Review: "Friendsgiving"

There aren't a lot of great Thanksgiving movies. "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" is about it, and the holiday is actually pretty tertiary to the plot. "Home for the Holidays?" "Free Bird?" "The House of Yes?" Not exactly a lot of quality choices at this table.

So given that low bar, "Friendsgiving" immediately gets counted as one of the better ones.

A comedy with some dramatic moments, as opposed to a true dramedy, it has a very TV sitcom-y feel. Malin Akerman and Kat Dennings play besties, both heartsick from recent breakups, who have vowed to spend Thanksgiving together, just the two of them, for some commiserating and libations. But then some unexpected guests show up, and then some more, and soon the house is festooned with a small army of interlopers.

It's a chaotic scene of ex-boyfriends versus rebound boyfriends, married-with-kids types bouncing off of childless singles, a wildly inappropriate mother, an irritating showbiz couple, a vegan shaman wannabe, and a random assortment of lesbians vying for attention in the form of video personals ads that they just sort of turn away and start spouting like a Shakespearean soliloquy. (They're pretty stereotypical, but also pretty funny.)

It's helmed by Nicole Paone, a veteran actress and writer who's making her directorial debut. She gets a great sense of spontaneity and charm out of her cast. The material feels a little canned, but hits all the right high and low notes.

Dennings is Abby, a loser sort who didn't even come out of the closet as gay until she was nearly 30. Her last relationship was borderline abusive, and she's got lots of self-esteem issues. She recently found out her ex is getting married, and the nails-on-chalkboard "support" from her mother and sister (via video call from Jersey) just ratchets up the tension.

Apparently Abby and her best friend, Molly (Akerman), came out to Hollywood to try to make it and only one of them did. Molly's a big movie star best known for action movies, and would seem to be living the dream with a Beverly Hills mansion and a 6-month-old son. Unfortunately, she is in the process of getting divorced and has already taken up with Jeff (Jack Donnelly), a beta-male Brit who often goes around without a top, or a bottom.

Jeff is... a piece of work. He seems incredibly warm and nice and supportive and deluded. He and Molly have only been together two weeks but he's already talking life journeys together. But he's not big on responsibility, or making money, or other grown-up things. He travels the globe running charities of indeterminate nature, which is how he makes do in between sugar mommas like Molly.

First to crash the party is Molly's Swedish mother, Helen (Jane Seymour), who shows up for a "surprise" visit of dubious intent. Helen is one of those women who claims to be unconcerned about her age but will throw herself at anybody, or everybody, as long as it means holding the spotlight. 

This includes Molly's ex boyfriend (before the husband, so a double-ex), Gunnar (Ryan Hansen), another big movie star, who shows up semi-invited looking to pitch woo.

Aisha Tyler and Deon Cole play Lauren and Dan, described as "the perfect couple," who have a great relationship, two wonderful kids and never any real problems. Andrew Santino and Christine Taylor are Rick and Brianne, just-married Hollywood types who seem to be in a war to out-douche each other. Then there's Barb (Dana DeLorenzo), who professes to be a holy woman carrying a song of peace but is just another loud-mouthed New York type underneath.

You can feel where everything in the movie is going to go before it goes there. Abby and Molly will have some sort of falling out, quickly repaired by the final scene; Helen will embarrass herself and her daughter repeatedly; Gunnar and Jeff will play a game of passive-aggressive one-upmanship; and there will be some sort of crisis that puts everything on hold (for a bit).

My biggest surprise was that instead of pulling out pot or pills for the inevitable "let's get high" scene, they turn to mushrooms instead.

I mostly enjoyed myself watching this movie, even though it held few surprises for me. Akerman and Dennings have a nice chemistry together as lifelong pals, and the various supporting characters perform their individual little dances well. 

As usual, movies that reflect Hollywood do so in a jaw-droppingly naïve way, such as the fact that Molly is supposed to be a movie star and yet doesn't have a single employee or entourage member to help out. So there's a lot of bustle about who's watching the baby or who's making sure all the food gets heated up in the right order, and we all know there'd be like two nannies and four cooks at a bare minimum, all forced to work on Thanksgiving and probably with instructions not to look anybody famous in the eye, too.

Molly even takes a Lyft to get from place to place, and if your suspension of belief hadn't dropped by then, at that point it falls down a well.

Still, this is a well-meaning and warmhearted movie that doesn't aim very high, but doesn't disappoint.

Review: "Rampage"

Just a short review today; Manuel Fernandez is handling the main review at The Film Yap, so  head over there to check it out.

"Rampage" is the best based-on-a-video-game movie I've ever seen. Granted, that's not saying much.

The roll call of these flicks ranges from the merely boring to the tragically awful. These movies tend to be big, loud and dumb. "Rampage" is too, but there's enough genuine fun in between the silliness to recommend it.

Dwayne "Not The Rock; OK, You Can Call Me The Rock" Johnson has his shtick down pretty well these days. I describe it as Flex and Smirk, Smirk and Flex, Flex and SCOWL... and Flex.

His characters (Davis Okoye) may have some other job description -- he's a primatologist here -- but he's always the biggest, baddest dude around. Woefully inadequate T-shirts fail to contain all his muscley muscleness. He is accomplished at hand-to-hand combat, firing big guns and piloting helicopters, because isn't that a skillset everyone at the San Diego zoo has?

If you don't remember the 1986 arcade game, it allowed players to control one of three giant monsters -- an ape, George; a wolf, Ralph; or a lizard, Lizzie -- destroying the city. You got to smash buildings, punch fire engines to smithereens and eat distressed damsels. It was great fun.

"Rampage" gets us to this scenario by way of some convoluted mix of corporate greed and scientific mumbo-jump. A nasty company named EnerGyne was conducting illegal experiments in space, one got loose and exploded the place, but not before three samples of the genetic editing MacGuffin landed on Earth, turning normal creatures into gigantic, aggressive smash machines.

One of them was George, an albino gorilla at Davis' zoo with whom he has a special relationship. They communicate with each other via sign language, and even joke around and flip each other the bird. The CGI for George and the other critters is quite good, especially the expressions on George's face. Ralph has spikes and a few other tricks, while Lizzie seems to be part alligator, part boar.

Naomie Harris plays Kate Caldwell, the do-gooder scientist who's helping Davis save the day; Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy are the sneering sibling villains; Jeffrey Dean Morgan does his Negan thing in the guise of a Southern-fried FBI agent who apparently has the wherewithal to go anywhere, summon any resources, give lip to anybody he wants.

Once George gets infected and starts growing at a geometric rate, Davis tries to keep the authorities from going all bang-bang on him. But it doesn't work, and soon he's tracking the path of destruction Chicago, which is about to get a big bag of hurt.

"Rampage" isn't a great movie by any stretch, but it's a decent popcorn flick to kick off the summer movie season.

Review: "Rock of Ages"

"Rock of Ages" is a soundtrack with a visual component tacked on. It's not so much a musical movie as music, with a movie.

Based on a Broadway show, "Rock of Ages" is virtually non-stop singing. The story is told through the lyrics and tunes of 1980s rock hits, sometimes intermixed with each other. Occasionally the characters will cease singing long enough for a few lines of dialogue -- but even then there's a beat going in the background, and you know the talkie part is just setting up the next number.

The experience of watching it is akin to listening to a runaway jukebox stuck in the 1970s and '80s, except the voices are replaced by those of actors who can't sing as well as the original artists.

Not that some of them aren't good, and occasionally really good. Among the latter is Tom Cruise as Stacee Jaxx, a wastrel rock god who's part Iggy Pop, a little bit Axl Rose and a smidge of Brett Michaels (at least the hat). Cruise's pipes are surprisingly good, doing an impressive rendition of the keening wail beloved in that era.

In fact, Cruise is the best thing in the show. It's a shrewdly comedic performance, part celebration of '80s rock excesses but with a heavily ladling of satire. One scene where he seduces a Rolling Stone reporter (Malin Akerman) is the movie's rollicking high point.

Even though it's technically a supporting part, Cruise steals every scene he's in, and whenever Jaxx disappears for too long the film deflates.

Certainly the main characters are dreary. Julianne Hough and Diego Boneta play Sherrie and Drew, youngsters who dream of making it big in the music biz, but end up working at the fictional Bourbon Room in Los Angeles. Of course, it's only a matter of time before they get to take the stage themselves.

Neither actor is a particularly adept singer, and Hough has one of those pinched little-girl voices that sounds like she's singing through a keyhole, a la Britney Spears. She even imitates Spears' colossally annoying affection of starting every stanza with a little croaky sound.

Sherrie is the prototypical small-town girl from Tulsa, living in a lonely world, and Drew is a city boy, so of course their signature song is "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey, a band that gets a heavy rotation throughout the movie. Other tunes include ones by Styx, Bon Jovi, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Poison and other acts Generation X-ers like myself grew up on.

I find it amusing that back in the actual '80s, these songs were disdainfully described by our elders and betters as representing the nadir of rock 'n' roll, a glammed-up shadow of the good ol' days. And now they're being held up as paragons of the genre.

I take note that in the time this story is set, 1987, the '50s were seen as the heyday. No doubt in 25 years today's Millennials will be middle-aged sell-outs looking back on the halcyon days of Lady Gaga and Kei$ha, God help us.

Alec Baldwin plays Dennis, the owner of the Bourbon, which has rock 'n' roll soaked into its timbers but is perpetually on the verge of going out of business. It's being helped in that regard by the new mayor (Bryan Cranston) and his wife Patricia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who's leading a Tipper Gore-esque crusade against smutty rock 'n' roll. Of course, she does so via singing and dancing, and is ultimately and unsurprisingly revealed to be a former Stacee Jaxx groupie.

Russell Brand plays Lonny, Dennis's right-hand rocker, and they share a romantic musical interlude that manages to be funny without being homophobic. Paul Giamatti is agreeably sleazy as Jaxx's mercenary agent, who robs the Bourbon of the take from Stacee's farewell concert.

Mary J. Blige, the only real singer in the mix, has a nice turn as the manager of a strip club where Sherrie ends up during her inevitable down-and-out phase. Drew's pit of despair is much funnier, as he gets recruited into a pop boy band, complete with rainbow-colored gangsta preppy outfits.

Director Adam Shankman does much the same thing with "Rock of Ages" he did several years ago with "Hairspray," which was sort of a 1960s version of this. He supplies a lot of energy and color, but the whirlwind winds up being more exhausting than invigorating.

At 123 minutes, screenwriters Allan Loeb, Justin Theroux and Chris D'Arienzo (based on the musical book by D'Arienzo) seemed to have a hard time knowing when to quit while they were ahead. Since the story is built entirely around songs, cutting it down would've meant eliminating tunes, and one gets the sense the filmmakers spent so much energy getting the rights to the songs they couldn't bring themselves to lop a couple out.

"Rock of Ages" has a few genuine thrills, most of them centering around Cruise's fun, freewheeling turn as Stacee Jaxx. Most of the time, though, it feels like an iPod stuck in shuffle mode.

2 stars out of four

Review: "Wanderlust"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 stars out of four

Review: "Couples Retreat"

If "Couples Retreat" looks a bit familiar, you are not imagining things: It's a passably funny comedy assembled from spare parts of other movies.

You've got the couples-on-vacation shtick crossed with the aging horndogs routine, with a little bit of water sports thrown in. Kristen Bell, who got to see some wildly inappropriate tropical yoga in last year's forgettable "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," participates in an encore in this movie.

Heck, the yoga guy even recycles Leslie Nielsen's "let me slip into something more comfortable" joke from the first "Naked Gun" flick. I prefer Nielsen's version, in which he changed from one business suit into another, than the yoga guy's swapping out an unnervingly small Speedo for a shinier one.

The movie stars Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, who launched their careers together with "Swingers" and co-wrote this script (along with Dana Fox). Vaughn does his usual motor-mouth charmer thing, while Favreau perpetually looks like he's bottling up something inside him that will eventually require an emotional catharsis, or at least a trip to the bathroom.

The set-up is that four couples take a trip to a resort called Eden expecting a vacation paradise, but instead get stuck with a lot of tedious relationship counseling and New Age bonding exercises.

The trip was initiated by Cynthia and Jason (Bell and Jason Bateman), an overly analytical duo who like to present everything in PowerPoint presentation -- even the fact that they're considering getting a divorce. They implore their friends to accompany them to the relationship resort so they can get the group discount.

Dave and Ronnie (Vaughn and Malin Akerman) seem to have the strongest relationship, but turmoil lies beneath a placid domestic surface filled with children and kitchen tile crises. Meanwhile, Joey and Lucy (Favreau and Kristin Davis) are phoning in their marriage until their daughter goes to college so they can split up.

Shane (Faizon Love), the big-bellied and big-hearted dude, has just split up from his wife and has brought along a chirpy 20-year-old party girl (Kali Hawk) he just met two weeks ago.

The island is run by Marcel (Jean Reno), a spiritual healer-slash-marketing genius, who built an identical resort next door to the one for married couples, except this one is for singles and consists of one long sex party.

Joey is anxious to get to the singles side for some action, while Lucy is aching for some downward dog time with the ripped yoga instructor.

The rest plays out pretty predictably: Shane realizes he shouldn't try to relive his youth, Dave and Ronnie discover some cracks beneath their seemingly stable foundation, and Cynthia and Jason learn to chase their inner libido.

The movie is directed by Peter Billingsley -- forever Ralphie from "A Christmas Story," who's gotten into the producing game ("Iron Man") and now steps behind the camera. He handles the cast nicely, and there are some good laughs here and there. Too bad so much of "Couples Retreat" seems plucked out of comedy's recycling bin.

2.5 stars