To describe “Rough Night,” a new ensemble comedy starring Scarlett Johansson, Zoë Kravitz, Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell and Ilana Glazer, as a comedy of errors makes it sound more genteel than it actually is. Deadly mistakes are made on this weekend bachelorette party getaway and there is loads of comedy but there is nothing genteel about this dark and debauched movie.
Johansson is Jess, an A-Type candidate for state senate and bride-to-be. When her former college roommates (and fellow beer-pong champions) arrange a weekend in Miami she’s hoping for a quiet, dignified affair. Her friends Alice (Bell), Blair (Kravitz), Frankie (Glazer) and Pippa (McKinnon) Jess’s Australian friend from a semester abroad, have different ideas; ideas that include foam parties, booze and male strippers.
The trouble starts early when Frankie uncorks a bottle of champagne at the airport and the pop, mistaken for a gunshot, causes panic. Checking into their swanky beach house (courtesy of Jess’s biggest and only campaign donors) they get the party started. Adding to the loose atmosphere are the swingers (Demi Moore and Ty Burrell) in the house next door. “This weekend is all about us,” says Jess, “just like old times.” And it is like old times, with camaraderie, laughs and plenty of booze and drugs until Alice accidentally kills the male stripper they hired as entertainment. “It really is a tragedy,” says Pippa, “he could have been a scientist and cured cancer.”
Aspiring politician Jess immediately kicks into survival mode, engaging in the great political pastime, the cover-up. “I know things are crazy right now,” she says, “but you’re going to have a lot of material for my wedding speeches.”
“Rough Night” breathes the same air as other big, raunchy ensemble movies like “Very Bad Things,” “How to be Single,” “The Night Before” and “The Hangover.” It embraces its wild side, adds a dollop of “Weekend at Bernie’s” to take advantage of its star power and push the envelope.
The first half hour plays like a naughty comedy, giddy with the promise of a raunchy good time. The tone changes abruptly as the body lies in a crimson puddle set against the stark white tile floor. There are still laughs but they come from a different place, a nasty place that takes some of the air out of this comedy balloon. It never quite gets to the level of inspired lunacy that “Bridesmaids” found so effortlessly because it doesn’t have the same kind of heart.
It does, however, have several fun moments, both before and after the death, most courtesy of McKinnon, Bell and Paul W. Downs who plays Jess’s nice-guy fiancée Peter.
McKinnon brings a wonky Australian accent and her trademark off kilter presence to the role of the best friend from far away. She plays Pippa like a visitor from Mars not Australia, someone who tries to fit in even though she’s unfamiliar with the ways of the rest of society.
Bell, who has shone in small roles in movies like “Fist Fight,” “22 Jump Street” and “The Night Before” is given a chance to strut her stuff here. She plays Alice as the kind of loose canon who throws up on the bar and nonchalantly says, “It smells like barf here. Let’s get outta here.” She’s the comedic engine who keeps the movie from succumbing to its dark side.
It would be a spoiler to describe Downs’ contribution to the goings on. Suffice to say, it involves Red Bull, gymnastics, adult diapers and a sweet disposition.
“Rough Night” has laughs but they are mostly derived from an unpleasant situation. It’s fun to see how the dynamics of the college friends manifest under stressful circumstances but the strain they feel mirrors the strain the movie feels trying to find a consistent, funny tone.
In Office Christmas Party T.J. Miller plays Clay, a scattered office manager with a “mind like a drunk baby.” In a last ditch effort to save his branch from closure he tries to woo a lucrative client by throwing a no-holds-barred Christmas party.
“This is the way we close Walter,” says Clay. “We throw the best Christmas party he’s ever seen. We could save everybody’s jobs.”
Miller leads an ensemble cast featuring heavy-hitters like Jason Bateman, Olivia Munn, Kate McKinnon and Jennifer Aniston but he doesn’t want to talk about that. Not right away, anyway.
Instead he begins the interview with, “Let’s talk comedy in a time of tragedy.”
OK, lets.
“Basically I have a political obstacle to my social mission statement,” he says. “The social statement was, tragedy permeates our everyday lives, people are lonely, they’re scared, they have death anxiety, they don’t know how to attribute meaning to their own existence, so through comedy we can provide an opiate or distraction that permeates our everyday lives. Through satire we can hopefully frame the world in a way that people can laugh at.
“Also I aim to help people, through my stand up, to release the death anxiety. I aim to help people not take themselves so seriously.”
When Miller, who also currently plays Erlich Bachman on Silicon Valley, finally gets around to talking about Office Christmas Party, he’s still on message.
“It’s very easy to promote a comedy during the apocalypse,” he says.
The Christmas film, which features a greedy pimp, a sexually repressed head of HR and an office load of drunk, disgruntled employees, is a mix and match of sentimentality and debauchery that Miller thinks is perfect for the season.
“What better way to spend the holidays?” he asks. “First of all you don’t have to talk to your family for an hour-and-a-half during the holidays. That’s a bonus. If the movie is funny, you talk about how funny it was for half-an-hour. How dynamic Jenifer Aniston, Jason Bateman and Courtney B. Vance are. How strange I look in a Santa suit for that long. That my facial hair is still abrasive and arresting. That’s two- and-a-half to three hours towards a stress free holiday. That’s what we’re pitching you.
“It’s a funny movie. It’s a laugh a minute. Well, it’s a laugh every minute-and-a-half to two minutes. We wanted to give you a break. It’s exhausting to laugh every minute.”
Miller, who once worked as a legal secretary in the same Chicago office building seen in the film, says the movie is silly and fun but shares his core comedy philosophy.
“Workplace environments have become so sterile and corporations have become so much about profit and not the people they work with that we’ve lost the fun of work. We don’t have cool office Christmas parties anymore. We are saying, ‘You spend so much time with the people you work with, why not have a night or two a year where you can kind of just relax? Take a night off from worrying about offending someone or giving ‘tude.’
“That is our message to North America. Take the holidays, drink way too much eggnog, laugh, relax and know that we’ve got a lot of work to do in 2017.”
Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman appeared in the edgy “Horrible Bosses” films so you’d expect their new movie, “Office Christmas Party” to be holiday fare more naughty than nice. But you’d be wrong. Their latest suffers from not being too vulgar, but from being not vulgar enough.
Aniston runs Zenotech Data Storage Systems, a tech company she inherited from her late father. Dad left her the company but gave the main branch to her party animal brother Clay (T.J. Miller). She’s a strict by–the-book business person the Grinch who cancels all branch Christmas parties to save money and gives Clay until the end of the quarter, just two days away, to turn things around or she will lay off 40% of the staff and cancel all bonuses.
Clay is scattered with a “mind like a drunk baby,” but determined to protect his branch and his staff. To that end he recruits head programmers Josh (Jason Bateman) and Tracey (Olivia Munn) to woo a lucrative client (Courtney B. Vance) by throwing a no-holds-barred office Christmas party. “This is the way we close Walter, we throw the best Christmas party he’s ever seen,” says Clay. “We could save everybody’s jobs.”
Despite Clay’s warning, “When I drink a lot bad things happen,” they proceed with the party. Add in a greedy pimp, $300,000 in cold hard cash, a sexually repressed head of HR (Kate McKinnon) and an office load of drunk, disgruntled employees and you have a Bacchanalia that would make would make Caligula blush.
Given the premise “Office Christmas Party” is not nearly as wild as a movie about and out of control party should be. Despite the excess of flesh and booze the movie often opts for sentimentality over debauchery. It most certainly doesn’t put the ‘X’ in Xmas.
Tone wise it should feel like anything could happen; like the movie could go off the rails at any second. Instead it’s as sweet and gooey as a (slightly soiled) Hallmark Christmas card.
Packed with comedy heavy hitters like Aniston, Bateman, McKinnon and Miller, it’s the supporting cast who garner most of the laughs. Fortune Feimster, a comic best known for her work on “The Mindy Project” livens things up as a motor mouth Uber driver and Randall Park’s take on a shy-but-kinky office worker has its charms but it is Courtney B. Vance who steals the show. The velvet-voiced character actor who specializes in playing lawyers—think “Law & Order” and his Johnnie Cochran in
“The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”—unexpectedly lets his freak flag fly and the results are glorious. If it was his movie it might have been more fun.
Alfred Hitchcock made three of his greatest films with Grace Kelly and tried to lure her back to the big screen long after she retired. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have a seemingly unbreakable cinematic bond and the world of movies would be far less interesting if Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski had never met. John Ford and John Wayne inspired one another to do their best work and Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s shared eccentricities gave us unforgettable nights at the multiplex.
Muses inspire their directors to aspire to new heights, to push the limits of their creativity.
Add another to the list: Melissa McCarthy.
Over the course of four films — including this weekend’s Ghostbusters — she has upped director Paul Feig’s game and in turn he gave her the roles that broke her out of the TV sidekick treadmill and turned her into a big screen star. “It’s not even like we go, ‘We’ve got to do the next movie together,’” Feig says.
“It’s just that suddenly the next movie will pop up and I’m like, ‘You know who would be great for this?’ So it’s funny that people think we have an agenda to keep doing this.”
Agenda or not, their creative chemistry is undeniable.
Feig describes McCarthy’s audition for the first film they made together, Bridesmaids, as a “religious moment.” She was less sure.
“The whole ride home from the audition,” she says, “I was thinking, ‘I got too weird. Should I turn the car around and do that cheesy actor thing of I can do it better! Give me another shot!’”
The director cast her in the scene-stealing role of Megan — imagine a feral, female Guy Fieri — and it was her flashpoint.
Her wonderfully weird performance, complete with sexual hijinks and an explosive bout of diarrhea —“It’s coming out of me like lava!” — stole the show out from under other, better-known stars like Kristen Wiig — and earned her an Oscar nomination.
Next up for the dynamic duo was The Heat, an odd couple, buddy cop movie set in Boston co-starring Sandra Bullock.
McCarthy plays a tough-talking street cop who forms an unlikely alliance with the uptight Sandra Bullock to bring down a murderous drug dealer.
The role riffed on McCarthy’s signature character, the aggressive but damaged comedic persona. “I’ve played a lot of characters who are very vocal, very aggressive,” she told me in 2014.
“For the women I’ve played there is a reason why they are so ballsy and it is nice when you see the crack in the veneer and you realize, ‘It’s part of their insecurity. They stay loud so nobody yells at them.’”
Feig knows when to let McCarthy off the leash — there are some wild slapstick scenes here — but he also knows when to pull her back and let the script do the work.
This week McCarthy headlines Feig’s all-female Ghostbusters reboot alongside Bridesmaids co-star Kristen Wiig.
Will that be their final collaboration? Don’t count on it.
Feig is reportedly writing a Spy sequel as we speak.
“She’s so good,” he says, “and we just really have the same sense of humour.”
Director Paul Fieg and Company are not the Ruiners of Your Childhood. Your youthful “Ghostbusters” memories are alive and well, in your head, in your DVD drawer or digital download file folder. Ghostbros, upset their 1984 favourite is being rebooted with an all female cast, flooded the internet with low-to-no star reviews. As it turns out, the time they spent trying to torpedo a movie they had not yet seen, might have been better spent making room on their basement shelves for the new “Ghostbusters” figurines. Feig hasn’t desecrated a classic, he has added a new chapter, creating a light and fluffy concoction that moves the franchise into the future while paying homage to the past.
When we first meet Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) she’s a professor at Columbia trying to hide her past as a paranormal investigator. When a ghost-hunting book she co-wrote with Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) comes to light she is let go. Like Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz and Egon Spengler before her, she leaves academia and becomes a professional New York City ghostbuster alongside Abby, proton pack engineer Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) and former subway worker Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones).
After making a name for themselves they uncover a major plot hatched by hotel janitor Rowan North (Neil Casey). Upset his genius has been ignored by the world, he plans on unleashing an army of undead to come back and “pester the world” in an event he calls the Fourth Cataclysm. He has created a vortex that will allow whatever it is on that plane to come crashing down on this plane and flood New York City with ghosts. By the climax the movie dissolves into regular summertime C.G.I. tomfoolery as the Ghostbusters battle spirits in Times Square.
There is a sense of déjà vu hanging heavy over “Ghostbusters.” The new film doesn’t continue the original story, it reboots it, taking us back to the origins of the group. In other words, it’s a lot like the 1984 movie. From class four semi-anchored entities and proton streams to cameos from Slimer, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, Annie “Ghostbusters, whaddaya want?” Potts plus a glimpse of a Harold Ramis statue, the movie feels familiar but has been freshened up.
The cast doesn’t try to imitate Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis and Hudson. The new characters are just that, new creations plunked down into an existing world.
McCarthy and Wiig, reteamed for the first time since “Bridesmaids,” are solid and Jones is a formidable presence but most interesting is McKinnon as engineering nerd Holtzmann. She is unapologetically weird, as strange as her unruly asymmetrical haircut and a glorious addition to the “Ghostbusters” family.
Also welcome is Chris Hemsworth as the dippy receptionist who doesn’t have glass in his eyeglasses and says things like, “An aquarium is a submarine for fish.” He’s a walking non sequitur and very funny.
Like the old Abbott and Costello horror comedies, “Ghostbusters” doesn’t have any real scares but it will make you laugh. The script, co-written by Feig and “Parks and Recreation” writer Katie Dippold, is funny, if not exactly in a slap the knee kind of way, then in a slow boil constant giggle respect. Is it an out-of-this-world hit like Feig’s “Bridesmaids” or “Spy”? No. It occasionally suffers from a weird rhythm where scenes end suddenly and at least one of the cameos feels wedged in, but the overall effect is one of a respectful resurrection of a beloved franchise.
Best of all, it is self-aware. Reading on-line comments Erin comes across one that reads, “Ain’t no bitches going to hunt no ghosts.” Later Abby says, “Don’t read what crazy people write in the middle of the night online.” Are you listening Ghostbros?
Are you among the 200 million people that play Angry Birds on your smartphone? If so you’re in good company.
Angelina Jolie, Jack Black and Jon Hamm are fans and British Prime Minister David Cameron has admitted to being “mildly addicted” to the game. Since December 2009, folks have been flinging flocks of birds at pig’s fortresses, downloading more than 3 billion versions of the app.
This weekend the Angry Birds game takes the next logical step, catapulting onto the big screen with their very own movie.
Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad and Maya Rudolph star in The Angry Birds Movie, a story that tells us why the annoyed avians — like flock leader Red Bird, Bomb the Black Bird and Slingshot Stella the Cockatoo — are so angry. Turns out they feel betrayed by the tittering piggies that pretend to be their friends but are really only interested in stealing their eggs. Cue the catapults and mountains of TNT.
It’s a brand with a built-in audience, a combination Hollywood finds irresistible, and while it has colourful, easily marketed characters, the game itself doesn’t offer much in the way of story. But that has never stopped producers before.
Remember Super Mario Bros? Siskel & Ebert gave that one two thumbs down and star Bob Hoskins, who played Mario, called it “the worst thing I ever did.”
Despite brutal reviews and box office failure, Nintendo Power magazine praised the film, calling it a trailblazer in the genre of videogame movies.
Which leads us, 23 years after Mario and his brother Luigi stunk up movie theatres, to The Angry Birds Movie. Why is a game from a developer in Espoo, just outside Helsinki, Finland, popular enough to take flight as its own movie?
The success of Angry Birds has to do with something called schema formation, a five-dollar term for mentally grasping and embedding how the game’s interface works the first time you play it.
The addictive part comes in as the action of the game changes. In Play at Work, engineer Charles L. Mauro explains the appeal: “These little birds are packed with clever behaviours that expand the user’s mental model at just the point when game-level complexity is increased.”
The game’s genius is in adding playing details at just the right moment to increase user engagement. In other words, it’s fun. I guess that’s why gamers spend 200 million minutes a day flinging Angry Birds at various targets.
According to marketers AYTM, that’s “equal to 16 years of gameplay every hour of every day.” They also note that players have flung over 100 billion angry birds, a number equal to the amount of real birds on the planet. Those are the kind of statistics Hollywood can’t ignore.
One person unlikely to pass the time with Angry Birds is U.S. communications surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden. In 2014 he claimed the app was “leaky,” and was vulnerable to the harvesting of information by outside groups.
Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio Entertainment, the makers of Angry Birds, denied Snowden’s claims.
“We do not collaborate, collude, or share data with spy agencies anywhere in the world,” he said, which must have come as a relief to another of the game’s biggest fans, former Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney, who, apparently, also enjoys hurling a bird or two in his spare time.
200 million people play Angry Birds on their smartphones every day. More fictional birds have been flung in the name of the game than there are real birds in the world. It’s the first app to sell movie rights to the movies and if just a fraction of the people who play the game everyday go see the movie it should be a rousing success. Keep in mind though, that if “The Angry Birds Movie” doesn’t lay an egg at the box office it is inevitable that “Candy Crush: The Saga” and “Fruit Ninjas” movies won’t be far behind. The choice is yours.
This weekend the furious feathered friends catapult onto the big screen accompanied by a classic rock score—this may be the only kid’s flick to feature Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”—and plenty of bird puns—”Pluck my life,” says Red (Jason Sudeikis) when he is sentenced to anger management class.
Sudeikis, Josh Gad and Maya Rudolph star in “The Angry Birds Movie,” a story that tells us why the annoyed avians—like flock leader Red Bird, Bomb the Black Bird (Danny McBride) and Slingshot Stella the Cockatoo (Kate McKinnon)—are so angry. Turns out they feel betrayed when Bird Island is invaded by pigs—including one named John Ham—who arrive uninvited but soon win over the birds. “We mean no harm,” says Leonard the Pig (Bill Hader). “We saw your island from the sea and thought, I wonder what’s going on there?” Only Red who is suspicious of the porcine interlopers. “Something isn’t kosher with these pigs,” he says, “and it’s up to us to figure out what it is.” Seems the pigs are only pretending to be friendly. In truth they’re only interested in stealing all the eggs on the island. To save the eggs Red assembles the troops—“We’re birds were descended from dinosaurs,” he says, “we’re not supposed to be nice.”—the catapults and mountains of TNT.
“Angry Birds The Movie” is about as plot heavy as you’d imagine a movie based on an app would be. It’s an underdog tale with messages of never giving up and being true to yourself but mostly its an excuse for bad bird jokes—Free Rage Chicken anyone?—and lots of finely feathered action. Breezy in the extreme, it is padded out with frenetic chase scenes and music numbers. The colourful animation is designed to attract the attention of young eyes but for many adults the story will be as about as appealing as a case of bird flu.
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have such great chemistry together it’s almost as if they’re sisters from different misters. I guess that’s why their new movie, “Sisters” feels like a natural fit. Seeing the pair together it feels inevitable that one day they would move beyond sharing the stage at award shows and on to playing siblings.
They play Jane and Maura Ellis, middle-aged sisters at different places in their lives. Jane is a single mom who can’t hold on to a job. Maura is a nurse who always tries to help people… even if they don’t want her help.
When their parents (Dianne Wiest and James Brolin) decide to simplify their life, sell the family home and move into a senior’s complex in Orlando, the girls are called home to clean out their rooms. Being in the house dredges up memories of the past so they decide to revisit their glory days by throwing one last blow out before they turn the house over to the new owners.
“Sisters” feels a bit like a “Saturday Night Live” reunion. Ex-SNLers Maya Rudolph, Kate McKinnon, Rachel Dratch and Bobby Moynihan all make appearances in a movie that has about as much story as the average SNL skit. The laughs are there, particular when the action heats up midway, but “The Blind Assassin” this ain’t. It’s a simple comedic premise squeezed for giggles by a likeable cast.
At the helm of “Sisters” are Fey and Poehler, comic actors who play the material broadly but still manage to ground Jane and Maura in reality. On the other hand Moynihan goes full bore into a part Chris Farley might have played and while the movie is more fun when the cast run out of control, it’s Fey and Poehler’s rare quiet moments that humanize the story.
