The Little Hours

The Little Hours, a happily deranged comedy from writer-director Jeff Baena, doesn’t always work, but you have to admire the movie’s exuberant madness. It is by turns a Monty Python-esque period spoof, an improv comedy wet dream (the dialogue is mostly extemporized, the setting deliberately anarchic), and a philosophical meditation on the nature of existence. (It’s based on two stories from The Decameron.) The film is set in a Medieval convent somewhere in the Italian countryside, where three nuns, named Sister Alessandra, Sister Fernanda, and Sister Genevra (Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, and Kate Micucci, respectively) experience a sexual awakening. These three nuns look out upon their drab, cloistered little world with a kind of yearning that they can barely put into words. Then along comes the hunky young serf Massetto, (Dave Franco), who’s on the run from his angry master, Lord Bruno (Nick Offerman) after sleeping with the man’s wife (the delightful, snarky Lauren Weedman, whose dialogue is the equivalent of an endless series of glaring eyerolls).  

The three sisters are all immediately drawn to Massetto, partly because he’s pretending to be deaf and mute, a ruse devised by the priest (John C. Reilly) who runs the convent. Massetto’s silence is for his own protection, against the volcanic temper of Sister Fernanda. Early in the movie, when she and the others are passing by the previous gardener, she unleashes her comic fury, hurling curse words and turnips at him because she dislikes the convent food. The allegedly deaf-mute Massetto, non-threatening yet smoldering, emboldens the women to act on long-repressed sexual desires.

Then again, what would you do if the puppy-eyed, svelte Dave Franco showed up at your doorstep? Genuflect by day, and carouse by night, of course. The sisters, it turns out, are far more evolved than perhaps even they realize. It’s as if they’ve been waiting for something to set their desires into motion. And Sister Fernanda, in particular, isn't content with washing garments and tending the garden and saying her morning prayers: When she whips up a love potion using belladonna weed, she has more on her mind than romance: Sister Fernanda is part of a coven of witches, and she has her eye on Massetto as a potential sacrifice for an upcoming fertility ritual (!).

Even though The Little Hours can be jarring in its tonal shifts (the movie may be guilty of trying to be too many things), it’s never boring, and the performances have an other-worldly quality, partly because the dialogue is all modern. This anachronistic touch works especially because Baena doesn’t rely on it too much. The fact that Plaza, Brie, and Micucci talk like women from 2017 who’ve been transported back to 1398 (they curse like sailors, or perhaps teenagers posting selfies on Instagram), is a gimmick, but not the film's only source of comedy. It’s just a device made to loosen things up, so that Baena and his cast can explore and make fun of the world they've created, including the ways that the characters (and by extension, most humans) compartmentalize their lives. For example: John C. Reilly's priest, who’s in love with the soft-spoken mother superior (Molly Shannon). Their love isn’t portrayed as sleazy or clandestine; it’s longing and tender, and almost tragic in the way the romance in Brokeback Mountain was tragic, because it’s arbitrarily forbidden by the culture in which they live. The performances alone make The Little Hours worth seeing. All three of the leads seem to be harboring little sticks of comic dynamite inside them, and you never know when the next explosion will happen. All you can do is wait for one of them to get that look in her eyes.

22 Jump Street

I haven't seen 21 Jump Street (the film or the TV show on which it was based), but I must admit I had a good time at 22 Jump Street, a big-budget comedy that at least has the decency to make fun of itself. It also does a remarkable job of spoofing/elevating the male buddy comedy. I remember reading something in college about the male homosocial relationship. That word kept bubbling up in my mind throughout 22 Jump Street, a movie that celebrates the good things about male friendship and pokes fun at the idea that men should constantly demarcate the lines of heterosexuality that keep their friendships from looking anything other than straight. As ridiculous as this movie is--the plot is somewhat incidental--it's hard not to like. Channing Tatum proves his comic chops, and Jonah Hill--an actor I've had a hard time liking on screen--becomes sympathetic. I didn't expect to have either of those reactions walking into 22 Jump Street.

This time the partners--who in the previous film infiltrated a high school despite being far too old to convincingly play teenagers--are sent to a college to investigate suspected drug dealing. The drug in question (which is something of a joke in itself) is a new hybrid called WHYPHY (pronounced like Wi-fi). It's the latest thing with all the young folk, giving them about four hours' worth of intense concentration (for studying and such) and then another four hours of intense insanity (for being crazy and such). But when one of this new concoction's users dies, the police become worried that it could sweep the nation. So they send in Tatum and Hill for a little undercover work.

Channing Tatum has a comic goofiness that I haven't noticed before. I'm guessing it's present in 21 Jump Street (and probably other films going back even further), so I'm a bit late to the party. But it's a wonderful realization that he's not just making it on his looks. (Because Magic Mike was pretty dreadful.) He has timing and spontaneity, and he plays the slightly dumb cop with charm. He and Jonah Hill also have a good chemistry together. Their relationship--which is constantly being subversively (and not so subversively) compared to a gay couple's--is about as messy and high-strung as two people who have been married for 10 years.

Along the way, 22 Jump Street manages to make a lot of fun of its own bigness, and the fact that it's now part of an apparent franchise. (The end credits--imagining all sorts of Jump Street sequels that would make the creators of the endless Police Academy series feel inadequate--are truly hilarious.) But what makes this movie work is the sense that these are guys who care for their friendship. As sex-obsessed as a lot of these movies are (there seems to be no other object of amusement in the mind of many a Hollywood comedy writer), the writers of 22 Jump Street (Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel, Rodney Rothman) are at least interested in the idea of friendship and the weird emotions that can make friendship as complicated as a romantic relationship. And the fact that the line becomes blurred in distinguishing between the two is a reliable source of comic inspiration for this movie.

As a movie, 22 Jump Street works about as well as a Beverly Hills Cop-type film: it's predictable, a bit loose with its sense of story, and overall, not too inventive. I'm sure I'm guilty of over-praising the film for its humorous self-awareness. After all, being self-aware doesn't excuse a movie for being predictable or resorting to the same old jokes. Perhaps it's just funny because this is a big studio production, and it feels like the writers are sneaking in jokes at the franchise's expense. (On the other hand, the product placement--I noticed quite a few brands prominently displayed--somewhat hampers this trick.) But if you want something funny this summer, and you--like me--weren't all that thrilled with Tammy--you could do a lot worse.

Directed by Phil Lord. With Peter Stormare, Ice Cube, Amber Stevens, Wyatt Russell (son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn), Jillian Bell (who's hysterical as one of the coeds), Jimmy Tatro, Nick Offerman, and in cameos: Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, Queen Latifah, and Ana Farris. 

Neighbors

Neighbors calls into question the legitimacy of being a grown-up by showing us two grown-ups who aren't all that mature. They fancy themselves to be hip adults. Despite the fact that they've just had a baby, they're marijuana-friendly and have tried hard to keep in touch with their own identities, pre-parenthood, pre-marriage. Seth Rogen, King of the Man-Children, plays Mac, and Rose Byrne, an Australian pixie who's layered with a touch of insanity and a disarmingly sweet personality, plays Kelly. Their happy suburban-hipster-sitcom life is turned upside down by the arrival of a rowdy fraternity next door, which is headed by Zac Efron and James Franco's brother (Dave Franco).

Mac and Kelly make a concerted effort to win over the frat boys by going over to their house and introducing themselves and offering them a blunt. This fails to keep the frats from throwing a loud party into the wee hours of the night, and when, out of desperation, Mac and Kelly phone the police, Efron and his band of testosterony, party-animal frat brothers, embark on a campaign of sorts, to get their revenge. And that's about all there is to it.

Neighbors has a few things going for it. It has a playful spirit that lifts the movie out of its somewhat contrived, studio-raunch-comedy trappings. The script (credited to Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O'Brien) doesn't take its characters too seriously. This is a huge help to the movie, given the fact that it has such an anemic storyline. These are just adults who don't want to admit that their time to be irresponsible is over. So they engage in a cartoonishly violent sparring match that never ends. (And there are some very funny moments that involve Seth Rogen being physically injured in a myriad of ways.)

Another point in the movie's favor: Zac Efron. His acting talent surprised me. I didn't expect bad acting, but I sure as hell wasn't expecting this either. He has the comic chops of a ham and the power of a much bolder, stronger performer wells up from inside him on frequent occasions. I was shocked. He also plays off the charmingly goofy Dave Franco very well. They have a good buddy-movie charisma, and theirs is the only friendship that the film explores (other than that of the married couple) with any depth or success. There are a number of other characters who are barely introduced, and who sometimes take on bigger roles than their characters have been prepared to handle.

As is to be expected, the level of raunchy humor is pretty high here. Lots of vulgarity, lots of profanity, a disturbing obsession with sex that may make you want to not invite your parents to see this movie. (Although it's likely they won't want to see it anyway, if they've viewed the trailer.) There's also not that big of a discrepancy between the college students and our two put-upon heroes. Mac and Kelly are rather immature themselves, and ultimately, Neighbors pokes fun at this. These people are hiply square. Or squarely hip. However you want to size it up. And in the final few minutes, they embrace the beauty of the mundane that is normal life. Neighbors is really just a long episode of Workaholics (albeit not as smart as that show) mixed with The King of Queens. (Incidentally, the guys from Workaholics have a fun cameo appearance.)

Directed by Nicholas Stoller. With Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Carla Gallo, Lisa Kudrow (who's funny as an unsympathetic dean of students), Craig Roberts, and Ike Barinholtz.

Now You See Me

In Now You See Me, four magicians have crafted a masterful bank-robbing caper that keeps the FBI (represented here by an agent named Dylan Rhodes, who's played by Mark Ruffalo) on its toes. It's certainly an impressively grandiose film, with an enormous cast: Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, and Dave Franco are the magicians; Melanie Laurent plays a French Interpol agent; Michael Caine plays an investor who's backing the magicians; and Morgan Freeman plays an ex-magician who's been making a new career revealing the secrets behind the magic tricks.

It's an entertaining movie, to be sure. The tricks are dazzling and the story holds you, sometimes even mesmerizes you, and it's funny. The problem is that ultimately it's another caper film, mixed with the plot of an NCIS or Law and Order episode writ large for the big screen. Nothing here is particularly new or innovative, except for the excessive cleverness of the tricks themselves, but it's hard to be impressed by anything in movies anymore when most of the stunts and other feats are performed by a computer.

That leaves us with the talented cast and the undernourished characters: the four magicians are reduced to stock treatment, which means we get Jesse Eisenberg's usual schtick: he speaks too fast and exhibits that same untempered arrogance he had when he played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Woody Harrelson never plays anyone but himself, but at least he's likable: the dumb-on-the-outside but sharp-on-the-inside cowboy. Only Ruffalo and Laurent, whose relationship develops the more they're thrown together by the investigation, have much room to grow, and the writers--Ed Solomon, Boaz Yakin, and Edward Riccourt--tend to cliches, such as a budding but suppressed romance.

Louis Leterrier's direction is sure-footed enough though. He's intent on showing us a good time, and for the most part he succeeds. Watching Now You See Me is like watching really entertaining trash on TV: no one is likely to remember it a year from now, but it's a welcome diversion from all the other summer fodder, which involve superheroes and the like. 115 min. ★★

Warm Bodies

Warm Bodies is maybe the first feel-good zombie movie. It's based on a novel by Isaac Marion, and was written for the screen and directed by Jonathan Levine. When it comes to the very trendy sub-genre of dark romantic thrillers for teen audiences, Warm Bodies is several notches up the rung from Twilight. The plot is one you're familiar with: something apocalyptic has reduced a significant portion of the human race to mindless flesh-eaters, and the surviving humans have walled themselves in to try and stay uninfected. But when a group of adolescents is sent outside their little version of the Berlin Wall to try and procure supplies, one of them has an encounter with a zombie who's, not like all the others: the narrator, R, a zombie who can talk, and who, the more he is exposed to human life, seems to be changing from walking dead to walking...alive. And it's catching on with the other zombies. (Except for the "bonies," rotting skeletal creatures that resemble the Terminator near the end of that movie, who are so far gone that they're like the really bad zombies, the ones that cannot be changed.)

Warm Bodies offers some surprising sparks of philosophical thought. Can a zombie be regenerated, made alive again? Can there be good zombies and bad zombies? Should humans treat zombies with compassion or disgust? Can a human fall in love with a zombie? What's all this fuss about necrophilia? Or dating the guy who ate your boyfriend's brain?

That zombies serve a convenient function--they're symbols of us, of course!--is an obvious notion, and we might be tempted to give Warm Bodies perhaps more credit than it deserves for holding humans up to the light of social satire by making the zombies look more like us and vice versa. There were some well-aimed shots at our technological zombiefication, and our inability to connect with people. Warm Bodies is like the poster child for all the hipster-organic community cults out there today. (And I'm only half-criticizing them.)

Despite its philosophical underpinnings, Warm Bodies is a pretty simple love story with some horror imagery and apocalyptic themes thrown in for good measure. If this film had tried to tackle a lot of themes and plotlines, it wouldn't have worked. It would have been another monstrous franchise-initiator. Instead, it's an endearing little rom-com-horror flick, anchored by the two leads: Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer. With Rob Corddry, Dave Franco, Analeigh Tipton, and John Malkovich. 97 min. ★★★

Fright Night

The original Fright Night (1985) was a celebration and a send-up of camp. The movie opens to a dimly lit suburban neighborhood around midnight, and the audio of a late-nite horror movie program leads us into the bedroom of our hero, Charlie Brewster, who's too busy making out with his girlfriend to notice what's going on at his new neighbor's house, at first. Fright Night 1985 is something special to me, so I felt ambivalent toward the idea of a remake.

The 2011 remake gives Fright Night a contemporary make-over. It would seem like a refreshing antidote to the banality of Twilight, which is pure drivel as romance or as gothic horror.

We'll start with the good things: Anton Yelchin makes for a convincing Charlie Brewster, the put-upon boy-who-cried-wolf of the movie, who's unwilling to accept his nerdy friend Ed's claim that Charlie's new neighbor, the dashing Jerry Dandrige, is a bloodsucking vampire. As Dandrige, Colin Farrell is wonderfully ominous. He's so enjoyable as the vampire that you have a hard time sympathizing with the would-be victims. Dandrige likes screwing with his prey, playing darkly funny little mind games with them. Unfortunately, the scenes of Dandrige attacking his victims fall flat. There's something unconvincing about the way he tears open their necks (and their deaths seem meaningless the way they do in slasher movies). Only the satisfaction in Jerry's face works for those scenes--his insatiable appetite for blood is momentarily soothed, and he reminds you that the vampire is the ultimate junky.

The Peter Vincent character, played as a doddering old coward by Roddy McDowall in the 1985 version, has been altered for humorous affect to be a Las Vegas hack occultist with a nightly horror show. David Tennant plays him, and he invests some momentary comic relief, but his part never gets knitted into the story with any real panache. He and Charlie don't really mesh as a duo--they aren't given enough time.

Which brings me to the not-so-good stuff. The movie plays all its cards too soon. Characters aren't developed, relationships either, with the right pacing or momentum. We're meant to assume a lot about these relationships that, without experiencing them in the right ways and amounts of time, end up hurting the movie. It's harder to care about the characters let alone be scared for them. The humor in the movie is good because it keeps things light and helps avoid heavy-handedness, but at the same time no one seems very invested in what's happening. And there isn't that affection for the genre that makes a good horror-comedy click and resonate the way it should.

The rest of the cast includes Toni Collete as Charlie's mom (well-played for more comic effect), Imogen Poots as his girlfriend Amy, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Ed. He doesn't even come close to the off-the-wall performance of Stephen Geoffreys in the first film. He's too subdued, too nerdy to be frightening when he inevitably turns into an enemy. And that's the real problem with the remake: it's not all that scary. But it's good for a laugh, and probably worth seeing for Colin Farrell's performance alone.

The scene at the end with all the vampires is another problem. It reminded me of the part in Salem's Lot when they stumble upon Barlow's coffin under the house but are accosted by all his vampire henchmen. It's also mildly reminiscent of that wonderfully giddy moment in Re-Animator when all the corpses shoot up out of their gurneys in unison. Unfortunately, director Craig Gillespie doesn't seem to know how to make that scene pop the way it should. It feels deflated. The only other thing I'll say about the ending is that its kind to the viewer in not subjecting us to twelve phony climaxes the way so many action and horror movies feel obliged to do---the finale is nicely compact.