Guess what? Dad is a bigamist

Being Frank can't wring enough laughs from an outrageous situation.

Comedies sometimes pick a twisted premise and then play variations on the themes it suggests.

So goes Being Frank, a comedy about a son who discovers that his father is a bigamist. In comedy, almost everything is fair game, but in this case, the premise seems a little too twisted and the variations aren't funny enough to make up for any lapses of taste.

Jim Gaffigan portrays Frank, a father who mistreats his son, 17-year-old Philip (Logan Miller). An aspiring musician, Philip can't please his highly critical father.

Dad, who presides over the family ketchup factory, claims that he frequently must travel to Japan to take care of business. The catch: Dad never really visits Japan.

Instead, he spends time with his second family, another wife (Samantha Mathis), another son (Gage Polchlopek) and another daughter (Isabelle Phillips). Frank's first wife (Anna Gunn) suspects nothing. Same goes for Philip (at least initially) and his younger sister (an amusing Emerson Tate Alexander).

As it turns out, tyrannical Frank transforms into his polar opposite when he's with his second family; he becomes a fun father who can't heap enough praise on his football-playing son.

Working from a screenplay by Glen Lakin, director Miranda Bailey tries to wring laughs out the confusion that mounts when Philip discovers Frank's long-running ruse and begins hanging out with Dad's second family -- never, of course, disclosing his real identity.

Bailey, who sets the story in the 1990s, tries to make the movie more palatable by giving Frank an opportunity to explain how he got himself into this predicament in the first place. I guess we're supposed to think Frank's not the worst guy in the world. Some last-minute father/son bonding may also be part of the attempt to soften the movie's rough edges.

But bigamy and deceit don't have a ton of laugh potential, particularly when kids are involved and women are being exploited.

No faulting a game cast, but even talented actors can't make this creaky and marginally creepy farce hit enough of the right notes.

Eastwood and Hanks team for 'Sully'

A real-life drama with stunning highlights.

In a society riven with division, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger qualifies as a hero nearly everyone can get behind. You remember Sully, I'm sure. In January of 2009, he made an emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River. The feat was hailed as a heroic act of competence and daring in the face of potential disaster.

It all happened in a matter of minutes. Shortly after leaving Laguardia Airport, Sullenberger's jet was struck by a flock of geese. The plane's engines were disabled.

Sullenberger quickly calculated his chances of returning to Laguardia or making an unscheduled landing at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport. After determining that he couldn't reach either airport, Sullenberger and first officer Jeff Skiles landed their plane in the Hudson.

Miraculously -- there's really no other word for it -- all 155 passengers survived. No one was even seriously injured.

We all saw pictures of the shaken passengers standing on the plane's wings in the middle of the Hudson on a day when temperatures dipped into the 20s. We saw rescue boats scurrying to bring the passengers to safety. It was a national "Holy shit" moment, and -- for once -- it ended in a good way.

Director Clint Eastwood's Sully, which stars Tom Hanks as Sullenberger, offers stunning recreations of those events on the Hudson, but rather than move steadily toward the fateful moment, screenwriter Todd Komarnicki places them toward the middle of a film that focuses on the National Transportation Safety Board investigation that followed the landing.

According to the movie, an NTSB committee left an already shaken Sullenberger wondering whether he'd made the right decision.

Hanks' low-key performance underscores Eastwood's celebration of Sullenberger's competence and modesty, even as Hanks conveys Sullenberger's continuing bouts with doubt. Sully dreams of what might have happened had he miscalculated. He experiences post-traumatic stress, and his life is made more difficult by a relentless flood of media attention.

As co-pilot Skiles, Aaron Eckhart shows a bit more flare. He's a staunch defender of Sullenberger, and believes that the highly experienced captain had no choice but to gamble on a river landing.

Although the tension of the landing can be felt throughout Sully's entire 95-minute running time, Eastwood makes a public NTSB hearing the movie's climax, hinging its outcome on questions about the validity of NTSB computer simulations used to evaluate Sullenberger's decisions.

In a battle between human judgment and computers, there's little doubt which side Eastwood will take. I suppose the NTSB is vilified a bit -- albeit not in excoriating fashion. The NTSB investigators -- Anna Gunn plays one -- are portrayed as a panel of not-always-friendly inquisitors.

A compelling story helps Sully survive some of the problems that keep the film from total takeoff. Flashbacks to Sully's past (his start as a crop-dusting youngster and an episode from his stint in the Air Force) are inserted without great finesse, and there's little attempt to flesh-out the drama.

Despite Sully's statement that the landing and rescue reflected a team effort of which he was only a part, the movie remains a solo flight built around Sully's experiences, which include brief, troubled phone conversations with his wife (Laura Linney).

Eastwood, who has been praised by those who work with him as a no-nonsense director who knows what he wants, must have warmed to Sully, who never regards himself as a hero and who talks about what he accomplished in mundane terms: He was just doing his job.

The film compacts (justifiably, I think) the NTSB investigation, which took place over the course of 18 months -- not in the few days following the emergency landing. Besides, can you imagine the outcry that might be heard if the NTSB didn't investigate emergency water landings?

A few nuances might have given us a better feeling for such complexities, but Sully seems interested mostly in keeping faith with the unquestionable trustworthiness of its main character.

The movie also leaves you with an indelible sense of the terror and panic that would rattle you to the core if you were on a plane that was heading for water, and you were hearing fight attendants straining to overcome the sounds of a falling aircraft. "Brace. Brace. Brace," they shout in drum-beat fashion.

It's a moment you won't soon forget.

Don't look for equity on Wall Street

A drama that takes a look at women in the world of high finance.

When it comes to the pursuit of money, we probably shouldn't be surprised that people have a tendency to behave badly.

The new movie Equity is full of people who act as if such bad behavior constitutes a form of obligatory service, mostly because they're focused only on serving their own interests.

But Equity isn't a typical Wall Street movie that takes aim at greed by penetrating the environs of a big-time investment bank as it watches the characters try to smash each other to bits.

Instead, it's a telling look at problems women face as they're absorbed into a business that once was a preserve for men only. The women in Equity are smart and strong, but they're subject to problems that the men in similar positions don't face, being hit on by clients who they can't afford to offend, for example.

Working with a fine cast, director Meera Menon has made a thought-provoking drama that centers on Naomi (Anna Gunn), a powerful woman who's trying to recover from a bad professional experience. An IPO that Naomi was handling went bad, something that hasn't helped her chances for advancement at her firm.

Much rides on Anna's launch of Cache, a buzz-worthy company that provides Internet security and seems destined to become one of the year's hottest new stocks.

Confident and competent, Naomi has a no-nonsense approach that fits her job, but she's up against many obstacles: an ambitious assistant (Sarah Megan Thomas) of questionable loyalty and an equally ambitious prosecutor (Alysia Reiner) who's looking into the activities of Naomi's lover (James Purefoy) -- not to mention an insufferable client (Samuel Roukin) who believes his wallet should grow to match his ego in size.

Thomas' character, by the way, is pregnant, a condition that the movie presents as a clear liability among high-stakes business people who are jockeying for advantage. Will she overcompensate by being even more treacherous than she might have been were she not soon to give birth?

Equity might have fit on today's small screens as well as in theaters, but it's willing take a women's point of view without turning its characters into avatars for obvious feminist point scoring.

And despite the affluent trappings of a high-powered business world, Equity isn't afraid to expose the ugliness beneath the gloss of success.

For Gunn's Naomi, even falling asleep next to her lover, who also works at her firm, poses a business risk. He's liable to take advantage of her slumber by trying to access the data in her cellphone.

What could be more illuminating? In Naomi's world, nothing -- including the bedroom -- is immune from competition.