'Sheep Detectives' on the case

  What a preposterous idea. Who wants to watch a movie about a flock of sheep intent on discovering who murdered their beloved shepherd? Director Kyle Balda (Despicable Me 3, Minions: The Rise of Gru) turns to live action in The Sheep Detectives and finds more charm than any movie about sleuthing sheep deserves. 

  Based on German novelist Leonie Swann's Three Bags Full, Sheep Detectives has its eye on younger viewers but doesn't leave their adult escorts far behind. Sheep Detectives smartly follows a standard whodunit arc, arriving at the expected plot points with pleasing efficiency.

   The sheep know the mystery formula because the shepherd -- Hugh Jackman's George Hardy -- used to read them detective novels before they retired to the barn for a night's rest. Balda adds a bit of darkness to the bucolic background. The good-guy shepherd is murdered early on, reducing Jackman's screen time, and the story makes room for greedy ambition among its human characters.

   Overall, though, The Sheep Detectives involves endearing CGI animals who speak to one another in English. (Human characters can't hear them). Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) portrays the flock's leader. Regina King gives voice to Cloud, a sheep who gets by on good grooming. 

   Previous to the loss of their caretaker, the sheep had been living an idyllic life. They suppress bad memories, and soothe themselves with a belief about the afterlife: Sheep don't die; they turn into fluffy clouds. Chris O'Dowd's Mopple is the only sheep who remembers the flock's history. Byran Cranston voices a ram who lives apart from the rest of the group.

   A winter lamb, rejected by the others, paves the way for an instructional layer about tolerating creatures who don't fit in.

   The town's human population includes Derry (Nicholas Braun), a policeman of blatant incompetence. Emma Thompson signs on as a brittle lawyer who tries to administer the late shepherd's will.  Molly Gordon plays the shepherd's daughter; she hasn't seen her father in years. The town's butcher, the appropriately named Ham (Conleth Hill), regards the sheep as potential source of profit. Nicholas Galitzine portrays a reporter who's investigating the murder, and Hong Chau plays the operator of the town's hotel.

   The human characters add some of the eccentric flavor of an Ealing comedy to a story set in the English countryside. 

   It's a stretch to think of The Sheep Detectives as a family-oriented classic, but the movie proves amusing enough to earn its place in the world of talking animals that speak the language of quirky entertainment.

Suspend disbelief? Not this time

 Oh, Hi!, a movie that flirts with horror tropes while dealing with the consequences of jumping too quickly into a relationship, doesn't take long to squander its credibility. Meet Iris (Molly Gordon) and Isaac (Logan Lerman), a couple we encounter while they’re en route to a romantic rural getaway. Isaac picked a rental house that seems ideal and, for the most part, Iris and Isaac appear to be well-matched. After a breezy start, the movie could have proceeded as a romantic comedy or it could have added ingredients to upset love's apple cart. Regrettably, Oh, Hi! opts for disruption. After experimenting with S&M goodies the couple finds in one of the house's closets, Isaac stupidly tells Iris that he's not interested in an exclusive relationship. Why stupid? He's still handcuffed to the bed.  Iris hopes that, as the weekend progresses, the imprisoned Isaac will recognize that he's supposed to be with her. Director Sophie Brooks can't seem to decide whether to play for chills or laughs. We get little of either as we watch the increasingly annoying Iris abuse Isaac. Brooks, who also wrote the screenplay, contrives to have another couple (John Reynolds and Geraldine Viswanathan) arrive to help Iris resolve a disturbing problem: What if she releases Isaac and he heads straight for the nearest police station? The story ultimately tries to say something meaningful about the need for honesty in relationships, but as soon as Isaac was chained to the bed, I was shackled to a story that had lost most of its early appeal by over-extending its central conceit and getting too little in return.*

*Note: In an earlier version of this review I had gotten the name of Molly Gordon's character wrong. Thanks to the reader who pointed it out.

A bereaved family gathers: Comedy ensues

 

   A post-funeral Jewish comedy, Shiva Baby mixes ethnic stereotyping, fluid sexuality, and a young woman's uncertainty about her future in ways that don't always mesh. But mismatched ingredients may be the point of director Emma Seligman's comedy.

   Shiva Baby bounces the frustrated energies of its characters against the cramped walls of the small house in which most of the movie takes place. Fortunately, there are enough laughs to keep you from screaming.

  Rachel Sennott plays Danielle, a New York college senior who's earning extra money by carrying on a sex-for-cash relationship with a slightly older man (Danny Defarrari). 

  To please her parents, Danielle attends a shiva for a departed family member. There, she makes a surprising discovery.  Not only is Defaarari's character at the same shiva, he's married to a blonde shiksa (Dianna Agron). To top things off, the couple has a baby.

    For Danielle, the occasion -- a gathering to mark the period of mourning and comfort the bereaved -- immediately turns fraught.

    Danielle's parents are sharply drawn, perhaps overly so. Fred Melamed plays Danielle's mostly clueless father. Danielle's stronger mother (Polly Draper) nags at the daughter she clearly loves. She also tries to steer Danielle away from a childhood friend (Molly Gordon) with whom she has had a fling. 

    The comedy revolves around what the characters don't know and what they know but refuse to acknowledge, a good basis for farce although Shiva Baby over-relies on close-ups and jokes about the mourners' obsession with food tend to be repetitive. And, at least in my view, the movie's stereotypes sometimes morph into wince-inducing caricature.

     Draper, Sennott, and Gordon give the movie's best performances. Draper's humanity undercuts her character's more stereotypical traits. Sennott conveys the deep confusions of a perilously ungrounded woman, and Gordon allows honest intelligence to break the surface of cliche.

    So, I'd sum up this way: If Seligman were a chef, I'd say she hasn't created a totally satisfying meal but she succeeds in bringing many of the movie's ingredients to a rolling comic boil.

A gallery for those who've lost in love

    If you don't mind a movie that contains more contrivance than heartbreak, The Broken Hearts Gallery might be just your cup of sugar. I should say that the sugar in this 20something, New York-based rom-com is laced with the kind of humor that might be produced by characters who've spent far too much time on Twitter, a heady mixture of snark. cleverness and complaint.
     Almost never at a loss for something to say, the characters in Broken Hearts take a predictable journey in which friendship eventually turns to love, a development that could surprise only  the two characters in question.
      Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan) has a strange habit. She keeps something from each of  her failed relationships, turning her bedroom into a kind of memorial to lost love.
     Lucy lives with two roommates: Phillipa Soo's Nadine and Molly Gordon's Amanda. The roommates serve as a kind of Greek chorus, presuming you view a Greek chorus as a device for conveying an endless stream of wisecracks, some funny, some not.

     The main story focuses on Lucy. After being dumped by Max (Utkarsh Ambudkar), Lucy meets Nick (Dacre Montgomery). Mistakenly taking Nick for an Uber driver, she climbs into his Prius and ... well ... the rest is pretty much preordained.
      As befits a contemporary young person in a romcom, Lucy is going through a bad patch.  Not only has she been dumped, but she just lost her job at a supposedly prestigious art gallery run by the acerbic Eva Woolf (Bernadette Peters). 
     As it turns out, Nick has a life of his own dream. He's trying to convert an abandoned YMCA into a boutique hotel called The Chloe. Lucy decides that a Broken Hearts Gallery would make a catchy addition to The Chloe. 

     She'll collect and display the mementos of other people's heartbreaks -- along with a word or two about their stories. Predictably, the idea goes viral.
      Really? Even Lucy's enthusiasm wasn't enough to convince me that anything in her gallery might be worth looking at and the stories that accompany all these breakups aren't especially interesting, either.

      As for the hotel ... does Manhattan really need another one?
      I don't need to say much more. Writer/director Natalie Krinsky (Gossip Girl), concocts a smooth glide across the movie's surfaces with Lucy taking over interior decorating chores at The Chloe.
      Charged with carrying the movie, Viswanathan boasts a winning smile, oodles of verve and enough of whatever passes for intelligence in this kind of film to keep the whole business afloat.
      But in this romcom, the romance proves as corny as it is predictable and the comedy clings to verbal banter rather than from anything having do with keen observation.

      Despite its title, Broken Hearts is selling undisguised optimism.  There's someone for everyone. Money problems readily are solved. Things eventually work out. 

     And all before anyone in the movie turns 30.
      

Melissa McCarthy parties on -- and on

A mother joins her daughter as a college student in Life of the Party.

It’s entirely possible that a woman who gave up her career ambitions when she committed to marriage and raising a daughter might return to college to complete her senior year, particularly after being dumped by her husband of 23 years. It’s also possible that enough time would have passed that the woman's daughter could have arrived at her senior year in college, as well. It's even possible that mother and daughter would find themselves enrolled at the same university.

Considering all this, it’s not too much of a stretch to view Melissa McCarthy’s new comedy, Life of the Party, as a plausible effort to show what might happen if such a mother/daughter situation developed in the hallowed halls of fictional Decatur University.

But that’s where credibility ends and comedy (or what passes for it) begins in Life of the Party, a movie that provides an answer to a question you probably haven’t spent much time considering -- at least I hope not. What could be less appealing than an R-rated McCarthy comedy directed by her real-life husband Ben Falcone (Tammy and The Boss)? Yep, it’s a PG-13 rated comedy from the same team.

The mostly wan Life of the Party follows McCarthy’s Deanna into the dorms of Decatur and turns her into an archeology student who doesn’t dig up enough laughs to earn Life of the Party a passing grade.

At first, Deanna’s daughter’s (Molly Gordon) expresses embarrassment at having her mom around campus. But without much by way of transition, mother and daughter find a new bond as gal pals.

Daughter helps Mom with a fashion makeover that takes her from prim and proper to a woman who appeals to a college kid (Luke Benward) with whom she has hot sex. As Deanna puts it, she rocks his world.

Of the supporting cast, Maya Rudolph, as Deanna's best friend, gives a ribald edge of an otherwise staid suburban woman. Matt Walsh is wasted as Deanna’s ex, a man who has taken up with a realtor (Julie Brown) who bosses him around and immediately sells the home in which he and Deanna lived. The house was in his name.

Deanna has a sullen, self-isolating roommate (Heidi Gardner), but the sisters in her daughter's sorority are a fairly generic group for whom Deanna morphs from a fish-out-of-water woman into an inspirational figure.

Supposed high points protrude self-consciously from the mix. These include a scene in which Deanna and her college cohorts trash her ex-husband’s wedding, a scene at an 80s themed party at which Deanna dominates the dance floor, and a restaurant scene which Deanna confronts her former husband.

The restaurant scene lands some laughs, perhaps because it contains one of the movie's few surprises.

The only moment I found slightly amusing was a bit of physical comedy in which Deanna fumbles her way through an oral archaeology mid-term, engaging in battle with a recalcitrant lectern. Maybe I’m clutching at straws but the bit reminded me of Jerry Lewis. A little?

Otherwise, Life of the Party suggests that the filmmakers might do well to return to comedy school for a refresher in how to avoid the kind of formula traps that tend to neuter comic potential.