Who knew there was this much fun left in glee clubs this long after “Glee!” jumped the shark?
“Pitch Perfect” is a frothy, funny, dizzy and derivative farce set in the competitive world of college a cappella groups, “Glee!” without the soap opera or the sex, but stuffed with comic caricatures, hilarious one-liners and blessed with a cast that’s up to the challenge.
There’s an inviolable law of animated films — the more “names” you have in the voice cast, the weaker you know your film is.
“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” is wistful, witty, romantic and sentimental, almost a “Breakfast Club” for the new millennium. It’s not high school as it really was and is. It is high school as it really should be.
“The Perfect Family” might have been perfectly edgy and controversial — ten years ago. The material — a devout Catholic wife and mother who is so active in her parrish that she’s up for “Catholic Woman of the Year” — if only she can keep the monsignor, archbishop, pope and the rest from knowing her gay daughter just got married, her married son is carrying on an affair and her husband used to drink and cheat — had the makings of something madcap, broad and manic, with a hint of heart.
But this Kathleen Turner vehicle is a stiff, a picture with so little urgency that it drags on like a sermon without end, with all the flavor of a communion wafer.
“People Like Us” is a well-acted weeper that walks an unsteady line between the emotional and the darkly comical.
It’s about a guy who realizes he has a half sister, and who injects himself into her life without explaining who he is. He befriends her kid, encourages her through substance abuse recovery and sets up to help her financially.
Since he’s the handsome and charming Chris Pine and she’s the fetching and approachable Elizabeth Banks, somebody is sure to get the wrong idea. Which is the “darkly comical” bit.
You can be forgiven for puzzling over the first 30 minutes of “People v. The State of Illusion.” An odd blend of documentary, docu-drama and motivational speech, the question “What are they trying to sell me here?” leaps to mind more than once.
“Peace, Love & Misunderstanding” is a forgiving little trifle, an open air feast of Woodstock Generation cliches. How much you forgive this easygoing romantic comedy depends on your tolerance for tie-dye, Jane Fonda, senior citizens who never outgrew their ’60s idealism and The Grateful Dead.
Norman, the young hero of the animated delight “ParaNorman,” hears dead people. He sees them, too. So there’s no sense trying to comfort him because you think he’s missing his dead grandma too much.
“Grandma’s in a better place.”
“In the LIVING room?”
Since Norman has grown up in Blithe Hollow, a town with a rich history of witches and witch trials, it’s only natural that Norman is a little “ParaNorman.” But it gets him teased, and his creepy-crank of an uncle (voiced by John Goodman) won’t leave him alone. Norman has a destiny, his uncle says, a duty to lift the 300 year-old curse that’s hung over the town since one infamous witch trial centuries before. The witches are coming back to haunt the town. Only “ParaNorman” can save it.
The stars of “The Paperboy,” the ones who did their due diligence anyway, must be kicking themselves. They didn’t get to work with the Lee Daniels who directed the Oscar winning “Precious,” but were stuck with the Lee Daniels who embarrassed two Oscar winners in the film he made before that, “Shadowboxer.”
“The Paperboy” is a sordid, seamy Cracker Gothic murder mystery, a brutishly overwrought melodrama that plays like Tennessee Williams on absinthe. Perverse, pretentious and plodding, it’s a dirty little psycho-sexual period piece set in the barely air-conditioned Florida of the late 1960s.
In an ineptly-acted and written framing device, a documentary filmmaker interviews Anita (Macy Gray) who tells the story of murder, justice and sexual perversion in fictional 1969 Moat County, Florida. That’s where a rough customer was given the death penalty for a murder his prison pen pal paramour (Nicole Kidman, at her most overripe) is sure he did not commit.
She’s convinced some Miami journalists — played by Matthew McConaughey and David Oyelowo — to look into lost evidence in the case of a murdered local sheriff. And that’s how she meets paperboy Jack, the son of the small town newspaper publisher (Scott Glenn) who apparently just this week decided to grow his sideburns out.
Charlotte (Kidman) is sex incarnate, a 40something vulture who likes her men rough and doing time.
“I thank straight harrr gives me cla-yessss,” she drawls. Her industrial-strength makeup tells us different.Jack is smitten with Charlotte. Charlotte teases the big city reporters, and tempts the convicted killer (John Cusack, who has never looked rougher). Daniels stages a prison visit involving reporters, Charlotte and convict that may be the most absurdly over-the-top no-touch sex encounter ever staged.
Characters blow up, at the drop of a hat, make huge leaps through the holes in the plot and try on accents that they have the good sense to abandon because they don’t give them “clay-essss.”
The Philly native Daniels loses himself in Southern similes, some of which he gives to the British-accented Miami Times reporter (Oyelowo of “Red Tails”).
“I’m sweatin’ like a pregnant nun back home.”
Gray, who narrates (badly), was the maid to the family that Glenn heads, the house that siblings played by Efron and McConaughey grew up in. Race bubbles to the surface in this cauldron as “white trash” mingles freely with “The Help,” and the N-word is dropped here and there.
Daniels, working from a Pete Dexter novel, wallows in the sweat, the short skirts and bodily fluids. He’s visiting an alien land, one in which all his surreal touches (a jellyfish attack, and its “treatment”) can’t disguise his unfamiliarity with the people and the place. The brown water beaches and swamps don’t look anything like any part of Florida. And sticking characters out in swamps where there is no road that would account for vehicles, home construction or the like, is bayou boneheaded.
The odd utterly pointless scene — characters, in their underwear, dancing in the rain — merely adds to the sense that the actors didn’t realize the director/emperor had no clothes. Until it was too late.
MPAA Rating:R for strong sexual content, violence and language
Cast: Zac Efron, Nicole Kidman, Macy Gray, Matthew McConaughey, David Oyelowo, John Cusack
Credits: Directed by Lee Daniels, written by Pete Dexter and Lee Daniels, based on Dexter’s novel. A Millenium release. Running time: 1:47
A confined space and mismatched characters forced together by their traveling conditions are the recipe for “Overnight,” a wan comedy about passengers on an overnight cross-country flight.
They’re all looking for love, or to hang onto love, or to justify their love.
And not just in the jetliner’s lavoratory.
Writer-director Valerie Breiman gives us Jenny (Rachel Blanchard of “Where the Truth Lies”), fresh from ending her bi-coastal romance with a guy who has a girlfriend on each coast. There’s Tom, the hip banjo-playing British physics professor (James D’Arcy of Madonna’s film “W.E.”) fleeing the west coast where his ex just won’t accept that she’s his ex.
Rude and perpetually grumpy TMJ (Gbenga Akinnagbe) is a rapper forced to fly commercial because he’s transporting a lap dog to his east coast girlfriend.
Amir (Maz Jobrani) and Mohammed (Mousa Kraish) are trying to not let all the airline profiling and fellow passenger profiling ruin their trip.
And Captain Brody, the pilot (Anthony LaPaglia) is managing an ongoing cell-phone rant with his about-to-leave-him wife, so wrapped up in his calls that he occasionally shares them over the aircraft’s public address system. His fundamentalist co-pilot (Tom Hodges) is no help.
“Maybe you should talk to Him about this.”
“Who.”
“Jesus.”
Breiman tosses these characters together and tries to set off sparks. Few do.
Jenny and Tom, who don’t share their names with each other, have a sort of instant-rebound courtship/romance that runs from flirtation to a shared bathroom break to break-up, with fights, betrayals and mistrust, all in one trip. They get together because the script demands that they do. There’s nothing organic about the connection.
TMJ, played in one sour note for much of the film, clashes with the Arab Americans. Stewardesses take bets on who will wind up in the lavatory, coupling. And most every character has a heartfelt confession — a moment that will change their story arc.
It’s all blandly predictable, with the occasional slight twist to interrupt our ability to stay three steps ahead of the plot. The twists let us stay two steps in front.
It all makes for a bland and dull if not entirely intolerable trip, one mercifully shorter than a real cross-country flight. Though not by much.
MPAA Rating:R for language and some sexual content
Cast: James D’Arcy, Rachel Blanchard, Anthony LaPaglia, Gbenga Akinnagbe
Credits: Written and directed by Valerie Breiman, a Phoenix Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:34
