A hit-and-miss hunk of silliness

    Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo team in a movie that's vying for a dubious title: the most ridiculous movie ever made.

    Now, there's nothing wrong with ridiculousness and when a movie opts for so much unabashed silliness, we're obliged to give it a whirl, especially with the talented and often funny Wiig as one of the principals. Remember, too, Wiig and Mumolo wrote the screenplay for Bridesmaids.

    But as silly as Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar can be, it's only mildly amusing with one great gag involving culottes, women's pants that the movie considers to be a major fashion boo-boo.

    Wiig and Mumolo play a couple of Nebraska women who've lost their husbands, one to divorce, the other to death. After their jobs at a  furniture store vanish, this duo is expelled from the local Talking Club -- a preposterous small gathering of women with nothing to say. 

    What the hell? It's time for an adventure.

    So it's off to Florida, where Barb and Star become caught up in a plot that's being orchestrated by a woman with the whitest complexion in the western world. The chalky white Dr. Lady (also Wiig)-- wants to kill off the entire town of Vista Del Mar because of slights she suffered as a child.

  An Asian boy named YoYo (Reyn Doi) and a stooge who expects to marry Dr. Lady (Jamie Dornan) are part of  a plan to kill everyone in Vista Del Mar during the town's festive shrimp celebration.

   Once in Florida, Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig) lose their buddy mojos and begin competing for the affections of Dornan's Edgar.

   Director Josh Greenbaum does his best to turn Vista Del Mar into a pastel paradise, a riot of blues and pinks punctuated by occasional musical numbers. 

    There are chuckles. The worst kind of tourists, Barb and Star are unable to resist shopping for the trashiest tchotchkes. Before an accommodations upgrade, Barb & Star check into a ramshackle motel where the desk clerk asks if they will require towels. Wiig, Mumolo, and Dornan are sandwiched into an off-color sight gag, and an occasional line reveals how bereft of awareness, the two can be.

    "A person's face says a lot about how they look,'' says Star, a supposed example of her uncanny wisdom.

     If a movie is going to be this outlandish, it better do it with abandon and without shame. A total commitment to silliness might be Barb & Star's saving grace. Full of raunch, the movie may not always work but it's far too preposterous to hate.

    Still, a step back suggests that Wiig and Mumolo came up with two cluelessly funny characters who may not be worth an entire movie, particularly one with a climax involving swarms of deadly mosquitos and a kid in a submarine.

Everything but a consistently involving story

 

     At two-and-a-half-hours, Wonder Woman 1984 doesn't have a compelling enough story to keep the movie from wearing out. Gal Gadot returns as Wonder Woman. And director Patty Jenkins again takes charge of a movie that at least in its early going delivers the humor and buoyancy that make superhero movies fun.

    A prologue showing us Wonder Woman as a child stands as a masterful action sequence in which young Diana competes with grown women of her island home in games that recall TV shows in which contestants are pitted against one another on fiendishly designed obstacle courses. 

    The movie then shifts to Washington, D.C. The now-grown Diana, who in case you haven't already figured it out is also Wonder Woman, works at the Smithsonian. She dresses stylishly and avoids anything resembling a social life. 

    She hasn't gotten over losing the love of her life (Chris Pine), a World War I pilot. That happened in the last movie, but as we all know, sadness lingers.

    Sorrow aside, Diana remains Wonder Woman, saving kids at malls in set pieces that assure us Diana hasn't lost her mojo. 

     Enter Barbara (Kristen Wiig), a klutzy bespectacled anthropologist who's beginning work at the Smithsonian. Socially awkward and burdened by a hairdo in which no two strands of hair seem to be traveling in the same direction, Barbara badly needs a pal.  

     And unlike Diana, Barbara also would like to find love. She envies Diana's coolness and preternatural composure.

    While perusing her department's various treasures, Barbara comes across a crystal that she quickly deems worthless and which we immediately understand will be thrown into the plot in a big way, 

    OK, might as well spill the beans: The crystal can fulfill wishes, a power that will be bent toward evil before Wonder Woman's protracted finale.

    Eventually, the movie must get around to a plot. This one involves Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), a conman who uses TV to try to persuade ordinary people to make what he calls sure-fire oil investments. Remember, it's 1984 and oil still rules. 

    Lord refers to himself as a "TV personality," not a conman Any resemblance to any real-life public figure must have been purely coincidental.

    Anyway, the crystal falls into Lord's hands and he uses it  (surprise!) to threaten global catastrophe. 

    Oh, I forgot to mention that the crystal's wishing power also brings back Pine's Steve Trevor, which allows Jenkins to add a variety of comic bits (selection of clothing being one) that play on Steve's awe at the '80s world into which he has been reborn. 

     Steve's return also provides Pine with an occasion to apply techniques gleaned from the open-mouth school of acting as he gapes at the special effects.

    Once Steve arrives, the movie becomes a twosome. Diana and Steve travel to far-flung places -- Egypt among them. Their mission: to put an end to Lord's malicious plans. 

    I don't think it's a spoiler to let you know that the villainy is ... well ... only adequate. Pascal gives a pitchman's one note performance. It's almost like watching a comic-book character scream as he tries to lift himself off the page.

    When envy prompts Barbara's transformation into Cheetah, the evil opposite of Wonder Woman, the movie seems more silly than scary.

    Wonder Woman isn't a dreadful misfire, and it's difficult to imagine that we've seen the last of the superhero who speaks to issues of women's power. 

    After its long -- intermittently amusing journey -- Wonder Woman 1984 does some undisguised cheerleading for the truth, make that Truth with a capital "T."

    So here's my truth, subject of course to a bit of relativism that may be unsuited to a comic book world: Wonder Woman 1984 struck me as part engaging entertainment, part overlong franchise entry, part inflated action movie, and one more stop on what seems to be an endless superhero highway.

One raunchy 'Sausage Party'

This hunk of adult animation earns its R rating.

When I tell you that the animated movie, Sausage Party, involves walking, talking hot dogs and buns, you don't have to work too hard to surmise that the humor will be sexual and that it won't be subtle.

That's not to say that the splashy, adults-only animation in Sausage Party is not without trace elements of wit or that some of the jokes aren't funny, providing you're not put off by a slew of "F" and "MF" bombs that are thrown around so casually, they seem like accepted parts of speech.

And when I tell you that the villain in this ribald piece is a character named Douche (Nick Kroll), you should have all the information you need to know that Sausage Party is brash, impolite and damn proud of it.

Brimming with ethnic stereotyping and building toward an orgiastic finale that would be rated NC-17 if it didn't involve grocery store perishables, Sausage Party tells the story of hot dog Frank (voice by Seth Rogen). Frank falls for a bun named Brenda (Kristin Wiig). Frank and Brenda lust for one another, but can't do anything about their desires until they're liberated from their respective packaging.

The movie's characters give you some idea of what directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon have in mind.

In addition to Frank and Brenda, we meet Sammy (Ed Norton), a bagel who sounds very much like Woody Allen, and Lavas (David Krumholtz), an Arab hunk of pita who believes that eventually he'll be rewarded with 77 drips of extra virgin olive oil. I didn't even mention Teresa (Salma Hayek), a taco shell and Latin bombshell with lesbian leanings.

Sexual preferences aside, Sausage Party also immerses us in a story about the way faith functions to keep folks under control. The perishables at Shopwell, the supermarket where the story takes place, believe that when they're purchased they'll find eternal bliss in what they call "The Great Beyond." After being wheeled out of the store in shopping carts they'll be eternally happy.

Not so fast, says Honey Mustard (Danny McBride), a return item who has seen The Great Beyond, and knows that his perishable brothers and sisters will be sliced, diced, boiled, fried and otherwise "murdered" by hungry humans.

We follow some of the characters into The Great Beyond, notably little Barry (Michael Cera), a hot dog who hasn't grow to full size and who learns the horrible truth: The faith on which Shopwell runs is hokum.

Perhaps in a spirit of fairness, the screenplay also includes some non-perishable items, most prominently Firewater (Bill Hader), a native American bottle of liquor whose wisdom seems to derive from massive inhalations of marijuana.

Come on, you thought you'd make it through this kind of movie without a pot joke?

I don't know what it says about me, but I laughed at the wad of gum (Scott Underwood) that rides around in a wheel chair and talks in a voice that resembles the electronically produced voice of physicist Steven Hawking. Gum, we learn, became smart because he spent years stuck under the desk of a brilliant scientist.

Too much? Probably, but Sausage Party thrives on tossing out too much of everything.

In the right crowd, Sausage Party might be fun. It may not run out of energy, but it does sometimes run out of comic gas, and it's not always fall down funny.

By the time, the big orgy arrives, I'd had enough, which made me wonder whether Sausage Party's hour and 29 minutes might have been better had it been served as a snack rather than a full-course meal.

Women vs. ghosts, no winners

If you thought a female version of Ghostbusters would save the summer, think again.

For some time now, a stream of on-line scorn has been directed at the new Ghostbusters, which attempts to reboot the 1984 original with women in the principal roles.

A confession: I don't regard the original, which starred Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd and Ernie Hudson, as an inviolable work or even a great movie. And in a time of remakes, do-overs and sequels, a Ghostbusters reboot should do little to denigrate anyone's pop-cultural sacred cows.

So, no, the idea of the movie doesn't bother me in the least. The movie? Truth be told, it didn't bother me, either, but it also didn't make me laugh enough to enthuse over it.

As a special-effects driven comedy, the 2016 edition of Ghostbusters can't scare up enough yucks to haunt a closet, a problem that should come as a surprise to those who believe that Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon are capable of brilliant comic work.

McKinnon outdoes her comic compatriots, but this quartet gets slimed by the overblown scale of the production.

Adding Chris Hemsworth as a sexy but dumb receptionist was an interesting comic idea in gender reversal, but one that's beaten to death before the original Ghostbusters gang begins to turn up in dutifully placed cameos.

The wittiest cameo belongs to the late Harold Ramis, who appears as a bust on a mantel in the background of an early scene.

As for the rest: There's plenty of green slime and a few chuckles, but mostly the movie wastes an opportunity to bring four gifted comic actresses together for what should have been one of summer's surefire bets.

Director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) might have been in the unenviable position of having to keep fans of the original happy and make a refreshing new comedy.

Plot? Yeah, there's a semblance of one, but who really cares? I can't imagine you'll shiver because of Neil Casey, who plays Rowan, a creep with evil plans.

The movie's idea of feminist assertion arrives in the form of an online barb one of the characters shares with her colleagues. "Ain't no bitches gonna bust no ghosts."

Ghostbusters, of course, is meant to challenge that notion as its quartet of ghost fighters aims ray-spewing devices at a series of phantoms.

But the movie is too mired in blockbuster sensibilities to say much of anything. And if it has little to say and too few laughs, what exactly is the point?

Still, I guess Ghostbusters can be considered a form of progress. Why should only men be able to make silly, bloated comedies?

Can this botanist be saved?

Ridley Scott's The Martian puts a premium on smarts.

In 1979, Ridley Scott made his first journey into to space with Alien, a landmark movie that spawned sequels and turned the universe into a source of abiding terror.

Rather than harboring wondrous possibilities for communication with alien life (see Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Alien , introduced us to acid drooling monsters that hatched inside human bodies.

In 2012's Prometheus, Scott returned to space with a competent movie, but one that failed to gather Alien's cultural steam.

The same might be said about Scott's The Martian, but it's a much better movie than Prometheus, and its view of what awaits us in space may be more realistic; i.e., nothing but hardship and emptiness.

The story centers on a mission to Mars in which an early picture twist leaves botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) abandoned on the planet's desolate surface.

Believing Watney to be dead, his companions on the Ares III mission head back toward Earth. Watney must use all his scientific knowledge and ingenuity if he's going to have a chance at survival.

Despite its stark setting, the resultant film goes against the dystopian grain that distinguishes most contemporary sci-fi. The longer The Martian goes on, the more it becomes clear that Scott is making his ode to science. Brain power not brawn gives Watney a chance.

I don't know if the science in The Martian will make scientists happy. I'm hopeful that astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson will weigh in on the subject as he did on Gravity, a movie he didn't like.

But Scott has gone to great lengths to make the movie feel scientifically plausible, and from a dramatic point of view that's more important than turning the screen into a 3D science lesson.

Based on popular novel by Andy Weir, the story also makes us aware of what's happening on Earth. The head of NASA (Jeff Daniels) tries to figure out how to keep his program viable while hatching a rescue plan.

Daniels is joined by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Kristen Wiig in his efforts to determine whether Watney can be saved.

From time to time, we also check in on the crew that's headed back to Earth under the guidance of Commander Lewis (Jessica Chastain). Also on board the spaceship that fled the Martian storm believed to have killed Watney are astronauts played by Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan and Michael Pena.

Watney, who talks to himself for a long time before he discovers how to communicate with Earth, narrates some of the story. These "chats" add self-reflective humor to the proceedings and don't really intrude on the story, which addresses three important questions: How will Watney deal with problems revolving involving diminishing supplies of food, air and water?

As a piece of filmmaking, The Martian is more clear-eyed than visionary. and it's weighed down by an unnecessary epilogue that follows tense finale with enough white-knuckle potential to satisfy action junkies.

Scott makes witty use of Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive and other '70s disco music, and receives a strong assist from cinematographer Darisuz Wolski, who makes reasonable -- if not dazzling -- use of 3D.

For the most part, Scott maintains focus. He doesn't suggest that science will save us, but builds an exciting entertainment around the notion that some problems are best solved by knowledge, cooperation and courage bred of necessity.

No weapons required. I'd call that both a profession of faith and a relief.

She's sexually aggressive at 15

Diary of a Teenage Girl takes a serio-comic look at a provocative subject.

The filmmaking is lively and creative. The central performance is ripe with the burgeoning sexuality of a 15-year-old, and there's little question that the movie evokes a loosey/goosey, mid-1970s moment when the line between adult and adolescent behavior got a little blurry.

That social observation may be the most cogent thing about The Diary of a Teenage Girl, a movie in which a teenager has a sexual relationship with her mother's 30something boyfriend.

Bel Powley's performance as young Minnie Goetz should elevate her status as a bold and daring actress, and director Mirelle Heller makes a provocative debut with a movie that leaves us to sort through its many issues.

Put another way, Diary is an engaging act of assertion, as brash as its main character and not necessarily any more perceptive.

We know a lot about what Minnie thinks because her tape-recorded confessions give the movie its on-going perspective. She's constantly narrating her life for us.

"I had sex today. Holy shit," says Minnie at the outset.

Minnie not only has sex on that day, but on many other days: Leaving hearts and flowers at the door, Heller emphasizes the physicality of female desire.

When I say that a movie includes a sexual relationship between a 15-year-old girl and her mother's adult boyfriend, I can almost feel knees jerking with outrage. I get that.

I felt some of that, as well. I took the story on the level it's offered while also remembering that Diary isn't just a story about sexual awakening; it's about a particular sexual awakening -- one in which the characters don't seem to care much about boundaries.

Based on a semi-autobiographical graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, Diary seems to rely on environment to explain Minnie's unregulated behavior. It's not spelled out, but we know that she's seen plenty of adults whose behavior is no less regulated.

Minnie is alternately insecure and confident. She's also entirely unaware (maybe the movie is, as well) of the fact that her sexual choice might be an expression of anger toward her mother (Kristen Wiig).

Wing's Charlotte never has provided a stable environment for Minnie or her younger sister (Abby Wait).

Charlotte split with Minnie's stepfather (Christopher Meloni), smokes pot and, on occasion, snorts coke. She can't hold a job, and has taken up with the shiftless Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard), a grown man who hasn't matured much beyond Minnie's age level.

Skarsgard's Monroe is the kind of guy who makes himself at home wherever he happens to land; he doesn't spend much time agonizing about his behavior. Maybe he thinks it's cool to be sexually open with Minnie.

For all that, The Diary of a Teenage Girl isn't one long squirmfest, and it's not shy about seeing Minnie as a seductress who wants to have lots of sex, some of it even with boys her own age.

Perhaps as a way to honor the movie's roots as a graphic novel, Heller includes animation -- sometimes showing us Minnie's fantasies.

Minnie not only discovers sexual pleasure, she learns that there's power in sex. At one point, she imagines herself as a giantess rumbling through San Francisco's streets, a sexual powerhouse.

Fair to say that at 15, Minnie, who's also an aspiring cartoonist, doesn't know how to control the forces she's unleashing.

I'm guessing that Heller makes an assumption about her audience: Perhaps she thinks that we already know that a sexual relationship between a 15-year-old and a man in his 30s is neither legally nor in any other way acceptable. She doesn't lecture us about it.

Instead, she takes us inside Minnie's world. She refuses to condemn anyone.

That's OK, but it would have helped if Heller had dug a bit deeper. Minnie's perspective gives the movie its personality, but it can't help but be a bit limited.

Powley, a British actress who's really in her early 20s, makes a willing co-conspirator for Heller. With her eyes popped wide open, Powley conveys Minnie's desire, bolstered by intermittent bursts of bravado.

In Powley and Heller's hands, Diary feel as alive as its young protagonist. And by the movie's end, it's clear that Heller has fashioned another coming-of-age story -- albeit one that brims with sex, talk about sex and nudity.

Diary of a Teenage Girl is an odd duck of a movie: Brave and cheeky, but not an inch removed from the sometimes wanton behavior of its characters. How you feel about that may well determine how you feel about the movie.

Kristin Wiig breaks many molds

Is Kristen Wiig an actress, a comedian, a sketch artist or maybe a daredevil?

She's probably all of those things -- and she brings a bit of each to Welcome to Me, a purposefully weird comedy in which Wiig plays Alice Klieg, a woman suffering from borderline personality disorder.

Alice's life changes when she wins the California lottery and decides to use her new-found fortune to finance her own talk show.

Obviously no one in his or her right mind would put someone like Alice on TV -- except for a financially strapped production company that's wallowing in failed infomercials.

As a compulsive fan of Oprah Winfrey, Alice believes that she can become a talk show host, but her idea of a talk show involves sharing weird recipes (a meatloaf cake), near-hysterical reenactments of childhood traumas and a series of programs devoted to neutering dogs.

I'd be lying if I told you I knew exactly what to make of Welcome to Me, which was directed by Shira Piven from a screenplay by Eliot Laurence.

The movie made me laugh; it made me queasy and, by the end, I concluded that it couldn't quite sustain its crazy premise.

Still, Wiig doesn't flinch from the challenge of carrying the movie, even though she receives support from Wes Bentley and James Marsden, as the owners of the infomercial business, as well as from Joan Cusack, as the show's director. Linda Cardellini plays Alice's best friend, and Tim Robbins appears as Alice's therapist, a role that's handled with enough seriousness to keep the movie off-balance.

But then everything about Welcome to Me is a bit off-balance, and I imagine that audiences will include those who laugh, those who squirm and perhaps even a few who walk out.

Wiig has had big hits (Bridesmaids), voiced animated characters (How to Train Your Dragon) and veered away from the mainstream (The Skeleton Twins).

Welcome to Me again takes Wiig off the beaten track with a comedy about a mentally ill character who finds a temporary home on television. Draw your own conclusions.

It probably would be wrong to categorize Welcome to Me as any kind of media satire: Like Wiig, it exists in its own category-resistant world -- and probably is better off for it.

Kirsten Wiig gets serious

Hateship Loveship proves punchless.

Hateship Loveship -- one of several recent movies that has been available on VOD prior to reaching theaters -- proves a restrained but imperfect attempt to turn an Alice Munro short story into a feature-length movie.

Hateship Loveship surrounds Kristen Wiig -- in a serious role -- with some fine supporting talent, notably Nick Nolte, Hailee Steinfeld and Guy Pearce.

Wiig plays Johanna, a woman who embarks on a new adventure after the elderly woman she has been working for dies. Isolated for much of her life, Johanna becomes a kind of housemaid and nanny to Mr. McCauley (Nolte) and his recalcitrant teen-age granddaughter Sabitha (Steinfeld).

The plot engages when one of Sabitha's friends (Sami Gayle) decides to play a prank on Johanna, setting up an affectionate e-mail correspondence between Johanna and Pearce's Ken, Sabitha's drug-addicted father. Ken's contributions to this dialogue are composed by Gayle's Edith.

Acting on what she believes to be her one chance for love, lonely Johanna travels to Chicago and moves in with Ken, who resides in a rundown motel that he makes noises about renovating.

Half spooky and half sincere, Wiig proves convincing as a woman who knows next to nothing about the world and its rules.

Gradually, Johanna takes over Ken's life: She sees hope where we see nothing but potential doom.

To worm her way into Ken's world, the emotionally underdeveloped Johanna must displace Chloe (Jennifer Jason Leigh), one of Ken's junkie pals.

Director Liza Johnson, working from a script by Mark Poirier, files off the story's rougher edges, which has the effect of making Loveship Hateship entirely too easy to shrug off.

What could have been a tender little movie seems little more than a curiosity: Wiig in a role without a comic side.

With friends like these ....

A trendy sitcom of a movie substitutes banter for real depth.

Call me old-fashioned, but I still cling to the expectation that movies should to be richer, bigger and more emotionally savvy than anything that's available on TV. While watching Friends With Kids, a rom-com from director Jennifer Westfeldt, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had tuned into a sitcom made by a writer/director who was well-versed in the distressingly insular language of contemporary relationships.

Westfeldt's movie feels smart in the way that sit-coms sometimes feel smart; it's almost as if issues are being referenced rather than explored.

Like most rom-coms, Friends With Kids springs from a contrivance. Two friends (Westfeldt and Adam Scott) are wary of the pitfalls that can sabotage sustained relationships, but want to become parents anyway. So, they decide to avoid the problems faced by their friends with children and have a kid without the burden of also having a romantic relationship. Because they're not sexually attracted to each other, they think it should be easy to have a kid, share parenting chores and otherwise get with their lives. It helps that they live in the same Manhattan apartment building.

For the most part, the movie's more traditional couples are accessories that support the main endeavor. Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd play a husband and wife who fight all the time because they're both constantly frazzled about the demands of child-rearing. Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig play another couple. Their marriage buckles because of the strains placed on it by his womanizing.

Not surprisingly, the married couples think that Westfeldt’s Julie and Scott’s Jason have lost their minds. They think it's a mistake to have kids without a formal relationship, but at least in the beginning, Julie and Jason seem to have made a wise choice. They're super-tolerant of each other’s dating lives, and they split the demanding chores of caring for an infant.

Westfeldt (co-writer and star of Kissing Jessica Stein) keeps the tone reasonably light, as she examines the dating lives of Julie and Jason. A beefy looking Ed Burns shows up as a a possible beau for Julie; he’s a generally nice guy who’s divorced and has kids of his own. Jason falls for a sexy dancer (Megan Fox) who’s very clear about having no interest in a traditional relationship or in having kids.

About three-quarters of the way through, Westfeldt shifts the movie's tone. At a dinner on a Vermont ski trip the friends take together, Ham’s character has too much to drink and launches into a sneering tirade about Julie and Jason, predicting that their arrangement ultimately will crumble.

True to form, it does, and the movie stops being a trendy look at contemporary lives and love, and becomes a traditional rom-com that poses a distressingly predictable question: Will Julie and Jason become a couple?

I watched Friends With Kids without being bored or totally put off, but things never really deepen in ways that feel emotionally right.

One footnote: I won't give anything away, but the last line of the movie is needlessly coarse, a turn-off just at the moment when Friends With Kids could have used a little glow.