I'm willing to overlook a criminal underuse of Olivia Munn
The Steve Carell/Tina Fey team-up Date Night could be used as a case study for big-studio comedy, not for how perfectly it turns out nor for its ruination, but for how it manages to pretty much work down the middle despite the potential for sinking lower or soaring higher. I was worried about this movie because the director, Shawn Levy, has made a litany of clumsy big-studio comedies (Night at the Museum movies, the Pink Panther remake) that make quick waste of talented casts (and because the screenwriter's principle credits are the lousy Shrek the Third and the unpromising Shrek Forever After). Yet as many comedies as Levy has bungled in the past, I didn't catch so many blunders in this one. He still shoots too close and stages physical stunts without much grace, and the digital photography on this particular movie looks awful -- Crank 2 was shot with high-end consumer-grade digital video and it looks a lot sharper and clearer than Date Night, which looks surprisingly close to an indie movie that cost $500,000 rather than a studio production that cost $50 million. I guess you could make an argument that it looks grainy and video-y on purpose, for grit or something, but Levy isn't exactly pulling a Michael Mann with his camera. But for the most part, he doesn't get in the way, at least not to the degree of his other movies.
The real point, though, is what he doesn't get in the way of: Fey and Carell, playing a "boring couple from New Jersey" on a date that turns into an After Hours type of ride through wild New York City, are very funny, individually and together. This should come as no surprise, as both have been funny for years and only get more practice on the sets of two very funny television shows, and can, additionally, improvise laughs out of just about anything slash nothing, as they seem to do a few times in this movie. But their performances go beyond the ability to punch up second-rate material (which, despite a clever concept, this movie's script most certainly is). They're not just funny, but believable; certainly they don't have the benefit of much characterization, as Fey essentially plays Liz Lemon transplanted to family life and Carell plays a nicer, less incompetent version of his other characters, but they create a marriage between two smart, sweet, but sometimes tired and overwhelmed people. It's such a relief to watch a sorta-romantic comedy that puts male and female characters on more or less equal footing: both funny, both flawed. As a result, the quiet moments between the two of them -- the stuff that would be inexcusably mawkish and sentimental in so many other studio comedies -- manage to be cute, funny, even a little affecting.
It's not that Date Night is a wonderfully-made laugh riot, although I had fun watching it with Marisa, Amanda, Sara, and Jillian. The After Hours scenario is disappointingly generic -- it barely needs to be set in New York, and in fact might've been funnier in a seedier or more obscure city -- and their uninspired adventures are more amusing than laugh-out-loud hilarious. But there's also a certain level of confidence at play: it may not be jam-packed with jokes or even particularly well-staged scenes, but very few jokes bomb outright (it's less scattershot than, say, Hot Tub Time Machine, although that movie probably has bigger individual laughs than anything here). Fey and Carell don't just make the movie tolerable by improvising a few funny lines; they make the whole thing pretty much work from the concept on up. It's more Baby Mama than Mean Girls, but good comedians have done a lot worse. Between this, 30 Rock, and her showcase this week on Saturday Night Live, Fey in particular has come into her own as not just a skilled writer and comedy architect, but a pretty excellent performer.
Marisa and I had some time to kill between the TKTS booth and the actual play on Saturday, so I cashed in a free movie ticket on Diary of a Wimpy Kid, on the recommendations of Maggie and Nathaniel. I was okay with it, even though it's kinda cheap-looking and none of the kid actors really stand out; it nonetheless gets the general in-between feelings of middle school, although if I had known that Gabe Sachs and Jeff Judah, a pair of Freaks and Geeks writers, had worked on the script, I might've adjusted my expectations higher and found myself more disappointed. I did like the episodic, low-drama rhythm. But I get the feeling, from the movie and the drawings in the movie and the drawings that I've seen when flipping through the book in comics shops, that I would enjoy the books more.
The play we saw was A Behanding in Spokane, from Martin McDonagh. This was actually the first play of his I've seen, having become an instant fan following his movie In Bruges, and I'm to understand that some of his other work is a little weightier than Behanding, which is a fantastic ninety-minute dark-comedy showcase for Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, Anthony Mackie, Zoe Kazan, and McDonagh's profane, beautifully written dialogue. It's just a crazy amount of fun, and given how many Broadway shows I've seen that strive for crazy amounts of fun with only limited success, it's neat to see a ninety-minute straight play clean up that way.
Then we went over to Tom & Maggie's for the aforementioned SNL, preceded by a bunch of Life in HD. Komodo dragons are bad news. I had no idea how bad before, but now I have seen them take out a water buffalo several times their size and I'm starting to think I might prefer an encounter with an actual dragon. I would have no trouble encountering a pebble frog, though. Those guys seem A-OK. Marisa also got to watch plenty of underwater footage as a teaser for when she makes me take her to see Oceans later this month. Girl loves squids and ugly fish.
Sort of speaking of Dr. Zoidberg, Marisa and Nathaniel and I are watching every episode of Futurama in the run-up to that show's return in June (!!) so I'm going to go ahead and continue with that.
The real point, though, is what he doesn't get in the way of: Fey and Carell, playing a "boring couple from New Jersey" on a date that turns into an After Hours type of ride through wild New York City, are very funny, individually and together. This should come as no surprise, as both have been funny for years and only get more practice on the sets of two very funny television shows, and can, additionally, improvise laughs out of just about anything slash nothing, as they seem to do a few times in this movie. But their performances go beyond the ability to punch up second-rate material (which, despite a clever concept, this movie's script most certainly is). They're not just funny, but believable; certainly they don't have the benefit of much characterization, as Fey essentially plays Liz Lemon transplanted to family life and Carell plays a nicer, less incompetent version of his other characters, but they create a marriage between two smart, sweet, but sometimes tired and overwhelmed people. It's such a relief to watch a sorta-romantic comedy that puts male and female characters on more or less equal footing: both funny, both flawed. As a result, the quiet moments between the two of them -- the stuff that would be inexcusably mawkish and sentimental in so many other studio comedies -- manage to be cute, funny, even a little affecting.
It's not that Date Night is a wonderfully-made laugh riot, although I had fun watching it with Marisa, Amanda, Sara, and Jillian. The After Hours scenario is disappointingly generic -- it barely needs to be set in New York, and in fact might've been funnier in a seedier or more obscure city -- and their uninspired adventures are more amusing than laugh-out-loud hilarious. But there's also a certain level of confidence at play: it may not be jam-packed with jokes or even particularly well-staged scenes, but very few jokes bomb outright (it's less scattershot than, say, Hot Tub Time Machine, although that movie probably has bigger individual laughs than anything here). Fey and Carell don't just make the movie tolerable by improvising a few funny lines; they make the whole thing pretty much work from the concept on up. It's more Baby Mama than Mean Girls, but good comedians have done a lot worse. Between this, 30 Rock, and her showcase this week on Saturday Night Live, Fey in particular has come into her own as not just a skilled writer and comedy architect, but a pretty excellent performer.
Marisa and I had some time to kill between the TKTS booth and the actual play on Saturday, so I cashed in a free movie ticket on Diary of a Wimpy Kid, on the recommendations of Maggie and Nathaniel. I was okay with it, even though it's kinda cheap-looking and none of the kid actors really stand out; it nonetheless gets the general in-between feelings of middle school, although if I had known that Gabe Sachs and Jeff Judah, a pair of Freaks and Geeks writers, had worked on the script, I might've adjusted my expectations higher and found myself more disappointed. I did like the episodic, low-drama rhythm. But I get the feeling, from the movie and the drawings in the movie and the drawings that I've seen when flipping through the book in comics shops, that I would enjoy the books more.
The play we saw was A Behanding in Spokane, from Martin McDonagh. This was actually the first play of his I've seen, having become an instant fan following his movie In Bruges, and I'm to understand that some of his other work is a little weightier than Behanding, which is a fantastic ninety-minute dark-comedy showcase for Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, Anthony Mackie, Zoe Kazan, and McDonagh's profane, beautifully written dialogue. It's just a crazy amount of fun, and given how many Broadway shows I've seen that strive for crazy amounts of fun with only limited success, it's neat to see a ninety-minute straight play clean up that way.
Then we went over to Tom & Maggie's for the aforementioned SNL, preceded by a bunch of Life in HD. Komodo dragons are bad news. I had no idea how bad before, but now I have seen them take out a water buffalo several times their size and I'm starting to think I might prefer an encounter with an actual dragon. I would have no trouble encountering a pebble frog, though. Those guys seem A-OK. Marisa also got to watch plenty of underwater footage as a teaser for when she makes me take her to see Oceans later this month. Girl loves squids and ugly fish.
Sort of speaking of Dr. Zoidberg, Marisa and Nathaniel and I are watching every episode of Futurama in the run-up to that show's return in June (!!) so I'm going to go ahead and continue with that.