Unlike “Mr Peabody & Sherman,” the new “Peanuts” adaptation seems to be hewing closer to its TV roots — same Vince Guaraldi music, same SFX for Snoopy’s voice.
But what’s the story, and seriously, how good can it be? Every “Peanuts” movie that stretched the comic strip form longer than a 22 minute or so TV special was a groaner.
And it’s in 3D, why exactly? Money money money.
It’s due out next year, and Blue Sky (“Rio,” “Ice Age”) is the producing studio.
It starts with a trip to the bar to drown his sorrows, or at least steel his courage. Craig (Pat Healy) has been laid off. How can he tell his wife (Amanda Fuller) that they’re about to be evicted? How will he support her and their baby?
Before this night is through, Craig will have run into the wrong old pal (Ethan Embry) from his skateboarding days . They will have downed a few shots as they caught up, and attracted the attention of the wrong rich couple (David Koechner and Sara Paxton). And those two, looking for “Cheap Thrills” by paying them to do foolish, dangerous and increasingly deadly pranks on a dare, will push Craig to his physical limits and make him question his own boundaries between right and wrong.
“Cheap Thrills” is a nasty, elemental thriller, basically a four-character play with blood and guts and sex and drugs and dares — starting with the one that makes Vince (Embry) slap a waitress on the behind. They flee the bar, and Craig is left facing an irate bouncer.
“Five hundred bucks if you hit him first!”
Craig needs the money. Vince, a collector for a loan shark, could use some himself. And Colin (Koechner), who tosses cash around in a never ending effort to impress his dazed beauty of a trophy wife, Violet (Paxton), seems like the answer to their prayers.
Colin’s ethos, “C’mon, it’s her BIRTHDAY.” Colin’s promise? “You will never forget this night, or who you were with.”
As the evening rolls on, Craig, a starving writer who was moonlighting as a mechanic until that afternoon, wonders how far he will go and what’s worse, how far Vince will go, just to stuff their pockets and live to pay the rent another day.
Screenwriters David Chirchirillo and Trent Haaga have cooked up a violent and profane “Twilight Zone” episode, a realistic waking nightmare built around primal fears — personal injury, infidelity and financial ruin. It is a nerve-wracking and even gruesome affair with laugh-out-loud lines, a “midnight movie” that tilts toward the puerile and predictable.
Yes, the two old friends take stock of their lives, insult and hurt each other as things turn personal and ugly. Manhood will be measured in more ways than one, starting with Craig’s punchout with that bouncer.
“You drop like a souffle, dude.”
Healy makes Craig’s desperation palpable, Embry wears heavy boots to make himself tougher looking than he’s ever been on screen and Paxton wears a dazed malevolence as her “come hither” look.
And through it all, Koechner, with a resume of twisted, comically tortured losers stretching from “Waiting…” to “Anchorman,” is in his element. Colin is gross gaucherie incarnate, from his constant coke-snorting to his nauseating throat-clearing to the boundaries he not only crosses, but refuses to so much as recognize.
MPAA Rating: Unrated, with graphic violence, sex, drug abuse and profanity
Cast: Pat Healy, Ethan Embry, David Koechner, Sara Paxton, Amanda Fuller
Credits: Directed E.L. Katz, scripted by David Chirchirillo and Trent Haaga. A Drafthouse Films release.
Running time: 1:28
Jake Gyllenhaal does tour de force double duty in the intimate thriller “Enemy,” a cryptic essay on identity.
He is terrific in both guises, but he is trapped in a frustrating puzzle without a solution. “Enemy” is a fever dream fantasy about a rumpled college professor with perhaps a taste for the kinky who discovers that he has an exact double — a bit player actor has the same voice, is wearing the same beard and has the same scars.
Professor Adam Bell drives his professorial Volvo home to a lovely blond (Melanie Laurent), his girlfriend. Antsy actor Anthony Claire takes his motorcycle home to his blond wife (Sarah Gadon), who doesn’t trust him.
Adam is semi-mindlessly going through his days, repeating the same anecdotes to class after class of bored Canadian college kids (this is set in Toronto). He seems depressed, in between rolls in the sack with Mary, a relationship sketched in tentative, empty strokes. Something’s missing, which might explain his opening scene visit to a twisted voyeur’s club of men watching naked women do things to spiders.
Spiders? That’s no help. Nor is the opening tease — “Chaos is order yet undefined.”
What is helpful is realizing this is based on a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, whose “Blindness” was also cryptic, and something of an essay on human connection and how depriving a city’s residents of a single sense causes social breakdown.
A colleague suggests a movie to Adam, and in it, he spies a bellhop, played by a struggling actor who is a dead ringer for himself. Adam, with more energy than he brings to the rest of his life, methodically tracks down Anthony Saint Claire and nervously angles for a meeting. But not without upsetting Anthony and his very confused, very pregnant wife.
With identity and how we cling to it occupying center stage in this linked-in/identity thieving/NSA-monitored world, it’s no surprise that this lesser novel by Saramago would merit an adaptation by the Canadian director of “Incendies” and last fall’s “Prisoners.” It’s also not surprising that this isn’t the only identity-obsessed doppelganger piece to come out this spring, with Jesse Eisenberg seeing double in the dark comedy “The Double” from the director of “Submarine.”
But while it’s an idea on the tip of the zeitgeist and this film is layered in creepy, calamitous dread, it’s hard to say that Villeneuve and the screenwriter got a handle on anything resembling a point.
It’s David Lynch-lite, a 90 minute puzzle that might be decode-able by those willing to parse its clues obsessively. On a single viewing, though, we have Gyllenhaal’s simple but immaculate separation of the characters, and the time to wonder if it’s all just one man’s nightmare about the life he’s settled into. With spiders.
MPAA Rating: R for some strong sexual content, graphic nudity and language
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Melanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon
Credits: Directed Denis Villeneuve, scripted by Javier Gullón, based on the Jose Saramago novel “The Double.” An A-24/eOne release.
Running time: 1:30
Jeff Goldman was leaning in decades before “Lean In” became a catch-phrase of the moment.
You can see it from his earliest movies and TV appearances, Goldblum’s angular frame and wide eyes tilting toward and drinking in whoever is opposite him. It can be flattering and flirtatious, or, as New York Magazine’s David Edelstein writes of his leaning-in turn in the new film “Le Week-End,” “creepily intimate.”
“Flirtatious” makes Goldblum laugh. Blame it on a persona that started forming when he played a journalist/classmate pick-up line specialist in the reunion dramedy “The Big Chill” thirty years ago. Blame it on “Jurassic Park,” where his “on-the-make” image was forever wedded to that “go-to-guy-for-explaining-big-science” in science fiction films (see “The Fly,” “Independence Day,” “Earth Girls are Easy,” etc). Goldblum himself has an even better answer, one linked to his study under the acclaimed acting teacher Sanford “Sandy” Meisner.
“He said, ‘You’re interesting to the extent that you’re interested.’ So it looks flirtatious, but what I think I’m doing is showing a real curiosity about and an appetite for and an appreciation of what’s going on with the other person, with whoever it is you’re with. Off camera, on stage, it doesn’t matter. Pay attention to who you’re talking to and the world around you. It’s life enhancing.”
Goldblum, 61, brings that charm to film, to the theater and to TV, as heroes, villains and victims. And he’s not shy about letting it spill into real life, and interviews.
“That’s the thing I’m attracted to in other people. If I see genuine interest — the way a baby or even a cat is fascinated by the things around them — if I see that in a person, it’s pretty intriguing.”
He’s had a recurring role on TV’s “Portlandia,” a natural fit for his quirky, dry humor. And he’s in two films at the moment, as a lawyer caught up in the intrigues surrounding a will that could determine who gets a great fortune in Wes Anderson’s delightful “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and as a pop philosopher and ex-classmate of an academic (Jim Broadbent) who is in Paris in the throes of a marriage about to bust up in “Le Week-End.”
The latter role is a classic Goldblum part, a “Goldblum-esque blurter,” as Edelstein writes in New York, noting the actor’s famed line-reading style — a silky, hesitant baritone whose words come in a rush. It is a part Goldblum plays “with colorful relish,” raved Rex Reed in The New York Observer.
“Paris is a very romantic place, and we get to see it, in this movie, through Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan’s eyes. The Paris of their youth, and now they’re older and maybe about to split up. They watch this old 1960s Godard film, ‘Bande a part.’ What Godard had in that movie, the existential romanticism, or whatever you’d call it, they’re trying to achieve as a couple and that’s beyond all intellectual or emotional relationship connections. Pure play and joy and sport and love.”
(Roger Moore reviews “Le Week-End” here)
Goldblum sees Morgan, his character in that film, as “part of a strain of something that runs through my work, my ‘style.’ There, I’ve admitted it. I can see it.”
That’s something he can pass on. As the product of one of the last century’s great acting teachers, Goldblum does some teaching himself. And one of things he tries to teach his students is something he had to learn himself, the hard way. Let a little of yourself find its way into the performance.
“The first job I had on Broadway was a musical — ‘Two Gents’. John Guare adapted Shakespeare’s ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona.’ It was a multi-racial, diverse cast. And Alvin Lum, this wonderful Asian actor, was playing the part I was under-studying. He was sick one day, and I had to go on. I hadn’t thought about exactly how I was going to play the part, but I looked in the Yellow Pages — which you had to do in those days — and found a makeup specialist who could make me look Asian!”
In those pre-politically correct 1970s, Goldblum showed up on stage with tape to narrow his eyes, among other adjustments. And while no one criticized him at the time, “I realized RIGHT afterward that this wasn’t the smartest thing to do!” Find yourself in the part, he decided. And he has. His imitable speaking style, rightly compared to jazz (he fronts a jazz combo in his spare time), the intense, staring eyes, the blush-inducing familiarity, it turns up in almost every appearance.
He’s cultivated that charm off screen, as well. Wes Anderson has hired him more than once (“The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” and “Grand Budapest”). It’s why Spielberg & Co. have never shied away from using him, why Phil Kaufmann remembered his turn in a small role in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and cast him in “The Right Stuff.” And it’s how “Le Week-End” came to be his second film with Roger Michell, who’d directed him in “Morning Glory” and found something even juicier for him in “Le Week-End,” one of the most critically acclaimed films of the new year.
All this “repeat business” isn’t just because Goldblum is on time and knows his lines, something he’s scrupulous about passing on to his acting students.
“Jeff Goldblum wants to work,” Michell says. “He doesn’t want to grandstand, play games, show off, look good or bad, be the star: He just wants to work. To be detailed, truthful, alive, in the moment, alive to the actors around him and the crew around them. Jeff is super-smart, funny, charming and also great at singing show tunes. ‘Dull’ is a word that is impossible to use around Jeff Goldblum. I love him.”
And he’s willing to improvise, make the lines better in the fashion of filmdom’s greatest improvisational director, Robert Altman.
“These folks all make shooting a movie a fun art piece, what Altman (“Nashville,” a VERY early Goldblum appearance) said — ‘It’s like making a sandcastle. No matter what it winds up being, the waters will eventually wash it away.'”
” The experience of MAKING the movie is the real joy. It’s ephemeral, and it doesn’t last. But while it does, I like having a good time.”
“Blood Ties” is a cop-crooks thriller based on a French film, “Les liens du sang.” It’s a period piece set in 1974, when the lapels were wide, the cars were wider and pay phones were the cell phones of the day.
But thanks to its story — a lovesick cop (Billy Crudup) lives in awe of and beholden to his ex-con older brother (Clive Owen), it feels much older. It may not be the oldest story in the crime picture book, but it’s only a chapter or two away from it.
Frank is “the good brother,” but that’s a relative term. He pines for his ex girlfriend, Vanessa (Zoe Saldana). And when cops in the movies pine, they stalk.
“Oh, can you be seen with a colored girl now?” she snaps when she confronts Frank.
Chris (Owen) is just out of the joint, a career criminal whose earliest run-in with the law he still holds over Frank. Lili Taylor plays their sister, James Caan their sickly, dying old man, the guy who supposedly loves them all equally.
Chris left behind a junky/hooker (Marion Cotillard) when he went to prison, and their two kids. He wants to go straight, if only to see the kids and maybe rescue them from the lives he and their mother have sentenced them to.
Mila Kunis is Natalie, a cashier in the New York car lot/garage where Chris finds work. She is temptation incarnate, and tempted herself. If only she can trust him. Of course, she can’t.
Chris falls in with his colorful old crowd. Frank starts getting pressure from the higher ups (Noah Emmerich) in the police department.
“Your brother has a very LOUD reputation.”
Director co-writer Guillaume Canet, better known as a French actor, doesn’t do a particularly good job of hiding the novelty here. We’re meant to misjudge each character and have our opinions flipped. But Crudup’s Frank is obviously less “good” than we first think, and Owen’s Chris seems redeemable only until the first time he shoots somebody, which doesn’t take long.
Among the cast, the Oscar winner Cotillard acquits herself the best, bleary-eyed and bitter, a woman who knows just what to expect from Chris, no matter what appearances suggest. And the contempt is mutual.
“You’re trash to the core.”
Owen does well in a sort of Jason Statham hardcase role, but Crudup seems a little lost, playing a cowardly, lovesick cop still cunning enough cop to get the girl he wants by hook or by crook. The film refuses to judge him, but the viewer doesn’t have that problem. Kunis tries on a Brooklyn accent — for a couple of scenes, anyway.
You only notice those sorts of things in the first two acts, because the third act — with a high body count, a cascade of pitiless crimes, vast intervals of time and plot holes you could drive a ’72 El Dorado through — is simply risible.
Perhaps this played better in French. Subtitles, at least, tend to distract you from a story that was drawing a pension back when Bogart and Cagney were chewing up the silver screen.
MPAA Rating: R for violence, pervasive language, some sexual content and brief drug use
Cast: Zoe Saldana, Clive Owen, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup, Mila Kunis, James Caan
Credits: Directed by Guillaume Canet, scripted by Guillaume Canet and James Gray, based on the French film “Les liens du sang.” A Roadside Attractions release.
Running time: 2:08
To topple the frightening and powerful, the first step is to make them look
foolish.
That’s the object lesson in “Rob the Mob,” a tragi-comic tale of a couple of
idiots who figured New York’s “five families” were just “greasy old guys
cruising on their reputations.” So this naive and clumsy “Bonnie & Clod”
proceed to rob the wiseguys, making them strip to their underwear as they
do.
And since this “true story” happened in the middle of the high-profile trial
of “The Teflon Don,” John Gotti, what can the mob do about it?
The Feds were watching and listening in. The press (Ray Romano plays a
newspaper columnist) was amused, and that amusement spread as the world came to
realize these pot-bellied thugs weren’t so scary and weren’t coated in Teflon
after all.
Michael Pitt (“Seven Psychopaths”) is Tommy, a crackhead who can’t even get
away with robbing a florist’s shop on Valentine’s Day. Nina Arianda (of “Tower
Heist”) is Rosie, the ditz who loves Tommy so much she drives the getaway car
her dad left to her when he died.
After Tommy does his time for that crime, Rosie dreams of them going straight
— staying off drugs, working at real jobs. She’s already a star at the
collection agency where she works. Tommy can join her, right?
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” her boss (Griffin Dunne, a hoot) croons.
But Tommy is instantly bored, given to advising clients on sneaky ways to avoid
paying their bills a little while longer. It worked for him.
What truly fascinates Tommy is the Gotti trial, with its the riveting inside
testimony of guys like Sammy “The Bull” Gravano. Where others are hooked on the
crimes, the violence and the slang, Tommy — who plays hooky, sitting in court,
doodling — is noticing important things. Like that the Mafia has all these
“social clubs,” where the made men gather and play cards and make deals and
count their loot. And these clubs? No guns allowed.
“Wise guys and guns,” Gravano (Garry Pastore) testifies, “it’s a bad
mix.”
Tommy, reasoning that the last guys to call the cops would be mobsters,
figures he’s got the perfect crime. And Rosie, whose reasoning is as
short-sighted and stupid as Tommy’s, comes along for the ride.
The F.B.I. (Frank Whaley) is listening in, incredulously, as Tommy pulls off
these inept, Uzi-fired heists. A newspaper columnist (Romano) gets wind of an
amusing side show to the Gotti trial.
And a culinarily-inclined mob boss, Big Al (Andy Garcia) and his lieutenant
(Michael Rispoli) cannot believe these brazen insults to their mafioso
manhood.
“I’ve been VIOLATED here!”
It’s all good fun, with Tommy waving a gun around and yelling, “You, goombah
— grab that spaghetti bowl. ALL the cash, inside!” But you just know somebody’s
going to get hurt.
The robberies are — to a one — impromptu and hilarious.
“C’mon. Gotti put you up to this?”
The aftermaths, less so.
Garcia’s “City Island” director Raymond de Felitta packs the screen with
veteran character actors and turns them loose on this Jonathan Fernandez script.
Garcia broods, and cooks, Dunne vamps and kvetches, Whaley and Romano play it
straight but with a twist.
And Pitt and Arianda utterly inhabit these dolts and their delusional dreams.
They’re careless and clumsy, never thinking things through, never seriously
considering the inevitable consequences of what happens when you poke the
bull.
And they poke. And poke. And humiliate. And tease.
And we grimace in anticipation. Because we know what Rosie and Tommy can’t
seem to grasp, that sooner or later, those fat “greasy old guys cruising on
their reputations” are going to poke back.
MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, some sexual material and brief drug
use
Cast: Michael Pitt, Nina Arianda, Andy Garcia, Ray Romano, Cathy Moriarty
Frank Whaley, Burt Young
Credits: Directed by Raymond de Felitta, written by Jonathan Fernandez. A
Millennium release.
Running time: 1:44
The young actor Ansel Elgort has worked with Shailene Woodley in two films, now. And he has a suggestion for anyone meeting her.
“My advice to people, when they’re first meeting Shailene, is to HUG HER BACK,” Elgort says, laughing. “You are going to be hugged, so be ready.”
“I do love a good hug,” admits Woodley, whose work on TV in “The Secret Life of an American Teenager” led to break-out film performances in “The Descendants” and last summer’s “The Spectacular Now.”
Critics and her peers noticed right away her open-eyed, open-hearted transparency, the way any film she takes on instantly feels more real just because she’s in it.
“‘Authentic’ is the right word for her,” says author Veronica Roth. Roth wrote the “Divergent” series, the sci-fi novels that Hollywood is predicting could become the next “Hunger Games” when the first film hits theaters Mar. 21. “Shailene’s not afraid to go places, playing it from the gut. Vulnerable.”
Elgort, who plays Woodley’s character’s brother in “Divergent” and her love interest in this June’s “The Fault in Our Stars,” agrees. “It’s science fiction. You need somebody as real as her to make it real.”
For her part, Woodley doesn’t consider that acting, “not so much a skill as just how I am.” Maybe it’s something she picked up. Maybe she was born with it.
“I’m astrologically a triple water sign (Nov,. 15, a Scorpio), so I’m basically an emotional watery mess,” Woodley jokes. “But I grew up with two psychologist parents, which explains a lot. They established feeling and compassion in me in a very young age. I wonder if that helped me connect, emotionally, with someone really easily.”
“Divergent” depicts a dystopian future where teens choose their lifelong career path, their tribe or “faction”, whether they’ll be warriors or rulers or thinkers or laborers, based on their true natures — nurturing or brave, imaginative or cogs in the agricultural or manufacturing faction that makes this world work. Roth admits to being fans of “The Hunger Games” novels and owns up — a little — to the resemblance between the two series.
But “Divergent,” to be followed by “Insurgent” and “Allegiant” as Woodley’s character, Tris, finds herself and sets herself up in opposition to the rigid social structure she’s born into, has the best “Young Adult” bonafides of any book turned to film series in that genre. It’s not just the stars who are young — Woodley is 22, Elgort just turned 20. Roth, the novelist, is only 26 herself.
“The choices real teenagers have to make at 16, 17 or 18, feel like these life and death decisions,” Roth says. “It’s their emotional reality. I felt that at 16, this pressure to get it right the first time. People change majors, change colleges, change jobs. But when you’re 16, 17, you don’t have that perspective yet.”
Woodley felt that herself as she pondered whether to tackle her first “franchise.” She’s spent a couple of years as a “critic’s darling,” making movies that did not become the sort of life-altering blockbusters that “The Hunger Games” did. That film series changed “Winter’s Bone” starlet Jennifer Lawrence into the hottest acting property in Hollywood, and a tabloid favorite.
“I had to decide if I wanted something this big in my life,” Woodley says. “I’m grateful that I did, because I have no regrets and I know that thinking about it more made it easier to see was the right decision.”
To ease her into “Divergent,” “Spectacular Now” co-star Miles Teller took a supporting role. And after working with Elgort in “Divergent,” Woodley was happy to co-star with him in “The Fault in Our Stars,” a romance about two physically damaged teens who fall in love in a support group for cancer patients.
“It’s very comforting,” Woodley says, “to have friends with you on the set when you’re trying something new or scary. I loved having Miles in Chicago, for ‘Divergent.’ And having a prior relationship with Ansel made playing these really vulnerable characters in ‘Fault in Our Stars’ easier.”
And it’s got to be a help, knowing that when you hug somebody on that first day on the set, they know what to do in response.
“Oh yeah, they know they’d better hug back.”
Saturday’s box office numbers solidified the hold “Mr. Peabody & Sherman” has on the top spot for St. Patrick’s Day weekend. Over $21 million in its second week. It will be lucky to get in the ballpark of $100 million, with Disney’s “Muppets” taking away its thunder next weekend.
“Need for Speed” tailed off considerably on Saturday and now looks to make about $18 million this weekend, or just north of it.
“The Single Moms Club” tumbled as well and won’t do much better than $8 million, thus the wisdom of Lionsgate getting out of the Tyler Perry business.
“Veronica Mars”, fan financed and fan pandering, may hit $2.2 million on 291 screens. It’s in the black and will be even more so thanks to the kickstarter financing, sale to Warners and Warners giving it just enough screens to pay for itself.
“Frozen” is very very close to $400 million, but may not make it as home video takes the last of its money and it loses screens next weekend.
“Monuments Men” hangs around the top ten.
But “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is well within the top ten, on a fraction of the screens that “Mars” is.
“Mr. Peabody & Sherman” is having a strong holdover at the box office, allowing this animated hit to climb to the top of the rankings this weekend with over $20 million coming its way in its second week. It’s hardly a blockbuster and will be lucky to do much better than $100-110, chump change for cartoons.
“300: Rise of an Empire,” has lost most of its pop and will finish in the mid-teens. That puts it well behind the new action opening, “Need for Speed.” Aaron Paul is still a TV star, second banana on “Breaking Bad” and all. The movie earned poor reviews, and “Need” will only pull in about $19 million, well below “Fast & Furious” projections. That lack of a multi-racial cast hurts more than the “real cars, real stunts” nature of the film — rich white folk racin’ supercars isn’t nearly as relatable as the vintage rides and modified street tuners of the “Furious” franchise.
Another video game turned into a movie that bombs. Oh well.
But $19 million isn’t really “bomb” territory. Under $10 is, when you’re Tyler Perry and you’ve had films open in the upper $20s and $30s. Lionsgate got out of the TP Business just in time, from the looks of “The Single Mom’s Club.” Terrible reviews didn’t help. The guy had ambition, once. Now, he’s just primping and preening like he thinks he’s a movie star. In a dress, he isn’t.
Meanwhile, Wes Anderson’s delightful “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is riding swell reviews into a rising tide of box office sales. A platform release that is rolling out this weekend and next, it cracked the top ten. Lotsa critic love is helping that one.
“Veronica Mars” is into profits, as it was fan-financed and thus paid for before Warners ever dropped it into theaters.
Good thing. There’s NO audience for this TV show that was canceled years ago. $1 million Friday, maybe $2 million, $2.5 by Sunday? That’s barely in the top ten on a weak weekend for movies. Figure it’ll manage $5-7 million, total, by the end of its run. The per-screen average isn’t all that either.
It was a good run. Well, maybe “good” isn’t the right word for Tyler Perry’s decade of making movies for Lionsgate. The studio decided to drop its option to distribute his films earlier this month, nine years and many “Mad Black” women later.
His steadily eroding box office appeal would be the reason for that. You’ve seen the desperation in his recent films, casting a Kardashian here, a Cable Guy there.
Then again, maybe the studio folks had just left a screening of “The Single Moms Club,” Perry’s latest and maybe last picture for them. It’s interminable. It’s excruciating.
He rounded up a modest cast — Nia Long, Amy Smart , Wendi McLendon-Covey (“Bridesmaids”), Cocoa Brown and Zulay Henao are the moms, supported by Perry himself and the unconquerable Terry Crews. He found another way of depicting women as put upon victims of selfish, greedy, cruel and no-count men, and reason for empowering them — single motherhood.
But he is flat out of laughs, and his heartfelt Oprah-approved sermonettes about every woman deserving a “good man” and the like feel exhausted and played. Perry has made better movies, and perhaps worse ones. But never one as dull as this.
The women all have their kids in an exclusive Atlanta prep school. One (Smart, of “Crank) is a sheltered housewife going through a divorce. Another (Long, recently of “The Best Man Holiday”) is a working reporter and would-be writer whose little boy’s daddy is a never-ending disappointment. A third (McClendon-Covey) is a publishing exec whose career is hampered by the child she had as if adding an accessory to her wardrobe. The sassy Waffle House waitress (Cocoa Brown of “For Better or Worse”) has a brood of kids, a couple in prison. And the Latina in this stew (Zulay Henao) has a new man in her life but is still controlled by her rich jerk of an ex.
Their kids are going off the rails, so the school hurls them together to plan a dance. So they meet, clash cultures, drink wine and get all girl-bonding friendly.
The shared parenting wisdom is deep — “You can’t think about it. Just do it…You take it one snotty nose and one dirty diaper at a time.”
Indeed.
Perry’s wish fulfillment fantasies are aimed squarely at women, with a little something-something for gay men (shirtless hunks). Here, aside from Crews, a blast of tooth-flashing fun as a suitor to the waitress, the menfolk have even less to do than usual. The women are dressed up and coiffed and made-up to the hilt, with the exception of Smart, whose makeup looks as if a child plastered it on. And none of the ladies ever look as primped as Perry himself — teeth bleached, nary a whisker on his perfectly-trimmed beard out of place.
There’s little tragedy, no drama, no emotions at all to “Single Moms Club.” The culture clash of white professional woman and waitress, pampered “kept” women and working mothers, sets off no sparks.
And without Madea, without any reasonable facsimile of a joke, Lionsgate finally caught up to what audiences have been noticing for a while, and critics have complained about for years. You can’t be a “Mad Black Woman” when you’ve grown too rich and happy to wear the dress.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sexual material and thematic elements
Cast: Nia Long, Tyler Perry, Amy Smart, Terry Crews, Cocoa Brown, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Zulay Henao
Credits: Written and directed by Tyler Perry. A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:50
