Sean Axmaker: Film & DVD Reviews, Essays, Interviews

I sounds crazy when you say it - David Mamet writes and directs a martial arts drama - but it’s a superb match of sensibility and genre. In so many ways, Redbelt is both a revival and a complete redefinition of the kind of film that Jean-Claude Van Damme cranked out in the eighties, the kind of thriller that pit fighters in matches in underground leagues and our honorable hero overcomes his disdain for such bloodsport to take revenge for the murder of a brother/friend in the ring.

Mamet, of course, latches on to the philosophical grounding of martial arts that is always given lip service in such films, and then either ignored or bent to fit the revenge plots. But he also embraces the machismo of the genre, but in his own way: the confidence of strength, the courage of modesty, and the professional grace of a fighter who uses the least amount of effort and movement to achieve his goal.

I wrote about the film for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here:

David Mamet’s stage reputation is built on his glorious dialogue, pushed far beyond any sense of realism into a verbal symphony of intertwining solos built on staccato bursts of profane words elevated to terse poetry. But when it comes to Hollywood, his most interesting films are his genre pictures — heist films, murder mysteries, con movies, all generally male-centric narratives that he reworks with his own brand of professional pride, machismo and male honor. It’s a man’s world and he revels in it.

“Redbelt” takes Mamet into territory no one otherwise would have predicted, the martial-arts thriller of honorable expert fighters, international competition and sinister organizers who corrupt the process. The sport here is Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, but Mamet hews to the samurai code, with Iraq vet and poor but proud Jiu-jitsu instructor Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor, all quiet dignity and modesty) as his honorable warrior in a dishonorable world.

The review is a rave, but there are more ambiguous elements that I didn’t get to explore in the short format of the newspaper reviews.

Mike is an idealist in a corrupt society. But he is also an idealist with little concern for taking care of himself and his family, financially speaking, in a material world. His own business, a martial arts training studio where he brings up his students like they apprentices, is broke and his wife is sacrificing her own business funds to keep him from closing. You could say he’s “too pure” to be a businessman, which is supposed to be a sign of his honor. But his honor comes at a cost to the people around him, a contradiction that Mamet seems to be starting to explore until he returns to the simple poles of loyalty and betrayal in the final act. The climax almost all theatrical gesture, hardly a crime in this genre, but from Mamet I expect a little more dramatic authenticity, or at least a shadow of ambiguity.

Yet I’m won over by the film. Mamet loves to explore process and expose the way things work, and spends a lot of time elucidating the details setting up and promoting the big pay-per-view fight that will end the film, showing the promoters hatching ideas on finding a hook to give it an identity, and then create buzz to attract attention. These behind-the-scenes details are fascinating, but they also define the sensibilities of the characters involved in the enterprise, especially when Mamet reveals the sleight-of-hand twist that throws the entire bout in a whole new light. (In this case, it is a literal sleight-of-hand, which feels so right coming from an artist so fascinated by con artists and false identities, and who casts stage magician and raconteur Ricky Jay in so many films - including this one.)

There’s a disappointed realism behind the cynicism of entrepreneurs behind the big PPV martial arts smackdown, men sacrificing the honor of the sport for the money that can be generated by manipulating the drama of the fight, and a passionate idealism when it comes to military service and the soldier’s code. With Mike, a Desert Storm veteran himself, it combines with his code of honor as a Jiu-jitsu instructor and martial arts master to create a man of unbending integrity.

Read the Seattle P-I review here.

Son of Rambow

I am won over by the joy and imagination of this celebration of two boys in 1980s rural Britain - sheltered Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), a creative child in a severe religious sect, and school bad-boy Lee Carter (Will Poulter), a kid left to his own devices (none of them good) by absent parents and a tyrannical older brother - who team up to shoot a sequel to “Rambo” on home video equipment.

Perhaps the most ingeniously imaginative element in “Son of Rambow,” a film exploding with imagination (some of it scrawled directly over the film in animated expressions of Will’s private world), is its very conceit. A viewing of “First Blood” (on a bootleg video, of all things) opens the floodgates of Will’s creativity, inspiring him to turn his private stories and imagery into a fantasy rescue of an absent father: a wild war movie by way of “The Wizard of Oz.”

Writer/director Garth Jennings captures the innocent ecstasy of boys discovering the elemental power of cinema and the unfettered play of imagination with disarming humor. And he gives the boys a cartoonish invulnerability that falters only when their private world is invaded by competing egos (notably a French exchange student who becomes the local king of new wave cool).

The entire review is here.

My Brother Is an Only Child

Director Daniele Luchetti’s small-scale survey of political passion and action on both sides of the spectrum recalls the acclaimed Italian drama “Best of Youth” — no surprise as he collaborates with the film’s screenwriters, Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli. In this lively drama of rebellion and revolution, emotion is even more inflammatory than politics.

…

“My Brother Is an Only Child” isn’t a critique of the left but a film about the consequences and responsibility of “political action.” Luchetti measures social justice not in ideals but in positive change and the compassion with which it is accomplished.

My complete review is here.

Because you know that you really want to know.

MSN Movies: What’s in your DVD player?

Todd Haynes: I watched “La Vie en Rose” last night on hotel pay-per-view, and I watched “Knocked Up” the night before. I hadn’t seen either of those before. But I just got the Criterion Collection of Lindsay Anderson’s “If …,” one of my favorite movies. I wanted to watch the extras, but I didn’t have time before I left town.

You’ve recorded commentary for some of your DVD releases. How do you feel about commentary tracks?

I guess it’s a good thing. I remember feeling like I was sharing stuff on my films that I thought might be interesting to some people, and I’ve heard some people say that it was, but I don’t really ever listen to them on other films myself and I never listen to my own.

When you put out a DVD, what things you like to see on there, the things you like to share with audiences and you think would expand their connection to the film?

It depends on the film. I do a lot of preparation for my films and it depends on what that preparation is. Often it’s about talking about other directors and approaches, the way the film was shot, the way the film looks, or literary references, things about [Douglas] Sirk or [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder or about [Jean] Genet, it just depends on the film in particular. Just where a lot of the ideas came from.

Read the rest here on MSN.

A longer, different version of the interview is here on GreenCine.

The greatest film experience of my life was watching Kevin Brownlow’s restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoleon in 2001. It was the closing night film at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (often called the Pordenone Silent Film Festival), shown at the Udine Opera House with a full orchestra under the baton of Carl Davis, who prepared and arranged the compilation score, and it ran for a mighty 5 1/2 hours, not including three intermissions (including a dinner break).

We won’t be seeing this anytime soon on video - Francis Ford Coppola has the distribution rights in the US and stands by the version of the film he edited into a shorter presentation to be shown with a score written by his father - but this week another Gance restoration debuts on DVD. The recently restored La Roue (1923) premiered on TCM a week ago at a running time of 4 1/2 hours, not as long as its original 32 reel version that premiered in France in a special two-night event, but at 20 reels certainly the most complete version seen since, as it was edited down for distribution across France and even further for U.S. distribution.

The plot is simple: A compassionate railroad engineer, Sisif (Séverin-Mars), saves an orphaned girl from a flaming train wreck and raises her alongside his young son, only to slide into guilt and self-hatred when she grows into a young woman (played by Gabriel de Gravone) and he falls in love with her. The film, however, is a working-class melodrama with grand swathes of tragedy, intense scenes of destruction (the aftermath of a train wreck is an inferno suggested by bold silhouettes against burning orange tints), and devastating moments of loss and redemption directed with delicate grace. Shot during the course of three years on location at the train yards in Nice and in the French Alps, the film was released in 1923 and was years ahead of its time, influencing filmmakers all over the world (the rhythmic editing, building to a staccato fury, was appropriated by Sergei Eisenstein, among others).

There really is no other director like Gance. He draws upon the full range of graphic effects, from irises to dramatic masking, double exposures to composites, and unleashes his arsenal within the first few minutes. But his technical mastery is in the service of the story, and he transforms the story of La Roue into an emotional epic. He is a master conductor who plays scenes like symphonies of feelings, continuing long past the narrative point has been established to express the emotional intensity of the characters and situations, and to add moments of pure grace to the mighty drama.

The performances are as dramatic as the effects, a little too dramatic and uncontrolled, to be honest. Séverin-Mars, as Sisif, the engineer, opens the film with a wild-eyed performance, young and intense and passionate, and quickly sinks into sad-sack pathos with just as much exaggeration. Ivy Close, the British actress who plays his adopted daughter, Norma (saved from a flaming train wreck in the blast of an opening scene) overplays the childlike dottiness of a teenage girl, playing the unbridled adolescent while all the men of the train yard eye her with desire. And Gabriel de Gravone, as Sisif’s son, is the tortured artist and the doting older brother from the first scene. Griffith would have tamped these actors down, at least a degree or two. Gance waits until the second half of the film, when it becomes a chamber drama set against the drama of the French alps, to pull his actors back from the brink.

The restoration is quite beautiful and its clarity is thrown into relief when the film resorts (for brief passages) to 9.5mm footage for otherwise lost footage. And the orchestral score by Robert Israel is lovely, often drawing only upon small sections of the orchestra for character themes and quiet movements, then drawing upon the power of the full orchestra in other scenes.

Read my review on MSN here.

Also new and notable on DVD this week is Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There:

This is a freewheeling Bob Dylan portrait in which his name is never spoken and his life and career are represented by six actors representing various personae: Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), the early folk-singer icon who burst from the coffee-house scene into the national spotlight; Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), the electric, weird, wired-on-amphetamines Dylan who riffs and fidgets through interviews; an actor (Heath Ledger) who once played Jack Rollins in a biopic; an 11-year-old hobo (Marcus Carl Franklin) who spins tales of his past; an aging cowboy (Richard Gere) in a town populated by characters from Dylan songs; and a poet (Ben Whishaw) who calls himself Arthur Rimbaud. Faced with an artist defined more by his lyrics than his life story, Haynes delivers a song-cycle of a movie: vivid, exaggerated, contradictory impressions of a man who confounds a culture looking to peg him with a definition.

Read my DVD review on MSN here. I also reviewed the film for the Seattle P-I when it was released theatrically.

New TV on DVD this week is Crossing Jordan: Season One:

Dr. Jordan Cavanaugh (Jill Hennessy) is a coroner with authority issues, which has caused her to bounce around from job to job. As “Crossing Jordan” opens (with Cavanaugh in an anger management class in Los Angeles), she’s offered a chance to land back in her home town of Boston and start again with her dad (Ken Howard), a cop in forced retirement, and her old colleague, Dr. Garret Macy (Miguel Ferrer), who put his own position on the line to get her hired back. Created by Tim Kring (”Heroes”), this is a forensic crime show with a sense of humor and a distinct lack of glamour. The team here isn’t nearly as talky as the “CSI” squad, they don’t have all those high-tech toys, and the cops actually get a little bent out of shape when the forensic guys muscle in on investigations. Which doesn’t stop Cavanaugh from hustling her way through red tape and sharing her opinions (not always tactfully) with the police. “I’ve got no editor in my brain,” she confesses at one point, which might explain her rather disastrous, even self-destructive, romantic life.

Here’s a digest of the other DVD releases featured on my MSN column.

Movies: Delirious with Steve Buscemi, Brian Jun’s indie drama Steel City, and Christophe Honore’s Dans Paris:

Christophe Honoré’s comic drama about two brothers co-existing in a Paris apartment with their gentle curmudgeon of a father (Guy Marchand) is a tribute to the freewheeling energy and youth of the French New Wave. The brooding elder (Romain Duris) has come home to recover from a painful breakup, taking over the bedroom of happy-go-lucky younger (Louis Garrel), a student who spends his days using his easy charm and cheerful irresponsibility to bed practically every young beauty he comes across. Garrel narrates his brother’s story in direct address to the camera (with a brief detour to acknowledge the fact that he’s talking to the camera), and then slips away to play through the streets as Honore plays with the story, bouncing between the sorrow of Duris and the impish joy of Garrel.

TV: The 4400: The Fourth Season (and, as of this writing, apparently the final season):

Corporate millionaire turned visionary guru Gordon Collier (Billy Campbell) is disseminating a drug that can give everyone a unique power (if it doesn’t kill them) and offering sanctuary for the gifted, taking on not only Homeland Security but his own protégé (Patrick Flueger). The ground between the good guys and the bad guys is still shifting, thanks to a conspiracy from the future and the messianic zeal of Collier, encouraged by the visions of the newly-turned Kyle (Chad Faust).

Special Releases: John Waters’ Serial Mom: Collector’s Edition and The Films of Morris Engel with Ruth Orkin, a two-disc set that pays tribute to the pioneering godparents of modern American independent filmmaking:

Rediscover the work of an early American independent husband-and-wife filmmaking team and the intimate films they shot on location in New York with the three films on this two-disc set. The Oscar-nominated Little Fugitive (1953), the adventures of a young boy who flees to Coney Island after a cruel practical joke, is their most famous, a leisurely paced tale less concerned with story than character and the flavor of its locations. While “Little Fugitive” runs largely on charm, their second film Lovers and Lollipops (1955), the story of a little girl struggling to come to terms with her widowed mother’s new boyfriend, is more sophisticated and mature. Engel and Orkin capture the range of emotions and the complicated evolution as each member of the triangle adjusts to new situations and relationships, finding the right balance between playfulness, selfishness, anger, need and fear of change.

Weddings and Babies (1960) with Viveca Lindfors completes the collection.

The weekly column goes live every Tuesday on MSN Entertainment.

I have a couple of new film essays on Turner Classic Movies for features playing this month. Up first is the David Lean comedy Hobson’s Choice (1954):

Charles Laughton stars as the blustery Henry Hobson, a widower with a thriving business in boots and shoes and three daughters who work his shop without wages. Alice (Daphne Anderson) and Vicky (Prunella Scales) are young, pretty, empty-headed things with flirtatious natures who are actively courted by the sons of local businessmen. Maggie (Brenda De Banzie), the eldest, runs the shop and the home with hardheaded practicality. When Hobson dismisses Maggie’s desire for a husband, branding her an old maid (at the age of thirty) and sentencing her to a life looking after him and running his shop, she rebels against his blithe tyranny and takes her future into her own hands. She sets out to remake her life and embark on her own business, one in direct competition to her father’s boot shop. She also lets no man dissuade her otherwise, neither her father or the timorous Willie Mossop (John Mills), the shop’s brilliant boot-maker and partner in her plan, whether he knows it or not. “My brains and your talent will make a working partnership,” she promises, and proceeds to build his confidence, draw out his potential, and inspire his ambition. Along the way, she finds his way into his affections and reveals her own, and in the final act, offers Henry Hobson the “Hobson choice” that gives the film its title.

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Three of Ozu’s most delightful silent films are collected in the three disc set from Eclipse, Criterion’s budget-minded, no-frills sister label. I review the films and survey a little of Ozu’s early career for Turner Classic Movies.

Tokyo Chorus (1931) opens with a scene of familiar college humor (students horsing around as a teacher eyes them and carefully marks out their demerits in his notepad) and segues into salaryman movie territory. Hapless college boy Shinji (played by Tokihiko Okada) is now a husband and father of three (including a very willful son) working for an insurance company and eagerly awaiting his bonus (the gags of adult men attempting to discreetly count their bonus money suggests they haven’t matured much since their college days). The father stands up to his boss over the unfair firing of an elder employee (Ozu regular Takeshi Sakamoto) and, after a childish game of tit-for-tat played with folded fans escalates into a comic scrap, joins the ranks of the unemployed (the “Tokyo Chorus” of the title).

Directing from a screenplay by Kogo Noda, who went on to write many of Ozu’s greatest films (including Tokyo Story, 1953, and Floating Weeds, 1959), Ozu fills the film with deft sight gags, many thanks to the antics of the son, yet there’s undercurrent of desperation to the comedy. As father struggles to find work to support his wife and children, and is forced to sell his wife’s kimonos to pay the doctor when their young daughter falls ill (the sick child is a classic dramatic crisis in Ozu’s silent films, invariably illustrated with the image of a bag of ice water suspended on the child’s forehead with a string). And when the wife sees Shinji marching the streets with an advertising banner, reduced to the lowest form of day labor, she’s first humiliated by his spectacle and then shamed by her attitude to his sacrifice for them. For all the comedy, the film is filled with tender and delicate moments in such seemingly simple scenes as a round-robin of patty-cake with the kids or sing-song at the teacher’s banquet. It’s still very traditional filmmaking compared to his later style, more Lubitsch than late Ozu, but you can see the director mastering his tools and finding his voice. In the words of Japanese film historian Donald Ritchie, “With this film, what Ozu called his “darker side” and what we would call his mature style began to emerge.”

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Just a couple of capsule reviews this week. First up, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s lovely Fight of the Red Balloon:

The shadow of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 fantasy “The Red Balloon” hovers over Hou Hsiao-hsien’s drama…. Hou’s first film made outside of Asia is his most emotionally turbulent, yet he remains, like the balloon, outside looking in, a compassionate but distant observer capturing it all with a graceful restraint and floating beauty that ultimately carried me away with it.

I liked Love Songs almost as much:

Christophe Honore continues his tribute to the French New Wave (begun with the SIFF 2007 feature “Dans Paris”) with this playful, polysexual romantic musical…. Honore drops the brightness and joy of the form into the chilly, gray winter of Paris to explore love and loss and intimacy. It is a joy, from the cute songs and sudden bursts of comedy to the profound and affecting sadness of one lover mourning the death of another while finding the strength to go on.

You can read both reviews here.

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I preview SIFF 2008 for GreenCine:

The 2008 Seattle International Film Festival opens on Thursday, May 22 with Battle in Seattle, a fictional portrait of the 1999 anti-globalization protests that met the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, directed by Stuart Townsend and starring Charlize Theron (who is expected to attend with Townsend) and Woody Harrelson, and ends 3½ weeks later on Sunday, June 15. The complete schedule won’t be released until May 8, but we do have a preview of coming attractions.

Closing night film will be the Sundance-premiered Bottle Shock, the story of the California wine industry’s rise to international renown in the 70s, starring Alan Rickman and Bill Pullman. In a shift from tradition, the closing night gala will be on Saturday, June 14, with a full day of screenings to follow on Sunday. Perhaps it’s to help prevent those Monday morning hangovers from the closing night party.

For the first time I can remember, the film count has actually been pared back from the previous year, from 287 features and documentaries in 2007 to just under 250 this year. SIFF still holds claim to the title of biggest film festival in the US, both in numbers and in length (25 days of screenings, not counting weeks of advance press screenings). There’s a trade-off for such reach, of course, the most obvious being that SIFF does not attract a lot of high profile premieres. One exception this year: SIFF co-founder turned director Dan Ireland will premiere his film Jolene at the festival. Other world premieres include Julia Sweeney’s performance film Letting Go of God, the documentaries In Search of Kennedy from Chuck Workman and Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Tennis Shoes (sure to be a sell-out in such a loyal public radio city), the British thriller The Disappeared (in the Midnight Adrenaline line-up), and a number of American films, many with a Northwest connection.

The “Emerging Masters” series continues with four new directors chosen to be honored with screenings and (hopefully) personal appearances. The most exciting choices are Abdel Kechiche, who took home four Cesar Awards this year for The Secret of the Grain, and Fatih Akin, with his new film The Edge of Heaven. I know them from their previous features. Both Kechiche’s Games of Love and Chance and Akin’s Head-On find their respective stories in the complicated social identities of their contemporary multi-cultural worlds. The other celebrated directors are Jeremy Podeswa (The Five Senses and Fugitive Pieces) from Canada and David Mackenzie (Young Adam and Mister Foe) from Great Britain.

Read the complete preview at GreenCine here.

If you haven’t seen Chris Haddock’s Canadian crime series Intelligence, you are missing one of the best shows on TV. It’s not available in most parts of the US, unfortunately, though folks close to the Canadian border can often pick it up from Canadian stations. But now the first season is available on stateside on DVD and it is well worth checking out.

To say that Chris Haddock’s Canadian TV series “Intelligence” is as good as any American crime show is unfair to Haddock. It’s better, smarter and more sophisticated than its American counterparts, more clever in its tangle of narratives and less showy in a visual style. Set in the shipping hub of Vancouver, British Columbia (the home of Haddock’s previous series, “Da Vinci’s Inquest”), “Intelligence” is a domestic espionage show about the groundwork of intelligence agents after the kind of international crime that Jack Bauer is too busy to bother with: gun running, drug smuggling, human trafficking. It’s also about the working of local crime with international reach, in particular Vancouver crime boss and marijuana smuggler Jimmy Reardon (Ian Tracey, of “Da Vinci’s Inquest”), who plays informant for the ambitious head of the Organized Crime Unit, Mary Spalding (Klea Scott) in a quid pro quo exchange of information.

Visit the TV section of my DVD column on MSN for more on this and other TV releases on DVD.

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Chiwetel Ejiofor didn’t come out of nowhere when he attracted international acclaim for his haunting breakthrough performance in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, playing an illegal immigrant from Nigeria with a devastating past, but it seemed that way. After all, he looked to be well into his thirties and in complete command of his craft. How could we have missed such a seasoned actor?

In fact, he was much younger than appeared on screen, but he was seasoned, largely on stage, and he’s continued to hone his craft and expand his range. He has since worked with Woody Allen (Melinda and Melinda), Spike Lee (Inside Man), Alfonso Caurón (Children of Men), and Ridley Scott (American Gangster), starred in Joss Whedon’s Serenity, and played in Talk To Me opposite Don Cheadle. Now he stars in David Mamet’s new film Redbelt, playing a Jiu-jitsu master and teacher who puts his honor on the line when his code is put at risk. I talked to the actor in early April for GreenCine.

Your character is very self-possessed through the entire film, both on and off the mat. How did learning the moves and the rhythms of the martial art on the mat carry over to the way you informed how your character moved and held himself through the rest of the film?

When you’re learning and when you’re with people who do it, just being around Renato Magno and the Machado Brother allows you to observe how some of these guys carry themselves. With their training and their knowledge, they have a certain grace to their movement, which could be seen to as being rather slow or methodical and thought out. There’s an ease of movement and it comes through constant training, the honing of the body and the honing of these moves, and you find that it becomes how they move in life. They move with an ease and grace and simplicity and it’s almost as if they’re always ready for any situation that comes their way, which in fact they are. They’re mentally prepared and that’s part of how the training and the philosophy blends into life and lifestyle anyway. So that was observation, but I was also feeling my body change and feeling more confident with the Jiu-jitsu aspect of it, and allowing the confidence with Jiu-jitsu to affect movement, so that was all part and parcel of creating the character.

Some of my favorite performances of yours involve characters who are very methodical, who do not waste movement. I’m thinking of Dirty Pretty Things, where you play a man who is very still and closed in, but also the agent in Serenity and the underground leader in Children of Men.

They are all very interesting characters and they’re all people who have this sense of the world. In Serenity and Children of Men, there’s a sense of it being a confused or mistaken view of the world, but they have an intrinsic belief system in what they’re doing and somehow that does also manifest itself in their movement and in the way that they approach the world. And Okwe in Dirty Pretty Things has a way of living his life. And there is an economy to his movement, based on the fact that he’s shot part of himself down as a person. So all those things were there and are part of the stories and it’s kind of interesting to utilize the physicality to express ideas and express the depth of emotion or the depth of conviction that suddenly shuts down the way people move and makes them quite limited in their movements. It’s definitely interesting to explore and I think there’s a direct parallel there in that exploration.

The complete interview is here.

I review the surrogate/maternity comedy Baby Mama in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The biological alarm isn’t just ticking in “Baby Mama,” it’s ringing so loud that single career woman Kate (Tina Fey) will do anything for a bundle of joy. With adoption out of reach and her own reproductive chances “one in a million,” that means a surrogate mother for her otherwise fertile eggs. Or, in the words of the surrogate pregnancy entrepreneur (Sigourney Weaver): outsourcing.

Enter Angie (Amy Poehler), a South Philly high school dropout with a low-watt loser of a common-law husband (Dax Shepard) and a junk-food diet. The trajectory isn’t all that hard to predict: Angie leaves her white-trash hubby and moves in with Kate, where odd-couple collisions and decidedly unusual pregnancy complications ensue.

The movie is what it is, but I must confess that for all the by-the-numbers plotting and utterly conventional turns of the plot, there’s a dynamic between stars Amy Poehler and Tina Fey that both lifts the comedy and grounds the characters in ways that made the film better than it should be. Their chemistry makes them a natural odd-couple buddy team, a genre so dominated by male comics that it’s practically an endangered cinematic species, and I hope it’s the beginning of beautiful big screen friendship. Maybe Fey can even write their next team-up herself.

The friends and former “Saturday Night Live” collaborators make a good odd-couple buddy comedy team. Fey underplays the uptight corporate professional with a frozen half-smile whenever she slides out of her narrow comfort zone and Poehler exuberantly overcompensates as the trashy woman-child who still acts as if she’s a sassy high school girl and is stymied by a child-proofed apartment.

It’s just that broad comedy isn’t always suited for their brand of improvisational give-and-take.

Read the full review here.