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.

Jennifer Aniston's bitter piece of 'Cake'

An emotionally scarred woman tries to drive everyone else away.

Toward the end of last year, Jennifer Aniston's name began to surface as a possible Oscar nominee for her performance in Cake, the story of an embittered woman whose life is mired in grief and rage. Aniston didn't get the nomination, but the actress best known for rom-coms and her long-running stint in TV's Friends, shows the kind of range Academy voters often appreciate.

In Cake, Aniston plays a woman with a scarred face, an aversion to make-up and a pill-popping addiction to pain killers. Aniston's Claire clearly has suffered both emotional and physical wounds.

Director Daniel Barnz, working from a script by Patrick Tobin, takes his time letting us know precisely what happened to put Claire into such a miserable state.

And miserable it is.

Claire has been so impossible to live with that she's driven off her caring husband(Chris Messina). Only her housekeeper (Adriana Barraza) seems willing to tolerate Claire's abusive ways -- and, at one point, even Barraza's Silvana is pushed to the brink.

Claire is so difficult that she's kicked out of a therapy group, which she disdains anyway. After leaving the group, she's haunted by visions of Nina (Anna Kendrick), a former group member who committed suicide.

Presented in straightforward fashion, these hallucinatory encounters give Kendrick something to do, but don't add much to the proceedings.

Those who remember The Good Girl (2002) already know that Aniston can play against type. In Cake, she pours on cynicism and bile, but the movie loses credibility when Claire establishes a relationship -- albeit a halting one -- with Nina's widowed husband (Sam Worthington), a man who has been left with a child.

If you've seen a few indie movies, you won't have much trouble guessing what has driven Claire to near distraction.

I've not been a fan of Aniston's endless string of rom-coms, but acting in romantic comedies is still acting, and Aniston deserves praise for taking a chance on a small, indie movie in which she's required to keep the audience at a distance.

Let's hope Cake helps push Aniston out of the rom-com ghetto. But taken strictly on its own somewhat attenuated terms, Cake needed to be better, as well as bitter.

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.

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.