A party you've attended before

Ever since the Hangover movies pushed the gross-out envelope to the breaking point, comedies have been trying to ascend ever higher rungs on the ladder of crudeness. So, it's hardly a surprise that Office Christmas Party -- a holiday formula job -- goes for gross-out gold. No stranger to lame comedies, Jason Bateman plays a computer exec who works at the Chicago branch of a computer company whose ruthless CEO (Jennifer Aniston) wants to impose massive layoffs. The CEO's brother (T.J. Miller) runs the company's Chicago branch as if it were an especially genial frat house. It falls to Miller's Clay and Bateman's Josh to find enough business to stave off a total shutdown. To accomplish their mission, they invite a potential major client (Courtney B. Vance) to the company Christmas party. Predictably, the party gets out of hand as directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck (Blades of Glory) try to jam a raft of supporting players (Rob Corddry, Kate McKinnon and more) into the preposterously overstated mayhem. Olivia Munn has a larger role as a computer whiz and love interest for Bateman's character. I won't bore you (or myself) with a recital of the tasteless gags you'll find in Office Christmas Party -- from prostitution to cocaine to a pimp (Jillian Bell) with a personality disorder. The movie's employees work for a company called Zenotek Data Storage Systems, which made me wonder whether someone (the Russians?) hadn't hacked most of the laughs out of this collection of comic missteps. Only McKinnon, as the flatulent head of human services, brought a smile to my face, which most of the time was either in full or partial grimace.

There's lots of fun in 'Zootopia'

Sometimes fun is the best ambition.

I have no idea whether Zootopia -- the latest animated fantasy from Disney -- will become a classic, but I do know that it scores high on the fun meter.

So three cheers for a story about Judy Hopps (voice by Ginnifer Goodwin), a bunny who aspires to become a cop in the city of Zootopia. Police work has been Judy's ambition since she was a child.

Primed for action and a do-gooder's career, Judy wants to leave the countryside and her family of underachieving carrot farmers.

When Judy arrives in the city, she becomes the first bunny on the Zootopia PD. An unimpressed chief Bogo (Idris Elba), arbitrarily decides that Judy's fit only for parking duty. He doesn't believe a bunny can hold her own on Zootopia's mean streets, hardly a surprising opinion from a water buffalo.

Zootopia is unique because the animals all get along. That's why it's called Zootopia. Predators and prey may not be the best of friends, but the former have learned to refrain from devouring the latter.

While handing out parking tickets, Judy meets Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a conniving con artist of a fox who eventually teams with Judy to help crack a case involving the disappearance of 15 mammals.

If Judy can solve the mystery, she'll get herself off parking duty, maintain a position on the force and climb out of Chief Bogo's (you'll pardon the expression) dog house.

Judy and Nick make an odd couple as they learn some shocking news: Some predators suddenly are turning on prey, thereby threatening Zootopia's peaceable social structure.

Disney loads up on animals and voices, but I particularly enjoyed an arctic shrew mobster who'll remind adults in the audience of Don Corleone. Mr. Big, as he's called, is brought to gravelly voiced life by Maurice LaMarche.
Appropriately, I suppose, the Zootopia's DMV is staffed by sloths, a joke that surely will appeal to every adult who's ever endured what seems like an interminable wait at any department of motor vehicles.

The story evolves into a light-hearted police procedural that winds up preaching a lesson about acceptance and free will -- if that's not too grandiose a term for the fact that the animal characters are forced to decide whether to be ruled by instinct or choice.

Directors Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush do a fine job of keeping Zootopia amusing for kids and equally enjoyable for the adults who accompany them to theaters.

Disney's animators seem to have had a grand time creating Zootopia -- which consists of districts such as Tundratown, Little Rodentia and Bunnyburrow.

OK, that's a bit theme-parkish, but dividing Zootopia into distinct environments must have kept the animators from getting bored. It also gives Judy and Nick an opportunity to venture into Zootopia's bad neighborhoods.

At various times Judy must prove to herself and the world that she's no dumb bunny; the same goes for this frolic of a movie. The highest compliment I can pay Zootopia? It's no dumb bunny, either.

Another Hollywood family grieves

It's not as bad you might think, but This is Where I Leave You is burdened by formula.

A mother (not Jewish) tells her four grown children that her departed husband (Jewish) made a final request: He wanted his family to sit shiva, the seven-day period of mourning that follows a Jewish death. During the period, the family receives guests who wish to pay condolences.

This is Where I Leave You uses a suburban shiva as a contrivance around which to string a strong comedy cast that's anchored by Jason Bateman and Tina Fey.

If you've seen the much-exposed trailer, you've got a pretty good idea about the movie's humor, which tends toward dismaying predictability.

And you certainly won't be surprised to learn that This is Where I Leave You eventually attempts to wring emotion out of the family's alternately awkward and combative encounters. The movie was directed by Shawn Levy (Date Night and Night at the Museum) from a screenplay by Jonathan Tropper, who adapted his own novel.

The story centers on Bateman's Judd Altman, a pleasant enough fellow who produces a radio talk show. Judd's life comes apart when he arrives home to find his wife (Abigail Spencer) in bed with his boss (Dax Shepard).

We are, of course, talking about an ultimate-bad-day scenario: Almost immediately after Judd's marriage and job go down the drain, he receives a phone call informing him of his father's death.

Judd, who becomes a kind of sitcom version of Job, heads home where he reunites with his mother (Jane Fonda) and siblings.

His older brother (Corey Stoll) runs the family's sporting goods store, and is manfully trying to perform his sexual duty with his wife (Kathryn Hahn). She's desperate to become pregnant.

Judd's sister Wendy (Fey) has a wavering marriage and two small children, one of whom has a fondness for using his potty in public, something the movie apparently regards as so hilarious, it must be repeated several times.

The irresponsible Altman brother (Adam Driver) shows up with an older woman (Connie Britton) in what's supposed to be his first serious relationship.

As the story unfolds, Judd reconnects with Penny (Rose Byrne), a woman who liked him in high school and who looms as a potential love interest. God forbid anyone in a Hollywood movie experience anything resembling lingering dejection and loneliness.

Timothy Olyphant turns up sporadically as one of Wendy's former boyfriends, a guy whose promising future hit the skids when he was brain damaged in an auto accident.

Not enough characters? Throw in Ben Schwartz as the local rabbi, a clergyman who the Altman brothers knew and tormented as a kid, and who now arrives to torment an audience.

The writing mixes sit-com style cleverness with heartfelt exchanges, creating scenes aimed at Hollywood's solid double; i.e., a blend of laughs and tears.

Apart from the fact that none of the siblings looks as if they've sprung from the same gene pool, the movie comes off as a formulaic attempt to be quirky.

Neither as painful as the trailer might lead you to believe nor as successful as it surely wanted to be, This is Where I Leave You feels like a movie that wanted to click in a big way, but put far too much effort into trying. It shows.

'Disconnect' tries to plug into real emotions

Parts more powerful than the whole in this admirably ambitious look at loneliness, isolation and the pain of daily living.

E-mail, chat rooms, cell phones, laptops, instant messaging, tablets and photos that go viral all become part of the high-tech plot machinery in Disconnect, a drama that attempts (and almost succeeds) to use technology as a gateway to examining the loneliness and isolation that often colors contemporary experience.

Director Henry Alex Rubin, who previously directed the documentary Murderball, takes a somber approach to material that's topical, disturbing and not without examples of cruelty.

A large and well-employed cast helps to overcome an increasingly melodramatic and inelegantly contrived screenplay as Rubin -- working from a script by Andrew Stern -- moves through a variety of story lines, each of which proves more interesting than the ways in which the director ties them together in the end.

Rubin's cast of characters includes a married couple (Alex Skarsgard and Paula Patton) that recently lost a son. They become victims of identity theft. We also meet two teen-age boys (Colin Ford and Aviad Bernstein) who adopt the on-line identity of a teen-age girl in order to embarrass a classmate (Jonah Bobo) whom they regard as geeky and vulnerable.

Bobo's Ben struggles with a range of typical problems faced by kids who are considered "uncool" by their classmates. His parents (Jason Bateman and Hope Davis) don't seem to realize the depth of their son's torment. Nor does Ben's sister (Haley Ramm), a teen who disdains her brother because her friends regard him as a social misfit.

Meanwhile, the ex-cop father of one of the bullying boys (Frank Grillo) is hired to investigate the identity theft experienced by Skarskard and Patton.

If all that weren't enough (and it might well have been) Rubin adds the story of an ambitious TV reporter (Andrea Riseborough) who discovers an on-line site that traffics in teen-age sexual exploitation. Riseborough's Nina tries to persuade one of the teen workers (Max Theiriot) to be interviewed for an expose that's bound to boost her career.

That's enough plot for several movies, but Rubin staves off confusion, as he develops the movie, giving each story a palpable sense of sadness.

Viewers inevitably will compare Disconnect to a movie such as Crash, which also tried to examine lots of interconnected lives. The comparison may be unavoidable, but that shouldn't negate Rubin's accomplishment.

Disconnect is the kind of emotionally charged project that requires actors to dig deep, and Rubin's cast doesn't let him (or us) down. Unfortunately, though, the material ultimately lets the actors down, and we're left with a movie in which some terrific and highly credible scenes don't jell in totally convincing ways.

'Identity Thief' can't steal a laugh

Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy in a formulaic road comedy that mines a garbage heap of gags..

Just when I thought things couldn't possibly get worse or less funny, the abysmally contrived Identity Thief introduced a car chase, a move for which the phrase "insult to injury" surely was invented.

Identity Thief wastes both Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman in a road-trip comedy that produces more grimaces than laughs.

Maybe McCarthy (Bridesmaids and This is 40) is best in small doses. Here, she comes close to wearing out her welcome as Diana, a Florida-based thief who steals other people's identities and uses their credit card info to finance wanton spending sprees.

A woeful script has Diana stealing the identity of Sandy Paterson (Bateman), a Denver-based husband and father. Threatened with bankruptcy and the loss of a new job, Sandy decides to travel to Florida to corral his nemesis, bring her back to Colorado and save what's left of his crumbling life and shattered reputation.

The cross-country trip is supposed to be excruciating for Bateman's Sandy, but it's equally painful for us as director Seth Gordon wades through a large pile of gag garbage, which includes car carnage and Diana's encounter with a horny widower named Big Chuck (Eric Stonestreet). Meanwhile, Diana is being pursued by a sleazy skip tracer (Robert Patrick) and two assassins (Genesis Rodriguez and T.I.) who operate on orders from a guy in prison.

Don't ask whether any of this tracks. Like just about everything else in this brashly distasteful comedy, very little makes sense.

You can tell the movie will flounder right from the start. Sandy, who's supposed to be a financial guy, improbably and foolishly falls for an obvious ruse. He gives his name and Social Security number to Diana, who poses as an official who calls to tell him that someone's trying to mess with his credit.

How likely is it that a guy who manages the finances of an investment company wouldn't do a bit of investigating before turning over his Social Security number?

Of course, credibility wouldn't matter if Identity Thief produced sufficient laughs as Diana and Sandy work their way toward Denver.

McCarthy can be very funny, and she certainly knows how to steal a scene, but her one-note truculence gets old when spread over 111 minutes. Poor Bateman. He winds up in the thankless job of straight man, as well as the butt of dumb jokes about his character's masculinity.

Not unexpectedly, this mess of a road trip takes a few sentimental turns that are supposed to make us like Diana, despite the fact that she's a pathological liar and felon.

Vulgar jokes, crashed cars and sentiment? McCarthy and Bateman, two actors who know how to be funny, deserved better.

'The Change-Up' confuses gross and funny

Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds wallow in another raunchy Hollywood comedy.

There's a difference between raunchy and funny, but the new comedy The Change-Up hasn't figured out what it is. That's why The Change-Up opens with a baby spraying a stream of excrement into a frustrated father's face. Yuck and double yuck! **** I suppose there'll be some who happily go along with the movie's shopworn conceit: a married lawyer (Jason Bateman) switches bodies with his reprobate pal (Ryan Reynolds). .... Each man gets a taste of the other's life, and -- here's a surprise -- each becomes a better person because of the swap. The sober married guy discovers that his humdrum life isn't so bad after all, and the single slothful guy learns something about the satisfaction of living up to one's responsibilities. .... Essentially, The Change-Up is one more buddy movie, which means the women serve as props. Looking more fetching than she did in last week's Cowboys & Aliens) Olivia Wilde portrays a hot-looking lawyer with a wild streak. Leslie Mann appears as the wife of Bateman's character. **** Bateman's a capable comic actor, and Reynolds -- last seen in the abysmal Green Lantern -- seems a fine fit for an odd-couple pairing built around the idea that, one way or another, American manhood is a story of failed dreams. But, for what little there is of my money, Bridesmaids was a smarter, raunchy comedy than this silly and extremely distasteful, R-rated mess.

No switch for Aniston, just another romcom

The Switch is an innocuous bit of summer fluff in which Jennifer Aniston continues to defend her title as queen of the contrived romcom. Don’t believe me: Check out Aniston’s recent output, movies such as The Bounty Hunter, Love Happens or He’s Just Not That Into You. The Switch represents a definite improvement over some of Aniston's worst efforts, but still fails to hit the bull's-eye.

It definitely helps that Aniston receives an assist from Jason Bateman, an actor of proven comic chops. Also on hand is a badly underutilized supporting cast that includes Jeff Goldblum, Juliette Lewis and Patrick Wilson.

As is the case with many rom-coms, The Switch feels a bit predigested. Sensitive piano music cues us to those moments when we’re supposed to feel something, and the movie’s arc follows a familiar trajectory: Two good friends must find their way to a romantic conclusion that arrives amid a flurry of bromides about the wondrous ways in which lasting connections are formed.

Of course, there’s a hook. As much as stars, romantic comedies need hooks, the twist that tricks us into thinking we’re watching something we haven’t seen before.

In this case, the hook involves sperm.

Aniston’s Kassie wants to have a baby. She’s a New York TV producer who hears her biological clock ticking. Kassie won’t allow the lack of a husband to thwart her parental ambitions. She does what any red-blooded heroine of a mildly manipulative romcom would do: She finds a sperm donor (Wilson).

Not content to let matters unfold from there, the script contrives to have Bateman’s neurotic Wally switch his sperm with that belonging to Wilson’s Roland, a smiling, hearty fellow who, unlike Wally, loves the outdoors. Wally, on the other hand, is a hypochondriac, a Woody Allen Lite figure who wallows in indecision.

The great sperm swap occurs at an insemination party staged to celebrate Kassie’s decision to expand the population. (All I can say is that if you receive an invitation to an insemination party, you'd be wise to decline. If you’re not smart enough to do that, at least don’t get wasted.)

Before she gives birth, Kassie leaves town. Seven years pass. Wally remains in a social rut. Offered another job in New York, Kassie returns to Manhattan with her eccentric six-year-old son in tow.

The rest of the movie involves a possible romance between Roland – divorced since his sperm-donating days -- and Kassie, Wally’s inability to tell Kassie the truth about either the origin of the sperm or his feelings for her and the introduction of young Sebastian (Thomas Robinson), Kassie’s son.

It takes a fair amount of jockeying for the script by Allan Loeb (based on a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides) to deal with all this. It's possible that excessive plot-shuffling (along with semen switching) can be blamed for making the movie seem more like a sitcom pilot than a fully enriched comic portrait. This despite the presence of two directors (Josh Gordon and Will Speck), the duo that shared directing chores on Will Ferrell’s Blades of Glory.

With nothing much to do, Goldblum is left to play around with line readings, allowing each bit of dialog to slide from his mouth as if the words were balls tumbling down hill with him racing to catch up. Lewis might as well have stayed home; her role doesn’t rise even to the level of amusing cliche, the acerbic gal pal who offers a steady stream of cynical advice.

Scenes between Bateman and Robinson show promise as the script reveals how much alike they are, and it’s difficult to work up hostility toward a movie that takes a potentially fertile (sorry) subject and turns it into the equivalent of multiplex wallpaper; i.e., another late summer throwaway. And don’t look for Bateman and Aniston to burn up the screen with fresh passion, although Aniston certainly owns the patent on this kind of role. Maybe we should begin to think of her as a Doris Day for the 21st century.

Credit The Switch for acknowledging the sex appeal of TV’s Diane Sawyer (never mind how), offering a few chuckles and drawing on Bateman’s ability effortlessly to shift between glib one-liners and neurotic introspection.

Otherwise, there’s not much to say other than to lament the fact that so many movies these days resemble the sitcoms that for so long were a staple of episodic television.

So here’s the drill: If you see The Switch, laugh on cue, sigh upon request and then return to something equally predictable but less subject to resolution in 101 minutes, our sagging economic fortunes.