Morning Glory (2010)

Roger Michell died last year at the age of 65, before his latest film The Duke was released. It is out now and I recommend seeing it, especially in a theater, where it will do the most good. Michell's most popular film is probably Notting Hill, but he also made The Mother and Enduring Love (for you Daniel Craig fans), and Hyde Park on Hudson (with Bill Murray as Franklin Roosevelt). To sum up, he made movies that are usually placed in "art-houses" where films of a limited budget and less than frivolous subject matter, unsullied by hyperbolic press and saturation campaigns go to die...and merit consideration during Awards Season, where sometimes their fortunes are favored, but mostly forgotten. And he was darned good at it. 

 

This was written at the time of the film's release.

 

"You're Gon-na Make it After Alllll"*
or
"Will Someone Tell Me Why I Logged Off 'BangingGrannies.com' For This?"

Talk about quick turn-around. Plucky news-producer Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams) has just rebounded from being fired from her New Jersey TV station to being hired to produce an in-the-ratings-dumper morning news-klatsch in New York City. The stipulation from boss Jerry Barnes (Jeff Goldblum, whose height advantage over McAdams is used to very good advantage) is that she has to turn the ratings around on the clunker or the venerable TV-institution called "DayBreak" will be cancelled.

But who wants to work in an institution?

The place is a televised mad-house. Goofy weatherman, clueless reporters, a perv' anchor (he delivers the second headline above), and the Nurse Ratched of the place is the veteran house-mother-anchor (Diane Keaton) who views Becky as just one more producer for a show that's "a revolving door for cretinous morons." She's seen 'em come and go, while she's been "pulling the train up the hill (...with my TEETH!)" for fourteen years. "DayBreak" needs to be fixed.

Becky starts to shake things up, and her first job is to find an anchor a little less orange. She goes the credibility route and seeks out Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford, who hasn't done this much mugging since Return of the Jedi**), a veteran news-man (he lunches with Chris Matthews, Bob Schieffer, and Morley Safer), grumpily living out his golden parachute contract, and has no desire to lower his standards working on a show with "half an audience who've lost the remote, and the other half are waiting for the nurse to turn them over." 

Warned that he is "the third-worst person in the world...after Kim Jong-Il and Angela Lansbury" by the movie's obligatory boy-friend (Patrick Wilson...slumming***), Becky finds a loop-hole in his contract and forces the pro to "lower his standards," but raise the bar on passive-aggressive behavior (he refuses to "banter, from the Latin word for 'gibber like a moron'")...as if the show needed any more of that. Pretty soon, every surface at the station has Becky-forehead-sized dents from her beating herself into them—that and her seeming incapacity to open doors are the two consistent jokes of which no opportunity is passed.

It's got the TV-industry cynicism down, but raised to the bitchy level of the fashion industry (the writer, Aline Brosh McKenna, also wrote The Devil Wears Prada, ...and 27 Dresses , and Laws of Attraction, and Three to Tango...so this is the first movie of hers I haven't actively avoided...although I did see Prada, and admired it). Director Roger Michell can do rom-com fine (Notting Hill), but he's capable of doing better stuff, and he keeps everything lively and semi-sunny, despite the rampant cruelty tossed around like so much unnecessary paper-shuffling on a news-desk. But, he can't do much with the cliched material, from the "meet cute" to the "slo-mo run through new York." 

Morning Glory is okay, but it breaks no boundaries (or news, for all that), it's another "working girl" comedy in the revolving door of them.

* Cue the hat-throw. Give credit where credit is due: I didn't notice this was basically "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" (and a two-hour stretch of the half-hour pilot, at that) until Ford's crusty news vet says to the young producer "You have a repellent moxie" in the same way that Ed Asner's Lou Grant said "You've got spunk....I HATE spunk!"  Where's Betty White when you need her?

** ...which makes me think something is wrong.  Ford is the master of the subtle slow-burn comic performance, but this one is at a hard-boil. His lines delivered in a husky, phlegmatic drone, you start to wonder if Ford—like his character—just isn't happy to be there (y'know, like his narration in BladeRunner?). Then, he manages to take what should have been the movie's worst scene, and make it shine, giving it depth, resonance and heart...while still not betraying his character. Nice work.

*** Yeah, but on the other hand, I've felt so sorry for so many good actresses playing "the girlfriend" over the years, this is one for equal opportunity. 

The Skeleton Twins

The Return of the Gruesome Twosome
or
Better Late Than Never

Bellingham native Craig Johnson's second feature (after the filmed-in-Seattle True Adolescents) is The Skeleton Twins, a story of dysfunctional siblings trying to function and benefiting from some great performances by SNL alums Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig (who haven't appeared in a film together since Adventureland away back in 2009).

Milo Dean (Hader) is a struggling actor in LA, gay, and in mourning due to post-parting depression. He writes a terse note "To Whom It May Concern: See You Later" turns up his favorite music...loud...then sinks into a bathtub and slits his wrists.

Cut to sister Maggie contemplating a handful of sleeping pills, when the phone rings. It's the hospital, telling her that Milo has attempted suicide. She looks at the pills. "Uh, he's okay" says the voice over the phone, confused by her long pause. "Good" comes the tentative reply.

Already there are parallels between brother and sister with the conflict apparent between them. She's trying to commit suicide but gets interrupted because he did it first. She flies out to California to see him; they haven't in ten years. "You changed your hair" is the first thing he says to her.

None of this is played for laughs, but comedy comes out of Hader and Wiig even through drama, and their shared past as performers fills in for the lifetime of shared memories of family members. There is an unquantifiable sixth sense in their reactions to each other and how they play off each other that goes far beyond the written page to timing, reaction, and suppressed thought that seems to seep out of their pores. It sometimes takes one, two, even three beats before one realizes that they're just messing with each other or being serious. Hader has the more flamboyant part, Wiig, the repressed one, but they exchange personas constantly throughout the movie in varying degrees of hope and despair.

Wiig plays a dental assistant who, after huffing nitrous, 
tries on an aparatus—her ad-lib cracks Hader up

When Maggie takes the wounded Milo home with her to recuperate, it's a bit of an invited invasion. They haven't seen in each other in a decade. She's gotten married to a fairly cheery guy (Luke Wilson, always good to see) and they're trying to have kids. The idea terrifies Maggie, and she's sneaking birth control pills to avoid it. She's also taking scuba diving lessons and carrying on a guilty affair with her hunkish Australian instructor (Boyd Holbrook). Milo takes the opportunity to meet up with a former teacher (Ty Burrell) with whom he had an affair as a student, and that does not go well, as he's now married with an eleven year old child—er, his wife and he have an eleven year old child (that would be better phrasing). You can't go home again.

But, sometimes it pays a visit. Their self-absorbed Mom (Joanna Gleason) comes by (she's in town for a new age retreat) and old animosities flair up, the chakras, evidently, being extraordinarily fiery. The kids were always closer to their father, who, himself, committed suicide, and, no doubt, imprinted his bi-polar giddy sense of life amidst the morbid drudgery of day-to-day living on them. If the film has a weakness, it's in the Mom's portrayal—she's all new age ideologue without a smidgen of complexity or roundness of character, and stands out like a cracked healing crystal from the rest of the dramatis personæ (in fact, she might have escaped from a Coen Brothers movie. Hmmm). It doesn't do the movie, or any satiric jab it might make about this sort of thing, any good.

No, you want to talk about good? That would be Hader and Wiig doing a hilarious lip-sync of Starship's feel-good "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" that just keeps getting better and better until the sequence ends. It's one of those magical moments that tends to obliterate the memory of any weaknesses the film may have, and propel it along on the good will of that one bit. It can't last, however, and the ending is a bit of a let-down from what has come before. Still, The Skeleton Twins is smart, funny, multi-layered and not content to merely "get by" (as is often the case)—and if it was, one gets the impression that Hader and Wiig wouldn't allow it.

Mr. Peabody and Sherman

A Dog and His Boy (The Way, WABAC)

or 
"You've Never Heard of....?"

Way, way back in the day (during the 1960's) in the first round of cheaply made cartoons for television (post-"Clutch Cargo"), there were some that replaced the low production values of their animation with some smart story-telling with subject matter and jokes that would fly over the noggins of their young viewers and connect with adults.  The best of those (and the longest running) were out of the production house of Jay Ward, who was making episodic shorts for packaging under the umbrella of "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show."  The animation was done in Mexico, but the stories were pure U.S., with an emphasis on puns, satire, and pop culture...but not so "inside" as to keep it from being "evergreen" (as a result, the episodes are still in syndication, and can be viewed and appreciated without titles explaining the context, or a commentary placing it in historical perspective).

But, still, sometimes "getting" the humor takes a little learning and a little growing up. For example, there was an episode of "Rocky" where humans were being "scrooched" by moon-men Gidney and Cloyd ("Shall I 'scrooch' him, Cloyd?" "Go ahead, Gidney"), a process that would make them less intelligent to the point of idiocy (the gun never worked on Bullwinkle because..well, what would be the point?).  And I remember Rocky got "scrooched" and the first thing out of his mouth was "Tell me 'bout the rabbits, George!" which is a literary reference that no kid is ever going to "get."  The villains were a pair of Russian spies, Boris (last name "Badenov," as opposed to "Goudenov") and Natasha, when tensions between the U.S. and Russia were at their peak at the height of the Cold War. The writers were Bill Scott, Chris Hayward and Allan Burns, who were well-read and not afraid to: 1) show it, or 2) expect the audience to "rise up" to the material. Writers are constantly told to "write to your audience"—but, thank God, some choose to ignore it, and write above them (because, ya know, said audience might "learn" something once in awhile—the opposite of "scrooching").

Peabody and Sherman being "disarming" in a Mummy's tomb.

One of those "Bullwinkle" vignettes was "Peabody's Improbably History" featuring a "wicked-smaht" dog named Mr. Peabody and "his boy" Sherman. Believing in "home-schooling" (before it was fashionable with anyone but the Amish), Peabody invented a time machine, called the WABAC (pronounced "Way-back") Machine, that would send them back in time to learn about some significant historical epoch, which was, in most episodes, not going the way History said it had. Peabody would inevitably set it right and end the segment with notoriously bad puns.

There have been live action versions of many of Ward's properties—The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, George of the Jungle, Dudley Do-Right, Boris and Natasha: The Movie—but this is the first feature with Peabody and Sherman, entitled, simply enough, Mr. Peabody and Sherman.  

One worries, going in, whether it can sustain the wit of those five minute shorts stretched out to ninety animated minutes, and, at the beginning, it does, with a brief spin to The French Revolution, quite literally, as it features a bit too much 3-D zooming and careening like a water-slide for these old eyes...and (I was cheered) it ends with an atrocious pun. Then, the whole thing gets bogged down with Sherman getting in trouble at school after he is bullied about his abnormal step-parentage. This leads to an investigation by CPS and the usual complications occurring in the space-time continuum when you try and expand five minutes to ninety. A lengthy "origin story" montage accompanied by a particularly poignant John Lennon song (no, it's not "Imagine" or "Hey Bulldog") doesn't help matters much, nor does a somewhat off-kilter vocal performance by Steven Colbert as one of the bullies' parents (Peabody is voiced by "Modern Family's" Ty Burrell; Sherman, by Max Charles, both of them pitch-perfect).

Things start to pick up when it is Sherman who must try and set things right by going back in time with the WABAC...to approximately where the movie started to go off the rails. At that point, things start flying fast and loose, some of the potential of an errant time-machine and a space-time rip pays off and there are some wonderfully manic comic moments that come out of left field...that kids will never understand.

...Like this one that even I admit is "inside"

For that, a grudging smile of appreciation, even though the lesson of Mr. Peabody and Sherman would appear to be "One simply can't go back and recapture the past."

"This Movie is Actually Better than it is..."