A calm splash through choppy waters

      He’s single but wants to be a father. She needs money so that she can go back to school. A $15,000 payday helps her decide to become the surrogate that carries his baby.  The non-couple attend counseling and follow the recommended procedures for surrogacy but have difficulty defining boundaries.

     That’s about all you need to know about the plot of Together Together, a comedy starring Ed Helms and Patti Harrison. Director Nikole Beckwith packs lots of potentially fractious issues into her movie but wisely avoids beating us over the head with any of them.

    Still best known for his work in The Hangover movies, Helms always has struck me as an actor whose great distinction involves looking entirely average, something on the order of the  neighbor who owns all the nifty tools you might want to borrow but never will buy. 

     In this outing, Helms distances himself from brash comedy and creates a real character, a fastidious, determined, sometimes annoying app developer who's determined to become a father.

     Harrison adds the movie's charm, bringing wit to the role of a woman who works as a barista but clearly aspires to something more. 

    For much of Together Together’s 90-minute running time, Helms and Harrison engage in awkward conversations as they struggle to find the appropriate level of intimacy for a surrogate and an expectant father. 

     Some of the gaps between Helms' Matt and Harrisons' Anna are generational. He's 46; she's a 20something. 

    Matt gets testy when Harrison’s Anna has sex during the early days of the pregnancy. He fusses about her diet as she casually charts what she believes to be a safe course.  You half get the feeling that if Matt could become pregnant, he would.

     Beckwith's screenplay provides a bit of backstory.  Anna hasn't spoken to her parents in years. His parents (Nora Dunn and Fred Melamed) don't quite understand their son's decision, but don’t play much of a role in the story.

   Romance isn't on Beckwith's mind. Matt and Anna get to know each other in halting tentative ways that seem realistic enough for strangers who are sharing an intimate and highly personal experience.

    Matt and Anna share a bond based on mutual appreciation. They become friends, but it’s unclear whether they will or should become anything more. 

     Essentially, a two-hander, the movie adds a few supporting characters, notably a young gay man (Julio Torres), a fellow employee at the cafe where Anna works as a barista. Tig Notaro appears as the therapist with whom Matt and Anna periodically meet. Sufe Bradshaw has a nice turn as the unflappable technician who performs ultrasounds on Anna.

    Generally pleasing, Together Together scores a low-key victory. Matt and Anna may not always know how to relate to one another or to the situation they're in, but there's nothing insincere about them -- a rarity in movies.

Looking for great comedy? 'Tag' isn't it

Grown men playing tag? They chase one another but have trouble catching laughs.

In 2013, The Wall Street Journal ran a diverting little article about a group of men from Spokane, Wash., who managed to stay in touch over decades by playing an annual, month-long game of tag.

Tag, a game that requires no equipment and which relies on speed and elusiveness, isn’t usually thought of as a competitive sport. But this group of long-time pals turned it into one — at least for four weeks a year. They drew up a contract specifying the rules of a game they played with stealth, subterfuge, cunning and an abiding commitment not to be the last man tagged, a status with which one of them had to live for an entire year before the game resumed.

Enter Hollywood and the idea that this amusing piffle of a story would make a good movie.

And it might have had director Jeff Tomsic displayed more interest in exploring the absurd side of male competitive drive, had he and his cohorts done a better job of getting the cast on the same page and had they not turned Tag into a movie that feels like a lukewarm bit of filler sandwiched between summer blockbusters.

The filmmakers seem to have made self-conscious attempts to alter the movie’s gender muscle flexing by having the wife (Isla Fisher) of one of the players (Ed Helms) accompany her husband as the game he plays the game. Moreover, the movie's Wall Street Journal reporter serves little purpose other than to make room for Annabelle Wallis, the actress who plays her.

Not that any of the male characters are particularly well-developed, either.

Helms portrays Hoagie, a man who suggests to another player -- a successful insurance company executive played by Jon Hamm -- that they team up to take down the reigning champion (Jeremy Renner). During the course of several decades, Renner's Jerry never has been tagged. As portrayed here, Jerry has ninja-like skills that are heightened by some quick editing, the sudden insertion of slo-mo trickery and an inexplicable ability to disappear.

Other players include a Denver-based stoner (Jake Johnson), a character who's introduced with a bong joke that would have seemed dated -- even had it turned up 50 years ago. Hannibal Buress signs on as a slightly nerdy gameplayer.

To keep the movie focused, the filmmakers assemble the players in Spokane, where Jerry is about to be married. Jerry hasn’t invited his buddies to the wedding because he knows they’ll show up anyway, using the nuptials as a long-awaited opportunity to bring down the champion.

Setting most of the movie in the players' hometown also gives the filmmakers an opportunity to throw in a bit of competition for an old high-school flame (Rashida Jones), a woman who attracts attention from both Hamm and Johnson’s characters.

All of this generates minimal chemistry. Granted the men are locked in fierce competition, but they seldom seem comfortable with one another, and Hamm, in particular, looks like a misfit addition to a misbegotten group that produces no stand-outs, except possibly for Fisher, who can be more underhanded than any of the male players. By rule, women are excluded from the game.

Renner does a convincing job as Jerry, but his intensely focused performance seems to belong in another movie.

Because the men are not playing in the confined space of a schoolyard but in the real world, they're forced to don lame disguises to sneak up one another or to engage in trickery, bribery and other forms of deceit that will allow them to approach their prey.

I went back and read the original Wall Street Journal article and a couple of follow-ups, all of which were more interesting than the resultant movie which can’t find its rhythm as a robust comedy with outlandish flourishes, including a far-fetched (and not especially funny) bit of action set in a wooded area.

The tag catchphrase — “you’re it" — might have given the movie stinging sharpness, but after laying out its premise, this over-amped effort does little to catch us unaware — and that includes a last-minute revelation that may have been added to create a bit of emotion without having done anything to earn it.

A Lake Bell comedy about marriage

As someone who loved Lake Bell's comedy In a World, I was looking forward to Bell's next movie, I Do ... Until I Don't. Oops. My expectations weren't entirely rewarded by Bell's new comedy about couples who participate in the filming of a documentary about marriage. The film is being made by an embittered British woman (Dolly Wells) who believes that marriages should have an opt-out clause that comes into effect every seven years. Bell's Alice is married to Noah (Ed Helms), who -- along with his wife -- struggles to make his window blinds business grow. Carol's hippie sister (Amber Heard) lives with her lover (Wyatt Cenac) in what they proudly bill as an open marriage. Cybil (Mary Steenburgen) is married to Harvey (Paul Reiser); it's her second marriage and it's gone stale. Steenburgen almost always is a joy to watch, and Bell and Helms are fine, as is everyone else in a strong cast, but I Do ... Until I Don't turns out to be wan and predictable. I wouldn't give up on Bell, though. She seems intent on writing, directing and starring in comedies that have something to say. She has the talent to strike again and make it work.

No funny rest stops in this 'Vacation'

A dud of an attempt to revive a franchise.

If you're looking for a break from stupid comedy, Vacation isn't likely to fill the bill. This lame attempt to revive a dormant franchise -- the last of four Vacation movies hit screens in 1997 -- vainly tries to wring new laughs from an old premise, the one that made the 1983 original a hit.

Ed Helms (of the Bachelor Party movies) plays Rusty Griswold, the grown son of Clark Griswold, the character Chevy Chase portrayed in the original.

A disrespected pilot for an economy airline, Rusty has the same idea that his father had more than 20 years ago. He wants to bring his family closer together by taking them on a car trip from Chicago to California, home of Walley World, the theme park from the first movie.

Christina Applegate portrays wife Debbie Griswold, and Skyler Gisondo and Steele Stebbins play the Griswold kids.

The movie -- which features late-picture cameos from Chase and Beverly D'Angelo, the original Griswold mom -- stuffs its trunk with gags that tend to be more painful than funny, not to mention a few that are disgustingly gross.

How gross? At one point, the Griswolds find themselves covered with excrement, having mistaken a pool full of sewage for an invigorating hot springs.

The trip begins when Helms' dim-witted Rusty rents an Albanian car for the trip. Surprise! Nothing about the Albanian "Prancer" -- which looks the same when viewed from either the back or the front -- works properly.

A running gag involving a Griswold confrontation with the driver of a semi is predictable and dumb. And the youngest Griswold -- the kid played by Stebbins -- is one of the more obnoxious movie kids in some time, a foul-mouthed brat.

Throw in jokes about pedophilia, shabby motels, and the Griswolds' fading sex life and the picture should become clear.

Perhaps to add more connection with the original, Rusty stops to visit his now grown sister (Leslie Mann) who's married to a hunky weatherman (Chris Hemsworth) with a very large ...

Oh, the hell with it.

Vacation qualifies as more R-rated rot for a generation of moviegoers that probably never heard of National Lampoon, the humor magazine that spawned Animal House and the original Vacation .

Does any of this prove anything? Only that one trip to Walley World is enough for any family.

For the record: The original was directed by the late Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day) from a script by the late John Hughes (Ferris Bueller's Day Off). This one has two directors: John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein, neither of whom previously has directed a feature-length movie. Goldstein and Daley also are credited with having written the script.

'Hangover III': Big finale or big fizzle?

It's difficult for me to call the latest Hangover movie anything but a major disappointment.
Two big-screen money machines are set to invade the nation's multiplexes this week -- the third movie in the Hangover series and the sixth Fast and Furious movie. We begin with the Hangover Part 3, which opens a day earlier than Fast and Furious 6 -- and which is considerably more disappointing than its speed-obsessed competition.

As just about everyone now knows, the first Hangover movie became one of 2009's monster hits, a surprise attack of blatantly crude humor that boosted two careers, those belonging to Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis.

Cooper, of course, went on to earn an Academy Award nomination for his work in Silver Linings Playbook, and Galifianakis has become an indispensable addition to a long line of taste-defying comics who'll step across almost any line.

The series' third -- and apparently final installment -- probably won't hurt either actor, even though The Hangover Part III a half-serious (and none too exciting) thriller plot hijacks most of the laughs.

The movie's first joke (already spoiled by its trailer) involves the decapitation of a giraffe. This bit of animal carnage arrives courtesy of Alan, the proudly stupid character played by Galifianakis. Obviously, the filmmakers did not behead a real animal, but the off-putting joke (one of many) was enough to make me consider becoming a card-carrying PETA member.

The familiar crew (Cooper, Ed Helms and Justin Bartha) returns under the guidance of director Todd Phillips, whose slick approach seems at odds with the ragged spirit of the best Hangover jokes. Putting this kind of production value into a Hangover movie seems as misguided as hiring James Levine to conduct an all-kazoo orchestra -- not that Phillips qualifies as a maestro of movies.

This episode adds a couple of new wrinkles. John Goodman portrays a gangster who's upset about the fact that the sexually dubious Chow (an over-exposed Ken Jeong) has stolen millions in gold from him. Melissa McCarthy appears as the operator of a Las Vegas pawn shop where Chow unloads the purloined gold.

A scene in which McCarthy confronts her cinematic soul mate (Galifianakis) teeters on the edge of being funny without quite tumbling into the expected hilarity.

The story eventually sends our heroes back to Las Vegas, perhaps in hopes of recapturing some of the brazenness of the hard-partying first movie. The strategy produces an insufficient number of laughs while Phillips plays around with thriller tropes and the actors await their obligatory doses of humiliation.

Oddly, there's hardly any drinking in this installment, and the only real hangover stems from whatever residual affection audiences can muster for characters whose unashamed pursuit of pleasure has led them into many drastically compromising situations. Put another way, Hangover Part 3 runs on whatever comic vapors linger from the first installment.

I've never been a big fan of the Hangover movies, but I certainly understood the appeal of the first movie, which pushed the envelope of grossness to what approached genre-breaking limits. I was unimpressed by the overproduced waste of the second and entirely dismayed by a third edition that stops in Tijuana before heading to Vegas.

A sequence following the end credits pays homage to the outrageous spirit of the movie's 2009 predecessor -- but it's a classic case of arriving too late to make much difference. Hard-core Hangover fans who stick around for this epilogue -- which boasts the movie's wildest sight gag -- may think that this is precisely where Hangover Part III should have started.

Another 'Hangover' hits the screen

The Hangover Part II shifts to Bangkok for a few laughs and a whole lot of desperation.

How many hangovers are too many? In this case, the answer has nothing to do with alcohol consumption and everything to do with what happens over the weekend when moviegoers cast their votes on The Hangover Part II, a prime example of what might be called “big-screen comedy coasting.” Comedy coasting occurs when filmmakers rely on the same basic gags as the first time -- only with bits of novelty added.

To make Part II, the writers seem to have accepted the oft-recited mantra about what creates real estate value: Location. Location. Location. In pursuit of freshness, the wanton debauchery of the original has shifted from Las Vegas to Thailand, a move that gives the second helping a different flavor, although it's one that's not entirely welcome.

In his return engagement, director Todd Phillips allows the comedy to absorb the pungent and often seamy atmosphere of Bangkok at its unsavory worst, a decision that ups the sleaze quotient of a comedy that’s already steeped in desperation. And this time, the desperation can seem as vivid than the humor.

If you’ve seen the first movie, you know the plot, as well as where to look for most of the laughs. Stu (Ed Helms) is slated to be married to a beautiful Thai woman (Jamie Chung). He invites his pals (Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis and Justin Bartha) to the Thai-based nuptials.

The boys vow to behave themselves, but a pre-wedding gathering on a Thai beach – for just one beer – escalates into a wild night. Of course, no one can remember what happened when the crew (minus Bartha’s character) awakens in Bangkok hotel room that's so squalid a better class of insect might refuse to check in. p> Once restored to consciousnesses, Cooper, Helms and Galifianakis set out to find Teddy (newcomer Mason Lee), the 16-year-old brother of the bride, a boy genius who's already excelling at Stanford. It seems Teddy disappeared during the previous night’s frolic.

Along the way, our hapless heroes also renew their contact with Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), the mincing gangster from the first installment. Paul Giamatti turns up in a small role as another gangster.

The screenwriters (Phillips, Craig Mazin and Scot Armstrong) spend a lot of time trying out variations on the original gags. In the 2009 movie, Helms’ character woke up without a tooth. This time, he wakes up with the same facial tattoo as Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight champ who made a cameo appearance in the first installment and who also appears in the second.

For those who need warnings about the kind of humor under discussion, it’s worth pointing out that Part II involves transgender sex, a severed finger, nudity, a cigarette-smoking monkey and a variety of other impolite gags that seem to have been tailored for an audience that may care more about reliable repetition than about expressions of originality or imagination.

I was not a big fan of the first movie, and this one turns out have roughly the same impact – only with a grunge quotient that’s not likely to do much for delicate sensibilities or for Bangkok’s already battered reputation.