Leftovers from the old year

I'm offering brief reviews of two movies (Anaconda and Goodbye, June) to go on record about movies that I hoped might offer diversion (in the case of Anaconda) and emotional heft (Goodbye June). Neither movie did either of those things, so here's my gloss on both them:

Anaconda

The end of the year usually finds critics weighing in on some of the year's more serious offerings, movies that probably will dominate the upcoming awards season. That wouldn't apply to Anaconda. Director Tom Gormican offers the sixth installment of the series, this one starring a usually reliable comedy crew that includes Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Thandiwe Newton, and Steve Zahn. The story revolves around a quartet of  old friends who reunite to rekindle the spark of enthusiasm they felt about the horror movies of their teens. Black, as a director of wedding videos, joins Rudd, as an actor with a dismal career, for a no-budget indie remake of their beloved Anaconda. Along with Newton, as a former high school pal, and Zahn, as another pal and cameraman, the principals head for the Amazon. Selton Mello appears as Santiago, the local hired as the movie's snake handler. Gormican mixes broad comedy and satire about movie cliches, but the movie's laughs may have gotten lost in the jungle, and its additions of horror seem like transfusions of gore into an already lost cause.

Goodbye June

And while we're on the subject of strong casts and weak results, consider Goodbye June, a Christmas movie that marks Kate Winslet's directorial debut. Winslet also appears on screen along with Toni Collette, Andrea Riseborough, and Johnny Flynn. They're siblings dealing with the imminent death from cancer of their mother (Helen Mirren). Dad (Timothy Spall) seems more interested in football and alcohol than in his family. Did I mention that the movie takes place at Christmas time and reaches a sentimental conclusion when grandchildren perform a Christmas play for their dying grandma? This one is meant to jerk tears,  but if I were going to shed any tears, they would be for a cast that deserved better material. No hard feelings, though. These accomplished actors surely will triumph anew.

'Mickey 17' fails to stick a landing

    Korean director Bong Joon Ho finds his way to Hollywood for Mickey 17,  a teeming, cockeyed adaptation of a novel by Edward Ashton. Ashton titled his novel Mickey7. 

    I don't know whether Bong has upped the ante by adding more Mickeys. I haven’t read Ashton’s book. I did, however, approach Mickey 17 with high hopes. Bong, after all, has directed some of my favorite movies. The list includes The Host (2006), Snowpiercer (2013), and Okja (2017). He also directed Parasite (2019), which won him best-picture and best director Oscars.

   Given my expectations, I’d say Mickey 17 registers as a disappointment. Although the movie can be funny and audacious, its many tonal shifts (from serious sci-fi to blatant slapstick to broadly expressed satire) never cohere into a satisfying whole.

   Bong again deals with class divisions and the human tendency to destroy anything regarded as alien, but Mickey 17 lacks the controlled brilliance with which Parasite vaulted over the top.

   The casting  features a variety of acting styles. A groggy- looking Robert Pattinson plays Mickey, a desperate young man who signs on for a space voyage to escape a vindictive loan shark on Earth. 

   Aboard the ship, Mickey becomes a human guinea pig, a so-called “Expendable.” He’s exposed to lethally extreme conditions so that the vessel’s scientists can develop vaccines to protect the crew when the ship concludes its four-and-a-half year journey to the distant planet of Niflheim, which evidently lacks an atmosphere conducive to human life.

   Thanks to advances in cloning, Mickey's body is replicated after each of his deaths, but Mickey isn’t entirely obliterated. A memory storage brick allows the proliferating Mickeys to retain the same basic identity. Mickey remembers his many deaths.

   As the story's dystopian future unfolds, Mickey 17 survives one of his dangerous forays, a situation that prompts the authorities — who think he has died — to print another Mickey. Also played by Pattinson, he's Mickey 18. Bold and crass, Mickey 18 —known as a “Multiple” -- begins to figure into an already crowded plot.

   Two women enter Mickey’s life. Naomi Ackie plays Nasha, a security officer on the ship who falls for this schlub of an everyman. Anamaria Vartolomei portrays Kai, a woman rising in the ship’s rigid hierarchy. 

   Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo in a clownish hunk of exaggerated performing) presides over the ship with his devious wife Yilfa (Toni Collette). A former congressman, Marshall is followed by enthusiasts who wear red hats. (Draw your own conclusions.)

   Steven Yeun plays Timo, the guy who got poor Mickey into the trouble that caused both of them to flee Earth. In space, the shrewd Timo fares better than Mickey. He becomes a pilot.

   When the ship reaches the snowy planet of Niflheifm, the crew encounters Creepers, creatures that look like a cross between insects and armadillos. Fascistic and racist, Commander Marshall wants to kill the planet’s inhabitants and seize it for those humans he deems as genetically superior.

   All of this builds toward an epic battle in which the two Mickeys try to save Zoko, a baby Creeper that has been kidnapped by Marshall. What worse crime could occur than threatening to drop a wiggling hunk of Creeper cuteness into a flaming shipboard incinerator?

    A messy overreach of a movie, Mickey 17 may not satisfy sci-fi fans or those looking for satirical rigor. Thematically, Mickey 17 digs no deeper than the average Star Trek episode.

    Sure, Bong’s darkly hued comic inclinations ensure that parts of the movie succeed and some of its images compel, but, for me, Mickey 17 emerged as an intermittently amusing smorgasbord of scenes rather than the masterful directorial performance I expected.

Bob's Cinema Diary April 14: 'Cherry' and 'Mafia Mamma'

Cherry 

A couple  of weeks ago Cherry, a movie about a 25-year-old woman facing a difficult choice, might not have been acutely topical. But recent court decisions have put the future of abortion pills in doubt and given the movie an unexpected jolt. Maybe not directly, but in its well-observed approach to Cherry (Alex Trewhitt), an unsettled Los Angeles woman who learns that she is 10 weeks pregnant. Cherry has 24 hours to decide on whether to use the pill. If not, California law will require that she wait and have a surgical abortion. Of course, Cherry also can opt to have the baby. It's clear from the outset that Cherry, who works in a thrift store and is devoted to roller skating, isn't prepared for parenthood. Trewhitt gives a convincing performance as an addled young woman who can't bring herself to talk about her situation with her mother, sister, or father. She discusses it with her boyfriend, but he immediately balks at the idea of parenthood. With no guidance forthcoming, Cherry must confront her situation alone. Director Sophie Galibert keeps the tone light but not so light that the seriousness of the issue is lost. Yes, choice can be difficult, but Cherry fortunately has a choice to make: The movie makes you wonder what would have happened had that not been the case.

Mafia Mamma

A mafia comedy with a scenic Italian backdrop. What's not to like? Well, an awful lot about director Catherine Hardwicke's misguided Mafia Mamma, a farcical look at a harried American mom who inherits the leadership of a famous mafia family. In an effort to poke fun at mob-movie cliches, Hawdwicke replaces them with comedy cliches, the most notable being a fish-out-of-water scenario with Toni Collette working hard to turn Kristin Balbano into a woman who’s woefully ignorant about mob tactics. She hasn’t even seen The Godfather, an immediate strike against her, not to mention the source of a few  lame jokes. After Kristin arrives in Italy for her grandfather’s funeral, she receives help from Monica Bellucci, the secretary who served the recently deceased Don. Conflict, of course, arises. The Balbanos feud and fight with the Romanos, another mob family. The movie dines on cliches and stereotypes without giving them enough comic punch to knock them onto fresh turf. Recently separated, Kristin is a horny boss who grows into a crime role that the movie ultimately launders. The movie’s major accomplishment: It may make you hungry for gnocchi, a delight that Kristin craves soon after landing in Italy.

A slow and overlong 'Nightmare Alley'

     It’s no surprise that director Guillermo del Toro has remade Nightmare Alley,  a 1947 noir movie starring Tyrone Power in a role intended to challenge the actor's glamor-boy image. 

     The material, from a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham,  seems well-suited for Guillermo (Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water), a director who often draws in dark, bizarre strokes.

     Beginning in the world of low-rent carnivals,  the 1947 movie delved into the world of fraud and exploitation, spreading its story across two environments, one seedy, the other more decorous. The leap suggested that greed and ambition knew no borders.

    More than 70 years later, del Toro has taken the original 111-minute movie and turned it into a 140-minute trip into sideshow culture.

    The difference in length can be taken as emblematic of the way that cult or noir creations have muscled their way into the mainstream. Black-and-white photography turns to color in the hands of cinematographer Dan Lausten, and following his usual bent, del Toro creates images that are both detailed and bizarre.

    De Toro gives his movies their own worlds and Nightmare Alley is no exception -- which is not to say that the movie can be taken as an unalloyed success. More on that later.

    The story twists its way through a variety of complications. Lost and on the run, Stan Carlisle (BradleyCooper) stumbles into a carnival presided over by Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe). Hoatley specializes in displaying deformed fetuses he preserves in alcohol. His favorite: a three-eyed baby he calls Enoch. 

     Stan learns the carnival trade when he meets Pete Krumbein (David Strathairn) and his wife Zeena (Toni Collette). Zeena quickly seduces Stan, who immediately senses opportunity in a special code Pete devised to create the illusion of mind-reading.

     Money and fame, the twin engines of American dreaming, loom.

     Needing a helpmate for his career, Stan takes up with Molly (Rooney Mara), a carnival worker with a grotesque occupation. She makes her living surviving electrocutions as part of the carnival’s sideshow repertoire.  

     Mary falls for Stan’s charms and the two head for Chicago. Stan ignores the warnings of strongman Bruno (Ron Perlman) who sees himself as Mary's protector. Bruno threatens harm should Mary be hurt.

     Unfazed, Stan trades his carney clothes for a tuxedo; he headlines a popular nightclub act as a premier mentalist.

    One of the movie’s running themes centers sin and hellfire or their metaphoric equivalents as found in 1930s America. 

     Consider “the Geek,” the most desperate of souls, a pitiful fellow who carnie bosses steer into the lowliest of employments, hooking them with drink and addictive drugs. A filthy caged man, the Geek bites the heads off live chickens, an act shown by del Toro but never seen in the original. 

    The Geek becomes a symbol of condemnation; he represents the hideous fate of sinners and Stan provides plenty of reason for us to consider him a sinner.

    In Chicago, the movie adopts a new look, displaying fabulous Art Deco interiors and upscale hotel rooms where Stan and Mary are living the good life. It also begins to drag — albeit with a bright spot.

    Stan encounters Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a sophisticated Chicago therapist who tapes her sessions with her clients. Stand suggests a partnership in which the tapes will help him bilk the wealthy, notably a rich man (Richard Jenkins) who’s guilt-ridden about the death of his wife.

    Note: Is there anything Blanchett can’t do. She makes a great femme fatale.

    You needn’t be a mind reader to see where all of this is headed, but the film has less to do with story than with ambiance, seedy carnival life juxtaposed against the sleek world to which Stan aspires. Cooper makes it clear that Stan's ambition quickly can slide into desperation.

    Del Toro’s screenplay gives Stan a motivational backstory but it allows scenes to play out to the point where impatience sets in. 

    Now, I’m going to get to the hub of things, belatedly I suppose, probably because I respect del Toro's talent and commitment to cinema. 

   Nightmare Alley limps its way through a story that needed to move quickly, vanquishing the opportunity for second thoughts or over-evaluation.

    At times, del Toro’s images seem frozen in their dark beauty. Del Toro has made a noir movie in which ugliness is aestheticized. A carnival becomes a lurid dreamscape and the Deco interiors of Chicago are airless, so highly designed they can feel sterile.

     Slow and dawn-out, Del Toro's version sometimes suffocates under the director's lavish treatment. Nightmare Alley is less a neo-noir outing than a brilliant display of lighting and production design. 

    Noir had the high-contrast sheen of lurid pulp. Del Toro’s version inflates the atmosphere and deflates the movie as a result. By the end, he almost turns Nightmare Alley into something I wouldn't have thought possible, noir as coffee-table book.

Survival choices on a voyage to Mars

 

   

            Stowaway, the latest space adventure from Netflix,  launches another flight to Mars, the planet where NASA just flew a robotic helicopter and where Elon Musk wants to start a colony.

               When it comes to Mars, maybe it's time to stop fictionalizing and watching the news. Still, Mars remains a prime destination for movies that need a deep-space destination.

        Operating in what seems to be the relatively near future, Stowaway mercifully avoids any sign of acid-drooling aliens, but slow pacing and a quartet of less-than-fascinating characters keep the movie from turning into the gripping survival story that must have been intended.

   The title tells you this is no ordinary voyage. A construction engineer trapped in the ship’s innards becomes an inadvertent stowaway on a three-person trip to Mars, a problem that can be described as a "mega-oops," to employ the scientific term for such catastrophes.

    When the equipment that cleans the ship's air of carbon dioxide is rendered non-functional,  the crew is threatened by a looming shortage of oxygen. Three people might make it Mars. Four? No way.

   Director Joe Penna plunges a diversified cast (Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim, and Shamier Anderson) into the most severe of ethical problems. Must one of them die so that the others can complete the already battered mission?

   The spaceship Hyperion generates its own gravity, which means the actors don’t need to spend the entire movie floating around — not literally at least. But they are left somewhat adrift by a script in which character depth seems in almost as short supply as sunlight.

   Collette portrays Marina, the commander of the flight. Kim plays David, the science officer charged with maintaining algae that will be used to test possibilities for colonization of Mars. Kendrick appears as Zoe, the ship’s cheerful doctor, and Anderson plays the title character,  a man who, as it turns out, is less a stowaway than a victim of a mistake the movie doesn’t adequately explain.

    Most of the characters can be described with a word or two: Marina, responsible. David, realistic. Zoe, humane; and Anderson, unhinged. 

    Not everything computes. Anderson's Michael worries about the needy sister he’s left on Earth for what promises to be two difficult years. But wait. The company that's paying for this trip will take care of the sister -- all expenses paid.

    This raises a question: Why did the screenplay give Michael a sister in the first place? Isn't learning that you'll unexpectedly be leaving everything you know and love for two years enough cause for anxiety.

   Credit Penna and production designer Marco Bittner Rosser with creating a realistic shipboard environment, as well as a convincing EVA episode (of course, there’s one) that shows off the ship’s exterior.

   Though interesting to ponder, the movie’s central issue doesn’t  translate into an exiting one-hour and 56-minute movie,  and Stowaway misses its mark as either brainy sci-fi or a visceral space adventure. 

   Members of the Hyperion crew face a horrible choice. Deciding how to deal with it may be working on the their guts, but that doesn't mean it's working on ours.

   

Despair, comedy and Charlie Kaufman

     Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008) baffled many, but it had real pain, insight, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theater director obsessed with creating a masterpiece. Kaufman's new film, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, displays some of the same existential fatigue that marked Synecdoche. Ditto for the director's 2015 animated feature, Anamolisa.  
    I mention the past to point out that Kaufman knows his way around misery and because he's at it again.
     Some movies never allow a theme to emerge from the slagheap of their narratives. That can't be said of I'm Thinking About Ending Things: This odd, sometimes haunting, sometimes funny, sometimes baffling movie allows many themes to marinate in its dreary brine.
     Among them: mortality, aging, relationships, and the malleability of time. 
     All of this unfolds in a deadpan style that mirrors the internal state of characters who, as the title suggests, are living lives in which happiness and contentment seem as inaccessible as far-off galaxies.
     The aroma of defeat wafts through nearly everything in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, much of which is staged in a car in which two people (Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons) travel through a snowstorm. The car's windshield wipers become a kind of metronome, marking the passing of each gray minute.
     Although it's barely relevant, I'm Thinking of Ending Things does have a plot. Buckley's character -- sometimes called Lucia and sometimes called Lucy -- accompanies Plemons' Jake on a trip to meet Jake's parents, who live on an isolated farm. 
     Even before they arrive at their destination, Lucy wonders why she's wasting her time on a relationship she's sure has no future. Jake is nice. Jake is intelligent. But he's not The One.
     As played by Plemons,  we’re ready to agree with Lucy’s assessment. Jake seems to have accepted the monotony of life on an even keel.
     Both characters are smart, though, and they're not shy about telling each other what they know.
     When Lucy and Jake arrive at the farmhouse, the movie begins its full ascent into weirdness, becoming what might be considered a comedy of despair.   
     Watching Lucy encounter Jake's mother (Toni Collette) and her father (a very strange David Thewlis) leads to the kind of deadpan humor that won't appeal to everyone but which made me laugh.
    Even before this, signs of weirdness emerge: We're talking dead frozen sheep, a story about pigs that were eaten by maggots and, other suggestions that unspeakable horror lurks in the farm's rural isolation.
    At his point, the movie -- which is based on a novel by Iain Reid -- seems as if it might be springing from Lucy's mind as she imagines what life with David (and the inevitable association with his parents) might be like: Grimly comic images pervade a howling snowstorm as Lucy sees Jake’s parents in more youthful stages and in their decrepitude.
    Eventually, Jake and Lucy return to the road. Although the snow has worsened, Jake insists on stopping for ice cream at Tulsey Town, a stand that's inexplicably open in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a blizzard. 
     The ride also includes a discussion of  John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence with Lucy offering a strident takedown of the movie, which some will recognize as Pauline Kael's review of the movie with its particular concentration on the work of actress Gena Rowlands. 
     Is this parody? Is it a dig at reviewers? Is it a comment on the way opinion tends to be absorbed and regurgitated in ways that obliterate individual obligations to respond?
     The evening culminates when Jake decides that he wants to show Lucy his high school, a place where we've already seen images of a janitor mopping up the hallways, watching TV (a movie supposedly directed by Robert Zemeckis), and snippets from a student production of Oklahoma.
     Jake, by the way, is a fan of musicals and these final scenes include a lovely dance duet and a further blurring of identities. Is Jake the janitor at a different stage of his life?
       Throughout all of this, Kaufman insists on giving his movie a feeling in which strangeness has become ordinary; weirdness absent any shimmering sense of mystery.
        What to think? I found myself digesting the movie in pieces. Yes to this bit. No to that. Unsure about something else.  
       I'll get back to you on the way the movie seems to invite interpretation but does little to confirm whatever meaning (or meanings) we might wish to read into it.
       In its overall impact, I'm Thinking of Ending Things accumulates around us like steadily falling snow, leaving drifts of recollected moments from which we must dig ourselves out.
      Good luck and see you when the weather clears.

A satire tries to give the art world its due

Velvet Buzzsaw aims at an easy target -- the commodification of art -- but the movie's cast produces enjoyable results.

If you think that the Los Angeles art world is ripe for satire, director Dan Gilroy's Velvet Buzzsaw won't disappoint. It's not that Velvet Buzzsaw lands a mortal hit. How could it? It's based on an obvious conceit about the obscene invasion of major money into a corrupted art world. It may not be a thematic powerhouse, but Velvet Buzzsaw makes some dead-on observations. Better yet, its cast of characters -- some bordering on art-world caricatures -- proves consistently amusing.

Reunited with his Nightcrawler star Jake Gyllenhaal, Gilroy introduces flashes of horror into a story in which the characters are precisely and wickedly drawn. Gyllenhaal's Morf, for example, is an art critic who regards his taste as nothing less than definitive. He's also in tip-top shape, a devotee of Peloton and Pilates. Sporting bangs and glasses, Morf evidently is one of those critics who can make or break a career. He's bisexual and so taste-conscious that he feels no compunction about expressing his displeasure with at the color of the coffin at a gallerist's funeral.

Rhodora Haze (Renee Russo) runs a top-drawer Los Angeles gallery. Rhodora has a keen eye for money and an attitude of superiority that flirts with bitchery. Oh well, forget flirts. Russo, who also worked in Gilroy's Nightcrawler, takes her character all the way. It's a pleasure to watch her.

Zawe Ashton works for Rhodora who claims to be grooming her charge for better things. Toni Collette has a sharply funny turn as a museum curator turned art consultant. Rhodora's main competition arrives in the form of another dealer Tom Sturridge's Jon Dondon.

The movie pushes us into the art world with style and wit before introducing its plot. The story gathers steam when Ashton's Josephina discovers a dead body in her apartment building. She enters the apartment of the deceased and discovers a collection of paintings done by the dead man, an unknown artist named Vetril Dease. Some of Dease's portraits evoke terror and torment. All his paintings, even those with wholesome subjects, have an eerie aura.

Josephina shows Dease's work to Morf. He immediately confirms her sense that she's stumbled onto a trove of original and highly marketable work. Eyes light up because Dease evidently is the next big thing. Even better, he's dead: His body of work never will expand.

No one seems particularly shaken by the fact that Dease wanted all of his paintings destroyed. As the movie unfolds, we discover why. People start getting murdered in horror-movie fashion.

But the resolution is less important than the way that Gilroy uses the plot to bring the characters into money-grubbing conflict.

John Malkovich sounds an almost sane note in a small role as an art star whose reputation has begun to fade.

Gilroy's satirical eye extends to the various high-fashion art uniforms worn by a chic-conscious cast of characters: Trends rather than trenchancy dominate.

The pretensions of the art world make for an easy target and Gilroy's overall insight -- greed motivates the sale and purchase of art -- can't be called fresh. But he invents a movie full of characters that provide a fair measure of entertainment. I'd say that the cast members were having one hell of a good time, even if some of their characters are brutally (and often creatively) knocked off.

A relaxed, enjoyable father/daughter tale

Heart Beats Loud is one of those laid-back movies that isn't out to oversell you on anything. Set in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, the movie tells the story of a father and daughter who make music together. The twist: The daughter (an appealing Kiersey Clemons) has ambitions that go beyond music. She's about to start college and wants to be a doctor. Dad (a relaxed but sometimes dour Nick Offerman) thinks the two should try to pursue a musical career together, particularly because Clemons' Sam has an obviously potent talent. But it’s Offerman's Frank who dreams of striking musical gold. A hit record could liberate him from the failing, vinyl-only record store over which he presides. He'd like to make music, not sell it. The songs -- pleasing enough -- are interrupted by whispers of a plot involving Offerman’s character’s mom (Blythe Danner); his landlady (Toni Collette) and his bartender friend (Ted Danson). A romance between Clemons' character and a young woman played by American Honey's Sasha Lane doesn't add much, but the movie is relaxed enough to accommodate a bit of meandering. Offerman has a sly way of commanding the screen, avoiding any of the ingratiating gestures that would have turned Frank into an off-beat role model. Director Brett Haley (I'll See You in My Dreams) may not dig deep, but his movie wanders into summer buoyed by the odd couple chemistry of a father who may have more growing up to do than his brightly ambitious daughter.

Melissa McCarthy's summer stumble

Tammy's as crude as you'd expect, but not as funny as you might have hoped.

Few things are more painful than being stuck in a moving vehicle with people who you find annoying. That's exactly how I felt watching Tammy, a movie that puts Melissa McCarthy and Susan Sarandon on the road.

Painfully misguided, Tammy is the result of a collaboration between McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone, who co-wrote the screenplay with McCarthy and who also handled the directing chores.

Tammy finds McCarthy playing the title character, the wayward granddaughter of an aging alcoholic (Sarandon).

After being fired from her job at a fast-food franchise, McCarthy's Tammy sets out on a road trip with her grandmother, who supplies the car -- an aging Cadillac -- and the money that supports a journey toward Niagara Falls, a stop on grandma's bucket list.

All of this takes place over the objections of Tammy's mother (Allison Janney), who understands that grandma is both a diabetic and a drunk, and shouldn't be let loose on an unsuspecting world.

Sarandon may be game for anything, but she's given scenes that struck me as embarrassing: carrying on in the backseat of a car with a guy (Cary Cole) she meets in a bar or having a drunken outburst at a Fourth of July party thrown by her lesbian cousin (Kathy Bates).

McCarthy's luckier: Her previous comic roles have immunized her against embarrassment. Here, she plays a foul-mouthed woman whose husband (Nat Faxon) is having an affair with a neighbor (Toni Collette).

As is the case with many crude comedies, Tammy feels the need to sentimentalize its main character before it's done, something like an boisterous drunk who ends the evening crying in his beer.

Tammy 's told -- via lame dialogue Bates delivers with unnecessary conviction -- that she needs to take control of her life and stop wallowing in self-pity.

She's supposed to do this even though her drunken aunt has grabbed a microphone and told the partying lesbians that Tammy's a fat loser worthy of the nickname "cheeseburger."

Sarandon has been made to look as old as possible, even to the point of donning artificially swollen ankles, but she's never convincingly dissolute.

In what may have been intended as a comic high point, Tammy puts a paper bag on her head and robs a fast-food outlet after fashioning another paper bag into a pretend revolver. She needs money to bail grandma out of jail.

If this was intended as the movie's comic high point, it's not much of one.

Mark Duplass plays the son of the man who picked up grandma in a bar and a potential love interest for Tammy, the movie's lone representative of normalcy.

Tammy tries to get by making lame jokes about old folks, dishing out crude humor and toying with the image McCarthy has created in previous comedies such as Identity Thief, The Heat and, of course, in Bridesmaids, the movie that provided her with a breakthrough role.

Maybe because it's summer, Tammy even finds an excuse to blow up grandma's car. If only that had happened before grandma and Tammy had had a chance to get into it.

He comes of age in a water park

I recall reading somewhere that a single caring adult can alter the whole trajectory of a kid's life, particularly if that adult shows up at a critical point in a young person's development.

I thought about that while watching The Way, Way Back, a comedy about a dejected, angry teen-ager who blossoms under the mentorship of the owner of a Massachusetts water park called Water Wizz.

Fourteen-year-old Duncan (Liam James) seems entirely uncomfortable in the world until he meets Owen (Sam Rockwell), an adult who senses the boy's loneliness and encourages him have a little fun.

For Duncan, loosening-up is no easy task. He's stuck on a month-long beach vacation with his divorced mother (Toni Collette) and the new man in her life (Steve Carell). To make matters even worse, Carell's Trent and Collette's Pam are in the early stages of their relationship and have yet to settle important territorial issues.

Just to add a little more insult to the already festering pile of Duncan's injuries, Trent's daugther (Zoe Levin) is a stuck-up, socially conscious teen who's totally condescending toward the dweebish Duncan -- at least when she's not entirely indifferent toward what she perceives as his worthless existence.

Directed and written by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash -- actors and screenwriters who won an Oscar for adapting The Descendants for the screen -- The Way, Way Back can't entirely overcome the familiarity of what amounts to yet another teen reclamation project. But the movie offers interesting wrinkles en route to a predictable -- if slightly attenuated -- finale.

To begin with, The Way, Way Back allows Carell to play to a jerk. Carell's Trent declares his jerkhood from the movie's outset, and does little to change our opinion of him as the story develops.

In Pam, Trent seems to have found a woman so desperate to hold onto a potentially stable relationship that she'll put up with a lot. Trent seems more than willing to take advantage of the situation. He shows far more interest in socializing with another couple (Rob Corddry and Amanda Peet) than in testing the waters of stepfatherhood -- or even in spending time with Pam.

Duncan's shot at self-affirmation arrives in the form of Rockwell's Owen, who becomes a kind of surrogate father for Owen. Not only does Owen offer Duncan a job at Water Wizz, he knows how to relate to a kid, in part because he still is one. In a way, the movie is Owen's coming-of-age story, too.

The cast is further bolstered by Allison Janney, who plays Trent's garrulous neighbor and Anna Sophia Robb, who appears as Janney's daughter, a girl who's smart enough to take an interest in the dejected Duncan, who suffers one indignity after another. An example: He's forced to explore the beachfront Massachusetts town where the story unfolds on a pink girls' bicycle he finds in Trent's garage.

Maya Rudloph appears as one of Sam's employees, and both Faxon and Rash play small roles as water-park workers.

To their credit, Faxon and Rash provide some shading, even for the dislikable Trent, and they belatedly give Collette a chance to dig more deeply into a character with an alarming tendency toward over-dependence.

For all of this, The Way, Way Back may leave you shrugging, perhaps because we've been down this road too many times, perhaps because the movie tends to be a bit bland and perhaps because the adult conflicts -- though sketchily presented -- are more interesting than Duncan's problems.

Let me backtrack a bit, though. It's convenient, but a little inaccurate to classify The Way, Way Back as a coming-of-age story. In truth, neither the movie's teens nor its adults fully mature.

Rather, they're brought to the brink of important life changes. Faxon and Rash keep the movie's ending upbeat, but allow us just enough room to speculate about whether these characters really will be able to sustain new and better versions of themselves.