You should probably lower your expectations of 'Sisters'.

Sisters, the latest movie pairing of TV stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, is too bawdy for people who loved Baby Mama and too conventional to really sizzle as an R-rated party comedy. The film, which was directed by Jason Moore (Pitch Perfect) and written by SNL veteran Paula Pell, is banking on the hope that your love for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler will somehow make you love this movie, whether it’s good or not. Sadly, Sisters is overall a disappointing effort. And it looked promising from the trailers. Sisters does offer some laughs, but just as many moments fall flat. In that sense, it’s like any episode of Saturday Night Live. (And it will probably be better a few years from now while you’re flipping channels late one night.)

At this point, the rapport between Fey and Poehler isn’t enough on which to build a movie. (But it was enough to get my expectations extremely high.) I love both 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation very much, and I love imagining that Amy and Tina are best friends, and that they are a kind of 21st-century Mary and Rhoda, only they aren’t fictional characters. But the beloved shows of these two very funny women aren’t merely based on the personalities of their stars. It’s good writing that lets Tina Fey and Amy Poehler shine, and Sisters feels underdeveloped. Even the characters aren’t particularly fresh: Fey plays the older sister Kate, a party monster and perpetual screw-up (a personality that is, from what I know, very far from the actual Tina Fey); and Poehler, also playing someone quite different from herself, is the always dependable, competent younger sister Maura.

The film mostly takes place in Orlando, where Kate and Maura return to their childhood home only to find that their parents (James Brolin and Dianne Wiest, who have far too little screen time) have sold it. The girls are tasked with cleaning out their bedroom (which apparently was once two separate rooms before they knocked down the adjoining wall). Devastated by the news that the house they grew up in will no longer be accessible, Kate and Maura vow to throw one last party and invite all their friends from high school.

Much of the humor focuses on aging and nostalgia. The girls’ room is a virtual time capsule, taking us back to every forgotten pop culture object of the 1980s. You get the feeling that the creators of this (probably with help from the stars) simply wanted an excuse to film all the things they loved as teenagers. There’s a montage of the women reliving their adolescence (the room is pretty great as a shrine to teenage girls circa 1986), but the funniest moment is in the trailer, when Poehler stands against her Xanadu poster with a blow drier pointed at her head to give her the Olivia Newton John flowing-hair effect. 

Even the conversations in this movie are often about the past. This feels like old hat, simply the Tina and Amy version of whatever other recent comedies have focused on characters stuck in their teen years. Comedies right now love critiquing characters who refuse to grow up--at the end, after they’ve basically allowed their characters to be utter children for nearly two hours. Sisters does the same: Kate and Maura cannot get over the past, and it’s pretty clear from their guests that everyone has calcified into some banal generic grown-up version of her or his formerly unique self. (This pro-youth propaganda, I’m sure, isn’t something that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler really wish to perpetuate.)

Sisters is about reconciling one’s youthful energy of the past with one’s tired present defeatism. But none of the guests has the energy to re-conjure the madcap, orgiastic hijinks of their youth. Their friends want a Big Chill-esque chat session, but the ladies are thinking Animal House-style rager. (One of their sleazier friends--played by John Leguizamo--summons his drug dealer, played by John Cena, whose assorted powders and pills, etc. help liven up the proceedings.)

Good party scenes are particularly challenging filmmaking feats. One of the best party scenes occurs in the otherwise overrated Breakfast at Tiffany’s. That sequence bubbles with energy, and Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly, mostly an annoying affectation of a character, crystallizes into something charming and clever in those moments. Valley Girl, a minor 80s classic, has a pretty good extended party scene too, although it’s not quite as well-shaped as the one from Tiffany’s. Both of them feel of their time: we become flies on the wall imbibing the flavor of the 1960s or the 1980s, respectively. These scenes build to something (whether it’s a fight or a kiss or some little bit of slapstick), and in a way those party sequences are like mini-narratives inside a larger story. Sisters is one long party full of comic actors trying very hard to be funny and sometimes succeeding. There’s less shaping and more, “let’s throw this up and see if it sticks.” And there are plenty of sticky things happening in Sisters. You can go whole scenes without laughing, or you might get a solid belly laugh here and there. Perhaps it will depend largely on your mood and your expectations.

This is also the raunchiest collaboration between Fey and Poehler. The guests let their freak flags fly with a little help from cocaine. For some inexplicable reason, director Jason Moore is overly fond one one particularly grating character named Alex (played by current SNL cast member Bobby Moynahan), who screams unfunny jokes at the camera even before he begins inhaling cocaine like it’s air. At different times we see Alex pleasuring himself with food and then later with one of the Vietnamese salon girls that Maura invited to the party. There’s a particularly painful to watch scene involving actor Ike Barinholtz (playing Maura’s love interest), his rectum, and a ballerina music box. Unfortunately, that gag is ruined by the movie trailer, as is the great throwaway line uttered by Tina Fey (to John Cena’s character): “You’re the type of bad-ass that I was susceptible to.” (John Cena, incidentally, may be the breakout star of 2015 what with his surprisingly endearing and very funny performance in Trainwreck and his comic relief here in Sisters.)

Other comic stars tag along for the fun: Maya Rudolph (the foil, a high school rival of Kate’s), Samantha Bee, Kate McKinnon, Rachel Dratch, Britt Lower, and Chris Parnell, to name a few. But comedy can’t be forced. Sisters feels like the cinematic equivalent of constipation: the whole movie is exhausted and red-faced. And it may be better if you lower your expectations.

John Wick

There are so many elegant little touches in John Wick that it would be tempting to dismiss them as out of place in an intensely violent revenge picture. There’s a scene in a cemetery early in the film, and the tombstones in the foreground are thrown into relief by the skyscrapers of New York in the background, so that the buildings really just look like taller tombstones. Yes, one can read a lot of symbolism into this shot, but it’s better, perhaps, to think of it as simply an artful shot, conceived by a director (Chad Stahelski) and a cinematographer (Jonathan Sela) who love movies and love what they can suggest visually in movies. This isn’t an attempt to be showy or pompous, it’s just exuberant filmmaking.

It’s precisely that exuberant filmmaking that our popular genres have been missing for so long. The skillful ways that Stahelski elevates the visual elements of John Wick set it apart from the rest of its ilk, and that’s a wonderful, refreshing surprise. It’s the only action movie in recent memory that actually cares about being a movie. (Except Skyfall. And maybe a few others.) The violence is so exciting, so well-staged and suspenseful, that you might forget just how brutal it would be in real life. (I did feel overwhelmed at times, but I’m not an aficionado of this genre per se.) Viewers who have been made to sit through so much garden variety action crap may find their appetites wetted for a renewed standard of quality, one that they had forgotten after years of being mediocritied to death. (No, that’s not a real word.)

This is a perversely beautiful movie, which is just the right kind of beautiful for a “mindless” action thriller. Even the performance of Keanu Reeves—who is nothing if not a spotty actor—adds to the film’s panache. He doesn’t have a lot of speaking lines, and Stahelski uses this to his advantage, pointing up Reeves’s look: He’s a lean, fit, poised killing machine, and if anyone imagined that at fifty Reeves was less capable of ass-kicking, John Wick offers ample proof to the contrary. Actually, Keanu Reeves is one of those actors whose badness somehow translates into goodness.

When Reeves shouted “I am an FBI agent!” in Point Break, I laughed hysterically. Then I recorded the sound clip with my phone and made it one of my ring tones. I don’t suppose it will sound sincere, but I like Reeves’ acting as it is. He never seems insincere, but he often struggles to sound believable as an actor. But you admire him for trying, and it’s hard not to be impressed with his physical presence on the screen. Even now he can grab an audience in a way that seemingly more magnetic stars like Johnny Depp or Leonardo DiCaprio cannot. He’s more believable as an everyman than Depp, and more in touch with his physicality than DiCaprio.

The first half of John Wick has a murky atmosphere that suits the mood of the title character, who’s grieving the death of his wife and completely alone. But then something happens that ignites Wick’s sense of vengeance, and he goes after a group of Russian mobsters with the full force of his hatred and his considerable skills as a professional killer, one whose services the mob frequented before he retired. In one scene, a group of masked men working for the Russian mobsters raids Wick’s house, but he takes them on with enjoyable ease and an impressive degree of cold skill and smarts.

We’re usually treated to fight scenes that are virtually incomprehensible because of the rapid camera movement and editing. John Wick shows off its star’s abilities and its filmmakers’ too—letting us see fighting that is masterfully staged and actually, you know, visible. The suspense from those scenes is organic, never forced by flashy editing. In a later sequence—a big showdown at a nightclub all glossed out in neon reds, greens and pinks, Stahelski is at the peak of his powers: the violence hits an all-time high in its indefensibleness, and the visual beauty—all the colors and the exciting ways that the actors inhabit their bodies and the choreography of their brawling—combine into a riveting display of sheer vainglorious mayhem. After a while you begin to feel exhausted by the intensity of it, but never numb, and as the film is mercilessly short at 98 minutes, you’re not there long enough to resent the movie for its carnage. And the movie is still very tame if you compare it to something like a Tarantino film. It’s violent but not excessively gory. John Wick is intense, funny, well-mounted kung fu, only with machine guns.

With Michael Nyqvist Alfie Allen, Willem Defoe, Dean Winters (hilarious as the Russian mobster’s non-fighting right-hand-man), Adrianne Palicki, Bridget Moynahan, John Leguizamo, and Ian McShane. Written by Derek Kolstad.

Chef

It's the most conveniently worked out movie I've seen in a long time, and yet Chef is the most fun movie I've seen this year (so far). It's an utterly joyous, unashamed foodie road trip movie about a once celebrated chef named Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) whose public meltdown (when he confronts a food critic who trashed him) goes viral and ends up completely uprooting his life. Casper was once the darling of the culinary world, but now he's old hat. For the past decade he's seemingly been in an ideal position as head chef at a well-known restaurant in California, but secretly it's confined him, made him unhappy and forced him to settle for a routine. Moreover, things are not great between him and his 10-year-old son Percy (played with delightful matter-of-factness by Emjay Anthony). Percy hasn't adjusted to his parents' divorce, even though they have the most amicable broken marriage in history.

But then, Carl gives in to his ex-wife's suggestion that he purchase a food truck and start making the recipes he's good at and wants to make. This suggestion--which Carl predictably balks at initially--proves to be a winner, and provides a framework for a new bond between father and son. They all go to Miami to grab the truck, and then Carl, his son, and Carl's long-time colleague (John Leguizamo) who also conveniently shows up to join in their grand foodventure, trek across country making Cubans, beignets, and assorted other delicious delicacies as they head back to California.

Jon Favreau wrote and directed Chef, and he captures the zeal of a foodie in this movie: We get to see the mouth-watering recipes that Carl cooks up, and the delight that appears on his face when he discovers a new, delicious dish, and the art that food can conjure up. It's perhaps the most accessible art form there is.

But I can already hear the critical voices in my head. I heard them last night in the theater about an hour into the movie. I looked at one of the friends with whom I was sitting and both of us were thinking, "something has to go wrong, right?" We were waiting and waiting for a problem to arrive. Granted, the film did have an initial problem, that being Carl Casper's embarrassing viral video fiasco and the subsequent destruction of his career. But things pick up very fast, and everything is all the more convenient for Carl because his ex-wife is supportive in a way that seems totally unrealistic. My inner-critic and my movie-watching past had primed me for some other contrived conflict to be inserted into the narrative. That moment, that conflict, never came. And we were left thinking, should we be okay with this? Is Chef too easy on its characters? Does everything work out too conveniently?

Oh right. It's a movie. And thank you Chef for giving us a movie that is a freaking movie. It's just so rare these days to find one that doesn't want to throw millions of contrived obstacles in its characters' paths. Yes, the events in Chef, the people in Chef, are perhaps unrealistic. The ex-wife (played with verve by Sofia Vergara) is so obviously still in love with Carl (and he with her) that you just know they're going to get back together. It's like The Parent Trap. And the son so desperately longs to be a part of Carl's world, that Carl's myopic inability to get to know his son (at first) seems to be the only real contrivance here. In fact, it was Jon Favreau's character that threatened to be the one annoying thing about this movie. For the first twenty minutes, as we watch him self-destruct, he's very obviously his own worst enemy. And that did get on my nerves. But things quickly change for the better, and this movie won me over thoroughly. And at least there were big things at stake in this movie: Carl's career, his relationship with his son, his own belief in himself.

There's another side to Chef that makes it culturally very relevant, or maybe just culturally amusing, actually. The film taps into the way the internet has revolutionized how we live and interact with each other. Favreau paints himself as the typically technologically-inept grown-up, whose son runs rings around him with a smart phone and uses Twitter (a website which Carl often amusingly fails to understand) to advertise the whereabouts of their food truck. In fact, it is Carl's ineptitude that triggers the whole movie: what he imagines to be a private message (via Twitter) to the food critic who slammed him, is actually seen by all and eventually passed on to thousands and thousands of people. Perhaps this movie was funded by Twitter? It can be difficult to distinguish between a movie that plugs a giant social media site and one that shows us how it has affected us. Chef falls into the second category.

For some time now I've wondered how movies would change as a result of the cell phone age and the internet age, and how movies would depict characters interacting with their gadgets, and I think Chef does a fine job of this. It makes use of these new things that seem to be taking over more and more parts of our lives, and manages to show us the best and the worst about them with a sense of humor. Perhaps the best example of a movie critiquing our gadget addiction is Don Jon, the Joseph Gordon-Levitt comedy in which his character's sister is always glued to her phone, and barely speaks a word through the entire film.

Finally, I once again feel the need to defend Chef. Yes, yes, yes, it is too damned easy. Everything just works out so nicely. But it was such a pleasure to watch, such a happy, energetic, likable movie, that I don't care. I hope people will give this movie a chance and not resort to picking its story apart because we're all so used to something more cynical in our entertainment, even when it comes to our comedies. With Scarlet Johansson, Dustin Hoffman, Amy Sedaris (in a very funny cameo as Carl's ex-wife's publicist), Robert Downey, Jr., Bobby Cannavale, and Oliver Platt (as the food critic).

Land of the Dead

Land of the Dead (2005) is a problematic zombie outing, the fourth go-round for writer-director George Romero, whose obvious attempts at social commentary have never been clumsier. The setting is a walled city full of zombie apocalypse survivors. A swanky high-rise called Fiddler's Green separates the rich from the poor (who are confined to the streets and the slummier residences), and in the scene where Romero shows us "The Green" he can't resist the urge to cut to a shot of a big birdcage. Because the birds are like a metaphor, man! Romero lays on lots of "social satire," but none of it amounts to anything revelatory. People want to go back to normal. Normal is bad. Zombies are bad but not as bad as people, who are worse. It's all so damned obvious, like a lofty essay written by a student who thinks he's spinning rhetorical gold. (There's some really bad expository narration over the main credits, too.)

I don't mean to hate on George Romero. I grew up on Night of the Living Dead and its sequels. He's done good work before, and Land isn't a terrible movie. For all their flaws, the first three Dead films worked, and much of Land works too, despite its crummy dialogue and squishy, almost underwhelming plotting. And occasionally there are good bits of dialogue, like when John Leguizamo, as one of the grunts working for the "emperor" of Fiddler's Green, says "Looks like God left the phone off the hook." But the good lines always feel improvised, while I'm convinced the really bad ones were worked out on paper by Romero, gleaming with self-satisfaction.

There's an off-kilter pace to Land that results in a lack of suspense. The movie cuts back and forth between two parallel stories that are perhaps not as compelling as the director would like to believe. I think the problem is that we all know exactly what's going to happen, and this foreknowledge takes some of the air out of Romero's story, because he seems so convinced that he's surprising us. Nevertheless, the movie is an entertaining mess, full of enjoyable visuals. (It is pretty disgusting, though, especially if you watch the unrated version, which is, unfortunately, the only version available in widescreen at this time.)

Dennis Hopper makes an amusing appearance as Kaufman, the guy who runs the city with his briefcase full of money. But it's hard to understand his devotion to capital in a post-apocalyptic world, and even harder to understand why anybody would follow him. (Romero seems too in love with his own ideas to fashion them so that they'll fit within the confines of his movie.) Simon Baker plays the hero, a guy named Reilly who used to go outside the city to procure supplies, but is tired of working for the Man and wants to find his own way. (He's like, a loner.) I really enjoyed Leguizamo's performance. He's a foil, the greedy upstart who wants to steal Kaufman's money. (Again with the money, though. Who freaking cares?)

There is one nifty idea amidst all this: when Kaufman's grunts go out of the city to make supply runs, they shoot fireworks off to keep the zombies distracted. It's a cool effect, and the one little piece of invention that seems clever without being forced or "impressive". The zombies, it should be mentioned, aren't as memorable as they were in the first three films. They look too generic, and Romero's attempts to humanize them often come off as unintentionally funny. There's one zombie, poorly nicknamed Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), who seems to be getting smarter, and he tries to rub off on the other ghouls, with mixed results. (It worked better with "Bub" in Day of the Dead.)

Robert Joy also makes an impression, as Simon Baker's sidekick. He's ostensibly dim-witted but loyal (not to mention a crackshot), and gives the best and least appreciated performance in the film. Also starring Asia Argento (daughter of Italian horror maestro Dario), Alan Van Sprang, and Shawn Roberts. ★★½