You’re Cordially Invited

You’re Cordially Invited

Posted on January 30, 2025 at 5:00 pm

C
Lowest Recommended Age: High School
MPAA Rating: Rated R for language throughout and some sexual references
Profanity: Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking and drunkenness
Violence/ Scariness: Comic peril and violence with some grisly wounds
Diversity Issues: None
Date Released to Theaters: January 31, 2025

There are so many brilliant, funny, wildly talented people in and behind this movie that it is difficult to understand why it is so hard to watch.

Writer/director Nick Stoller is responsible for comedy hits like “Get Him to the Greek,” “The Muppets” (2001), and “Yes Man” along with lesser entries like “Zoolander 2” and “Night School.” He filled the movie with top comedy powerhouses Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon, supported by immensely talented up-and-coming performers Geraldine Viswanathan (“The Broken Hearts Gallery,” “Blockers”), Meredith Hagner (“Bad Monkey”), Jimmy Tatro (“Theater Camp,” the under-appreciated television series “Home Economics”), and solid supporting comic actors Fortune Feimster, Jack McBrayer, and Rory Scovel, plus the very funny stand-up comic Leanne Morgan and Keyla Monterroso Mejia, a standout in this month’s “One of Them Days.”

But one crucial ingredient is missing: the stakes. The entire premise for the film is that a luxury island destination off the coast of Georgia has been double booked. Why? Because the elderly lady who took one of the reservations had a heart attack and died before she could write it down with a working pen in the hotel’s calendar book. Fun, right? It is close to impossible to care which bride gets what services and even more difficult to care about any of the people who do care about it.

There is single dad Jim (Ferrell), whose entire life has revolved around his daughter, Jenni (Viswanathan) since her mother died when she was a little girl. It is supposed to be both funny and endearing that she is his whole world. It is not. For example, the two of them have a “cute” little musical number they like to perform together, apparently without ever having listened to the lyrics. It’s “Islands in the Stream,” which is of course a love song duet with the couple singing about making love.” Ew. Jenni wanted her best friend and maid of honor Heather (Mejia) to make all the plans, so Jim has not confirmed any of the details.

In the other corner is reality television producer Margot (Witherspoon), who does not get along with anyone in her family except for her baby sister Neve (Hagner), who is her favorite person in the world. As a producer and, if this is not redundant, control freak, Margot has made three visits to the island to nail down everything up to and including the canapés. And as someone who feels her family does not appreciate or approve of her, she is ready for battle over every one of those details.

Both have emotional attachments to the venue. Jim and his late wife were married there. Margo and Neve spent summers on the island with their late grandmother. At first they try to get along but very soon this leads to a succession of petty, silly, and mostly dull efforts to obliterate each other, with escalating hijinks that make these people more and more unpleasant. A bride gets hit in the face, leaving a huge bruise. A wedding party gets knocked into the water. There is a sharp contrast between the slapstick and the exquisite music (not “Islands in the Stream” — the soundtrack also features a gorgeous song from Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” and operatic selections). It is a nagging reminder of the gulf between the meaning of the events, which even the couples seem to have overlooked, and the ridiculous pettiness of the conflicts.

Parents should know that this movie has a lot of very strong and crude language with sexual references. There is also a lot of comic peril and violence. No one is badly hurt but we do see some bloody woulds and a bad bruise.

Family discussion: Would you want to attend either of these weddings? What weddings have you been to that you especially enjoyed?

If you like this, try: better movies with the cast including “The Broken Hearts Gallery,” “Stranger than Fiction,” and “Legally Blonde”

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One of Them Days

One of Them Days

Posted on January 15, 2025 at 8:34 pm

B +
Lowest Recommended Age: High School
MPAA Rating: Rated R for brief drug use, sexual material, and language throughout
Profanity: Constant strong language including the n-word
Alcohol/ Drugs: Brief drug use
Violence/ Scariness: Comic peril and violence, one very bloody scene, gangster violence, fire
Diversity Issues: A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters: January 17, 2025

If winter seems unending and the headlines have you down, “One of Them Days” will cheer you up. Keke Palmer (Dreux) and SZA (Alyssa) play best friends and roommates having a day that gets even more wildly and more hilariously wrong, It is crazy, silly, over-the-top, and a ton of fun.

Copyright 2025 Sony

We first see Dreux near the end of her overnight shift at Norm’s, part of a chain of diners. We can see that she is good at her job, friendly, capable, caring with her regular customers. Dreux is organized and focused. Alyssa is more of a free spirit, an artist who says she is in touch with her ancestors and trusts to the universe to take care of her.

Dreux leaves Norm’s at 7 am. At 4, she will have an interview for a job as a manager that she very much wants. She is nervous because she does not have some of the academic credentials of her competition, but hopes that her experience will be enough to persuade them to take a chance on her. All she needs to do is get home, get some sleep, and get ready.

But her landlord (Rizi Timane as Uche) tells her that her rent has not been paid and if he does not get the money by 6 pm she and Alyssa will be evicted, with everything in their apartment moved to the curb. It turns out Alyssa gave the rent money to her feckless boyfriend Keshawn (Joshua David Neal) and he never gave it to Uche. A clock appears on screen to tell us how much time the women have before they’re evicted.

Keshawn lies about more than the money. He’s cheating on Alyssa with fiery red-head Berniece (Aziza Scott). When she blames Alyssa and Dreux for humiliating her, she decided to go after them to beat them up.

Thus, there’s a set-up with three ticking clocks, to be on time and presentable for the interview, to have the money for the landlord, and to hide from Berniece. More tension piles up as their car gets towed, their efforts to get money go haywire, and they manage to get in trouble with the local kingpin, who demands $5000 by midnight, adding another ticking clock.

But in the midst of all this the tension is just enough to create a frame around the Lucy-and-Ethel level of crazy shenanigans I do not want to spoil. I’ll just say there’s a lot of mayhem and ups and downs plus some harsh words and a reconciliation.

This movie is a lot smarter and, yes, even in the midst of the wild and crazy stuff, it has a lot more heart than you might expect. There are echoes of films like “Friday” and “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” but this is kinder to the characters (most of them) and to us. They are not clowns. They are just a couple of young women trying to make it in a world stacked against them, with resilience and ingenuity.

Early in the film, Dreux and Alyssa learn that their building (which they call “the jungle”) is getting its first white tenant. It turns out to be a friendly young woman named Bethany (Maude Apatow). Thankfully, she is neither presented as someone who is there to teach Dreux and Alyssa or to learn from them. She may have a different experience and vocabulary. Her apartment, unlike theirs, looks like the pictures on the building’s website, with crown molding and a working air conditioner. But she is genuine and would like to make friends.

Palmer and SZA are outstanding, but so is the supporting cast. Every encounter Druex and Alyssa have is buoyed by the actors in even the smallest roles. It is difficult to pick just a few to mention, but the most memorable include Katt Williams as a man who tries to warn the young women to stay away from a predatory lender (“If you don’t have the money this month, you won’t have it next month”), Keyla Monterroso Mejia as the intake officer at the lender who cannot hide her laughter at Dreux’s credit score (and listen for the voice of producer Issa Rae in the audio recording in the lender waiting room). There is some cartoonish slapstick at the blood bank and a power line, but there are also moments of kindness and support, with Vanessa Bell Calloway as a neighbor who runs a mini-bodega out of her apartment and Gabrielle Dennis as one of the executives interviewing Dreux. And there’s an almost Capra-esque moment of the community coming together as the young women learn that they had what they needed all along.

Parents should know that this movie has constant very strong language and slapstick violence, including a visit to the blood bank gone very wrong. There are humorous sexual references including a man’s revealing underwear and brief drug use. A gangster’s henchmen drop someone out of a window.

Family discussion: What would you do if you were in Dreux’s and Alyssa’s situation? How do they feel about Bethany and why? What did you think Maniac’s story was going to be?

If you like this, try: “Friday” and its sequels and “Up in Smoke”

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A Real Pain

A Real Pain

Posted on November 12, 2024 at 5:46 pm

A-
Lowest Recommended Age: High School
MPAA Rating: Rated R for language throughout and some drug use
Profanity: Constant strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Alcohol and marijuana
Violence/ Scariness: References to the Holocaust, attempted suicide
Diversity Issues: A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters: November 15, 2024

Jesse Eisenberg wrote, directed, and stars in “A Real Pain” but gave the showiest role to Kieran Culkin, who gives one of the best performances of the year.

Eisenberg, a careful writer with an excellent ear for what people say, and the spaces left by what they don’t say, gives the film a title with an illuminating double meaning. There’s the colloquial use for someone or something that is annoying, frustrating, but generally in a minor way. It is sometimes said with affection, sometimes with impatience, sometimes both. Then there is the more literal recognition of two words of enormous portent. This is a movie about pain, about generational pain caused by historic trauma and by internal, very individual struggles. It is about the pain we bear and the more difficult challenge of the pain we witness but cannot fix.

A Real Pain trailer

David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) Kaplan are close but very different first cousins who are on a Heritage Tour of Poland, a small group led by a British historian, visiting locations related to the Holocaust. They are planning to leave the tour a day early to stop at what was once the home of their late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.

David is intentional and careful. He worries constantly, which makes it difficult for him to feel comfortable around new people. Benji is impulsive, with volatile moods and no filters. He is often annoying, but he is genuinely curious about other people and warmly sympathetic, and authentically vulnerable, which makes people feel comfortable, even protective.

As the trip begins, David leaves a series of voicemails for Benji with advice and encouragement and concern. Meanwhile, Benji is at the airport early, chilling (or maybe he just has nowhere else to be). The tour guide is James (Will Sharpe), who begins by telling the group he is not Jewish but very interested in the culture and history. The other people on the tour are Marcia (Jennifer Grey), a recent divorcee, a retired married couple, Diane (Liza Sadovy) and Mark (Daniel Oreskes), and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the genocide in Rwanda and convert to Judaism.

The inherent impossible conflicts of a trip like this (based on one Eisenberg and his wife took) are handled exceptionally well in the film, often explicitly. Benji objects to first class train travel en route to a tour of a concentration camp, compared to the horrific cattle car transport of the people the trip is attempting to honor. He’s right and he’s wrong, of course. Would walking to the site be more respectful? Is there any accommodation today’s visitors could make that would not be somehow disrespectful? In another moment, Benji tells James he is throwing too many facts and statistics at them. Again, he’s both right and wrong. While history is essential for understanding the past, it is impossible to find an appropriate context for paying the right (if there is such a thing) kind of respect to those who suffered and perished. There will always be survivor guilt, but anyone who thinks skipping dinner or traveling economy — or immersing themselves in numbers and names — will assuage that burden is in denial. And Benji, by the way, stalks out of the first class car with a superior edge, and then ends up traveling first class anyway, laughing at his pretension.

Benji wants a picture of himself doing a silly pose on a huge statue memorializing the Warsaw uprising, the largest armed Jewish rebellion against the Nazis, insensitive. David finds that insensitive and disrepectful. At first, the others in the group do, too, but then they join in, finding some release in pretending to be part of the heroic response to oppression. As James reminds them, this is just one example that refutes the claims that Jews were docile in response to the horrors of the Holocaust. So perhaps the silly pretense of fighting alongside the Jews confined to the Warsaw ghetto eased the tension and helped the group bond.

The challenge of comfortable 21st century American tourists visiting sites from the Holocaust in a manner that is meaningful is juxtaposed with the very personal conflicts between David and Benji. Both struggle with anxiety. David takes medication, does meditation, and has established a satisfying life with a wife and son (played by Eisenberg’s real-life son, Banner). He has a job, though it is one Benji thinks is useless. And he worries about Benji. Their grandmother, who died a few months earlier, left money for the two of them to visit her home in Poland. Benji has been rudderless, without a job or family, self-medicating with weed. David hopes that bringing Benji on the trip will help him get some distance from his grief and give him something to do.

When David’s patience runs out, Eisenberg delivers a beautiful speech to the rest of the group about his love, frustration, worry, and his envy for Benji’s easy ability to connect and endear himself to everyone he meets. Like Norman Maclean in the book and movie “A River Runs Through It,” Eisenberg recognizes that:

We can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them – we can love completely without complete understanding.

Parents should know that this movie has mature material including historical references to the Holocaust, very strong language, smoking, drinking, and drugs. The characters discuss a sad death and a suicide attempt.

Family discussion: Who from this group would you rather travel with? How can we best show respect for the past?

If you like this, try: the “Trip” trilogy starring Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan

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My Old Ass

My Old Ass

Posted on September 19, 2024 at 5:19 pm

B +
Lowest Recommended Age: Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating: Rated R for language throughout, drug use and sexual material
Profanity: Very strong language used by teens and an adult
Alcohol/ Drugs: Teen drug use
Violence/ Scariness: Reference to sad death, some family conflict
Diversity Issues: None
Date Released to Theaters: September 20, 2024

I don’t think there is a sadder sentence than this one: “I thought I would always be able to go back.”

We all know that feeling, captured memorably in the last act of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” When Emily gets a chance to revisit a day from her early teen years, the mingled joy, nostalgia, and regret for taking every part of that life for granted are overwhelming. Something like that happens to Elliott (a terrific Maisy Stella) on her 18th birthday. Instead of dinner with her family, Elliott (a terrific Maisy Stella) goes off with her friends for a celebration involving some sketchily-sourced mushrooms. While her friend Ro (Kerrie Brooks) dances and her friend Ruthie (Maddie Zeigler) zonks out, Elliott has a conversation with…her future self (Aubrey Plaza), age 39.

Copyright 2024 Indian Paintbrush

If you were 18, what would you ask your future self? (Don’t ask for stock tips; that’s off limits.) If you had a chance to talk to your 19-years-younger self, what advice would you give? If you were 18, what advice would you take?

Elliott’s family owns a cranberry farm in a spectacularly beautiful section of Canada. But all she can think about how how excited she is to be leaving — she is about to go to college in Toronto and she has a been dreaming of the excitement of independence in a big city for as long as she can remember. Her middle brother, Max (Seth Isaac Johnson) loves the farm and is happy to be the one to take it over when his parents retire, but Elliott cannot wait for what she considers her real life to begin.

Older Elliott has had almost two decades of that “real life.” The wonderful Aubrey Plaza does not often get a chance to show the kind of warmth she does here, and it is a pleasure to see. Her 39-year-old Elliott is fragile in a way the younger version is not. She insists she is happy with her life (and proud to be a near-40-year-old PhD student) but she has clearly experienced some difficult times. The least successful moments in the film are a few brief indications that humans have had some setbacks in the next 29 years. They seem to be from an earlier draft that someone forgot to leave out.

The one very clear piece of advice older Elliott is very firm about is telling her younger self to stay far away from anyone called Chad. This is a mystery because younger Elliott has no idea who that might be and she is exclusively attracted to girls, so she cannot imagine how anyone named Chad might be a problem.

And then Chad (Percy Hynes White) suddenly appears, as Elliott is skinny dipping in a pond. He is her parents’ summer hire for the farm. And he is…irresistible. Despite her promise, despite her resolve, despite her fundamental notion of herself as exclusively gay, his patient kindness and “symmetrical face” are intoxicating.

Older Elliott has somehow managed to put her phone number in younger’s cell (as My Old Ass), so they are able to have some conversations and text exchanges, and older keeps reminding younger to have nothing to do with Chad. She also tells younger to be nicer to Mom (a lovely Maria Dizzia) and her brothers. For those last few days before she leaves for college, younger Elliott takes time to realize how much she has at home and how much she will miss everyone and everything. One of the toughest parts of growing up is realizing that you will not always be able to go back, and, as Emily says in “Our Town” that no one is able to appreciate it while it is happening. “My Old Ass” conveys all of this with welcome heart and humor.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong language, teenage drug use, and sexual references and situations.

Family discussion: What would you tell your younger self? What would you ask your older self?

If you like this, try: “17 Again”

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Jackpot!

Jackpot!

Posted on August 15, 2024 at 9:56 am

B +
Lowest Recommended Age: Mature High Schooler
Profanity: Extensive very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs: None
Violence/ Scariness: Constant action-style peril and violence, characters injured and killed, some disturbing and graphic images
Diversity Issues: Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters: August 15, 2024

My biggest complaint about “Jackpot!” is that there is no possible reason this crazy, don’t- think-just-laugh, essence of summer silliness, action comedy should be straight to streaming. We should be coming from the hot air into the air-conditioned theater, grabbing a bucket of popcorn, and joining an audience that is all there to laugh together. “Jackpot!” is a joyously goofy hoot of a movie with a killer cast. And that works very well, even if you’re watching it at home on your laptop. 

Copyright Amazon 2024

The premise is simple. Okay, deranged, but simple. A few years in the future, everything is terrible. Los Angeles has established a gigantic lottery. The twist is that when a winner is picked, everyone in the city has 24 hours to kill the winner (no guns, though, only what can be thrown) and take the money. Winners’ options are to evade a city full of murders, despite drone cameras reporting their location to everyone every 14 minutes, to escape across the city border, thus staying alive but foregoing the prize, or hiring a high-end security firm that specializes in protecting winners.

If the person with the lucky winning ticket manages to survive for 24 hours, the prize is delivered on camera, one of those cheesy giant cardboard checks. presented by a ghoulishly grinning game show host played by the delightful Murray Hill (Fred Rococo in “Somebody Somewhere”).

Think “The Purge” meets “Hunger Games.” But funny. Really.

Awkwafina plays Katie Kim, a former child actress (her best-known work was a commercial for square pasta. She has just returned to Los Angeles after caring for her dying mother and does not know anything about the lottery. She somehow finds herself in possession of a winning ticket, and the rest is pretty much jokes (often pretty funny, especially the understated throw-aways), chases, and fight scenes. See what I mean about summer silliness?

Katie still has no idea why everyone is trying to kill her when a car drives up and Noel (John Cena) opens the door and tells her to get in. When he explains what is happening, she naturally wonders why she should trust him. So mixed with the wild action (you will not believe how many lethal objects people can throw when billions of dollars are at stake) there is the development of the Katie/Noel connection to make the stakes more meaningful.

I know what you’ve been waiting to ask. Yes, the action scenes are off the hook. Did I mention John Cena? How about if I raise you a Simu Liu, as Noel’s former colleague-turned-competitor and possibly enemy? And there are some wild interactions along the way with some improbable co-stars including Dolly De Leon (“Triangle of Sadness” and also featured in this month’s “Between the Temples”), Becky Ann Baker (quite a twist as a character named Sweet Irene), Ayden Mayeri and Donald Elise Watkins as Katie’s crazy Airbnb roomies (“He’s a DJ and his name is DJ!”) and, I’m not kidding, Machine Gun Kelly as himself. Keep an eye out for the fight scene in the celebrity wax museum (nice Kardashian joke), and be sure to stay tuned for the outtakes over the credits to see that they had as much fun making it as it is to watch it.

Parents should know that this film is constant action- and comedy-style violence with many characters injured and killed and graphic and disturbing images. Characters use very strong and crude language.

Family discussion: If you were Katie, what would it take to get you to trust Noel or Louis? If you won $3.8 billion, what would you spend it on?

If you like this, try: Jackie Chan movies

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