Storks” is a better concept than final product. It’s middle-of-the-road animation for kiddies with some humor thrown in for adults that doesn’t really click. I guess we should appreciate the effort, but whether they tried to include us or not, we’re not laughing.

The setup is that storks actually were in the baby delivering business until 18 years ago, when a colossal screw-up left them in the lurch and they had to take on a lost infant themselves, who’s grown up into an annoying teen who screws everything up. The boss stork, Hunter (voice of Kelsey Grammer), came up with the idea of transforming them into Cornerstore.com, an Amazon-like outlet for all kinds of consumer junk delivered door-to-door via free bird.

(Right now somewhere, Jeff Bezos is cursing his army of expensive drones.)

Hunter’s ready to move up the chain and hand the business off to Junior (Andy Samberg), a neurotic yet ambitious young climber. Except Nate (Anton Starkman), a lonely human kid who wants a baby brother to play with, sends a letter off to the storks requesting same. (“Please include ninja skills,” he underlines.) And Tulip (Katie Crown), the storks’ pet orphan, accidentally feeds it into their dormant giant gizmo that turns the letter molecules into the DNA of a new baby, or something. Out spits an adorable tyke with cotton candy-colored hair.

The metaphysics don’t make a lick of sense, but just go with it.

…except I can’t. Leaving aside the stationary-into-infant-humans thing, does this mean people weren’t having sex prior to the storks abandoning their trade? And now they’ve been making babies the old-fashioned way? If that’s the case, I’d think the headlines wouldn’t read “Storks back to making babies” but rather “Evil birds out to ruin your sex life!”

Anyway, Junior and Tulip embark on a trip to return the little girl to her rightful place, which involves journeying across sky, land and sea. (Junior conveniently busts his wing right before, thus removing the “Why not just take the eagles to Mordor?” argument a la the “Lord of the Rings” movies.)

Along the way they encounter a wolf pack that first wants to eat, then adopt the baby for themselves. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele voice the alpha dogs. The wolves have the curious, but genuinely hilarious, ability to link their bodies together to form a bridge, a boat and more stuff. There’s also a nasty little pigeon toadie (Stephen Kramer Glickman) looking to deep-six Junior’s favored status.

The movie keeps cutting away to Nate’s house, where he manages to pry his workaholic realtor parents (Jennifer Aniston and Ty Burrell) away from their phone headsets long enough to get some overdue bonding in.

Nicholas Stoller, who wrote the screenplay and co-directed with Doug Sweetland, has a fondness for rapid-delivery dialogue that is reminiscent of classic screwball comedies. Except they overuse it to the extent it becomes just irritating. It’s almost like theyassumeverythingbecomesfunnierjustbecauseyousayitfast.

If there’s a point to the story, it’s that kids are great, and you should have kids, and hug them lots and spend time with them. I can think of better ways to accomplish that than taking them to “Storks.”

Anyway, that’s my review. Now here’s one from Joel Lloyd, age almost 6: “Omigaw I love this movie!! I liked the part where the machine made a million babies with rainbow hair. Can we get it on DVD for Christmas??”

Review: "Don't Think Twice"

When I was around 20 and 21 years old, I went almost every weekend to an improv comedy show in my native Orlando. I was taking a break from college to make money so I could go back, so the $7 admission price was a good fit with my entertainment budget. Sometimes the group hit the top floor, laughs all around, and occasionally the performance struggled to get off the ground. But I always enjoyed the dynamics of the form -- a blend of stand-up comedy, acting technique and traditional theater.

It was pretty obvious to anyone who went to the show regularly that there were a couple of standouts. And nobody was surprised when they went on to productive showbiz careers. Wayne Brady is a well-known stage and television actor/singer who briefly had his own talk show; Joel McCrary had a funny bit on "Seinfeld" and went on to appear in "American Beauty" and the "Princess Diaries" movies, among others.

I occasionally pondered what it must have been like for the members of their old troupe to see them onscreen. I'm sure like any human being, they felt a combination of joy and envy. 'Why them and not me?' they think. Or they wonder how a group effort that they all had a hand in creating ended up capturing attention for one of their number, but not the others.

"Don't Think Twice" is essentially the cinematic embodiment of that predicament. It's written and directed by Mike Birbiglia, who's known mostly for his stand-up routine and comedy specials; a few years ago he spun off his one-man show "Sleepwalk with Me" into a narrative film. His shows blend laughter and sadness, with a great deal of insight about how people think and act in the real world when they don't think anyone's looking.

Birbiglia is a wonderful storyteller, so it makes sense that he approached a movie about an improv comedy group with the intention of giving all six of them equal screen time and treatment. I'm not sure if that was the best move. Because just as in any endeavor, some people are more interesting than others; some are going to make it big and some are not.

There's also an intrinsic melancholy to a tale about a tight-knit group that comes unraveled when one of them, Jack (Keegan-Michael Key), gets called up to "Weekend Live," a not-at-all obscured version of "Saturday Night Live." This causes a great deal of tension and accusations, especially from Miles (Birbiglia), the oldest guy and founder of their group, The Commune.

He essentially taught all the others how to do improv, and now they're a family with him as the goofy patriarch. Miles tried out for "Weekend Live" a dozen years earlier himself and didn't make the cut. He's young enough (36) to have a lot of pathways in life still open to him, but old enough to store up resentments and self-doubt.

Gillian Jacobs plays Sam, who is probably the best natural performer of the group and also Jack's girlfriend. She herself was called in to audition for the show at the same time, but wigged out and blew it off. Now they're stuck in a situation where he's gone all the time to work on this big high-profile TV show, and she's perfectly happy performing in The Commune, even if it means she has to work a crappy day job.

Chris Gethard has a poignant presence as Bill, the resident straight man and nebbishy nice guy. His old man is rich so he doesn't really worry about money, but there's the ever-present sense that his dad considers him a failure. Your 20s is all about giving it all for your dreams, he observes, while in your 30s you realize how much of that time and energy was wasted.

Kate Micucci is Allison, a bit of a wallflower who had a great start as a cartoonist that never panned out, so she segued into improv. Tami Sagher plays Lindsay, who also performs out of a sense of love rather than financial need, yet often seems like the most devoted member.

I immensely enjoyed spending time with these people, as they go through the episodic routine of getting ready to go out onstage and function as a team. This has carried over into their personal relationships, where they can't ever "turn it off," making jokes even while kissing (Jack and Sam) or dealing with a serious family medical crisis.

Their improv works as a circular arrangement, but people need to eventually break out of that loop and go somewhere else, or their lives suffer.

"Don't Think Twice" is a story about people reaching that point of departure in their lives, professionally and personally. It's one they probably would have come to soon enough, but Jack's sudden success acts as the tripwire that sets things in motion.

Like Birbiglia's other work, it's funny, a little depressing, and a lot smart.

 

Video review: "The Angry Birds Movie"

“The Angry Birds Movie” is an exemplar of the generational divide: I loathe it, but my kids love it.

Since the Blu-ray showed up in the mail, my 5-year-old has watched it twice and asked about a third, at which point a parent’s protective instincts kick in. The quality of entertainment for children has gone through the roof since my day, so lazy and inept stuff like this is even more egregious.

People like to disparage movies based on video games as dredging the bottom of the cultural barrel. But Angry Birds isn’t even a real video game, in the same way that tic-tac-toe bears little resemblance to Monopoly. It’s a smartphone app in which birds hurl themselves via a giant slingshot at the buildings and other structures of evil green pigs.

(Oddly, no one has ever thought to question why none of these birds have functioning wings. I mean, you figure any multicultural bird community is going to have a few penguins, ostriches and the odd emu here and there. But 100% flightless? Darwin says, “Uh uh.”)

Directors Clay Kaytis and Fergal Reilly and screenwriter Jon Vitti give us a paint-by-numbers cast and story. Red (voice of Jason Sudeikis) is a bird with anger management problems and the ostensible hero. His buddies include Chuck, a motor-mouth yellow guy voiced by Josh Gad, and Bomb (Danny McBride), who does as his name implies when he gets excited.

There’s also Terence, a massive red fellow who just growls at everyone, never speaking. He’s voiced (if you can call it that) by Sean Penn.

When the pigs land on bird island, they befriend the locals before making off with all their eggs. Bill Hader does the voice of Leonard, their smarmy leader. It’s only a matter of time before Red and company follow them back home and start slinging themselves at piggy places.

Perhaps the film’s only genuine laugh is provided by Peter Dinklage as Mighty Eagle, the mascot/mythical protector of the birds, who lives the high life up in his eyrie.

The rest is a generic jumble of fart jokes and zippy pratfalls. It’s just lazy moviemaking.

But enough parents got dragged to the theater by their kids to make this a huge hit, so get ready for the sequel. In the meantime, “The Angry Birds Movie” is the sort of thing you set your little guys up with in the living with some popcorn, and go get 97 minutes to yourself.

Bonus features are middling. With the DVD there is a single deleted scene; the Blake Shelton music video, “Friends”; character sketch gallery; music vignettes with composer Heitor Pareira; and a “symphony mode” where you can watch the movie with only music.

Upgrade to the Blu-ray version and you add five making-of featurettes; more deleted scenes; several mini-movies featuring the Hatchlings characters; and the short film, “The Early Hatchling Gets the Worm.”

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Review: "The Angry Birds Movie"

Movies fail for all kinds of reasons. Poor casting, bad story structure, uninspired direction -- even the music can ruin a moment. I’ve seen it all, and generally don’t hold it against the filmmakers. They swung, they whiffed, maybe they’ll do better at their next at bat.

The one reason I can’t abide, though, is sheer brute laziness.

“The Angry Birds Movie” is a merchandising opportunity in search of a movie. It’s based on a video game, and the batting average for that conversion is still .000. And the Angry Birds games aren’t even really games, they’re apps -- ways to pass the time on your smartphone while you’re waiting for the dentist.

There are no characters, no story, no drama. You just plink bird ordnance at pig structures to smash them. Ostensibly it’s because the pigs stole the birds’ eggs and they’re angry about it… but you never even get to the eggs.

You might as well try to make a film out of tic-tac-toe.

Still, the total lack of a format means rookie directors Clay Kaytis and Fergal Reilly and screenwriter Jon Vitti had no structure to hold them back. They could make up any kind of scenario they wanted and inserted imaginative characters and situations into them. Totally free reign.

Instead, they slapped together a droning mélange of quips, crude body humor and zippy action. Entire scenes and exchanges of dialogue seem improvised on the spot, which is impressive (in a way) for an animated film with an estimated budget of $80 million.

Little kids may be carried along by the bright colors and goofy action. But this parent was bored nearly to the point of walking out.

Here the birds all live on one happy island, protected by legendary guardian Mighty Eagle, who’s more aspirational than operational these days. The one malcontent is Red (voice of Jason Sudeikis), a pugnacious bird with Groucho Marx eyebrows and a tendency to lose his cool. For his crimes he’s sentenced to anger management class, led by hippy-dippy chickie Matilda (Maya Rudolph).

His classmates are Chuck, a hyper-fast yellow bird voiced by the excitable Josh Gad, and Bomb (Danny McBride), a burly black fellow with a tendency to literally explode when stressed, though his body is only slightly singed in the process. (The movie’s metaphysics are suspect.)

Oh, and there’s a massive red bird named Terence the size of a blimp -- he mostly resembles Red on steroids, eyebrows and all – who only ever glares at people and grumbles. I’m astonished to learn he is voiced by Sean Penn, who has hereby accomplished the Method Acting pinnacle of getting paid to grunt.

Anyway, the green pigs roll up on the beach one day offering friendship, led by the officious Leonard (Bill Hader), and they quickly set about spoiling bird paradise with their machines and noise. It’s all an excuse to make off with the birds’ eggs for their feast … which they sure seem to take their time getting around to. (Three-minute boil, anyone?)

Eventually, an hour into the movie, the birds starting launching themselves into the pig town via a giant slingshot the pigs brought with them, also for reasons unknown.

Mighty Eagle makes an appearance, gallantly voiced by Peter Dinklage, having now gone to seed. His first undertaking, after Bomb and Chuck have bathed in the mystical lake on top of his mountain, provides the movie’s sole laugh-out-loud moment.

As I say, I don’t often get mad about bad movies. But when you can feel the people who made them not trying, consider my feathers ruffled.

Review: "Keanu"

Great hitters can't always field the ball, good choral singers aren't necessarily strong soloists, and fine orators often make poor leaders. And so it is with television comedians trying to make the jump to feature films.

Like Amy Schumer with "Trainwreck," the team behind the Comedy Central hit "Key and Peele" fail to grasp the difference between sketch comedy and film comedy. The former only has to be funny or make sense for a few minutes; the latter has to carry its energy all the way through.

"Keanu" does not. The story of a pair of uptight, upper-middle-class black dudes who spend an evening in the roughest L.A. 'hoods, it's got a handful of laugh-out-loud moments. Most of these revolve around Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) and Rell (Jordan Peele) screaming like little girls when confronted with some horrific act of violence or the prospect of their imminent demise.

On their show, Pelle and Key can easily jump from character to character -- there's always a commercial to break up the sketches. Here they start out as nerdy "Oreos" (black on the outside, white on the inside) and spend the rest of the movie trying to talk and act like the sort of hardcase gangstas they've only experienced through television and film.

The setup is that Rell has his new kitten, Keanu, stolen after his house is broken into -- apparently a case of mistaken identity, as his next door neighbor (Will Forte), is a drug dealer. The kitty keeps changing hends, from Colombian drug lords to a pair of ghost-like killers known only as "the Allentown boys" (actually Key and Pelle, heavily made up) to Cheddar, a local banger played by Method Man.

The running joke is that all these grim characters instantly fall in love with Keanu, and will do anything to get him back, including kill or be killed.

Rell and Clarence foolishly head over to Cheddar's HQ, the Hot Party Vixens club (check that acronym), where they are immediately called out as suburban wimps. So they adopt the personas of Tectonic and Shark Tank -- after the puffer fish in "Finding Nemo?" -- which means dropping their voices an octave and saying the n-word a whole lot.

One of the funnier sequences is where a bunch of them are waiting in Clarence's minivan, which he says he drives because it's inconspicuous, and they turn on his stereo, which left off on a George Michael song. Clarence, ahem, Shark Tank, manages to convince them Michael is actually cool black music.

Tiffany Haddish plays Hi-C, one of Cheddar's crew who starts to take an unlikely shine to Rell/Tectonic, Nia Long is Clarence's wife and Luis Guzman plays the drug lord.

Co-written by Peele and Alex Rubens and directed by Peter Atencio, "Keanu" is the sort of thing you expect from a bunch of TV guys who think they've got what it takes for the big screen. It's a whole lot of obvious jokes -- want to guess if the cat's most famous namesake turns up, at least aurally? -- and playing off the stars' television personalities.

There are three or four good and funny scenes, about enough for a single half-hour episode of "Key and Peele."

Video review: "Tomorrowland"

The most disappointing films are usually not aggressively bad, merely forgettable. Though it has been but four months since I saw “Tomorrowland,” I can barely recall the plot without reading my own summary of it.

With director Brad Bird at the helm -- a man whose previous worst film was merely “very good” -- and an intriguing premise, “Tomorrowland” seemed to have all the makings of a sci-fi fairy tale. But the movie gets bogged down in a convoluted plot, and even George Clooney seems grumpy and fuzzy about what’s going on.

The story centers on a bright young teen, Casey (Britt Robertson), who finds herself transported into an amazing future world whenever she touches a mysterious pin. It’s all an illusion, sort of, but leads her to the door of reclusive inventor Frank (Clooney), with the help of an enigmatic British girl (Raffey Cassidy).

Things go on from there, which are hard to describe without ruining the movie’s (attempted) allure. Suffice to say they end up on a Da Vinci Code-like ride, finding clues to the Tomorrowland in famous places. They eventually reach it, but of course there’s more to the futuristic fantasyland than meets the eye.

A well-meaning film loaded with stellar talent, “Tomorrowland” is the proverbial sleek rocket that never gets off the launch pad.

Bonus features are excellent, though you’ll have to spring for the blu-ray combo pack to get most of them. One of the neatest things is production diaries by Brad Bird. There are three, though the DVD edition only comes with one of them. It also has “Blast from the Past,” a fictional commercial for Tomorrowland.

With the Blu-ray combo pack, you get all the diaries, eight deleted scenes, four Easter eggs, three making-of featurettes, a fictional children’s show, “The World of Tomorrow Science Hour” with futurologist David Nix, and an animated short, “The Origins of Plus Ultra.”

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Review: "Hotel Transylvania 2"

The first "Hotel Transylvania" was an uninspired amalgam of other movies, stitching together the current cinematic fascination with vampires, zombies and the like with angsty teen imperatives. The sequel is a distinct improvement, though curiously almost none of it takes place in the titular hotel.

The last go-round was about Dracula (Adam Sandler, sounding like a Borscht Belt Bela Lugosi) learning to find tolerance for humans when his teen daughter -- well, hundred-and-teens, anyway -- Mavis (Selena Gomez) fell in love with goofy human Jonathan (Andy Samberg).

Flash forward a few years. Mavis and Jonathan are now happily wed and have an adorable tyke, Dennis (Asher Blinkoff). Drac is thoroughly delighted with his grandson ... though he's a little worried that he has yet to indicate any vampire-ish abilities. He seems to be a carbon copy of Jonathan: big poof of red hair, pasty skin, normal, non-sharp incisors, etc.

"He's just a late fanger," Dracula dismisses, though he's secretly worried the kid is really all human. And how disappointing would that be!

Mavis is considering moving their family to Santa Cruz to raise him alongside Jonathan's parents (chirpy Molly Shannon and droll Nick Offerman) and other regular humans. Drac can't stand the idea of being apart from them, so while they're away scouting out the potential new hometown, he and his crew whip up a plan for a road trip to encourage Dennis' monsterish side to come out.

Hijinks ensue, of the lightly scary/slightly vulgar variety.

The gang of supporting characters are back, including Steve Buscemi as a werewolf hectored by his wolf-wife and small army of pups; Frankenstein (Kevin James), big and blandly nice; a fabulous mummy (Keegan-Michael Key); and an invisible man (David Spade), who keeps trying to convince his buddies he has an invisible girlfriend.

The new guy on the block is Dracula's daddy, Vlad, wonderfully voiced by Mel Brooks. He's an old-school type who keeps the fires of hate toward humans well-stoked, and he's got a crew of giant vampire bat henchman to do his bidding. Drac takes steps to ensure Vlad doesn't find out his great-grandkid isn't a bloodsucker.

Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky with a screenplay by Sandler and buddy Robert Smigel, "Hotel Transylvania 2" won't win any contests for originality. It's television-quality storytelling with better animation and voice cast.

But it's breezy, fun and dopey, and sure to keep your little monsters entertained for an hour and a half.

Review: "Tomorrowland"

Maybe you’ve seen the trailer for “Tomorrowland,” in which a young woman touches a pin and is instantaneously, breathtakingly transported to another place. Like me, you probably found it highly intriguing, but after watching it you didn’t really feel like you had any idea what the movie was about.

Well, I’ve seen the whole film now – and I still don’t have a clear picture of it.

It’s a weird cotton candy concoction. It wants to be fun and fluffy, but the film also has this determined air of mystery to it, like it resents sharing its secrets. And there’s some late portentous stuff that seems way too sour for what came before.

This is surely one of the most disappointing movies of the year, given expectations and the talent involved: star George Clooney, who seems to instinctively gravitate toward quality material or vice-versa; director Brad Bird, one of the top animation filmmakers (“The Incredibles”) who successfully made the jump to live action; Damon Lindelhof, co-creator of the TV show “Lost,” who wrote the script along with Bird.

I’m afraid this may also prove a disappointing review, since I feel like I can’t tell you very much about “Tomorrowland.” Its entire appeal is steeped in guarding its enigma, then slowly – too slowly – revealing itself. Even though I found the movie underwhelming, blurting out its secrets seems a disservice both to the film and its audience.

I’ll stick to things that are shown in the trailer, or you can figure out easily. Given the title and that it’s from Disney, you can guess that it has something to do with the utopian vision of the future from the ubiquitous theme parks. Touching one of these odd ceremonial pins immediately teleports you to a magical, soaring city of arches and scientific advancement -- at least for a while.

Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) is a smart and gutsy teen who comes to be in possession of one of these pins, and tenaciously follows the thread of its mystery. This includes gaining the companionship of a strange young girl, Athena (Raffey Cassidy). She in turn leads Casey to Frank (Clooney), an isolated inventor who appears to be very, very angry at the world.

Together they have all sorts of adventures involving rockets, robots, cross-dimension travel and guzzling Coca-Colas. For a while it almost seems like a science fiction version of “The Da Vinci Code,” with famous locales and figures revealing long-shrouded purposes.

The movie takes a long, long time to get rolling. It feels like a roller-coaster in which two-thirds of the ride is clickety-clacking up that first big rise. The last 45 minutes or so are pretty engaging, but some of the twists are more jerky than thrilling.

Clooney is dyspeptic and missing his usual facile charm. Robertson is buoyant and enthusiastic, though the script often has her saying or doing patently ridiculous things. Young Cassidy has terrific screen presence; somehow she speaks in a very clear British accent, yet I struggled to understand her words.

“Tomorrowland” is a story for and about dreamers, those who dare to strive for something better and never give in to the naysayers. It’s a beautiful sentiment, but the problem with that is sometimes the naysayers are right. And though I dreamed of adoring this movie, I must say: nay.