Kenneth Branagh takes Poirot to Venice

 Kenneth Branagh continues his Agatha Christie preoccupation with A Haunting in Venice, his third in a series of films based on Christie novels. As is the case with much of Christie's work, Haunting  delays its big revelation until the end, allowing ace detective Hercule Poirot finally to disclose whodunit. 

  I won't do that with this review. Here's my take: Haunting is an adequate -- though hardly exhilarating -- thriller seasoned by supernatural suggestion that goes against the ultra-rational Poitrot grain.

  As a director, Branagh, who also plays Poirot, takes advantage of otherworldly possibilities, trying for a few jolts and a large helping of eeriness. But the film doesn't register as a superior slice of horror, if that's what Branagh had in mind.

    Christie purists will note that Branagh has based his film on the author's novel, Hallowe'en Party, and shifted its location from England to Italy. By confining most of the tale to the creepy confines of an old  palazzo, Branagh misses an opportunity. The labyrinthian alleys and byways of Venice could have augmented the movie's mystery and terror.

    The story begins in 1947 when Ariadne Oliver, a mystery writer played by Tina Fey, invites Poirot to a Halloween party. She wants the great sleuth to expose a psychic (Michelle Yeoh) who claims to communicate with the dead, one of whom happened to be the daughter of the palazzo's owner (Kelly Reilly). The girl, we learn, entered the realm of the departed after committing suicide.

    Not surprisingly, the mystery doesn't end when Poirot discover that the psychic is a fraud. The plot contrives to allow Poirot to do what he always does: hunt a killer. 

    The visual atmosphere ranges from dim to dark and Branagh also employs a charged angle about the palazzo's past. At one time, the place housed orphans who were abandoned to die. Their ghosts are said to have haunted the place ever since. 

    The supporting cast of characters -- or more precisely suspects  -- includes a visiting American (Kyle Allen), a psychologically damaged physician (Jamie Dornan), his precocious son (Jude Hill) and others who expand the list of red herrings.

     We're meant to wonder whether a stream of mysterious occurrences will shatter Poirot's commitment to reason, causing him to rethink his rejection of otherworldly claims. Let's just say that Poirot's skepticism, forged by many murder investigations, has deep roots.

      Earlier in this review, I called Haunting adequate,  hardly a ringing endorsement for a whodunit that generates too little concern about who  committed the dastardly deed.

     It's not so much that we figure things out early on; it's that we're not given enough reason to immerse in the gloomy game Poirot must play.

     

    

A comedy about a 50th birthday

Amy Poehler makes her directorial debut with Wine Country, a comedy about six friends who gather at a home in the Napa Valley to celebrate the 50th birthday of one of their number. When you watch Wine Country, it will be difficult not to see that the women on the screen -- a group that includes Maya Rudolph, Paula Pell, Rachel Dratch, and Ana Gasteyer, as well as Poehler and Emily Spivey -- are having a good time. That impression may result from the fact that some of these women evidently made a similar trip together in real life, which is where Poehler got the idea for the movie. She even makes room for old pal Tina Fey, who appears in a drop-in role as the owner the house the women have rented for their weekend celebration. Poehler makes sure that each of these women has a highlight moment with the best delivered by Pell, as the group's gay pal, and the always enjoyable Rudolph, as a woman who's secretly worrying about a possible health issue. Dratch portrays the self-effacing woman whose birthday the group is celebrating. The movie also includes a visit from a tarot card reader (Cherry Jones) and a cameo from TED Talks star Brene Brown. Jason Schwartzman signs on as Devon, the chef and chauffeur who comes with the rented house and who spends hours making paella for the group. The women are characterized in ways that reflect someone's idea -- actually screenwriters Spivey and Liz Cackowski -- about what might be on the minds of 50-year-old women: aging, careers, marriages, and relationships (or the lack of them). You won't hear anything resembling the kind of discussions that rely on high-flying bouts of imagination. More amusing than uproarious, Wine Country's cast sells this slender movie, which includes the usual "serious" counterpoint that seems to have become part of every comedy. The story resolves predictably, but the actresses who gather in wine country give the movie its kick -- not a major kick, but a kick nonetheless.

Tina Fey, Amy Poehler get lewd

A little more wit would have been welcome, but there are enough laughs to keep Sisters humming.

When a couple of guys make a movie that spends most of its running time chasing lewd laughs, we're almost never surprised. In fact, we more or less expect that comic actors such as the overexposed Seth Rogen will find new ways to push the envelope of propriety.

But women?

That's another story, even after movies such as Bridesmaids, which added a bit of raunch to the female comedy mix.

In what amounts to a small but revolutionary step, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have not only pushed the envelope, they've tried to rip it to shreds with Sisters, a comedy about two siblings who wind up throwing a wildly uninhibited house party that gives the movie its comic crescendo.

As far as plot, that's pretty much all there is.

The party happens during a visit the Atlanta-based sisters make to their parents (Dianne Wiest and James Brolin), who still live in Florida, where the sisters grew up.

Once in Florida, the sisters begin to revert to their adolescence. In the case of these two, it's a relatively short trip.

The party is supposed to undermine a deal the parents have made to sell the family home to a young, upwardly mobile couple. Despite the fact that they haven't lived there for a long time, the sisters refuse to let go of the house in which they grew up.

As you might expect, the folks at the party have too good a time, so much so that the house is wrecked. Don't consider that a spoiler; it's not just that the house is wrecked, it's how and who does the wrecking that leads to the movie's laughs.

Sisters was written by SNL's Paula Pell. Jason Moore (Pitch Perfect) handles the directing chores, but the whole business is inconceivable without Fey and Poehler -- and even they can't make every joke work. Sisters is a bumpy affair.

Mild attempts at characterization are made: Fey's Kate is a mom with a disapproving teen-age daughter (Madison Davenport) and not much talent for hairdressing, which is unfortunate because that's how she tries to earn a living.

Poehler's Maura is a do-gooder who can't pass a homeless person without offering help. To the extent that Maura has a character arc, it involves dropping her reserve and emerging as a hard partying demon.

Maya Randolph has a nice turn as a former high school classmate of the sisters who feels superior to them. John Leguizamo plays a former high school chum who seems happy despite the fact that his life has gone nowhere. John Cena portrays a heavily muscled drug dealer, and Ike Barinholtz appear as a handyman who arouses Maura's not so latent desires. As a nerdy partygoer, Bobby Moynihan starts at a high pitch and becomes even more manic.

I have to confess that it took me a while to adjust to the low level of humor Fey and Poehler have adopted in their third joint outing after Mean Girls and Baby Mama.

But these are two funny women, who are so heartily committed to this comedy, you might as well surrender -- at least until something a little smarter comes along.

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.

College-based 'Admission' has little to say

Fey and Rudd can't save a movie that too often flatlines.
I wasn't exactly trembling with anticipation about a comedy that revolves around the agonies associated with Princeton University's admission process -- even when I learned that the movie stars the gifted Tina Fey and the affable Paul Rudd.

The new movie Admission marks one of those rare times when my initial expectations proved right. As directed by Paul Weitz from Karen Croner's adaptation of a novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission offers little by way of fresh insight and even less reason for us to get heavily involved.

Why? Consider: Although anxiety about college admissions has become a national pastime for hordes of high school seniors, the incoming class at Princeton is limited to 1,248 students, or at least that's what the movie tells us at the outset. Those privileged few are culled from a stack of applications numbering more than 26,000.

Even at that, we're talking about a small number of youngsters who aspire to (or even think about) Princeton. Moreover, it's probably reasonable to assume that many of Princeton's applicants are the offspring of the exceptionally well-heeled.

Put another way: Finding a rooting interest when it comes to admission to one of the nation's most elite universities is not exactly a slam dunk.

Even if you discount my state-school bias, Admission still doesn't hold up, mostly because it doesn't really have a whole lot to say.

Fey plays Portia, a career-minded woman who works as an admissions officer at Princeton. And work she does. Portia's burdened with a fair number of those 26,000-plus applications, each representing the dreams of the young, hopeful and bright.

Portia also aspires to replace her boss (a very credible Wallace Shawn), an administrator who's on the verge of retirement. Portia is one of two leading candidates for the dean of admissions job, the other being a woman (Gloria Reuben) who seems more adept when it comes to office politics.

The story -- and eventually Portia's future -- hinges on the fate of one high school student (Nat Wolff), a youngster whose grades are terrible but whose test scores are off-the-charts. Wolff's Jeremiah attends New Quest, an experimental school where Rudd's character teaches.

We quickly learn that Rudd's John Pressman went to Dartmouth with Portia, which is one of the reasons he tries to persuade her to give Jeremiah special consideration. He understands that the kid might be a bit of a project, but he wants to help the young man -- an orphan who was adopted by a hard-working couple that runs a convenience store.

It's just here that you might be asking yourself a few pertinent questions. Wouldn't a really concerned teacher suggest that Jeremiah might flourish in at least one other school besides Princeton, that he ought to aim high but also hedge his bets?

Rudd's character comes off as too much of a benevolent cliche, a do-gooder with an adopted Ugandan son named Nelson (Travaris Spears). John teaches at a school where the students get involved with such unconventional pursuits as caring for farm animals, but he hankers to roll up his sleeves, get back to a developing country and lift more of the world's lost souls out of the mud of impoverishment.

Throw Lily Tomlin into the mix as Portia's feminist mother and you've got the makings of a movie that never finds a believable groove and in which character traits are drawn with a very broad brush.

Tomlin's character, for example, can't just be a feminist: She has to have a tattoo of Bella Abzug on her right shoulder. She insists that Portia call her "Susannah" instead of "mom." Perhaps to bolster her bona fides, we're told that she's written a well-regarded book entitled The Masculine Myth.

Everyone knows (or should) that Fey is a brilliant comic actress, but -- like the movie itself -- she seldom clicks, perhaps because the screenplay keeps throwing curves at her character. An example: Portia's significant other (Michael Sheen), an English professor, dumps her for a "hot" new scholar in the English department.

Admissions makes room for a couple of plot twists that you may not see coming, but they can't elevate a college-centered comedy in which Fey and Rudd don't generate enough romantic sparks to fire material that obviously wants to bring them together.

Admission doesn't seem to have much awareness that it might have used its story to say something unexpected and sharp about elite schools, college craziness, boiling ambition and love.

At the risk of pushing a college simile to the breaking point, I'd say that Admission is a lot like the student who enrolls in a whole lot of courses -- a few potentially interesting -- but can't find a way to excel at any of them.

'Date Night?' Wish I'd been stood up

Maybe Steve Carell and Tina Fey shouldn't date.

-- The maitre'd at Claw, a trendy Manhattan seafood restaurant, seems dismissive of anyone who appears not to be wearing eau du A-List. Want to venture a guess about our host's sexual orientation?

-- A mob boss chomps away at his dinner in the back of Manhattan bar. His ethnicity?

-- During a perilous car chase, drivers and passengers open their mouths and do what?

If you require them - and I doubt that you do - the answers to these questions are a) gay b) Italian-American and c) scream.

Granted, I've cast my net far from the center of Date Night, a marriage comedy starring Steve Carell and Tina Fey. But it's at the periphery of this second-rate effort where you may first begin to notice that the filmmakers seem a little too eager to sacrifice their smarts on an altar piled high with everything from cartoonish gangsters to corrupt cops.

Director Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum) and screenwriter Josh Klausner seem to be betting - or so it seemed to me - that watching two supposedly "normal" people react to one extreme situation after another is justification enough for the movie's slapdash enthusiasms. If you're looking for insight into why marriages often slip into the doldrums, you might as well turn to Dr. Phil. Date Night doesn't have much to say about the subject, other than to point out that those who hop off the suburban treadmill, do so at their peril.

Look, Carell and Fey are too capable not to wring some laughs out of even second-rate material. But the movie's overall approach -- following one extreme situation with another -- results in a comedy of contrivances. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but in this case, it puts Carell and Fey into a tough spot: They must pit their comic instincts against an overpowering and not especially funny scenario in which anything that can go wrong does.

Like most comedies, Date Night would be lost without cliches. Carell's Phil works as an accountant. Fey's Claire sells real estate. They live in new Jersey with their two kids. Their lives consist of work, domestic chores, outings with the kids and the occasional book-club meeting. Even their weekly date nights have gone stale, carving yet another groove in the endless rut of their suburban lives.

One night Phil and Claire yield to something that seems to have become entirely foreign to them: impulse. The couple travels to a fancy Manhattan restaurant, the kind that has become so trendy most people make reservations six months in advance. With their romantic evening on the verge of collapse, Phil and Claire languish at the bar.

But wait.

An idea - not to mention the major plot twist - dawns. Phil and Claire commandeer the reservation of a couple that hasn't shown up. As those who've seen the trailer know, the couple Phil and Claire are impersonating has gotten crosswise with the mob, a situation that kicks our couple and the rest of the movie into a higher but far less savvy gear.

If you're old enough to remember The Out of Towners, a 1970 comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis, you may want to think of Date Night as The Out of Towers with heavy artillery and an ear-splitting chase sequence. Phil and Claire face one potential catastrophe after another as they're dragged through the urban mud.

Sans shirt and looking buffed to the max, Mark Wahlberg turns up as a kind of private investigator who owns his own security company. The movie uses Wahlberg as a running, though increasingly tired, joke. Phil and Claire keep visiting the sleek bachelor pad where Wahlberg's character keeps his buxom girlfriend purring. He offers help in their night of desperation.

Date Night does an admirable job of disguising James Franco, who appears with Mila Kunis, as one member of the dopey duo who originally made the reservation at Claw. Ray Liotta plays a grim-faced mob boss, and Taraji P. Henson portrays a New York City detective who sides with our fleeing couple. Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig are entirely wasted in early scenes that cast them as a couple fighting the monotony of marriage. They've decided to split.

Date Night isn't the first movie to try to stretch a one-joke premise into a full-length feature, but even at a crisp 88 minutes, it seems to run out of creative steam. I don't know what kind of prospects Date Night faces at the box office, but I'd say Hollywood owes Carell and Fey another - and much smarter - comedy. Us, too.