A boy's time travel adventure

French illustrator Ugo Bienvenu's Arco tells an  environmentally conscious story that follows 10-year-old Arco through a time-travel trip. Arco leaves a calm, futuristic world, heading backward into a more turbulent 2075. The story follows a basic adventure arc: Arco (Juliano Krue Valdi) has yet to turn 12, the age at which time travel is allowed. Sensing he may have gotten more than he bargained for, Arco tries to return home. Once he arrives in the past, Arco meets Iris (Romy Fay), a girl who becomes his companion and helpmate. Natalie Portman, one of the movie's producers, Mark Ruffalo, and Will Ferrell provide additional voice work, but the movie's real star is Bienvenu, whose imaginative creations include bubble shields that protect the suburban neighborhoods of 2075 from toxic fumes and raging fires. Iris's parents are so busy working, they rely on holographic figures to interact with their kids. A robot named Mikki handles the family's parenting chores. Despite environmental threats, Arco's overall mood lacks the caustic sting of many futuristic adventures. Nominated for an Oscar in the animated-feature category, the film -- Bienvenu's first -- layers emotion into the relationship between Arco and Iris, which anchors the story in the language of more conventional animated efforts. Still, a high level of craftsmanship bolsters Bienvenu's efforts, adding plenty of artistic uplift.

An old friendship hits the road

 

   Will & Harper, a chronicle of a 16-day cross-country road trip made by Will Ferrell and Harper Steele, deals with two old friends adjusting to a challenging new development in their lives. In 2022, Steele came out as a transgender woman.

   Previously, Steele had been Andrew Steele; he and Ferrell had been friends since 1995 when they met as new members of the Saturday Night Live family. Steele wrote for SNL and championed Ferrell, who didn't immediately fit the SNL mold.

    After reading an email in which Harper, who has two children from a now-dissolved marriage, discussed his identity as a transgender woman, Ferrell thought a cross-country trip might be in order. The two travelers would determine how they might continue to relate to each other.

   For Steele, the trip also became a test run for a shifting persona, a chance to be seen in public in the kind of places she frequented as Andrew. While traveling solo across the country, Andrew indulged his fondness for dive bars, places not usually associated with gender diversity. 

   Could Harper bring a truck-stop sensibility to her  transgender evolution?

   Inevitably episodic, Will & Harper includes poignant and revealing moments. Ferrell approaches his friend with sincerity, and Steele responds in kind. The two share memories and laughs, as they navigate waters that aren't always comfortable. 

   Harper talks about the despair she felt prior to transitioning, but she approaches some of Ferrell’s questions with openness and good humor.

Her boobs? She says she loves them.

   At one point, Ferrell and Steele -- both sports fans -- attend an Indiana Pacers' game where they encounter Republican Governor Eric Holcomb, who's cordial even though he'd just signed legislation imposing restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors.  

    After the meeting, Ferrell learned about the ban. Oops.

    During a later stop, Steele and Ferrell visit an Oklahoma bar sporting a confederate flag and an impolite anti-Biden sign. Steele enters first; the bar’s patrons become friendlier once Ferrell makes his entrance. I guess celebrity presence opens doors.

     Steele talks about his masculine face and voice, and tries to learn new rules of the road. As a transgender woman, it might be ill-advised for Harper to walk alone down alleys, something Andrew might have done without giving it much thought. Such gender-related recalibrations add another layer of interest.   

   Director Josh Greenbaum (Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar) offers a goofy scene in an upscale Las Vegas restaurant that seems overly contrived, and in a trip that can't entirely avoid road fatigue, not every observation proves fascinating.

   But Ferrell and Harper risk a level of exposure that many would avoid, and the movie ultimately tells a story about an enduring friendship. Without calling attention to the fact that Ferrell and Steele are accompanied by a film crew, Will & Harper serves as a testament to a shared history that both want to preserve, even in the face of radical change.*

*Now in select theaters, Will & Harper begins streaming on Netflix on Sept. 27.

It’s all ‘Downhill’ from here

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell star in an American remake of a much better Swedish movie.

What didn’t make sense in 2014’s Force Majeure, a film from Swedish director Ruben Ostlund, makes even less sense in Downhill, an American remake starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell. Though still set in Europe, this American version suffers from one of the worst things that can happen to a film: indecision about what it wants to be.

Hovering in limbo between comedy and drama, Downhill won't be helped by audience expectations. Both Louis-Dreyfus and Ferrell are gifted comic actors and you can’t fault an audience for expecting some major laughs, particularly when the film’s trailer plays up moments that can be read as comedy.

At heart, though, Force Majeure was a film about a failing marriage. It explored issues of manhood and fatherhood and tried to understand the mentality of a middle-aged man who was drifting away from his wife and two children. That movie’s darkly comic elements have absorbed too much sunlight in this meager translation. Though brightened, the comic moments feel as slushy as melting snow.

The dynamic of a troubled marriage remains in directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash’s version of the film, but it has lost the subtle flavors that helped elevate Force Majeure.

As with the original, the story revolves around a pivotal event. Louis-Dreyfus’ Billie and Ferrell’s Pete are the mother and father of an American family that has traveled to Europe to ski and regroup.

On a break from the slopes, Billie and Pete are having lunch with their two young sons (Julian Grey and Ammon Jacob Ford). An explosion is heard in the distance. A controlled avalanche has been set off, not an unusual occurrence at ski resorts.

Suddenly, though, a large cloud of snow descends on the restaurant. It doesn’t look as if it's going to stop. Those dining on the outdoor deck where the family is eating scream in panic. Ferrell’s Pete grabs his phone and runs, leaving his family behind.

As it turns out, everyone’s safe but major questions linger. Why did Pete run? What did his flight mean? Can his marriage survive this act of cowardice? Should it?

Initially, Pete tries to downplay his behavior. Everyone’s fine. What’s the big deal?

The growing tension between Billie and Pete proves as annoying as it is revealing with Louis-Dreyfus drawing sharper lines than Ferrell, whose character often seems a trifle pathetic. The fact that Ferrell is considerably taller than Louis-Dreyfuss creates a kind of jarring visual contrast that doesn’t help, either.

The story introduces a few supporting characters. Zach Woods and Zoe Chao play a touring couple. Pete knows Woods' character from the States. Eager to escape the routine of a family trip, Pete asks the couple to visit. The blind-sided Billie doesn't want company. She views the trip as an opportunity for the family to renew bonds that were fraying in the wake of Pete's grief over his father's recent death.

Miranda Otto shows up as a concierge, an out-sized bombshell of a character who espouses sexual freedom; Otto's Charlotte splashes through the movie like a tipped-over can of paint.

Individually, Louis-Dreyfus and Ferrell do some interesting things, but both struggle to find the right rhythm for material that’s not sure whether to go for laughs or dive into the messy world of a foundering marriage. Not surprisingly, Downhill doesn't do much of either.

Another visit from Derek Zoolander

Ben Stiller revives a character that should have been left alone.

The original Zoolander (2001) became a cult favorite in the days when you still could find a Blockbuster store at which you could rent a weekend's full of dumb comedies. Here we are, 15 years later, and you'll have to go to a multiplex -- at least for a while -- to catch the even dumber sequel, Zoolander 2.

But there's dumb funny, and just plain dumb, and after you chuckle at renewing your acquaintance with the movie's collection of "ridiculously good-looking" dopes, there's not much left to tickle the funny bone in this amped-up rehash.

I suppose ardent fans of the first movie will turn out, but despite the return of Ben Stiller (as Derek Zoolander), Owen Wilson (as Hansel), Will Ferrell (as Mugatu) and the addition of Penelope Cruz (as an Interpol agent, fashion police division), this one proves overproduced and undernourished.

The movie opens with the collapse of the Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good and Who Want to Learn to Do Other Stuff Good, Too. The building, a holdover from the first movie, falls into the East River.

A series of newscasters -- Katie Couric among them -- tell us that Derek's wife (Christine Taylor) died in the collapse. An incompetent father, Derek soon loses his son to social services and retreats to a cabin in the frozen wilds of extreme northern New Jersey.

He's so dispirited, he can't even do his patented Blue Steel look anymore.

We also learn that Hansel, Derek's modeling rival, has retreated from the limelight; he's ashamed to show his face, which was scarred when the Zoolander Center crumbled. Hansel now lives in the Malibu desert among of tribe of misfit nomads that includes Kiefer Sutherland and others who try to buoy Hansel's by catering to his taste for orgies.

Derek and Hansel soon are summoned to Rome for a big modeling job that could resurrect their faded careers. Zoolander goes so that he can prove he's capable of raising his 11-year-old son, played by Cyrus Arnold.

A series of cameos from the likes of Kristin Wiig, Sting and Benedict Cumberbatch doesn't do much to add merriment.

Justin Theroux, who appeared in the first movie, also turns up, as does Billy Zane, but the movie almost seems as if it's satirizing itself rather than poking fun at the world of high fashion.

The first movie had some difficulty expanding what began as a sketch into a full movie, and this one struggles even more with a Rome-based story involving the murder of pop stars and a plan to eliminate such fashion icons such as Vogue's Anna Wintour, Tommy Hilfiger , Vera Wang, Valentino, Marc Jacobs and others. Perhaps because they're good natured, these gods of fashion appear in the movie; they may live to regret it.

And, no, Donald Trump who did cameo duty in the first movie, skipped this one.

The fun wears out quicker than a fashion trend, leaving us wondering why anyone thought it would be a good idea to revive characters who should have been allowed to remain favorites of their zealous fans while leaving the rest of the world alone.

Laughs on the way to prison

Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart team up for a comedy that's short on imagination.

If you read the words "American comedy," what springs to mind?

If "stupid," "tasteless" and "juvenile" crop up, you're definitely in the right ballpark.

I'll go with dumb and even dumber for the new comedy Get Hard in which Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart strain to deliver as many jokes about homosexual rape as an "R" rating can abide.

Get Hard -- a movie that seems to have built around little more than stereotypical thinking and commercial calculation -- relies on the fact that Ferrell is so insistently goofy, it's difficult to be offended by him. For his part, Hart has perfected a mixture of agitation and likability.

Together, Ferrell and Hart do their best to sell a comedy that's long on repetitive gags and short on imagination. Their best isn't enough.

Here's the premise: Ferrell plays a rich Los Angeles hedge-fund manager who's sentenced to 10 years in jail after being wrongly convicted of fraud.

Thinking most black males have done prison time, Ferrell's James asks the guy who washes his car (Hart's Darnell) to prepare him for the frightening ordeal of prison.

James doesn't think to ask whether Darnell actually has been in prison (he hasn't), but figures that any black man should know the ropes when it comes to incarceration. Family man Darnell goes along with James's racist assumption because he needs $30,000 to move his wife and daughter out of South Central and into a safer neighborhood with better schools.

Once the deal is struck, James and Darnell retreat to James's mansion where they try to simulate prison conditions as a way to ready James for the harsh realities of San Quentin, the slammer where he's supposed to serve his time.

The movie's obvious double entendre title should give you a clue about the kind of humor that's on tap. It also helps to know that you'll have seen Ferrell's bare butt twice before the opening credits have finished.

The supporting cast is pretty much incidental. For the record, Craig T. Nelson plays James's boss, and Alison Brie appears as the boss's daughter, a conniving sexpot who -- at least at the beginning of the movie -- is engaged to James.

Some of the early reviews of Get Hard have talked about the movie's homophobia. There's even a men's room scene in which James -- pretty much a failure at turning himself into thug -- is told that the only option he has left is to learn how to fellate tougher convicts, voluntarily becoming the "bitch" they want him to be.

Comedies that try to push the envelope when it comes to bits that are bound to offend the unwary can earn a modicum of forgiveness by being funny. This one, not so much.

When it finally dawns on Darnell and James that James never will transform into a hard case, they devote their time to wrapping up the movie's poor excuse of a plot by trying to prove that James doesn't have to do the time because he didn't do the crime.

Director Etan Cohen, who wrote Tropic Thunder and Men in Black 3, gleefully packages the movie's bad taste, stereotypes and endless jokes about prison rape. But as Hollywood comedies go, Hard Guys feels like it's mining material that long since has been tapped out or possibly even run out of town: It's more of the same, only maybe even less clever.

A funny, messy 'Anchorman 2'

If promotional effort counts, Will Ferrell deserves 2013's award for being the hardest working man in showbusiness.

In full Ron Burgundy regalia, Ferrell seems to have turned up everywhere. In some markets, willing news anchors have acted as if Ferrell's promotions are the funniest thing ever. To which I only can say, "Puh-leeze."

Not that Ferrell isn't funny: It's just that his Anchorman 2 promotional shtick wore me out.

Now, allow me to equivocate some more. There's little question that Ferrell's Ron Burgundy qualifies as a classic comic character, a self-absorbed anchorman who's as devoted to his hair as he is to the pursuit of truth, justice and the American way.

The original movie, a modest box-office success, has done landmark business in the secondary market. Excitement about the sequel, even though it arrives nine years after release of the original, is running high.

So what's the verdict?

Let me put it this way: Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues put me in mind of Charles Dickens's famous opening for A Tale of Two Cities: To paraphrase and perhaps overstate matters: Anchorman 2 is the best of comedies; it's also the worst of comedies. If you read a little further into Dickens' opening paragraph, you'll find this sentence, as well: "It was the age of foolishness."

If Anchorman 2 is representative of its time, we are indeed living in another age of foolishness. Unashamedly ridiculous, this sequel catches up with characters from the first installment some 10 years after we first met them.

Ron and his wife Victoria (Christina Applegate) are now a news team in New York City. When the anchor of the network evening news (Harrison Ford) cedes his job to Victoria, a jealous Ron goes into a tailspin, abandoning his wife and young son (Judah Nelson) and landing work as an announcer at San Diego's SeaWorld.

Ron's rescued from exile when an eager representative (Dylan Baker) of an emerging 24-hour news network invites him to gather his old team and become part of the fledgling GNN family.

This gives director Adam McKay, who wrote the screenplay with Ferrell, an opportunity to bring back the cast from the first installment: Paul Rudd returns as Brian Fantana, hard-partying investigative reporter; Steve Carell reprises his role as Brick Tamland, the world's weirdest weatherman; and David Koechner revives Champ Kind, America's crudest sportscaster.

Added to the mix are Kristen Wiig, as a weirdly intense love interest for Carell's Brick; Megan Good, as GNN's hard-charging boss; and James Marsden as Jack Lime, GNN's handsome anchor and network star.

While Lime headlines GNN's newscast, Burgundy and his cohorts are relegated to the 2 a.m. slot, which is about as close to prime time as Burgundy is to Edward R. Murrow.

But wait....

Burgundy regains prime-time exposure when he stumbles upon a rating-boosting formula, a mix of feel-good news and mindless patriotism, all presented with Ferrell's masterful pomposity.

Setting the story during the period when non-stop news was born gives Ferrell and McKay an opportunity to add a bit of trenchancy to their comedy, serving up satire about the 24-hour news cycle and the vacuousness of so much of broadcast news.

It would be nearly impossible to sum up all the gags and sketchy plot lines in Anchorman 2, which survives a woeful beginning before providing its biggest laughs. It also would be unfair to reveal the many big-name cameos that are stuffed into the picture's finale. Discovering their presence is half the fun.

By the time, the end credits roll, you either will have submitted to the movie's unashamed foolishness or you'll have found the nearest exit.

If memory serves (and who knows about that), the approach here seems more scattershot than in the original, which also was directed by McKay. Anchorman 2 emerges as a disjointed collection of gags -- one involving a rescued shark, another mocking the over-produced oomph of summer movies, another reducing Ron to bawling infancy. The list goes on -- and then on some more.

You get the idea, when it's bad, Anchorman 2 falls flat; when it's good, it's a preposterously silly look at ... well ... I'm not entirely sure what.

Still, I laughed enough to leave the theater with a smile on my face or maybe it was a half smile, inspired partly by my puzzlement at the hit-and-miss quality of the whole affair and partly by the bits I found too funny to resist.

A movie that campaigns for laughs

For Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, politics is a laughing matter -- at least for a while..

Right up until it develops a conscience, The Campaign is a very funny comedy about a congressional election that pits a slick, empty-headed congressman named Cam Brady (Will Ferell) against an unlikely opponent (Zach Galifianakis).

Under the guidance of director Jay Roach, The Campaign is at its best when its being preposterous, lewd and blatantly outrageous.

Cam's has had a lock on his North Carolina seat in the House for years. But Cam's re-election bid (for a fifth term) hits the skids when he's caught making an obscene phone call to one of his mistresses. Cam's speeches emphasize America, Jesus and freedom, but even such default cheerleading may not save him this time around.

Sensing vulnerability, a couple of kingmakers -- the billionaire Motch brothers (Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow) -- handpick Galifianakis's Marty Huggins as the GOP challenger to Cam, a Democrat whose years in Congress have turned him into a cipher.

Jokes trump party affiliations with Galifianakis playing his character as a mincing, effeminate man who's tutored in the rough side of politics by his ruthless campaign manager (Dylan McDermott). Marty's married with children, but seems more devoted to his two pet pugs than to his family.

Best not to reveal too many of the jokes, but the movie plays with a variety of stereotypes, most hilariously with a maid who works for Marty's dad (Brian Cox). And there's humor and bite in a debate scene in which Marty challenges a bumbling Cam to a task that stymies him: reciting the Lord's Prayer.

All well and funny, but the screenplay becomes significantly less amusing when it tries to sharpen its satirical edge, making obvious points about the injection of big money into politics. The Motch brothers, of course, evoke the real-life Koch brothers.

Not content to stop there, the script takes a misguided Capraesque turn in its third act, again proving that sincerity and comedy don't necessarily make good bedfellows.

Clocking in at a mercifully fleet 85 minutes, The Campaign fizzles before it's done, but when it's funny, it's a lot funnier than most of this summer's comedies. Is it possible to cast a positive vote for half a movie?

Will Ferrell, the Spanish-language edition

If you know nothing about Mexican cinema, you might be fooled by Casa de me Padre into thinking that films produced in Mexico are poorly made, overly melodramatic, embarrassingly cheap and inadvertently silly. Those who know Mexican film understand that nothing could be further from the truth. Mexican cinema, though often neglected in the U.S., has had many periods of high achievement. What Will Ferrell & company have done in Casa de me Padre is to make a parodic version of the kind of movie they believe characterized Mexican cinema in the 1970s. Some critics have suggested that this subtitled movie, in which Ferrell and all the other actors speak Spanish, is more indicative of the work found in popular Spanish-language telenovelas. If you can get past all that, you may find some chuckles in what amounts to a courageous gamble for Ferrell, starring in a Spanish-language movie that may not appeal to his generally avid fan base. Ferrell plays Armando, the nerdy son of a rancher (Pedro Armendariz Jr.) Armendariz's Miguel Ernesto regards Armando as a lovable dolt, favoring his more wayward son Raul (Diego Luna).* When Raul arrives home with a beautiful woman (Genesis Rodriguez), papa is overjoyed. The smart son has returned. But all is not well. An illicit and often-brutal drug trade (led by a gangster known as La Onza (Gael Garcia Bernal) flourishes on the ranch. The movie plays a bit like an extended sketch, but Ferrell and his spirited comic cohorts plunge happily into material that draws much of its humor from the self-consciously shoddy way in which the film has been made. At one point, Ferrell and Rodriguez ride fake horses, a phony looking white cat adds mystical flourish, and no attempt is made to paper over holes in the movie's low-rent artifice. It's quite possible that Casa de me Padre -- a hit-and-miss affair that includes some amusing moments -- will become a footnote in Ferrell's career. Despite occasional burst of violence, the movie plays like a good-natured spoof that pokes fun at the kind of movies that, though presented with great seriousness, can't help but be perceived as preposterous.

*For those who like to keep track of passing time, it has been 11 years since Bernal and Luna appeared in the popular comedy, Y Tu Mamá También.

Police work may be a laughing matter

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg as hapless cops.

If you don't like Will Ferrell, you'd best run for cover. Not only does Ferrell have a new comedy - The Other Guys - out this week, but he also has two movies in postproduction and seven in development. So says IMDb, the invaluable movie web site.

Ferrell has made his big-screen mark in movies as diverse as the gleefully crude Old School (2003) and the more sophisticated Stranger than Fiction (2006). He also has experienced some critical drubbing, notably for Land of the Lost of the Lost (2009), which scored a dismal 32 out of 100 at the aggregate review site Metacritic.

Ferrell's growing filmography suggests that he has a kind of unstoppable drive, and it's evident in his work, which typically finds him mixing silliness and earnestness in ways that create an absurd incongruence, like opening your door and discovering a naked insurance salesman on the porch.

Although The Other Guys isn't a top-drawer comedy, it makes room for some of Ferrell's funniest work. Presented in the guise of a buddy-cop movie, The Other Guys teams Ferrell with Mark Wahlberg; they play detectives too inept even to pull off a routine good cop/bad cop interrogation.

The Other Guys reunites Ferrell with director Adam McKay, who directed Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. This time, Ferrell and McKay spoof urban cop movies, adding topical gloss with a plot that revolves around a Bernie Madoff-like financial fraud. Steve Coogan plays a British financier who's involved in a scam that has Ferrell and Wahlberg racing around New York City.

Ferrell portrays Allen Gamble, an accountant who works for the New York City Police Department, where he tries never to leave his desk. Wahlberg plays Terry Hoitz, a loose-cannon detective who craves action, but who has been shunted aside because of a whopping error in judgment. (You'll have to see the movie to find out what it is.)

The temptation with comedy is to steal some of the jokes for a review. I'll try to resist. Ferrell has some funny bits, not the least of which involves the way he describes his wife (Eva Mendes). I won't give away more, except to note that there are few red-blooded American men who would regard the sultry Mendes as an eyesore and a burden.

An amusing bit involving the way in which Ferrell's character earned money in college requires him to flip into a strange alter-ego expression of a "dark side" that he struggles to keep under wraps. These collegiate flashbacks make no sense, which, of course, makes them even funnier.

Michael Keaton is spot on but underutilized as Capt. Gene Mauch, boss of this improbable duo, a policeman who supplements his income with shifts at Bed, Bath & Beyond. He needs extra cash to support his college-age son, a character who doesn't appear in the movie but who becomes the source of a repetitive joke about sexual preference.

Wahlberg? At times, he seems to be pushing awfully hard to provide a contrast with Ferrell. But the two keep things humming through a variety of scenes that make for a ragged jigsaw puzzle of a movie. Put another way: The Other Guys is a bit of a mess.

Opinions may differ, but I don't think that McKay has the right chops to handle the movie's action, presumably intended as a send-up of the action in many urban movies of recent memory. But the thing about comedy is this: If you laugh enough, you stop caring about everything else. You feel a little better about saying that no one likely will mistake The Other Guys for a great movie, even as you wish that someone (anyone) could make a comedy that comes close to working on all levels.

Hang around for the end credits, which are designed to raise your ire about the current economic situation and which contain more pointed satire than anything else in the movie. Very clever.