Low-key peril and violence, predators eat an egg and try to eat the penguins
Diversity Issues:
None
Date Released to Theaters:
April 17, 2019
Copyright Disney 2019If there’s anything cuter than an Adelie penguin, it has to be a penguin voiced by Ed Helms (“The Office,” “The Hangover”). He provides the perfect slightly nerdy but always hopeful narration for the story of Steve, a young penguin on his first trek to find a mate, raise some chicks, and get them home.
As we know from “March of the Penguins,” it’s a long trek. Steve tells us it’s “a monumental expedition that favors the early bird and Steve is the last one to the party.” He gets lost on the way and ends up confusedly consulting some Emperor penguins, who smack him away. “I just got beat up by a baby,” he says dejectedly. It’s pretty disorienting even when he gets back to his own species. The millions of black and white birds look like that page in Where’s Waldo? that’s all Waldos.
We see Steve painstakingly collect stones to build a nest so he can tempt one of the female penguins, despite the efforts of the older penguins to steal them away. But Steve succeeds, and he does attract a female named Adeline. They tenderly sing to one another, memorizing each other’s voices, which they will recognize for as long as they live.
The film takes us through the year as Adeline lays her eggs, they hatch, and their penguin parents feed them (by barfing into their mouths, Steve explains). There are predators and other challenges, but there are also pop songs (REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight this Feeling Anymore”) and Steve’s bumbling but sincere devotion to Adeline, the chicks, and, well, life, is very touching.
Parents should know that this film includes a gentle depiction of some of the harsher aspects of nature and environmental challenges and a brief mild word.
Family discussion: How is Steve most like a human? Why did the other penguins want to steal Steve’s stones? What could he do to stop them?
If you like this, try: “Monkey Kingdom,” “Bears,” and “Born in China” and of course “March of the Penguins”
Rated R for language throughout, crude sexual content, drug use and brief nudity
Profanity:
Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drinking and drugs
Violence/ Scariness:
Extended comic peril and violence, medical issues
Diversity Issues:
None
Date Released to Theaters:
June 15, 2018
Date Released to DVD:
August 27, 2018
Copyright 2018 Warner Brothers
One of the most reliably funny situations in literature is adults taking on with utmost seriousness the kinds of concerns generally left to children. The bigger the gap between the actual and perceived stakes, the funnier it gets. One of my favorite P.G. Wodehouse stories, “The Purity of the Turf,” is a classic example.
“Tag” is the story of adult men who have been playing the same game since their schoolyard days. The players may not be all-stars when it comes to tagging each other, but as comic actors they are at the top of the class, and every one of the actors is a standout. Despite a couple of missteps in the script, it is one of the most consistently and even endearingly funny films of the summer.
Children like the game of tag because the rules are simple enough to learn immediately but complicated enough to negotiate over (no tag backs!), and because you can run around and triumph over each other. Normally, though, when children get older they prefer more structure and complexity and move on to amateur versions of popular games that you can see professionals play on television like tennis and golf. Not the “Tag Brothers,” though. As described in a 2013 Wall Street Journal front page story, a group of Catholic schoolboys spend a month each year trying to tag each other. They wear disguises and sneak into each other’s workplaces. They say that it keeps them young and literally keeps them in touch.
While this is a highly fictionalized — and very funny — version of the story, some of the wildest elements are true. One notorious tag occurred at the funeral of one member’s father. He became “it” as he stood at the side of his father’s grave. And, in an interview on CBS Sunday Morning, he said his father would have loved it.
In a job interview, Hoagie (Ed Helms) explains that even though he is a veterinarian, he is applying for a job as a janitor because it is on his apparently quite literal bucket list. The job is at a large corporation, where Callahan, the CEO (Jon Hamm), is about to be interviewed by a reporter for the Wall Street Journal (Annabelle Wallis as Rebecca). Hoagie successfully not only tags Callahan but persuades him to leave the interview, the office, and pretty much any shred of adult responsibility to spend the month of May playing tag. There is a special reason for this year’s tag game. Jerry (Jeremy Renner) is the only one of the group who has never been tagged. He’s essentially the tag ninja. He is getting married on the last day of the annual tag month, and the game may be over after that. Hoagie, Callahan, their stoner friend Chilli (Jake Johnson), and the high-strung Sable they interrupt in the middle of a therapy session (Hannibal Buress) join forces to get Jerry at last.
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing,” the tag team likes to say, even though they are not always accurate about who said it. But it turns out that you can keep playing but you can’t put off getting old. The simplest game in the world, probably dating back to the Cro-Magnan era, cannot help developing an overlay of complexity as the players get older, both in tactics and stakes. That is part of what makes this movie so much silly fun. Seeing grown-ups strategize a game of tag — including formal legal amendments to the foundational agreement — gives this movie a joyful bounciness that becomes positively giddy.
The mayhem is deftly staged by director Jeff Tomsic and editor Josh Crockett, but the film never loses sight of how much the game means to the players and the people around them. Isla Fisher, as Hoagie’s wife, brings that “Wedding Crasher” intensity. She is as committed and competitive as the whole group of guys put together, and thank you to the filmmakers, including producer Will Ferrell, for not relegating the women in the cast to the “Now, honey, it’s time for you grow up” roles. Thomas Middleditch makes the most of his scene as a health club attendant with a braid and an attitude. Helms, Buress, and Johnson are all terrific, creating complete characters in the midst of the comic chaos, but it is a special pleasure to see Hamm and Renner, known for their dramatic roles, show off their comedy skills. With a team like this, I’d keep playing, too.
Parents should know that this film includes constant very strong and crude language, vulgar sexual references and situations, a bare behind, extended comic peril, mayhem, and violence, medical issues played for comedy including cancer and a miscarriage, alcohol, alcoholism, and marijuana.
Family discussion: What childhood game do you still enjoy? What keeps you connected to your old friends?
If you like this, try; “The Hangover” and “Cedar Rapids”
“The Clapper” is an unpretentious little indie from writer/director Dito Montiel, adapting his own novel. It has actors who are familiar from studio movies and television playing quirky characters with a bit of social satire some family dysfunction, and a love story. The screenplay is uneven, but the exceptionally strong cast makes it watchable.
Ed Helms is a gifted actor/comedian who can play something other than a repressed, depressed but very nice guy (see, for example, “Jeff, Who Lives at Home,” and “We’re the Millers”), but that seems to be where he is most comfortable. Like the neglected gem “Cedar Rapids,” which he produced, as he did here, Helms plays a man who has shut down many of his emotions following a loss. He has what might be termed a micro-job. He and his best friend, Chris (Tracy Morgan) are “clappers.” They sit in the audience in infomercials and appear to be amazed and wildly enthusiastic about whatever is being pitched. Occasionally, they will get a line like, “There’s more?” for a couple of extra bucks. He has a hat and a fake moustache to try to look different for each show.
But a late-night host (Russell Peters) figures out that it is the same guy in all of the ads, and turns it into a bit, crowdsourcing a “Where’s the clapper?” search for the elusive audience member. It goes viral. In the world of this film, there is something existentially compelling about the sad sack who has nothing better to do than pretend to be in ecstasy over a bunch of cheesy junk and get rich quick schemes.
You might think that with a main character named Eddie Krumble, the movie is going to be harsher and more sharply satiric than it is. But there is a sweetness to it that is undeniably captivating. The talk show host and his producers (Adam Levine and the very funny P.J. Byrne) are out for ratings and not especially sensitive, but they are also not cartoonish villains, and they are not without heart. Eddie is horrified at the attention and knows it means he will lose his job, but he agrees to go on the show so he can find Judy (Amanda Seyfried), the shy, animal-loving gas station attendant he loves from afar. He does not think through the consequences of his appeal, because of course he turns on her the same kind of misery he has been subjected to as a result of the spotlight.
The script is uneven, with some awkward shifts in tone, as when Eddie’s mother appears as a caricature out of step with the rest of the film. But the movie’s biggest failure is in the character of Judy. Seyfried gives one of her best performances, but cannot save the character from the lack of agency or even personality that is the fault of the script. She is pretty much just there to for Eddie to respond to.
NOTE: I have a connection to this film. My daughter, Rachel Apatoff, was the assistant costume designer. So I make no pretense of objectivity in stating that the costumes were all superb and one of the highlights of the movie.
Hopes are high for Lake Bell after the delightful “In a World….,” which she wrote, directed, and starred in. A terrific cast, a peek at the unfamiliar world of voice actors, and an endearing heroine made it an exceptionally promising debut. Unfortunately, her sophomore effort retains only the superb casting and the affection for title ellipsis. “I Do…Until I Don’t” is more like an r-rated episode of the cheesy anthology series “Love American Style” than it is like “In a World.”
Bell clearly wants to explore the challenges of monogamy and marriage, a topic well worth exploring because most movies about romance end with the wedding, the “happily ever after” to be imagined. Where “In a World…” benefitted from the sharp, vivid observations of a person who thoroughly understood a world that the audience had never seen before, in “I Do…Until I Don’t,” the barely-out-of-the-newlywed-stage Bell (she and her husband were married in 2013) is trying to explain marriage to an audience who have all literally lived in or with the experience of marriage as husbands, wives, children, and family members. Her portrayal of three different couples is immediately apparent as superficial and unrealistic.
The entire premise is artificial. Bell imagines a cynical documentarian named Vivian (Dolly Wells) who is determined to expose the essential impossibility of the idea of marriage. Her theory is based on the tired theory that the idea of lifelong monogamy was developed in an era when the average lifespan was less than four decades and is therefore unrealistic when we are living twice as long. Of course when the lifespan was three decades marriages were more likely to be based on alliances of property and money than romantic love, which might have played into the expectations of the participants, but that has nothing to do with Vivian’s premise. And of course she has a villainous British accent just to remind us that she’s the bad guy.
Three couples become the focus of her film. Two of them are so unpleasant it is impossible for us to care very much whether they prove Vivian wrong, except to keep them off the market so they can’t marry someone nicer. All three of them are so thinly conceived that even the very able work of an outstanding cast cannot give them any depth or reality, even in a heightened comic setting.
Bell plays Alice, married to Noah (Ed Helms). Their business is failing. So are their efforts to become parents. Alice tells Noah Vivian will pay them a lot of money to be in her film. It is a lie. She has to find the money somewhere, so she agrees to provide “happy endings” at a massage parlor run by Bonnie (the terrific Chauntae Pink).
Harvey (Paul Reiser) and Cybill (Mary Steenburgen) are middle-aged and constantly snipe at each other, especially Cybill, who puts real effort into it while Harvey is mostly playing defense.
The third couple is not married and has an open relationship because why not. They are Fanny (Amber Heard) and Zander (Wyatt Cenac), free-wheeling hippie stereotypes. Alice thinks Noah is into Fanny for no particular reason other than her own insecurity over not being honest with him about pretty much anything.
These people are not interesting and their realizations are completely unfounded. My advice: don’t.
Parents should know that this film includes very strong and explicit language, explicit sexual references and situations, prostitution, drinking, and marital problems.
Family discussion: Why is it so important to Vivian to be right about marriage? Which couple changes the most?
If you like this, try: “In a World…” from the same writer/director/star
