It takes a while, but 'Sing' connects

I'm not going belabor Sing, a commercially potent bit of family entertainment with a decent amount of humor to carry it past its dull spots. This animated romp centers on a show-biz loving koala bear named Buster Moon (voice by Matthew McConaughey) who needs to raise money to save his beloved theater. To achieve his goal, Buster decides to sponsor a singing contest. As the result of a misprint, the winners think they'll receive $100,000. Poor Buster. He intended to award only a $1,000 prize. The plot makes room for a teeming cast of anthropomorphic animals such as a rat who croons like Sinatra (Seth MacFarlane) and a very shy elephant (Tori Kelly) who eventually unleashes a potent rendition of Leonard Coen's Hallelujah. Scarlett Johansson voices a porcupine punk rocker. We also meet a singing pig (Reese Witherspoon) who tries to juggle motherhood and a stage career, no easy task because she has 25 piglet kids. Then there's the gorilla (Aaron Egerton) who abandons his criminal father's ways to pursue a career on stage, but still longs for Dad's approval. There are more animals, but I think you get the idea. Sing makes use of many already popular tunes before arriving at a finale that pretty much rescues the whole enterprise. Director Garth Jennings (Son of Rambow) and his team don't offer animated perfection, but Sing ought to give Moana some competition for holiday viewing in a season that's running short on fun fare.

It's one 'Ted' too many

Laughs in short supply as Seth MacFarlane brings back the bear.

Near the beginning of Ted 2, the sequel to the 2012 comedy about a teddy bear that comes to life, director Seth MacFarlane stages a production number, a song-and-dance routine that evokes memories of Busby Berkeley. Dancers glide over highly polished floors in a number (Steppin' Out With My Baby) built around men in tuxedos, a silvery chorus line and, of course, Ted.

If you don't know by now, Ted (voice by MacFarlane) is a button-cute toy and foul-mouthed resident of Boston. Ted is pals with Johnny (Mark Wahlberg), the guy who owned him as a kid and who, as an adult, has devolved into a class A schlub. Recently divorced, Johnny has an unhealthy interest in Internet porn.

The joke? The cute bear has a mouth that could make a longshoreman blush.

That gives you a clue about McFarlane's comedy. He tends to create a friendly, feel good surface and then shreds it with jokes that are profane and even purposefully offensive.

But guess what? Once was enough.

Maybe it's the moment, but I wasn't in the mood for what feels like an endless stream of jokes about black men and their private parts. Nor was I in the mood for gay jokes or sexist jokes or any of the other so-called jests that Ted 2 tries to peddle in its efforts to give political correctness a sharp poke in the eye.

The second edition opens at Ted's wedding. He's marrying bombshell Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth). The couple couldn't be happier.

The movie then flashes forward by a year.

Living in a cramped apartment Ted and Tami-Lynn are at each other's throats. With their marriage threatening to dissolve, Ted suggests that the couple have a baby.

The problem: Ted -- who began his existence as a toy -- doesn't have the one appendage that accounts for so many of the movie's jokes.

As the plot develops, Ted and Tami-Lynn learn that adoption isn't an option because Massachusetts has decided that Ted isn't human. He's property.

The movie then chronicles Ted's fight for rights, a turn that allows MacFarlane to make references to the struggle for black and gay rights. MacFarlane seems to be serious about all this, but raising important issues in this context is a bit like wearing a tuxedo to a mud-wrestling contest.

The movie's legal thrust introduces Amanda Seyfried as novice attorney Sam L. Jackson; when she's not taking hits off a bong, she represents Ted in court. MacFarlane also gives her a musical number. She sings Mean Ol Moon around a camp fire.

Then there's an entirely useless storyline in which Donny (Giovanni Ribisi), the weird half-wit from the first movie, persuades a Hasbro executive (John Carroll Lynch) to try to steal Ted, murder him and cut him open to find out what brought him to life. The plan: To make more Teds.

There's more pseudo-seriousness when Morgan Freeman shows up as a prominent civil rights lawyer who winds up playing the movie's moral anthem by telling us what makes us human in a courtroom speech.

Ted 2 is better than McFarlane's last movie, the disastrous A Million Ways to Die in the West, and there's always an audience for this kind of humor.

Me? Let's put it this way, a scene in which Wahlberg's Johnny finds himself covered with semen made the semen scene in There's Something About Mary (heaven help us we're talking semen scenes) look as if it might have been written by Oscar Wilde.

Ted 2 isn't exactly a rehash; it is, however, hash, a low-down, unsatisfying jumble.

A comic western gets thrown from its horse

A Million Ways to Die in the West floods the screen with gags. Most of them don't work.

Watching A Million Ways to Die in the West, a new comedy from Seth MacFarlane, I wondered about Hollywood. Why has an obviously clever comic with good looks and a gameshow smile been given the opportunity to over-indulge what seem like fantasies created by watching too many Westerns?

Maybe it's because MacFarlane tries (boy, does he try) to make us laugh with intentionally placed anachronisms, a surfeit of fart jokes and many other crude expressions that make it seem as if he's testing puerile limits by focusing on all manner of bodily excretions.

When I first saw the trailer for A Million Ways to Die in the West, it struck me that MacFarlane might have hitched his horse to a wagon that long ago left the stable. The Western has been parodied before, most prominently in Mel Brooks' classic Blazing Saddles (1974).

Alas, I was right -- or at least I think I was. From its opening credits -- presented in the style of big-scenery westerns popular in the 1950s -- it seemed that MacFarlane's trip west would be marked by a mixture of dubious taste and comic irrelevance.

The movie's major insight goes something like this: Life on the frontier was miserable in nearly every regard, offering many opportunities for those who braved the western wilds to meet with doom, degradation and wounded pride.

To make his point, MacFarlane plays Albert, a sheep farmer who lives with his parents.

During the course of the movie, Albert complains about the West and is rejected by the local schoolmarm (Amanda Seyfried).

Albert eventually finds true love with the wife (Charlize Theron) of a brutally cruel outlaw (Liam Neeson).

Suffice it to say that each of the aforementioned actors seems to be working in a different movie. Seyfried can't seem to find a handle on a character who abandons the hapless Albert for a man who runs the local mustache shop (Neil Patrick Harris), an emporium that seems to specialize in a Snidely Whiplash look.

As a woman who knows how to wield a six-shooter, Theron seems committed to acting as an audience for MacFarlane, reacting as if her paycheck depended on turning herself into his personal laugh track.

Neeson mostly plays things straight, adding to the tonal confusion that prevails throughout most of this lengthy comic ride. The movie lasts for 116 minutes, many of them marked by inertness at their core.

It might be of some help to catalog the various jokes. The most repetitive of them involves the local brothel where a hooker (Sarah Silverman) plies her trade.

Silverman's Ruth talks freely about her work to her fiancee (Giovanni Ribisi), an avowed Christian who agrees that he shouldn't sleep with Silverman's character until they're properly married.

Repetition is also evident in the movie's several gunfights, which breed little tension and lots of fretting about when MacFarlane plans to bring the proceedings to a close.

The movie even includes a lengthy fantasy sequence, which is supposed to depict a drug-induced trip that MacFarlane's character experiences when he meets Cochise (Wes Studi).

Some of the jokes undermine themselves. MacFarlane probably was trying to make a comment about western racial attitudes with a bit that takes place at a shooting gallery at a county fare. The shooting gallery theme: Shoot a runaway slave.

It's a misfire: The offensiveness of the conceit trumps any satirical point MacFarlane migth have had in mind.

Say this: MacFarlane isn't shy about turning his humor on himself, most notably when a sheep urinates on his face. Yes, it's disgusting.

Some of MacFarlane's one liners have a sharpness about them. At one point he says that tending sheep is like trying to walk 150 really stupid dogs at the same time.

But MacFarlane's comic vision seems mired in conflict. He tries to pay homage to the grand scenery of Westerns while at the same time trashing the romanticism that has enriched the genre.

A Million Ways to Die in the West probably will attract some interest, primarily because MacFarlane scored big with Ted, a comedy about a foul-mouthed teddy bear. MacFarlane directed Ted, and also provided the bear's voice, which meant he remained off screen. He proved that he could garner laughs from a one-joke movie.

In A Million Ways to Die in the West, MacFarlane founders with a comedy that bombards us with one-liners, sight gags, gross-outs, and a cornucopia of jokes, most of them unbuoyed by anything resembling comic exuberance.

Lots of laughs for a one-joke movie

If it weren't for the irresistible pull of adolescence, America's multiplexes would be hard-pressed to find a comedy to play. Ted, the latest in the endless round of supposedly envelope-pushing comedies, finds a preposterously creative way to literalize the insistently popular boy/man split. Director Seth MacFarlane, of TV's animated comedy Family Guy, has directed a movie about a man (Mark Wahlberg) whose best friend is a teddy bear (voice by MacFarlane). The story begins in 1985. As a boy, Whalberg's John Bennett wishes that the teddy bear he receives as a Christmas gift could talk. John's wish is granted, and the movie forges ahead. Now in his mid-30s, John lives in Boston with Ted, his unimaginatively named bear, and his girlfriend (Mila Kunis). At this point, MacFarlane unveils the movie's single joke: Far from being a cuddly stuffed animal, Ted has matured into a foul-mouthed, pot-smoking adult who spews non-stop pop-cultural references. Disgusted with this perpetual juvenilia, Kunis's Lori insists that John move on, leaving Ted behind. MacFarlane gets more than the expected mileage from what essentially is a one-joke movie built around Ted's politically incorrect proclivities. The movie's supporting cast is used to mixed effect. Joel McHale plays Lori's obnoxious boss; Giovanni Ribisi portrays a nutcase who wants to kidnap Ted for his overweight son; and Sam J. Jones, who played Flash Gordon in the critically-derided 1980 movie, shows up as himself. The movie predictably (and unfortunately) sweetens toward the end, some of MacFarlane's jokes miss, and some of the jokes really are more offensive than funny. Overall, though, Ted works better than it has any right to, and when it hits, it tends to hit big, even finding a way to work Fenway Park into an action-oriented finale in which MacFarlane tires his hand at a car chase. Bad idea.