Movie Nation

“Blind Ambition” is a simple, straightforward non-fiction film about what we journalists call a “man bites dog” story. It’s about something wholly unexpected and unusual, odd and cute.

We meet a quartet of Zimbabwean refugees who fled hardship to South Africa, got jobs waiting tables and started the process of mastering fine wine at the dining establishments where they work.

They became sommeliers, wine stewards at their restaurants. And when they were good enough at it to at least earn consideration for membership on South Africa’s World Wine Tasting Championships team, they took a suggestion and formed their own Team Zim instead.

A poor, corruptly-run economic basket case country — Zimbabwe — found itself represented at the wine-identifying competition among sommeliers from around the world, held at Chateau de Gilly in France in 2017.

So, it’s “Cool Runnings” with wine, right? Not quite. This never crosses into cutesy. It’s “uplifting,” but conventionally so, with a certain dignity surrounding it. These are, after all, “the finest palettes in Africa.”

Filmmakers Warwick Ross and Robert Coe shadow sommeliers Joseph, Marlvin, Tinashe and Pardon as they “train.” We learn of their home lives, how they landed restaurant jobs. We see hear and see snippets of their backstories, glimpse the news coverage of the chaotic, crisis-riddled last years of Robert Mugabe’s rule of Zimbabwe, the reasons these four fled. And we’re reminded of South African xenophobia, the attacks on “foreigners” that shamed the country during those days.

Wine masters, chefs, authors and others flesh out the skills they had to master and the conditions these young men had to overcome. And then we get into the nitty gritty of wine tasting, “which is not at all the same as wine-drinking,” one expert takes pains to explain.

The pragmatic value a sommelier has in a restaurant is helping diners match the “perfect” wines to their meal. In “competition,” they must show themselves to be the ultimate wine snobs, experts who can name the style, the varietal (grape), the vintage, the region and if they’re really good, the winery that bottled it.

We meet not just the Zimbabweans and the experts on refugees, Zimbabwe and wine. We’re introduced to mentors who gave them their starts, and follow them to France where their hired-by-phone French coach drags them all over wine country, from the Rhine to the Rhone, giving them an appreciation of the best the world has to offer, if nothing else.

The “blind” taste tests of competition make up the climax of the film.

There’s not a lot of “learning” about wine on the viewer’s part. As plucky and distinct as these young men are, their stories are more representative of the African refugee diaspora and its possibilities than of some “next big thing” in the wine world. South African wines are well-established. Zimbabwean wines barely known, until now. With actual home grown experts, perhaps that will change.

And thanks to the competition, in which the team tastes, studies and compares notes — debating what this or that wine is in two minute evaluations — the third act of “Blind Ambition” is livelier than the first two.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Joseph Dhafana, Marlvin Gewese, Pardon Tagazu and Tinashe Nyamudoka.

Credits: Directed by Robert Coe and Warwick Ross, scripted by Robert Coe, Paul Murphy and Madeleine Ross. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:36

This BBC/Amazon Studios production features Chaske Spencer, Rafe Spall, Toby Jones, Stephen Rea and Ciaran Hinds in supporting roles.

Filmed in Oklahoma, six episodes worth, which is a good thing.

Close your eyes and you can pretty much imagine the full “package” of a movie that would make its premiere on Comedy Central.

It’d be derivative — familiar and “new” at the same time. Maybe update “The Office” for the Zoom Meeting era, with ditzy “types” over-sharing, accidentally or on purpose, the most intimate details of their messy lives.

“How do I ‘mute?'” “How do I ‘Leave Meeting?'”

The cast? Same deal, mix the familiar with the new. Put Jason Alexander and Cheri Oteri in small roles, give Ken Jeong, Leslie Jones and Jay Pharaoh supporting parts and make the perky “New Ellie Kemper/Kimmy Schmidt” your lead.

“Out of Office” was scripted and directed by an “Office” writer and on-air regular, Paul Lieberstein, who was the put-upon HR nebbish on the show. It’s not his first directorial rodeo, but since no one saw the adorable “Song of Back and Neck,” he returned to the comic situation that keeps on giving for his latest, another story of the cutesy, quarrelsome workplace “family” that has been a fact of life for American sitcoms, if not “real life,” since “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

It’s got a few laughs and a tiny dollop of heart, and wouldn’t have made a dime in theaters or much of a splash on Netflix or Paramount+. But it fits Comedy Central to a T.

Milana Vayntrub of the early years of “This Is Us” stars as Eliza, whom we meet as she’s escorted out of her latest workplace, a cardboard box with her belongings in it. She’s 28 and this isn’t her first “escort.” That’s why she’s cut-off in the middle of asking her parents (Oteri and Alexander) for money, brushing past the “Whattaya think room and BOARD is?” Because they’re selling the house she’s been mooching off them in to retire and move to Paris.

Eliza’s checkered employment history and lifetime of odd, impulsive choices means her exasperated dad won’t give her money before they board the plane. No, any cash she might need is entrusted to her younger, more responsible dental-hygienist sister.

Not to worry. That next job could be as close as the next job interview. It isn’t just the screwball in charge (Jeong) of this online help line who chats her up. He Zooms in the entire screwball staff (Emily Pendergast, Christopher Nicholas Smith, Elaine Carroll and Pharaoh) for the interview, which goes poorly until Eliza tells the boss what the others won’t — aka “what he wants to hear” about how to deal with his ongoing fight with his ever-escalating wife (Jones). Yeah, it’s bad advice and everybody else knows it. Consequence-free Eliza shrugs it off and gets the job.

But Mom’s parting words — “His marriage IS your job!” — should sink in. Think before you speak, give better suggestions and hope you’re a help. That’s a steep learning curve for Eliza to climb. Let’s see if she can manage it.

Liberstein populates this “Office” with absurdly-familiar, broadly drawn caricatures — the clueless guy in charge, the shaved-head, camo-clad veteran (Carroll), the argumentative over-qualified hunk (Smith), the too-nice wife (Pendergast) who shares too much of her not-able-to-conceive life with her office-mates, with her over-sharing husband (Chris Gethard) also working from their dormer office, free to blurt random input into every conversation. And then there’s our common sensible guy who went to the same college as Eliza (Pharoah), the “Designated Jim” (romantic interest) here, for those who remember the NBC TV series Lieberstein is recycling.

The banter is funny enough, starting with the Q&A job interview for work “literally ANYbody can do.”

“I see you’ve had a lot of…short time jobs?” “Yes. Thank you!”

A little office politics is introduced. A take-over is coming. The boss’s marital arguments turn uglier, more profane, more sexual and even scatological.

Then there are the little gems that would grab attention at any table read or writers brainstorming session for a sitcom. Jones’ wife character threatens to cheat with their aged neighbor, played by Monte Markham who makes that funny. Somebody plots throwing a “surprise” birthday party in the middle of an already-planned office party. (I can see Steve Carell trying that on “The Office.”).

And the staff’s way of calming boss Kyle in a bad moment is suggesting “a ‘Babe’ break.” That little interlude is just adorable.

Vayntrub makes a pleasant enough lead who would have been helped by sharper writing — more interesting character traits, funnier situations, a more obstacle-filled attempted courtship and funnier dialogue.

As with a lot of sitcoms, the idea here is to surround the romantic leads with funnier folk, and that works. Jones and Jeong on down the line deliver, with even “Office” alum Oscar Nunez scoring in a single scene as the new owner, bragging about taking “little companies” and making them into “great ones.” Quite the Mexican success story.

“My father lets me buy one company every two years!”

As a film, though, “Out of Office” plays more like a pilot to a sitcom that never was, a project any principled network “suit” would watch and dismiss.

“Too derivative,” she’d say. “We’ve already SEEN ‘The Office.'”

Rating: unrated, sexual situations, toilet humor, profanity (TV-14)

Cast: Milana Vayntrub, Jay Pharoah, Ken Jeong, Leslie Jones, Oscar Nunez, Emily Pendergast, Chris Gethard, Elaine Carroll, Christopher Nicholas Smith, Cheri Oteri and Jason Alexander.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Lieberstein. A Paramount/MTV Films release (Sept. 5) on Comedy Central.

Running time: 1:26

“Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul” is a dark comedy about a prosperity gospel megachurch preacher and his wife’s “comeback” from a fall from grace. First-time feature director Adamma Ebo got very lucky that Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall were dazzled enough by her script that they signed on. They’re so good that the viewer, like Ebo, can lose track of the fact this was supposed to be funny.

Hall, most recently impressive in “Master” and on TV’s “Nine Perfect Strangers,” and “This is Us” Emmy-winner Brown give us brilliantly-detailed portrayals of a prayerful power couple, brittle but hanging on, putting on brave, smiling faces because they’re willing to do whatever it takes to get back what they just lost.

We see and hear Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs speak and “perform,” and the mansion, the “beautiful Bugatti,” the Prada suits and the gigantic Wander to Greener Paths church need no explanation. He is electric in the pulpit, beaming and upbeat, handsome and the epitome of preaching charisma.

He peacocks his latest outfit — “Don’t it look like I’ve been favoring the Lord?”

And sitting at his side, often in chairs that would put Buckingham Palace to shame, is his beaming, cheerleading, stylishly-turned-out Trinitie, aka “First Lady” Childs, his beautiful wife.

But when we meet them, it’s in an empty megachurch. He is hyped-up about the documentary film crew, seen once and almost never heard, that’s just started to follow them around, “fly on the wall” style, to capture their “comeback.”

A montage of TV coverage buzzes about the “scandal” that brought them down. But Atlanta’s Black “Jim and Tammy Fay” are hellbent on winning back the congregation that abandoned them, certain that their showmanship and earnest “self-forgiveness” will let them put whatever threatens to take all this away “behind” them.

But the film crew captures the tension in their desperation and the veneer that each wears over their egos about this humiliating state of affairs and the fragile, brittle state of their marriage.

Pastor Lee-Childs has a profane flip-out over stepping in gum in his designer Italian shoes. “First Lady” snaps “won’t nothing ever confirmed” about the sexual misconduct scandal that emptied their church and took a bite out of their bank accounts — “settlement” money.

And we see the glower in their eyes — beaming faces notwithstanding — when they speak of the on-the-rise Heaven’s Home Church down the road, and the righteous young preaching couple (Nicole Beharie and Conphidance) who opportunistically swooped in and swept away much of their congregation.

As Lee-Childs trots out ideas to get attention for their big Easter Sunday reopening and rehearses in front of Trinitie and “The Devout 5” — the congregants who refused to bail on them — their boundless optimism frays under the strain, Lee-Childs’ “scandal” explains itself and First Lady’s demands for him to “get it all back” turn strident.

Hall and Brown are never less than credible, so much so that we feel for these two in those moments when we forget we’re not supposed to. They create a couple that has endured even as it has made its own allowances for disappointments and concessions to “whatever works” that keeps them together. Brown’s job here is to sparkle and sizzle with energy and charisma. Hall’s is to let us see the bargain Trinitie’s struck in her mind.

The “mockumentary” format of the film works, but has felt played if not played-out since “The Office” had its run. Then Ebo takes us into the bedroom and we start to notice that she’s not consistent in showing us only what the “fly on the wall” filmmakers see.

But writer-director Ebo’s most obvious mistake here is assuming all of this is funny, just in its presentation. In post-hypocrisy American Christianity, a “scandal” that the scandalous expect their gullible followers to ignore is old hat. Greedy, smirking preachers lying and fund-raising from the pulpit, inveighing against “the homosexual agenda” and demanding charity and forgiveness when they’re not the first to offer the same isn’t funny any more.

And expecting laughs from the “purple Prada, peach Prada, periwinkle Prada” and “peal Prada” suits and Trinitie’s outlandish (ish) hats is twenty years of Tyler Perry movies out of date.

The deeper into this story that the movie gets and the darker things turn, the more we see this tale the way the stars do — as a tragedy only in the eyes of its two main characters. Brown and Hall elevate this low-hanging-fruit simply because they have to.

Rating:  R for language and some sexual content.

Cast: Regina Hall, Sterling K. Brown and Nicole Beharie

Credits: Scripted and directed by Adamma Ebo. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:42

Women drive half of the story threads of the latest version of “The Lord of the Rings,” and that’s a definite broadening of perspective for the Amazon-created origin story “The Rings of Power.”

But is it enough to answer that nagging question that hangs over every sequel, prequel or franchise reboot? “Why was this made, again?”

It’s familiar enough for even a casual fan to follow, a tale with beautiful elves and pan-ethnic humans and Irish-accented Harfoots (Harfeet?) of the Hobbit persuasion. And the dwarves are Scots, because of course they are.

It’s a good-looking series, if not a particularly cinematic take on the epic fairytale. That unmistakable generic “green screen” (fake backdrops) lighting bathes most characters in most interiors. The musical score rises to “adequate.” The forced-perspective that makes hobbits look hobbit-sized is underwhelming. And the exteriors — New Zealand or not — are fairly humdrum — mountains and digital cities seen from afar, impressive-enough tank-work for a storm at sea bit.

The dialogue has its pithy moments, and overall, I’d say the writing is canonical enough for the Tolkien crowd. Lots of solid dwarvish wisdom.

“Thair can be noooo troost between hammer and rock,” the wonderful Peter Mullan, as the dwarf king, intones. “Eventually, one of the other must surely break.”

But is this trip to Middle Earth sure to be a rewarding one, and worth eight hours of our while? For five years? That’s surprisingly hard to say, based on the first two episodes Amazon provides. The opening is a talky, backstory-and-exposition-heavy drag while the second installment finally gets around to giving us a little humor, bigger blasts of action and the latest cinematic incarnation of an orc.

We follow five basic story threads. Galadriel the evilish warrior princess, played by Morfydd Clark of “Saint Maude,” is on a quest to finish the Sauron-hunting job her brother began. Yes, pre-“Rings” Sauron was already a “cruel and cunning sorcerer” and on the lam. Perhaps in the frozen north?

The “politician” Elrond (Robert Aramayo) would like to guide his people to a different future, perhaps with the aid of the great smithy Celbrimbor (Charles Edwards). Some sort of negotiation with the dwarves is in order, if they can be reasoned with inside their mountain fastness.

The human Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi of “Homeland” and “How I Met Your Mother”) fell in love with an elf lieutenant Arondir (Ismael Cruz Cordova of “Mary Queen of Scots” and “Berlin Station”). But now, their borderlands village’s guardposts are being abandoned as “the long war is over” with the evil ones. Arondir’s leave-taking has him wondering if this is a good idea, and separately, he and Bronwyn and her curious son (Tyroe Muhafidin) are about to find out if he’s right.

The Harfoots — hunter-gatherer hobbits of a migratory sort — have long depended on the wisdom of Sadoc Burrows (Brit TV vet Lenny Henry). But when the curious Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and Mari (Sara Zwangobani) stumble into The Stranger (Daniel Weyman), a slow-to-speak “giant” (human) who fell out of a shooting star and a creature with particular skills, everybody’s on uncertain ground.

“The Lord of the Rings” made big stars out of a couple of actors, but a few players — Elijah Wood, Ian McKellan, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Liv Tyler and even Sean Astin — came into it as pretty big names. That’s not where Amazon spent its money here, and that matters.

Because one thing that would help get this story on its feet quicker is star power — players who know how to use a close-up, strike a dramatic pose and make a story feel larger than life. Expecting everybody here to “grow into” the character is a reach, and a handicap in the early going. This is a generally colorless lot.

Boniadi impresses, Weyman’s Stranger intrigues. But truthfully, this enterprise doesn’t find its footing until it ventures underground with the bellowing, chiseling dwarves. Mullan, long a favorite among Scottish character actors (“Westworld,” “Tommy’s Honor,” “Hector”) lights up the series the moment he shows up, and Owain Arthur makes his mark as King Durin’s bearded blustery son.

It’s one thing to give Galadriel the most agency. But one can only hope Clark develops some swagger as the series progresses. It’s helpful to remember that Elrond is her cousin, because lowering our expectations of what their shared scenes portend is a must. Aramayo (“The King’s Man”) comes off awfully bland in the early going.

What’s left is pointlessly humorless and self-serious without stakes.

Let’s hope the whole enterprise gets better as the story reaches the middle acts and makes its turn towards the finish. Because I have to say, “Rings of Power” does not overwhelm, dazzle or sprint out of the gate.

Rating: TV-14, violence,

Cast: Morfydd Clark, Nazanin Boniadi, Ismael Cruz Cordoba, Robert Aramayo, Markella Kavenagh, Daniel Weyman and Peter Mullan

Credits: Created by Patrick McKay and John D. Payne, based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: Eight episodes @1:00 each.

A poor teen wants to break free of poverty via bio hop stardom.

Sept. 23 on Paramount Plus.

It’s entirely-too-tempting to try and psychoanalyze the Perversity of Polanski when dipping into the cinema of the Franco-Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski.

After all, we’re welcome to interpret his gory “Macbeth” as a reaction to the Manson Family’s murders of his wife Sharon Tate, and others. So it’s hard to not take the hints of his earliest films and earliest on-screen obsessions as “clues.”

“Cul-de-sac,” his third feature, revisits the dynamics of his debut, “Knife in the Water.” It’s a darkly comic thriller about what appears to be an “open marriage” and what happens when a guy with guns shows up to test it.

It’s a movie about masculinity and feminine manipulation of it, this time filtered through a Brit who doesn’t mind donning lady’s clothes and who can’t take offense when the guy with a gun refers to him as a “little fairy.”

The “darkly comic” interpretation stems from casting the fresh-off-the-Hollywood-Blacklist mug Lionel Stander as a mobster, on the run and stranded in the cliffside castle of George (Donald Pleasance, already “Blofeld” and “Night of the Generals” bald) and his younger “Continental” wife Teresa (Françoise Dorléac of “Billion Dollar Brain” and “Where the Spies Are”).

It was impossible for Stander to open his mouth and not get a laugh. From “Mr. Dees Goes to Town” to “Hart to Hart,” the guy sent up the “growling tough guy” who might be a pussycat “type.”

We meet the wounded mobster Richard or “Dickie” as he’s pushing his gut-shot partner (Jack McGowran) in their stolen driving school Morris Minor. Whatever “job” they were on went wrong. Now, they’re stranded on the North Sea coast. A search for help reveals a small, semi-restored and inhabited cliffside castle (Lindisfarne Island, Northumberland), and that the lady of the house enjoys a good nude roll in the sand dunes with a younger “friend of the family” (Iaian Quarrier).

Richard scavenges for food and drink, and hides out until the visitors motorboat away. He calls whoever hired him and Albie, and when that awakens the role-playing “lord” and lady of the house, he takes them hostage.

“One doesn’t choose the time one gets into trouble.”

The “not exactly Anglo-Saxon” Richard grates up against the effete, “snotty” old money George and insults George’s provocative “Let’s you and him fight” wife. She might be cunning enough to figure out a way out of this, but her “bravery” is almost entirely limited to trying to goad George into action.

Time and again we see escape routes — not literally, as the island’s causeway is under water for long stretches — or at least moments when they might get the better of their oafish captor. They end up cowering instead.

Polanski plays up the class conflict and plays down the sexual tension, despite having Dorléac nude in a few scenes. Veteran character actor Stander, with his boxer’s mug and foghorn-through-gravel voice, is good at suggesting native cunning in a man who can’t really get himself and his partner out of this fix without help from higher ups, and maybe a little divine intervention.

The stark, grey (black and white) sun-washed location can feel like the set for a Beckett play, moved out of doors.

The dynamics may be as simply laid-out as in “Knife in the Water,” two men, a woman seemingly manipulating and shifting allegiances as the power struggle plays out. But there’s little power struggle to this. It’s just “The Desperate Hours” in a northern English location, with visitors (including a very young Jacqueline Bisset) to chase off via insults and incidents as Richard poses as the rudest cook/”gardener” ever.

As a thriller, the film is at its most nerve-wracking in its score. Frequent Polanski collaborator Krzysztof Komeda serves up jazz-pop with a keening screech (Theremin? Synthesizer?) as the lead instrument. It gave me chest pains.

The setting lends “Cul-de-sac” a timelessness that holds up better than the plot or sexual trappings that decorate it. The “comedy” is dry, but dated.

And psychologically, all one can say about this, “Knife in the Water” and “Repulsion,” the movies that led up to “Fearless Vampire Killers” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” is that there was something decidedly off in the insecurities Polanski put on screen. It might have given direction to whatever therapy he got into, before or after the Manson murders — as in “not just strange” but “warrants keeping an eye on.”

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Donald Pleasance, Françoise Dorléac, Lionel Stander, Jack McGowran, Iain Quarrier, Marie Kean, Robert Dorning and Jaqueline Bisset

Credits: Directed by Roman Polanski, scripted by Roman Polanski and Gérard Brach. An MGM release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:52

“Killer Whales” is “true crime” mockumentary about the making of a documentary whose aim it to find the killer of a “bad boy” artist from among the four likeliest suspects.

It pokes fun at not just the genre, but the nature of “reality” on such “gotcha” enterprises and the sorts of people who often make them.

Not every investigative documentarian is Errol Morris or Alex Gibney. But everyone in Hollywood is a “type” which this picture sets out to lampoon.

Why was this artist murdered? For his apartment, of course. L.A’s housing crisis is the bizarre organizing principle of what I hesitate to label “the narrative,” because that a Screenwriting 101 disaster for the ages.

What it plays as is a movie about making a movie which recreates — half-assed “Rashomon” style — the events of the night of the murder with “the real suspects,” save for a couple who are played by the naive creator and producer of the doc, who dons dresses and makeup to portray them.

For the artist hilariously (cough cough) named Daveed Hackney, “I wanted Richard Dreyfuss,” turtle-necked doofus Donny Wunder (Wyatt Bunce, who also scripted this) complains. “I got his son, Harry.”

That’s the last thing we can accept as fact in this stumbling, clumsy struggle to not come off as the efforts of rank amateurs. Except again, Harry Dreyfuss is playing the artist in the “recreations” of “real” artist, who is played by Niel Kennedy.

The whole movie is this maddening jumble of players, players playing players, “found footage” and “new” interviews, NONE of which adds a single laugh to the picture.

A snide producer/money man (Neal Bledsoe of “Shameless” and “Ugly Betty”) won’t let Donny Wunder direct the documentary he’s dreamed up, even though Donny assures us that “I watched Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos.’ How hard could it be?”

So they hire Francis Falconi (Greg Vrotos), an ulfiltered, lazy rageaholic who doesn’t even bother to read the pitch before he takes the meeting. He doesn’t try to hide his contempt for documentaries or the “f—–g joke” Donny in his profane rages to his agent and anybody else within earshot.

Perfect guy to “grill” suspects, trip them up with his cleverly-conceived questions. Francis asks “I blade for Christ” roller-blading preacher T-Blade (Michael Cognata) “If you did it, if T-Blade DID murder somebody, what would T-Blade do?”

The stunningly-convoluted “frame” for this “story” is that the film was abandoned a couple of years before, and Donny, screaming Francis and others are interviewed in the fictive present to show the footage, talk about why it was abandoned and take one last stab at finding the real killer. Donny won’t let the project go. Francis supposedly “found Jesus” in the intervening years.

That’s not funny. That goes for almost the entire film, pretty much every scene — from the “splatter test” where Donny and Francis try to determine what real blood looks like and how it sprays about in a gory murder — to the screwy characters, like D & D-playing suspect Squire Naljaimon (Anthony Carrigan of TV’s “Barry”) or the spirit -guide Klara (Kristin Couture) lands like a rotten cantaloupe dropped from a great height.

Splat.

All this incompetently-handled “complexity” in the way the story is told is just a disastrous distraction for how inept the entire enterprise is.

Shockingly, a movie about a movie that was abandoned, mid-production, turns out to be a movie that should have been abandoned mid-production.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Wyatt Bunce, Greg Vrotsos, Kristin Couture, Michael Cognata, Anthony Carrigan and Harry Dreyfuss.

Credits: Directed by Willow Hamilton, scripted by Wyatt Bunce. Magpie Productions — self-distributed

Running time: 1: 24

From the folks who brought us “The Father.” No. I’m serious. Florian Zeller, who wrote the source plays both films are based on, and directed both films, and Christopher Hampton, who adapted them both and Sir Anthony Hopkins carry over from “The Father.”

Oscar bait for the holidays?

A little bloodshed, a few laughs, a bit of swearing.

Malin Akerman and Abigail Breslin star in this Oct. 21 release.