Ben Stiller looks at his parents

 Watching Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost sometimes feels as if you're sitting through 98 minutes of therapy -- not yours but a session belonging to Ben Stiller, who directed this engagingly introspective documentary about his parents. The movie chronicles the careers of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, a comedy duo that rose to prominence in the 1960s, receiving a major boost from frequent appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Ben Stiller, 59 and now a star in his own right, joins his sister Amy to clean out their parents' Manhattan apartment after Jerry passed away in 2015 at the age of 92. Anne died five years earlier at the age of 85. The couple had been married for 60 years. Jerry Stiller, we learn, did a lot of filming and taping of his family, and their West Side apartment brims with personal and career memorabilia. Growing up in a show-business dominated household isn't easy, and some of the problems -- an overly intense a focus on work, for example -- passed from Jerry and Anne to Ben, whose wife, Christine Taylor-Stiller, and kids also appear in the film. Despite the difficulties of being the children of people whose careers dominated their lives, neither Ben nor his sister seems irreparably harmed, and the movie emerges as a love story (Ben for his parents, and Jerry and Anne for each other) that navigates enough difficulties to keep it percolating: Jerry's perfectionism and Anne's alcoholism, for example. So we get a double hit here: a biopic about Stiller & Meara, him Jewish and her Irish, and a look at Stiller grappling with his relationship with his parents. That means Stiller has hold of something that goes beyond show business: The idea of children trying to understand their parents and, in the bargain, themselves.

He thinks everyone else is better off

Director Mike White casts Ben Stiller as a father whose confidence is lagging in Brad's Status.

Ben Stiller knows how to squirm in his own skin. Cheers for writer/director Mike White, who has found the perfect vehicle for Stiller to express a nearly intractable case of mid-life jitters. In Brad's Status, Stiller portrays a father who accompanies his son on a tour of the New England colleges to which the young man has applied. The trip forces Stiller's Brad to evaluate his own life. Mostly, he doesn't like what he sees.

Brad believes his old college chums have surpassed him in the success department, and Brad wonders whether he hasn't wasted his life running a non-profit when he could have been focused on magnifying his bank account.

Not that Brad is suffering. And that, ultimately, may be the movie's point. Brad and his wife (Jenna Fischer) live a comfortable life in California with a son (Austin Abrams) who's going to have no difficulty attending a good college and finding a place for himself in the world.

But Brad is undone by his ceaseless competitiveness. He insists on evaluating his life in terms of others -- even to the point where he might be envious of his son should the young man be admitted to Harvard. Brad graduated from Tufts, a fine school but not Harvard.

White, who wrote the screenplays for Chuck & Buck, The Good Girl and Beatriz at Dinner and who directed Year of the Dog, this time adopts an accessible approach, keeping his focus on the way Brad's rampant feelings of inferiority look when contrasted with what seem to be his more or less problem-free life.

To make the point, White's screenplay introduces us to the men with whom Brad compares himself.
White plays a successful movie director who happens to be gay but who didn't invite Brad to his wedding. Luke Wilson portrays a hedge fund manager who has acquired all the accouterments of great wealth, including a private jet. Jermaine Clement appears as Billy, a tech whiz who made a fortune and retired to Maui to live with two young women who know how to fill out bikinis.

Michael Sheen's Craig rounds out the quartet of jealousy-inducing stories that torment Brad; Sheen's Craig is a pundit who often appears on TV. He teaches a course at Harvard and can't make it through a restaurant dinner without someone approaching him to offer praise.

During Brad's visit to Boston, he and Troy meet one of Troy's friends. Shazi Raja portrays a young woman who seems to grasp the magnitude of privilege that supports Brad's life, but she's not entirely likable, either. She's a little too glib, a little too quick with her accusations, and a little too disrespectful of Brad's experience.

That, too, gives Brad's Status a welcome sense of realism.

White brings the movie to a somewhat predictable conclusion and he pretty much follows a blueprint in scenes that show us that the objects of Brad's envy aren't problem free. Everything looks better when viewed from the outside, and Troy seems far better adjusted than a father who picks at his life as if it were a scab that's beginning to itch.

OK, so it's not an insight that will rock your world, but White delivers it in a movie that manages to be easy going and troubled at the same time -- more insightful and a bit more rueful than you'd expect from what initially sounds like such an unpromising premise.

Another visit from Derek Zoolander

Ben Stiller revives a character that should have been left alone.

The original Zoolander (2001) became a cult favorite in the days when you still could find a Blockbuster store at which you could rent a weekend's full of dumb comedies. Here we are, 15 years later, and you'll have to go to a multiplex -- at least for a while -- to catch the even dumber sequel, Zoolander 2.

But there's dumb funny, and just plain dumb, and after you chuckle at renewing your acquaintance with the movie's collection of "ridiculously good-looking" dopes, there's not much left to tickle the funny bone in this amped-up rehash.

I suppose ardent fans of the first movie will turn out, but despite the return of Ben Stiller (as Derek Zoolander), Owen Wilson (as Hansel), Will Ferrell (as Mugatu) and the addition of Penelope Cruz (as an Interpol agent, fashion police division), this one proves overproduced and undernourished.

The movie opens with the collapse of the Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good and Who Want to Learn to Do Other Stuff Good, Too. The building, a holdover from the first movie, falls into the East River.

A series of newscasters -- Katie Couric among them -- tell us that Derek's wife (Christine Taylor) died in the collapse. An incompetent father, Derek soon loses his son to social services and retreats to a cabin in the frozen wilds of extreme northern New Jersey.

He's so dispirited, he can't even do his patented Blue Steel look anymore.

We also learn that Hansel, Derek's modeling rival, has retreated from the limelight; he's ashamed to show his face, which was scarred when the Zoolander Center crumbled. Hansel now lives in the Malibu desert among of tribe of misfit nomads that includes Kiefer Sutherland and others who try to buoy Hansel's by catering to his taste for orgies.

Derek and Hansel soon are summoned to Rome for a big modeling job that could resurrect their faded careers. Zoolander goes so that he can prove he's capable of raising his 11-year-old son, played by Cyrus Arnold.

A series of cameos from the likes of Kristin Wiig, Sting and Benedict Cumberbatch doesn't do much to add merriment.

Justin Theroux, who appeared in the first movie, also turns up, as does Billy Zane, but the movie almost seems as if it's satirizing itself rather than poking fun at the world of high fashion.

The first movie had some difficulty expanding what began as a sketch into a full movie, and this one struggles even more with a Rome-based story involving the murder of pop stars and a plan to eliminate such fashion icons such as Vogue's Anna Wintour, Tommy Hilfiger , Vera Wang, Valentino, Marc Jacobs and others. Perhaps because they're good natured, these gods of fashion appear in the movie; they may live to regret it.

And, no, Donald Trump who did cameo duty in the first movie, skipped this one.

The fun wears out quicker than a fashion trend, leaving us wondering why anyone thought it would be a good idea to revive characters who should have been allowed to remain favorites of their zealous fans while leaving the rest of the world alone.

Generations mix in 'While We're Young'

A semi-sharp comedy of manners from director Noah Baumbach.

There's a point during Noah Baumbach's While We're Young when one of the characters, a frustrated documentary filmmaker, refers to himself as an old man. Even as a comparative statement, it's a stretch. Played by Ben Stiller, the "aging" documentarian is in his mid-40s.

For those of us for whom the mid-40s long ago have slipped into (or perhaps out of) memory, Stiller's statement may prompt involuntary snickers.

But then Baumbach, 45 himself, isn't necessarily interested in actual aging. Among other things, his movie is about losing touch with the promise of youth. What happens when one realizes that the salad days are over and even the most exotic dressing can't put the crisp back into life's lettuce?

It's a potentially rich subject for a director who has been making films since 1995's Kicking and Screaming and whose filmography includes The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, and Frances Ha, as well as the upcoming Mistress America.

With age 50 in sight, does Baumbach worry about reaching his full potential?

While We're Young can be seen as a zeitgeist comedy set in New York City, a place where success and failure tend to exist in dramatic counterpoint.

When things aren't going well, New York is an easy place to feel small and failed. That makes it an ideal spot for a character played by Stiller, a self-conscious sad sack who's flirting with defeat.

I had a conflicted response to While We're Young. I didn't care much about the concerns of its principal characters, a middle-aged couple (Stiller and Naomi Watts) and a couple still in their 20s (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried).

At the same time, I found some of Baumbach's observations about these characters to be amusing and, on occasion, pointed.

Baumbach spends a good deal of time playing with generational styles and tastes, sometimes flip-flopping them between his middle-aged and the still youthful characters. The older characters, for example, are Google obsessed; the younger ones don't Google because they take pride in not knowing things. Why bother?

Stiller's Josh hasn't come close to fulfilling his potential. He's been working on his second documentary for 10 years, and can't get beyond a six-hour, sleep-inducing rough cut.

Watts' Cornelia frets about being childless. She works as a producer for her father (Charles Grodin), an acclaimed documentarian who's at a stage where he's receiving lifetime achievement awards. He's the worst possible father-in-law for Josh, a constant reminder of what Josh hasn't accomplished.

Driver's Jamie and Seyfried's Darby latch onto Josh at a film class he's teaching. Gradually, the tables turn, and Josh and Cornelia begin clinging to this younger, free-spirited duo.

Jamie's so unconcerned about being hip, he's actually hip. And unlike Josh, he's far too young to fear making fatal mistakes.

For her part, Darby dabbles with entrepreneurial craft projects: She makes ice cream.

Watching Josh and Cornelia try to turn back the clock can be amusing -- in a painful sort of way. They attempt to keep pace with the younger couple, most ludicrously at an Ayahuasca get-together where everyone ingests a psychedelic brew before barfing out inner demons.

Baumbach sticks fairly close to the surface as he allows these characters to reveal their inner preposterousness, Cornelia's laugh-out-loud foray into hip-hop dancing, for example.

It's not entirely surprising to learn that Jamie may not be living in the moment as much as he pretends to be, a development that dominates the movie's third act.

The story pretty much derails when it gets caught up in ethical issues involving a documentary Jamie is making (yes, he's a filmmaker, too).

While We're Young proves entertaining enough, but its many small observations don't add up to anything bigger.

By the end, I found myself wondering whether the plights of these self-absorbed characters could have been reduced to one perceptively amusing New Yorker cartoon. Put another way, I had a few good chuckles, and quickly turned the page.

An uneventful life gets busy

Despite fine flourishes, this Walter Mitty doesn't quite fly.

In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Ben Stiller -- as director and star -- works hard to present an offbeat story about a timid man who finally learns to merge his vivid imagination with reality.

Early on, we learn that Walter's the opposite of the guy in Dos Equis commercial: He's the world's least interesting man. Walter's life is so uneventful that he can't think of a single thing to say about himself when he enrolls in eHarmony. He's an anonymous dullard.

I suppose that's the movie's challenge: How do you make an interesting movie about a boring guy?

Stiller's Walter Mitty shouldn't be seen as a remake of the 1947 movie starring Danny Kaye or a faithful adaptation of the 1939 James Thurber story in which Mitty first appeared. It's a new take on old material -- albeit not an entirely successful one.

At its best, Stiller's movie has a pleasingly fanciful quality. It also mixes humor (a jab at The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Button is particularly well-aimed) with a growing onslaught of action-oriented special effects.

For all that effort, the movie's best bits have less to with bold adventure than with smaller incidents. On an elevator in his New York office building, Mitty imagines that he insults his boss's beard, an unsightly affair that makes the man (Adam Scott) look like an incongruous mixture of American Gothic and Brooks Brothers.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty takes place during the waning days of Life magazine, a publication to which Walter has devoted his career. He's in charge of cataloging and keeping track of the magazine's vast photo library.

As it turns out, Life has been taken over by a company that's intent on closing the publication. The final cover is to be a photograph taken by the legendary photographer Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn), a character who remains unseen until the film's final act.

O'Connell sends his negative to Life's New York's headquarters, but Mitty and his assistant (Adrian Martinez) lose track of it.

Under pressure from management, Mitty intensifies his search and ultimately takes a bold leap. He leaves New York and travels to the Iceland, the Himalayas and Afghanistan to find O'Connell, who makes a point of being unreachable.

To accept all this you have to forget that photography has gone digital and that toward its demise, Life magazine hardly occupied a pivotal position in American culture.

Before his departure from Manhattan, Mitty visits his mother (Shirley MacLaine) and his sister (Kathryn Hahn). He also tries to spark a relationship with a co-worker (Kristin Wiig) who has a young son, one of the few characters to whom Walter is able to relate.

To win the woman of his dreams, Mitty must chart a course of derring-do in which he sheds the cocoon of shyness that has been suffocating him most of his life.

Cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh tends to give Mitty a big-movie feel as Walter leaps from helicopters and engages in other exploits, but Walter Mitty never really hits its stride.

By the time, Walter hooks up with the elusive O'Connell we're ready for a finale that's a little more impactful than the one Stiller delivers in what begins to feel like an overly contrived attempt to marry whimsy and adventure. In truth, it's pretty much a shotgun wedding.

Stiller has directed before (Tropic Thunder, Zoolander, The Cable Guy and Reality Bites), and it's encouraging to watch him try to step off the beaten track. But this increasingly middling movie seems to have been aiming for a lot more than it's able to deliver.

Besides, in these CGI-dominated days, the average Walter Mitty doesn't need to overwork his imagination: All he has to is go to the movies and let Hollywood take care of the heavy lifting.

Bumbling neighbors on the prowl

On someone's drawing board, The Watch probably sounded like a good bet. Why not put three proven veterans -- Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Jonah Hill -- into a comedy slated for release at a time when audiences need a break from the explosive pleasures of summer blockbusters? And how about adding British comic Richard Ayoade for a bit of off-kilter seasoning?

The movie's premise, by the way, sounds tempting, too -- at least in a high-concept sort of way. A group of mostly inept guys from a small Ohio town form a neighborhood watch patrol, only instead of fighting would-be felons, they wind up battling aliens.

A few minutes into The Watch, you may realize that what might have seemed fool-proof has dwindled into pure foolishness. The Watch is an overly vulgar comedy that manages to find a few chuckles amid a ton of distasteful material.

Maybe this comedy was jinxed form the start. Originally titled Neighborhood Watch, the movie underwent a name change after the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida. The title change may have avoided a few unpleasant associations, but it did nothing to make the movie any funnier.

Stiller, who's looking a little long in the tooth for these sorts of boyish antics, plays Evan, a manager at a Costco store. Evan lives with his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) in a nice home in what appears to be an ordinary American town.

An organizer by nature, Evan always seems to be starting clubs or making efforts to diversify his portfolio of friends. He's reasonably happy until a Costco security guard -- on the day he acquires U.S. citizenship -- becomes the victim of a mysterious murder. Hoping to catch the guard's killer, Evan forms a neighborhood crime-fighting unit.

The only people Evan attracts to his misbegotten group are Hill's Franklin, a wannabe cop who flunked the police exam and who lives with his mother; Vaughn's Bob, a party-hearty guy who's mostly concerned about controlling his teen-age daughter's libido; and Ayoade's Jamarcus, a British transplant who wants to meet women.

The movie's quartet of aspiring crime-stoppers quickly discovers that it's chasing aliens instead of humans, but director Akiva Schaffer shows little facility for blending sci-fi and humor, a failing that's especially apparent during The Watch's overblown finale. And if you're expecting a comment or two on the perils of vigilantism, you'll have to look elsewhere.

The supporting cast doesn't bring much to the party, either. Billy Crudup shows up as one of Evan's weirder neighbors. R. Lee Ermy portrays as a profanely irascible town resident, and Will Forte signs on as a local cop who has no use for neighborhood watches.

Eventually, we learn that Hill's Franklin keeps a small arsenal of firearms in his bedroom. When he shows his pals his collection of weapons, we're supposed to laugh. Maybe it's just me, but after the Aurora shootings, I had trouble thinking of a worse idea than turning a gun cache into a sight gag.

Look, after the week we've had in Colorado, I couldn't have been more primed for a ridiculous comedy: The Watch gets it half right. It's ridiculous, but it's not much of a comedy.

One more thing: The Watch provides Costco with plenty of exposure: I wonder whether the company will be happy with the R-rated and mostly unfunny result.

This 'Tower' doesn't topple

If you were looking for a biting social critique about the kind of well-heeled miscreants who commit investor fraud, you'd do well to skip Tower Heist, a new comedy starring Ben Stiller. But if you're ready for an easygoing caper comedy that doesn't spend a minute worrying about how preposterous it can get, Tower Heist fills the bill.

Director Brett Ratner, best known for the Rush Hour movies, doesn't always seem to know whether to emphasize his movie's caper elements or flex its comic muscles, but he offers just enough of both to keep Tower from toppling.

The movie centers on the employees of The Tower, an upscale Manhattan high rise. Stiller portrays Josh Kovacs, manager of the building. Kovacs plies his trade with dedicated precision until the major plot twist arrives: One the building's tenants - Alan Alda's Arthur Shaw -- has defrauded investors out of billions, a sum that also happens to include the pension fund of the Tower's employees.

Before you can say Madoff, Josh tries to convince his co-workers to take revenge by robbing Shaw of $20 million he supposedly has stashed in his penthouse apartment, the one with the roof-top swimming pool that has a giant picture of a $100 bill painted on its bottom.

Joining Stiller are Casey Affleck (as the building's concierge); Matthew Broderick (as an apartment owner who has been foreclosed); Michael Pena (as an elevator operator); and Stephen McKinley Henderson (as the building's lovable doorman).

Of course, there's an obstacle: None of the aggrieved employees know the first thing about theft. Josh decides to address this flaw by enlisting the services of a low-grade felon (Eddie Murphy) from his Queens neighborhood.

Although he doesn't arrive until the picture's well under way, Murphy proves a welcome presence, as do Gabourey Sidibe, as a maid with safe-cracking skills, and Tea Leoni, as the FBI agent who's working Shaw's case.

The script tends to over-complicate things with twist upon twist, but a toned-down Stiller plays well against an amped-up Murphy, and there's one great set piece involving a red Ferrari, which Shaw - most improbably - keeps in his living room.

I won't say more, except to note if you don't like heights (that would be me), you'll find this sequence both excruciating and funny.

Will you believe any of this? I doubt it, but credibility doesn't matter as much as Ratner's inability to find consistent laughs.

Still - and it's a big still - Tower Heist goes down easily, passing muster as a mainstream comedy with a little socially oriented frosting, a generous helping of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and a couple of totally unlikely -- but nonetheless inspired -- moments.

Get the 'Fockers' out of here

It's difficult to imagine anyone approaching Little Fockers with anything but the lowest expectations. This latest edition to the series that kicked off in 2000 with Meet the Parents meets those low expectations -- and then some. * Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro reprise their roles as antagonistic in-laws in a story that begins when De Niro and Blythe Danner (as the Byrneses) visit their twin grandchildren for a fifth birthday celebration. * Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand (as the parents of Stiller's character) turn up to repeat old jokes; so does Owen Wilson, who plays one of Polo's former suitors. * Jessica Alba signs on as a flirtatious drug rep who asks Stiller's Greg to help sell Sustengo, a Viagra-like drug that leads to the expected (and predictably lame) joke about a long-lasting erection. * Harvey Keitel, who long ago starred with De Niro in Mean Streets, has a cameo role as a contractor who's working on a house that the Fockers are renovating. His presence serves only to remind us that just about everyone involved with this Focking mess might have made better use of their talents. * Whether little or big, the Fockers have worn out their welcome.