If you have seen the trailer for “Strays,” a new comedy starring a pack of very cute dogs and the voices of Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx, you know what you are in for.
If you haven’t seen the trailer, think of it as an animal road trip movie like “The Incredible Journey” minus the family-friendly bits. Or maybe as a riff on “The Adventures of Milo and Otis” with raunchy dialogue that would make Snoop Dogg blush.
Ferrell is trusting Border Terrier Reggie. He lives with Doug (Will Forte), a cruel owner who only puts up with the dog because his girlfriend adopted him from a local general store. The goodhearted Reggie calls Doug, “the best owner in the world,” despite the fact that their game of Fetch involves stranding Reggie far away from home to see if he can find his way back.
When the girlfriend leaves, Doug wants Reggie gone. He leaves the gullible dog to fend for himself on the street three hours away from home, alone and unloved. But Reggie doesn’t understand that he’s being abandoned. He thinks they’re playing another long-distance game of Fetch, and is determined to return to Doug and win the game.
Trouble is, he’s hopelessly lost. Dog-gone it.
On his journey Reggie meets Bug, a street-wise Boston Terrier, who runs with a pack of stray dogs that includes an Australian Shepherd named Maggie (Isla Fisher), and a therapy Great Dane named Hunter (Randall Park). Bug doesn’t trust humans. He was abandoned, and believes humans harvest dog poop to make chocolate.
Reggie’s new friends convince him that Doug has abandoned him. “Take it from me, kid,” Bug says, “he left your ass.” In disbelief, Reggie mumbles, “That would mean Doug doesn’t love me.”
His world turned upside down, Reggie vows to get revenge on his former owner. “You’re a stray,” Bug says. “You can do whatever you want.”
I think it is a safe bet to crown “Strays” the most adorable, yet rudest movie of the year. Reggie and his pals are a cute canine quartet but the film’s “beyond the chain” jokes and situations, mostly involving poop, vomit and doggie sex, are anything but sweet. It is a raunchy coming-of-age story as Reggie learns from his new friends that everyone has worth. It’s a great message, laced with laughs, for those with a high tolerance for poop-and-scoop humor.
As Reggie, Ferrell revisits the naiveté of the “Elf” era. The unsophisticated Border Terrier is a wide-eyed innocent, unaware of the ways of the world. He sees the good in everyone, including his hateful owner Doug. He’s a lovable waif, so the movie’s revenge fantasy angle plays well, but the real appeal here is his open-hearted way of viewing the world.
Ferrell is ably supported by Reggie’s new friends. Fisher and Park, are a flirty and often filthy duo, but it is Foxx’s finely tuned comic delivery that brings the funny. Add to that a truly strange cameo from Dennis Quaid and a ton of shock value, and you have a doggie style movie like no other.
“Strays” is not “Marley and Me.” It’s a deeply silly movie that fully embraces its extreme side. There is something inherently funny about watching these adorable dogs saying terrible things and while the humor may not be family friendly, the message that we should be nice to animals or they may do terrible things to us, is a good one.
The anti-rom com “Shortcomings,” a new film directed by Randall “Fresh Off the Boat” Park and now playing in theatres, is brave enough to center its story around an annoying twerp whose pretentiousness is matched only by his negativity and the ignorant remarks that fall so effortlessly from his lips.
Based on the 2007 graphic novel by Adrian Tomine (who wrote the script), Justin H. Min plays the antisocial Ben, a wannabe filmmaker and Berkeley arthouse theater manager. He has lots of personality, all of it bad. He says in school he was discriminated against, but not because he is Asian.
“It was because of your inherent bad personality,” says his BFF Alice (Sherry Cola).
“Exactly,” he says.
When his long-suffering girlfriend Miko (Ally Maki) accepts a temporary internship across the country in New York, he uses their “break” to selfishly dip his toe back into the dating pool. He pursues Autumn (Tavi Gevinson), a young performance artist who works at his theatre, and strikes up a relationship with Sasha (Debby Ryan), a friend of Alice who just broke up with her girlfriend.
When he realizes that he didn’t know what he had until it was gone, it’s may be too late. “Is this your rock bottom,” asks Alice. “High school was my rock bottom,” he replies unconvincingly.
“Shortcomings” does a great job of making, and keeping, its main character as toxic as possible. Director Park and Min make no attempt to shave down Ben’s rough edges, or make him more agreeable. But as unlikable as the self-loathing character is, he is compelling in his toxicity. Min is fearless in his portrayal of Ben’s foibles and flaws, and yet you feel empathy for him because he is so lost. As Alice says, “change is hard for assholes like us,” and it’s up in the air if Ben has it in him to put in the effort to embrace the change that will make his life better. It’s an unbending character you don’t normally find in movies with a romantic edge.
Clocking in at just under ninety minutes, Park’s economical film is stacked with ideas.
“Shortcomings” delivers laughs—Ben and Alice are a playful odd couple—and examines cultural expectations, but it really succeeds because of its uncompromising character study.
“Do you guys put the word quantum in front of everything?”
That’s the question Paul Rudd, playing Scott Lang / Ant-Man, asks in the new Marvel movie “Ant-Man and The Wasp.” Having seen the film I wonder why he didn’t speak up earlier, like when the screenwriters were scribbling about quantum physics, quantum realm, quantum void, quantum this and quantum that. These movies are supposed to be about a smart alecy guy who can shrink himself down to the size of an ant to solve crimes, not the Heisenberg principle.
The movie begins as Lang has just three days left on his house arrest following the events of “Captain America: Civil War.” Trapped in his apartment he has a strange dream. He sees Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), wife of scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), mother of Lilly van Dyne a.k.a. Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), trapped in the quantum wormhole she disappeared into three decades before. Meanwhile Hank and Lilly are perfecting a method to rescue their loved one from the quantum hike she now calls home. Trouble is, they can’t do it alone. They need any information that may be trapped in Rudd’s head and money from a grubby bad guy. Time is of the essence as Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), a spectral presence who can walk through walls, also seeks out Janet’s quantum power to heal her cellular disorder.
From the kitschy sounding title to the size-shifting characters to the scientific mumbo jumbo that takes up much of the screen time, “Ant-Man and The Wasp” is a throwback to drive-in movies of the 1950s. It’s been updated with better special effects and more authentic sounding science jargon, but make no mistake, for better and for worse, this has just as much in common with flickers like “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman” and “Them!” as it does with the Avengers. Like the 50s b-movies that were undoubtedly an influence, this is a loud-n-proud genre film but like many of the Avengers films that are part of the Ant-Man family, it is marred by excess. Too many characters, too many story shards—a rescue mission, two sets of baddies chasing down the quantum technology, a romantic subplot, a family film angle—too much exposition to much quantum theory.
There is a funny scene about an hour into the movie where Michael Peña, playing Lang’s former cellmate and current business partner, recaps the story so far. It takes two minutes, is laugh-out-loud funny and completely negates the need for much of the exposition—people in this movie love to ask things like, “What have you done?”—that comes before it. Move that to the beginning of the film and they could have saved pages of dialogue and juiced up the film’s fun factor by at least fifty percent.
“Ant-Man and The Wasp” does plough some new ground—it is the first time a female superhero’s name is in the title of an MCU film—but feels scattershot in its execution.
“Snatched” is a mother and daughter comedy. Sounds wholesome, right? Mom and daughter on holiday, but add in kidnapping, sex trafficking and manual tapeworm extraction and you have a raunchy comedy that plays like a cross between “Taken” and “Steel Magnolias.”
Amy Schumer is Emily Middleton, a sales clerk with no filter who over-shares with customers. On the eve of an Ecuadorian vacation her musician boyfriend (Randall Park) dumps her, leaving her with two plane tickets and a South American hotel with a king sized bed. Rather than cancel the trip Emily asks her divorced, retiree mother Linda (Goldie Hawn) to come along for the ride.
“Pack your bags,” Emily says, “we’re going to South America.”
“Everybody knows you need two years to plan a vacation,” says her cautious mom.
Linda is a worrywart, as uptight as Emily is free spirited. She’s the kind of person who triple locks her suburban doors and checks websites for nearby sex offenders.
To convince mom to come along for the ride Emily pulls the one card her mother can’t refuse. “The trip is non-refundable.”
In Ecuador Emily meets James (Tom Bateman), a handsome English man who sweeps her off her feet. On a day trip he convinces Emily and Linda to take the scenic route back to the hotel only to stand by as the women are abducted. Their captor is Morgado (Óscar Jaenada), a notorious gangster who holds them for $100,000 ransom. One daring escape later they are off on their own in the Columbian jungle, trying to make it to the American consulate in Bogotá. On their trip they are aided by Roger Simmons (Christopher Meloni), an explorer who seems to have just stepped out of a 1950 adventure film and two friends from the resort, Ruth (Wanda Sykes) and Barb (Joan Cusack).
Back home Jeffrey Middleton (Ike Barinholtz), Linda’s agoraphobic son convinces a reluctant State Department official (Bashir Salahuddin) to get involved.
At its dirty little heart “Snatched” is a movie about the importance of family, specifically the bond between mother and daughter but it’s not all sweetness and light. The film is inhabited by comic creations that are grounded enough to prevent the movie from careening into farce, but not so grounded that they can’t surprise us.
In her first movie role in fifteen years Hawn reminds us of what a gifted comedienne she is, spouting lines like, “I tell you when dad left I thought I’d never have sex again… and I was right,” with pitch perfect comic timing.
Schumer’s self-depreciating humour—“The sex traders want beautiful women. Your poufy faces will protect you.”—is relatable but it is her more subtle character work that really shines here. Little things, like the way she tries to take the perfect selfie, tell us everything we need to know about the self-indulgent Emily without a line of dialogue.
Sykes, Cusack, Barinholtz and Meloni all bring the funny in a series of off kilter cameos.
“Snatched” isn’t exactly a laugh-a-minute, it’s more a giggle followed by a laugh every few minutes but director Jonathan Levine (“Warm Bodies,” “The Night Before” and “50/50”) has a good grasp of the humour, action and mushy stuff, finding a pleasing balance between all three.
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.
This year a Christmas cinema miracle happened. “The Interview,” a Seth Rogen comedy materialized on screens big and small, despite hacker’s attempts to silence the movie. Chants of “Freedom” rang out across the land as the faithful lined up for their chance to see Rogen and James Franco exercise their right of free speech and make bad jokes.
Rogen and Franco play TV host Dave Skylark and producer Aaron Rapaport of the celebrity gossip talk show Skylark Tonight. Skylark is a smarmier version of Barbara Walters, a talk show host who trades in getting personal scoops form his guests. 1000 episodes in Eminem comes out of the closet on the show—”I’ve been playing gay peek-a-boo for years,” he says. “I’ve pretty much been leaving a gay bread crumb trail.”—but despite stratospheric ratings Rapaport doesn’t feel he is being taken seriously as a journalist. “I want to cover actual news,” he says, “not Nicki Minaj’s vagina flopping out at the Grammys.” When he learns North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un (Randall Park) is a fan of the show and wants to be interviewed by Dave, Aaron leaps at the chance to go to Pyongyang.
What begins as a chance at journalistic credibility soon turns into an assignment of a different sport when CIA Agent Lacey (Lizzy Caplan) recruits them to “take him out.” “Like for drinks? For kimchi? Take him out on the town?” Their job is to assassinate Kim with a special poison gadget hidden in their palms. Trouble is, when they touch down in Pyongyang Skylark becomes seduced by Kim’s charm. Convinced he is simply misunderstood and not evil, the dimwitted TV host has second thoughts about completing the mission. “He’s not evil, he was born into a bad situation.”
At a private dinner Dave discovers Kim’s truly dark side and, working with Aaron and propaganda minister Sook (Diana Bang), bring their visit to North Korea to a wild, bloody conclusion.
“The Interview” isn’t nearly as bad as some of the twitterati suggest—“I thought I’d never laugh again,” wrote one tweeter—or as subversive as others would like it to be.
The first twenty minutes has some genuinely funny moments, most fuelled by the Abbott and Costello-style bromantic chemistry between Rogen and the arrogantly idiotic Franco. The set-up earns some giggles at the expense of the media and celebrity journalists—an easy and deserving target—and the audacious nature of the film’s premise. Once the scenery changes from Hollywood to the hermit kingdom, however, the laughs become as rare as Angelina Jolie compliments in leaked Sony e-mails.
Still, there are some funny lines. “That tank was a gift to my father from Stalin,” says Kim. “In my country it’s pronounced Stallone,” replies the oblivious Dave. It’s not Noel Coward, but it’s a nice window into the chat show host’s tiny little world.
The rest of the movie, while intermittently entertaining, isn’t nearly as sharp. In fact it is a blunt instrument that spends 152 minutes (about ¢6 a minute if you rent the download) hammering the audience over the head with poop and rectum jokes. More actual satire and less hiding-things-in-Rogen’s-bum might have made watching the film act of political activism or even an exercise in freedom of speech, but as it is “The Interview” is a buddy comedy and not a declaration of war.
