He’s Ted Lasso. No wait, he’s an ex-con

 

   In South of Heaven, Jason Sudeikis sounds an awful lot like he does as Ted Lasso, but he’s playing an entirely different character, a man who’s worlds away from the amiable American football coach who finds himself coaching soccer in England. 

     This time out, Sudeikis portrays Jimmy Ray, a former convict who’s paroled from prison after serving 10 years for a bank robbery. Jimmy wants nothing more than to marry Ann (Evangeline Lilly), the woman he loves and who is dying of lung cancer. She has waited 10 years for him.

    Director Aharon Keshales (Big Bad Wolves) takes Jimmy’s story through too many mood swings to be effective. The movie alternates hard-boiled drama, tender exchanges, and, finally, a grotesquely out-of-place shootout that pits Jimmy against a small army of foes. 

     The story’s complications begin when Jimmy is tempted into more criminal behavior by a corrupt parole officer (Shea Whigham). 

   In the course of picking up some money, Jimmy has a car accident in which a motorcyclist dies. Turns out the cyclist was a courier for Whit Price (Mike Colter), a smooth-talking but brutal gangster who was waiting for the delivery of $500,000. Price wants his money and believes Jimmy stole it.

      Eventually, Price kidnaps Ann, forcing Jimmy to kidnap Price’s son (Thaddeus J. Mixson). The movie softens as the respective kidnappers get to know and, of course, like their victims.

      The relationship between Jimmy and Ann is well-drawn, but too much of the rest of the movie can’t accommodate the screenplay's wild variations. 

'Race,' the Jesse Owens story

Not a bad movie, but the subject deserved a better one.

Despite a strong performance from Stephan James as Jesse Owens, Race proves an only passable account of the track star's life -- from Owens' victories as a student athlete at Ohio State to his stunning triumphs at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

A sprinter and long jumper by trade, Owens won four gold medals in Berlin, a feat that was widely celebrated as a slap in the face to Hitler and his Nazi minions, racists who hoped to use the games as a demonstration of unbeatable Aryan superiority.

Director Stephen Hopkins' dutifully tells Owens' story -- or at least parts of it -- but he's so busy recounting events that he doesn't get deep enough into anything.

None of this is to say that Race, with its double-edged title, is an act hagiography.

Owens is shown making mistakes, notably an affair he had while he was engaged. And some of the movie's supporting players are also depicted as flawed.

Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons), an influential member of the International Olympic Committee in 1936 and later its head, was a construction mogul whose dealings with the Nazi government sparked controversy. Brundage wouldn't listen to progressive voices who insisted that this particular Olympics should be boycotted.

The movie also shows that Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis), Owens' tough-love coach at Ohio State, wrestles with alcohol problems, and, at times, seems insensitive to Owens' problems.

The movie takes a pretty positive view of Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houtem), the filmmaker whose Olympia set new standards for sports photography. Of course, Riefenstahl also made Triumph of the Will, a propaganda documentary and near exaltation that chronicled the massive 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg.

Here, Riefenstahl is portrayed as a rebellious spirit, defying Joseph Goebbels (Barnaby Metschurat) so that she could make her own film rather than the one that the propaganda minister wished to see.

Those who know little or nothing about Owens' life can view Race as a learning experience, but even the racial barriers in a script from Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse can feel as if they're being played by-the-numbers, including the virulent racism Owens faced at Ohio State, where he broke three world records at a now legendary 1935 Big Ten meet in Michigan.

A recent New York Times story briefly describes Owens life after the Olympics. He made an unsuccessful foray into Hollywood, dabbled in vaudeville, and, at one point, lost his amateur status, the article notes.

Desperate to support his family, he toiled at gas stations, and performed stunts in which he ran against race horses.

American racism kept Owens from capitalizing on his victories in Berlin. His triumphs abroad, presented here with the expected celebratory quality, didn't do much to change the racial climate at home, something the movie could (and should) have done more to dramatize.

Odd isn't it? When it comes to fictionalized sports movies Hollywood has no trouble serving up inspiration, but when it latches on to a historically important story, it can't get beyond an effort we'll call "adequate," and perhaps instructional for those unfamiliar with Owens' life.

Given all its volatile and exhilarating ingredients, it's disappointing that Race doesn't have greater impact.

A romcom that tries to be trendy

Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie star in Sleeping With Other People.

Predictability in romantic comedy isn't necessarily a bad thing. We've all experienced the pleasures that result from knowing that two characters are destined to be together -- even if they don't yet realize it.

But the success of such movies depends a lot on how we react to the characters who are working their way toward a shared destiny.

In the case of Sleeping With Other People, I was less-than-charmed by Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie, who are cast as a couple of sex addicts dedicated to protecting themselves from emotional involvement.

Reminiscent of When Harry Met Sally -- a signature contemporary rom-com -- Sleeping With Other People tries (strains?) not to get too starry-eyed about love.

Sudeikis' Jake sleeps with just about any woman who crosses his path. Larson's Lainey clings to her "love" for a gynecologist played by Adam Scott.

The sex in doc's office is great, but he's engaged to someone else.

When Jake and Lainey, who had a brief fling in college, become friends as adults, they listen to each other's sexual tales while insisting that their relationship remain platonic.

At one point, Jake becomes involved with his boss, a woman of preternatural understanding played by Amanda Peet.

Jason Mantzoukas and Andrea Savage turn up as the family folks in Jake's bachelor life.

Sudeikis and Brie aren't helped by glib dialogue that sounds so written, you can almost hear the clatter of typewriter keys.

When Harry Met Sally probably remains best known for its feigned orgasm scene. Perhaps by way of competition, Sleeping With Other People features a scene in which Jake offers Lainey advice about how she can more effectively masturbate.

He conducts a demonstration with a bottle that I won't describe in any detail, but know that, at minimum, it's indicative of a movie that feels as if it wants to be both shockingly frank and romantic.

As in life, those may not be complementary ambitions.

This week's mega-helping of vulgar fun

Another movie for fans of rude/crude humor.

If you've been hankering to watch Jennifer Aniston play dirty dentist, the new comedy Horrible Bosses is eager to oblige. So is Aniston, who turns out to be good at flaunting her character's maniacal libido.

Working overtime to turn out more of the rude/crude humor that has become a Hollywood staple, Horrible Bosses follows the antics of three bumbling employees who vow to kill their abusive bosses, one of them played by Aniston.

Heavier on raunch than wit, Horrible Bosses begins when our hapless heroes (Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis) decide their sanity depends on getting rid of the aggressively vile people for whom they work.

It's difficult to watch Horrible Bosses without thinking that the filmmakers are looking for increasingly outrageous ways to walk through the door thrown open by raunch masters such as Judd Apatow (The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up) and Todd Phillips (the Hangover movies).

As was the case with those movies, fans of purposefully tasteless humor should find laughs in a movie about downtrodden employees who know nothing about murder, which means they probably don't watch enough TV.

Not surprisingly, the movie's extremely horrible bosses serve up an exaggerated variety behavior that in real life would result in more lawsuits than laughter.

In a role that amounts to a cliche for him, Kevin Spacey plays the sadistic head of the financial company where Bateman's character works. He teases Bateman's Nick with promises of a promotion. He forces him to drink a glass of 18-year-old Scotch at 8:15 in the morning, and then accuses him of having a drinking problem. He's a humiliation specialist.

Colin Farrell -- whose main job here seems to involve not looking like himself -- portrays the odious Bobby Pellitt, the cocaine-snorting son of the kindly owner of a chemical company (Donald Sutherland). Sutherland's character dies within the first 15 minutes, leaving the company to his hateful son.

Taking a break from mediocre romantic comedies, Aniston portrays a sex-crazed dentist who insists that her assistant (Day) sleep with her. It's an impolite, turn-the-tables role in which a woman sexually harasses her male employee.

An underutilized and funny Jamie Foxx plays an ex-convict, a guy our trio of bumblers seeks out in a divey bar. For $5,000, Foxx's character -- whose name can't be printed here -- becomes what he calls "a murder consultant."

His idea: To avoid establishing any motives, the boys should kill one another's bosses, a plan that evokes references to (and jokes about) Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train.

Horrible Bosses does little more than look for ways to keep the jokestream flowing. Nothing wrong with that, but a joke about spilled cocaine? Really?

When it comes to comedy, especially vulgar ones, I feel duty-bound to distinguish the audience reaction from my own. I'd say that the preview audience with which I saw the movie found it funnier than I did. Me? The thing that made me chuckle the most -- aside from Foxx -- was one of the lines Sudeikis, as the over-sexed male in the group, delivers during the obligatory outtakes.

During the movie, Bateman and Sudeikis do a decent job of carrying the banter load with Day working at the more exasperated end of the spectrum. It also should be pointed out that for all its vulgarity,Horrible Bosses isn't nearly as corrosive as Hangover 2.

Once you adjust to director Seth Gordon's comic style, you can see many of the jokes coming. Some will make you yuk. Others will make you duck. How you respond to this ribald helping of humor probably depends on whether you're doing more of the former than the latter.