Bedfellows of the Strange

Brooklyn (2015): adapted by Nick Hornby from the novel by Colm Toibin; directed by John Crowley; starring Saoirse Ronan (Ellis Lacey), Fiona Glascott (Rose Lacey), Jane Brennan (Mary Lacey), Emory Cohen (Tony), and Domhnall Gleason (Jim Farrell): Pleasant, nicely acted melodrama got a couple of Oscar nominations for Saoirse Ronan (Best Actress) and Nick Hornby (Best Adapted Screenplay). Montreal also does fine work pretending to be a town in Ireland in 1952. This is the sort of immigrant's story that makes me think of Golden Age Hollywood and earnest CBC movies. But the cast is charming and the low-key writing and characterization fine except for a bit involving an eight-year-old boy writing love letters for his writing-challenged older brother that seems to have wandered into the movie from some lame 1970's Disney comedy. Recommended.

The Sitter (2011): written by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka; directed by David Gordon Green; starring Jonah Hill (Noah), Sam Rockwell (Karl), Ari Graynor (Marisa), Max Records (Slater), Landry Bender (Blithe), Kevin Hernandez (Rodrigo), and JB Smoove (Julio): Jonah Hill plays Fat Jonah Hill for the last time (to date) in a movie that's a lot funnier than it should be. One thing that helps is that the movie isn't simply foul-mouthed -- it's intermittently perverse, which is actually rare. It's also short and surprisingly tightly plotted and directed. Recommended.

Date Night (2010): written by Josh Klausner; directed by Shaun Levy; starring Steve Carell (Phil Foster), Tina Fey (Claire Foster), Mark Wahlberg (Holbrooke), and Taraji P. Henson (Detective Arroyo): A bit of a mess into which I assume Tina Fey and Steve Carell were parachuted so as to improvise some laughs. This bullets-and-cops-and-fish-out-of-water comedy seems to have been written in, oh, 1985. It wasn't, but it seems like it. A short, perfectly adequate time-waster that would have been even better with a Giorgio Moroder soundtrack and star turns from Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn. Lightly recommended.

The Watch (2012): written by Jared Stern, Seth Rogen, and Evan Goldberg; directed by Akiva Schaffer; starring Ben Stiller (Evan), Vince Vaughn (Bob), Jonah Hill (Franklin), Richard Ayoade (Jamarcus), and Rosemarie DeWitt (Abby): The Trayvon Martin tragedy saw the studio re-title this film (from Neighbourhood Watch). I don't know if some scenes were removed as well. The movie seems to lack a transitional middle section, but that may just be sloppy writing and/or editing. 

This cast and these writers should have managed something at least mildly great. They don't, but the movie improves noticeably about 45 minutes in as it finally gains some traction and leaves the sad-nebbish comedy behind for loopier stuff involving an alien invasion of suburbia centered on the local Costco, of which Ben Stiller is the manager. Richard Ayoade (Maurice Moss on The IT Crowd) is mostly wasted, though he manages to put an amusing spin on some of his lines. Stiller and the newly thinnish Jonah Hill are also fine. Vince Vaughn is a comedy-killing machine, as is mostly always the case. He's the place where jokes go to die. Lightly recommended.

Heroes and Misfires

The Amazing Spider-man 2: based on comics by Stan Lee, Gerry Conway, Gil Kane, Steve Ditko, Ross Andru, and others; written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Jeff Pinkner, and James Vanderbilt; directed by Marc Webb; starring Andrew Garfield (Spider-man/Peter Parker), Emma Stone (Gwen Stacy), Jamie Foxx (Electro/ Max Dillon), Dane DeHaan (Green Goblin/ Harry Osborn), Sally Field (Aunt May) and Chris Cooper (Norman Osborn) (2014): Not a complete misfire in the tradition of Batman and Robin or Ang Lee's Hulk, but also not a particularly good movie. 

Sony's desire to stuff in a whole bunch of crap about the Sinister Six didn't help things. Neither did trying to deal with both Electro and Harry Osborn's transformation into the Green Goblin into the same movie. Nor did all the ridiculous, exposition-heavy crap about Peter Parker's parents, their hidden Laboratory of Solitude, the Osborn family disease, Gwen Stacy's interview with Oxford University, and so on, and so forth. The whole goddamn thing ends up feeling like the second season of a TV series condensed into a sporadically draggy 2 1/2 hours.

You might want to watch it at home over two or three nights. You might also wonder why the film-makers turned C-list Spider-man villain Electro into a combination of Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan and Jim Carrey's version of the Riddler in Batman Forever. That's some nice borrowing, boys! Oh, and Gwen Stacy dies at the end. It was a bad idea in the comics in the early 1970's, and it's a bad idea now. God forbid superheroes just break up. Not really recommended.

X-Men: First Class: based on characters created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and others; written by Brian Singer, Sheldon Turner, Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman, Zack Stentz, and Ashley Miller; directed by Matthew Vaughn; starring James McAvoy (Professor X), Michael Fassbender (Magneto), Kevin Bacon (Sebastian Shaw), Rose Byrne (Moira MacTaggart), Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique), January Jones (Emma Frost), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), and a cast of thousands (2011): Competent, occasionally plodding origin story for the X-Men of the 1960's. That it didn't gross enough money is why we got X-Men: Days of Future Past and not X-Men: Freshman 15 or X-Men: Second Class. 

This isn't really a movie where one suspends one's disbelief to believe in superpowers. It's more of a movie where one suspends one's disbelief so as to believe that Michael Fassbender would age into Ian MacKellan, or James MacAvoy into Patrick Stewart. It's completely ridiculous, but we go with it, along with Rebecca Romjin starting off as Jennifer Lawrence, because one must do as one needs must when the Devil vomits in one's tea kettle.

The whole thing plays out as a counter-historical spy thriller set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, only with more mutants. A lot of the story's events rely on people with super-powers either not using them at all, or not using them against the people they should use them against. They stand around a lot, these mutants, or they move frenetically and with lots of noise. There's really no middle ground. And how the screenwriters, all four hundred of them, managed to turn Moira MacTaggart from a geneticist into a CIA agent must make one hell of a writers' room story. Lightly recommended.

Cuban Fury: written by Jon Brown and Nick Frost; directed by James Griffiths; starring Nick Frost (Bruce Garrett), Chris O'Dowd (Drew), Ian McShane (Ron Parfitt), Rashida Jones (Julia), Alexandra Roach (Helen), and Olivia Colman (Sam Garrett) (2014): Delightful romp from Nick Frost and company. Frost plays a former teen-aged salsa dancing prodigy whose love for the dance was destroyed by bullies. 25 years later, he gets a crush on his new boss (Rashida Jones), who turns out to be a salsa dancer herself. So Frost's character goes back into training.

It's all somewhat familiar in its plot beats, but Cuban Fury's subject matter (salsa dancing? in England? with Nick Frost?) makes the whole thing zing. The writers give the characters decent lines to say. And for all the focus on bullying, the movie views most people as benevolent. Having Ian McShane as the grumpy salsa instructor is some sort of casting genius. And having Chris O'Dowd play against type as a complete jerk also pays dividends. Recommended.

Despicable Me: written by Sergio Pablos, Ken Daurio, and Cinco Paul; directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud; starring the voices of Steve Carell (Gru), Jason Segel (Vector), Russell Brand (Dr. Nefario), Julie Andrews (Gru's Mom), Will Arnett (Mr. Perkins), and Kristen Wiig (Miss Hattie) (2010): Jolly animated foray into the world of super-villains is far better than the vast majority of live-action superhero movies. And it makes about as much sense. Steve Carell's bizarrely accented super-villain Gru is hilarious, the three girls he adopts as part of his nefarious plan to steal the Moon are adorable, and Gru's seemingly infinite supply of yellow-skinned, semi-robotic minions are scene-stealers (which is probably why they'll soon have their own movie). Highly recommended.

Clean and Jerk

Despicable Me 2: written by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio; directed by Peter Coffin and Chris Renaud; starring the voices of Steve Carell (Gru), Kristen Wiig (Lucy), Benjamin Bratt (Eduardo) and Russell Brand (Dr. Nefario) (2013): Fairly delightful animated romp sees reformed supervillain Gru enlisted by the Anti-Villain League to track down a new threat to world peace. The animation is clean and appealing, and the voicework by Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig especially is top-notch. There's a bit of dragginess in the middle, but nothing fatal. And boy, the little girls and the minions are cute. Recommended.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (Collected 2000): This early collection of published and spoken-word essays by David Sedaris divides into two sections, one dealing mostly with his childhood and pre-writing life, the other with his adventures living in a small town in France. It's all extremely funny and occasionally moving, though Sedaris doesn't ever lean towards sentimentality (or even sentiment, for that matter), preferring sarcasm and pointed observations directed as much at himself as at anyone else in his circle of family, friends, or acquaintances. His is a distinctive comic voice right from the beginning. Recommended.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World: written and directed by Lorene Scarfaria; starring Steve Carell (Dodge), Keira Knightley (Penny), Rob Corddry (Warren), Martin Sheen (Frank), Connie Britton (Diane) and William Petersen (Trucker) (2012): A small independent film with an A-list cast, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World got an unfairly limited release last summer. It's a small gem of a romantic comedy set against the backdrop of impending global apocalypse.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is the sort of science-fiction film that most people don't realize is a science-fiction film because it's concerned with character and not plot. But it is science fiction of the adult sort that almost never make it into a film, one in which the social implications of the impact of one changed premise upon a society are explored with wit, humour, and a certain amount of poignance.

A giant (actually, a really, really giant, as in ridiculously giant) asteroid will soon destroy life as we know it. On the bright side, the asteroid is named Matilda. Steve Carell's Dodge, whose wife runs out on him with three weeks to go until doomsday, is a slightly repressed and deeply unhappy insurance salesman. Keira Knightley is his free-spirit upstairs neighbour. Some of what happens between them can be predicted, but not all of it.

Forced together into a road trip, she to find a plane to get her back home to England to be with her family and he to desperately reconnect with the love of his life, they have a series of wacky but thankfully realistically muted adventures that net them a truck with a bullet hole in the windshield, a cute dog, and a lot of unpacking of emotional baggage.

Developments with the asteroid mostly go on in the background; in the foreground, people run the gamut of emotions and actions one would expect in such a situation. The power-company people are the real heroes here, as the electricity stays on pretty much right to the end. Kudos!

A nitpicker with even a bit of astronomical knowledge will probably decide by the end of this film that one way or the other, aliens are involved with this asteroid. With personal theories resulting from these asteroidal shenanigans (though the science here is at least as realistic as what happens with the comet and the asteroid in Deep Impact and Armageddon, respectively), one can decide what happens after the final scene in a way that I don't think writer-director Lorene Scarfaria intended.

As it stands, this is a worthy addition to that small but sturdy sub-genre of films with the apocalypse in the background and not the foreground (see also Last Night, Melancholia, and apparently five or six comedies coming out in the next six months). Knightley is really good, as is Carell, and the supporting characters are also all clearly defined and believeable. Recommended.

Crazy, Stupid, Love

Crazy, Stupid, Love: written by Dan Fogelman; directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa; starring Steve Carell (Cal Weaver), Ryan Gosling (Jacob Palmer), Julianne Moore (Emily Weaver), Emma Stone (Hannah), Analeigh Tipton (Jessica Riley), Jonah Bobo (Robbie Weaver), Marisa Tomei (Kate Taffety), Josh Groban (Richard), and Kevin Bacon (David Lindhagen) (2011): Enjoyable, simplistic trifle that seems even better than it probably is when compared to the dire state of the modern cinematic romantic comedy. Also, neither Katherine Heigl nor Jennifer Aniston are anywhere to be found.

What we get is a group of interlocking love stories. Steve Carell's character becomes estranged from wife Julianne Moore; Carell's 13-year-old son obsesses over the 17-year-old babysitter; the 17-year-old babysitter obsesses over Steve Carell; scoundrel Ryan Gosling takes the separated Carell under his wing to teach him how to pick up women; Julianne Moore tries to continue the fling she had with Kevin Bacon; Gosling finds himself falling in love with Emma Stone's recent law-school graduate. Whew!

If you believe in soulmates, you'll probably like this movie a lot. Thankfully, there's also a lot of unforced, generally believeable humour stemming from romantic success and heartbreak, including some nice slapstick at a backyard party -- several scenes take the film unflinchingly into screwball comedy territory, and Carell is good at that sort of thing.

The rest of the cast is game -- Stone and Gosling especially -- and the whole thing goes down pretty smoothly. You may get creeped out a bit by the babysitter/son plot thread. It really walks the line between funny and creepy. Or clever and stupid. Recommended.