Aubrey Plaza, star of the new zombie rom com Life After Beth, is a liar.
When asked if it is possible to overthink her approach to a character she says, “I’m not very smart to begin with so I can’t overthink anything. If I’m thinking about something, that’s a big deal for me.”
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
Actually, the New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts graduate, best known as April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation, is a secret smarty-pants with a well thought out career path.
“Most scripts I read feel wrong to me just because they’re not good,” she says. “I tend to try and do things that are scary to me because otherwise I’ll just get offered the same thing over and over again, and who wants to see that… except for everyone.”
Life After Beth offered up something different and a little scary. Plaza says the story of Zack (Dane DeHaan) and his recently deceased girlfriend Beth (Plaza) who refuses to stay dead is a metaphor “for a break up and how when you break up with someone it’s like they die. Then you try to get back together with them and you only remember the good things. Or you turn that person into a monster. There’s all kinds of ways you can look at the movie.”
The thirty-year-old actress says, “I like make-believe which is why I like movies and like making them and making people believe that I am good at that,” adding that she always had “grand delusions” of a career in film.
“I had really weird taste when I was little,” she says. “I was really into Judy Garland and Bette Midler. I had a sophisticated gay man’s taste at an early age.”
Plaza was also obsessed with Saturday Night Live, particularly with the female cast members like Molly Shannon, Tina Fey and her current Parks and Rec co-star Amy Poehler, a person she now calls a “close friend” and the nicest and funniest person in the room. “She is like a glowing orb of light.”
Her take on Poehler is believable, but when asked about her movie’s message, she lies again.
“I want people to see zombies in a whole new light and think before they shoot them in the brains,” she says. “If the zombie apocalypse happens I want the world to remember, ‘These were humans at one point…’ No, I think they should just shoot them. Immediately.”
“They Came Together,” a new satire starring Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler, is the last romantic comedy you’ll ever need to see. A pastiche of every rom com cliché, it’s a movie about sex and the city. Or maybe about what women want. Or perhaps it’s about friends with benefits. Actually, it’s about love, actually. Imagine one part “Airplane” and one part of every Kate Hudson romance and you get the idea.
Heading up a who’s who of a comedy cast, Rudd and Poehler play Joel and Molly, an unlikely couple who fall in love at first sight. He’s an executive at a candy company, she runs an independent confectionary shop called the Upper Sweet Side.
His company is trying to drive her store out of business so they can control NYC’s candy lucrative market, but despite their differences they find some common ground. “You like fiction books, too? No way!”
They also do all the things that people in rom coms do, but with a twist. In the standard “What am I going to wear montage” Molly ends up trying on a dozen outfits before deciding on a suit of armor. Joel sprints to declare his love for Molly only to wind up in a sword fight with her jealous ex-husband (an unexpected, but hilarious Michael Shannon). Meeting her parents takes a turn when they are revealed to be white supremacists there’s even the mandatory Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s montage. The only thing missing is Julia Roberts’s trademark guffaw.
Bookending the whole thing is a dinner conversation where Joel and Molly describe how they met to friends Karen (Ellie Kemper) and Kyle (Bill Hader).
Poking fun at romantic comedies is easy but for the most part “They Came Together” does it well. It hits a bull’s eye time after time with the tropes plucked from rom coms but presented with a spin. For instance, Joel plays basketball with his pals, each of whom gives him romantic advice, but none have names, they are simply introduced by the rom com trope they represent.
When “They Came Together” riffs on the absurdities of the genre it works, but too often it winks at the camera and becomes a little too self aware. With their looks and chemistry, Rudd and Poehler are rom com ready, but occasionally their eagerness to sell the joke gets in the way of letting the laughs and the parody happen naturally.
Ultimately, for all its insight and style—pitch perfect rom com soft lighting and pop soundtrack—“They Came Together” is stretched a little thin at feature length. As a skit or a short film it might have been a cutting parody of an over-worked genre. At eighty-three minutes it is harder to love.
“Thanksgiving is a turkey’s worst nightmare.” So says Reggie (voice of Owen Wilson), an outcast turkey who has never been part of the flock.
This year, however, Reggie has much to be thankful for. On the eve of Thanksgiving he is pardoned by the president, and taken to Camp David where he leads a life of luxury, watching TV and ordering in pizzas.
Reggie is in turkey heaven until a wild turkey named Jake (Woody Harrelson), the leader (and only member), of the Turkey Freedom Front, kidnaps him, babbling a wild story about the Great Turkey and a magic doorknob. Jake’s plan is to use a top secret egg shaped time machine to travel back to Plymouth Colony in 1621, just days before the first Thanksgiving, and take turkey off the menu.
PETA will likely approve of “Free Birds” pro-Tofurky message (and just in time for American Thanksgiving) but will the kids gobble up “Free Birds”?
They’ll probably enjoy the turkey characters and the cute little fuzzball chicks are guaranteed to make little voices go “Ahhhh,” but story wise “Free Birds” is as dry as Aunt Mable’s overdone turkey. There are good lessons about being part of the flock and learning about confidence, but the story feels drawn out to feature length.
The voice work is solid. Harrelson, Wilson and Amy Poehler do confident work, and George Takei amps it up as the voice of the time machine, but despite the headline voices, many of the jokes fall flat, plucked of the impact by long awkward “Family Guy” style pauses that don’t work as well for an audience full of kids as they do for adults.
Compared to many recent animated kid’s films—or even Angry Birds for that matter—“Free Birds” feels average, like a flightless bird trying to soar with the Pixars of the genre.
Baby Mama is a great example of a formulaic comedy almost saved by a very likeable cast.
SNLers Tina Fey and Amy Poehler headline the story of Kate (Fey), a single, infertile—she’s told she only has a million-to-one chance of getting pregnant—thirty-seven year old businesswoman so desperate to have a baby she hires Angie, an inappropriate South Philly wild child (Poehler) to be her surrogate.
When Angie’s and her boyfriend split she lands on Kate’s doorstep looking for a place to stay. Kate welcomes her into her newly baby proofed luxury apartment and tries to smooth out some of Angie’s rough edges—no more hair dye or Red Bull—in an attempt to turn her into the perfect expectant mom.
Baby Mama is well cast with Fey, Poehler, love interest Greg Kinnear and comic relief Steve Martin handing in admirable performances, but you just have to wonder what they could have done if they had been given a script equal to their talents. They squeeze out whatever humor and heart there is to be had here, but the laughs are scarce and the situations so predictable—Poehler and Fey sing Girls Just Wanna Have Fun… big surprise!—so clichéd that by the end the main feeling I was left with was disappointment because of the movie held so much promise and delivered so little.
Baby Mama isn’t a complete waste of time, Poehler has some inspired moments, but it is a big waste of a talented cast.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada 
