Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Grade: B

Director: Marielle Heller

Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, Dolly Wells, and Jane Curtain

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 47 min.

In my review of the otherwise awful Melissa McCarthy vehicle Identity Thief five years ago, I took note of a couple of tender scenes in which McCarthy departed from her comedic shtick and showed some dramatic chops, forecasting that she “might one day reap further accolades outside the comedy arena.”

That day may have finally arrived with Can You Ever Forgive Me? Drawn from a memoir of the same name, McCarthy portrays Lee Israel, once a real-life biographer of such stars as Katherine Hepburn and Tallulah Bankhead before Lee’s creative spark dimmed and her acerbic personality became overbearing. Directed by the up-and-coming Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl and next year’s Fred Rogers biopic, You Are My Friend), the film picks up with Lee in the late 1980s, her latest biography of Estee Lauder already consigned to the bookstore's discount table. She shares a filthy apartment with her only friend, her feeble 12-year-old cat. Lee owes money to everyone, from her super to the local vet, and has taken to pawning keepsakes like personal correspondences from Hepburn. Her agent (a terrific and underused Jane Curtin) won’t return her calls because nobody’s interested in her perpetually next book: a memoir of Fanny Brice, of all people. Lee holds disdain for the New York literati, and the feeling is mutual.

Lee’s the dowdy, grizzled embodiment of a cynical world, which is probably why there’s an instant alchemy between her and Jack Hock when he wanders into her favorite watering hole. Jack is a boozy, drug-addled English grifter and failed writer—his agent either died or moved to the suburbs, samesies. He’s is the flamboyant id to Lee’s crippling introversion, each sharing a nihilistic view of the world. They’re also gay people looking for love in a world that doesn’t love them back.

After hocking an old letter from Brice that she pilfers from the local library, Lee happens upon a money-making scheme. She channels her dormant writing skills, along with her old Smith Corona Electra typewriter, into fashioning forgeries of letters from such bygone celebrities as Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker. She sells her fakes to collectors around town, fetching nice payouts from an often equally unscrupulous collectables community.

To Heller and screenwriter Nicole Holofcener’s credit, they complement the tawdry details of Lee’s crimes with extensive deep dives into her complicating psyche. Still, their exploration is so multi-layered and diffuse that we don’t really have a better grasp on Lee Israel by the end of the film than we did during the opening ten minutes. Same goes for her relationship with Jack, a friendship of convenience and shared outlook but never trust.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a good film whose dalliance with greatness resides with McCarthy and Grant, Whether alone on screen or sharing scenes with each other, their acting here is effortless and sublime. They’re awards-worthy performances that, unlike their disreputable characters, deserve to be remembered.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

I shall call him Groot

Grade: B

Director: David Yates

Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Ezra Miller and Jon Voight

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 13 min.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them isn’t a great film. It largely shows the distended strain of a 120-page book bloated into a 133-minute movie. But this adaptation and amplification of author J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter supplement might also be one of the year’s most timely and subversive films.

Rowling’s original source book, published in 2001, is fashioned as Harry Potter's copy of the textbook of the same name mentioned in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Its menagerie of magical creatures carries over to the film’s screenplay, also and more recently penned by Rowling, which fleshes out a new storyline revolving around Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) and his 1926 trip from England to New York City.

Scamander is a former Hogwarts prodigy turned mysterious castout who carries around a leather suitcase that’s acts as a portal into a alt-dimension housing exotic beasts collected from around the world. The bewildered Scamander quickly misplaces his travel case into the unwitting hands of Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), a portly, aspiring baker and No-Maj (the American version of a Muggle).

Audiences spend the film’s first half trying to understand Redmayne as he method acts his way through a Gen Y trifle. Indeed, Scamander and Kowalski spend the film’s first half tracking and recapturing Scamander’s critters as they escape and run rampant around Manhattan. A Niffler is a long-snouted marsupial with a penchant for anything shiny; the Demiguise is blessed with invisibility and limited clairvoyance; an Occamy is a blue bird that enlarges or shrinks to fit any available space; the expansive Thunderbird is native to the arid Arizona climate; and an Erumpent is a huge rhino replicant that happens to be in heat. The film gets bogged down in Scamander and Kowalski’s hijinks, including their goofy interplay with Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston), a demoted bureaucratic witch, and her randy sister Queenie (Alison Sudol).

But Fantastic Beasts eventually, and thankfully, finds footing in its social and religious allegory. The film begins as an immigrant’s story, with Scamander entering the U.S. via Ellis Island in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. He finds a divided America, with one extreme being a radical group of No-Majs calling themselves The Second Salemers, dedicated to exposing and killing witches and wizards. Meanwhile, sorcerers have been forced underground, where they operate a shadow government that includes their own congress, president (Carmen Ejogo) and security force headed by Percival Graves (Colin Farrell).

The dark heart of colonial-era Salem’s war on witchcraft was actually religious oppression and persecution. The unease between No-Majs and wizards mirrors our real-life unrest between Westerners and the historic “Others,” most recently Muslims in both America and Rowling’s native England. The most hard-edged analog comes with the appearance of Obscurials, a dark, uncontrollable force created by children and young adults out of a need to suppress their magic, for fear that a No-Maj may discover them. Once released, Obscurials wreak havoc, demolish buildings and even kill perceived enemies—in one instance a prominent politician, the sire of newspaper magnate Jon Voight. Many, including other wizards, believe the terrorists, er, Obsurdials must be wiped out before they irrevocably turn No-Majs against the wizard community. Others, like Scamander, preaches efforts to understand and alleviate the underlying shame and repression giving rise to the danger.

It’s a provocative take on terrorism and its root causes that’s liable to breeze through all the whimsy. In both fact and fiction, there’s a tension between those preaching tolerance and those espousing protectionism and security. Director David Yates’ rich, baroque setting provides a worthy springboard for Rowling’s Harry Potter spin-off. The course of its future narratives, however, is up to us.

The Walk

This mock-up demonstrates how much I'm

going to drink before trying this stunt.

Grade: C +

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ben Kingsley and Charlotte Le Bon

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 2 hr. 3 min.

If The Polar Express elevated director Robert Zemeckis’ visual acuity to new heights, it also broadened his reliance on caricature over character. Two more motion capture films followed that prioritized style over substance, then even the R-rated Flight was eroded by half-written supporting roles, heavy-handed metaphors and a soppy ending.

There’s a moment early in The Walk, the latest from Zemeckis, when the director rewinds the milieu all the way back to 1968 Paris. The palette goes grayscale—save for a glint of Spielbergian red—and street performer Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) peddles about the city on his unicycle sporting a top hat. I half expected to see a baguette tucked under his arm.

Petit earns local acclaim as a tightrope artist, slacklining between trees and walking a high wire across the Notre Dame Cathedral. But his dream is stringing and traversing a steel cable between the nascent Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.

The painstaking planning and intricate execution of Petit’s self-described “coup” in 1974 is fascinating, although it’s also material covered in greater detail in James Marsh’s 2008 Oscar-winning documentary, Man on Wire. The full impact of Zemeckis’ 3D IMAX visual wizardry in The Walk is felt during the roughly half-hour act as Petit crosses the mise en scène 1,350 feet over Manhattan. The audience soars above and around Petit as he paces, pirouettes, kneels and lies on his wire, spurring acrophobia even among the steadiest of stomachs.

Unfortunately, that sensational sequence is sandwiched between essentially a live-action cartoon. Beyond Gordon-Levitt’s excessive emoting, bad wig and Pepé Le Pew accent, every character—lead and supporting—comes in easily conceivable form. A passing American tourist in Paris wears a cowboy hat and Texas twang. Some of the youngsters Petit recruits to help carry out his stunt are ‘70s stoners straight out of a Cheech & Chong flick. There are ‘Noo Yawk’ cops, and a construction foreman softened by small talk about “that SOB Nixon” and how the country went to hell after Kennedy died.

But the most irksome, infuriating element of The Walk is Petit’s intrusive, needless narration. It tramples almost every scene, including the climactic coup, when Zemeckis’ stark visuals have already conveyed all necessary sentiment. Moreover, Gordon-Levitt (as Petit) frequently delivers these asides atop a mock-up of the Statue of Liberty’s torch against the digital backdrop of the Twin Towers jutting from the Manhattan skyline.

The film’s obvious effort to juxtapose Petit’s heroism alongside 9/11 pathos isn’t offensive—his tale can’t be told today without at least unintentionally evoking the looming tragedy to come. And the assertion that Petit’s accomplishment breathed life into buildings that many New Yorkers previously considered eyesores is backed by some contemporary commentary and oral history.

But all that is sufficient for a spectacular short film, not a long, weary Walk.

The Intern

You gawkin' at me?

Grade: B –

Director: Nancy Meyers

Starring: Robert De Niro, Anne Hathaway, Rene Russo, Anders Holm, JoJo Kushner, Andrew Rannells, Adam DeVine and Zack Pearlman

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 1 min.

The tableau of The Intern unspools like the unofficial sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, with Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs now the ambitious yet affable head of her own e-commerce fashion company, herself forced to balance the demands of work and family. In truth, the two main characters in this latest feathery film from writer-director Nancy Meyers shrewdly project the two actors playing them.

Ben Whittaker (Robert De Niro) is a 70-year-old widower retired from a 40-year career in the phone book production business. Ben wiles away his lonesome days with 7:30 a.m. coffee at Starbucks, tai chi and periodic trips to San Diego to visit his son and grandchildren (none of whom we meet, curiously). He’s used up all his airline miles and, he fears, his usefulness.

A flyer advertising a Senior Internship Program at the Brooklyn-based workplace of About The Fit catches Ben’s eye. A video resume later and Ben milling around the company’s refurbished digs and assigned to Jules Ostin (Hathaway), its founder. Jules is the sort of spunky stereotype who bikes to and inside the office (a quirk that totally vanishes as quickly as it's introduced) and ventures to the shipping warehouse to correct the way they fold the tissue paper. She's also the sort of workaholic whose career detracts from life with her moppet and stay-at-home husband/dad, Matt (Anders Holm, with a performance that’s forgettable in real time).

The hook is that Ben’s snappy charcoal suits, 1973 attaché briefcase and flip phone stand in sharp relief to today’s casual Millennial milieu. Predictably, Ben shows the young'uns a thing or two and proves the deus ex machina for Jules’ home and work woes, including a looming decision whether to hire a CEO (from all male candidates, a gender dynamic never explored) to relieve Jules’ workload and further grow her 18-month-old clothing enterprise.

Jules, like Hathaway, is a female rising star in a male-dominated corporate world whose career success has coincided with dark times in her romantic relationships. Ben, like De Niro, is a former titan of his industry seemingly rendered obsolete by age and changing culture. Neither De Niro nor Hathaway appear at ease here when isolated on camera or with other castmates. However, there’s palpable, platonic chemistry whenever they’re paired off, and the parallels with their characters subtly surface during their byplay.

That said, The Intern is still a treacly, ethnically homogeneous Nancy Meyers joint (see also: Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated, and The Holiday) with missteps massive and minuscule. A mid-film sequence involving an errant e-mail Jules sends her unseen mother devolves into a heist op that undercuts Jules and Ben’s characterizations. Ben’s dalliance with Fiona, the flirty office masseuse (right …) played by Rene Russo, is a needless subplot that begins with a back rub turned De Niro chubby, something I could have gone my whole life without seeing.

And while De Niro and Hathaway are terrific, their amiable characters are ultimately uncomplicated. Jules has professional and personal obstacles, but nothing that time and a few tweaks don’t tidily resolve by film’s end. And Ben’s sage sensei comes sans any background messiness. He’s the embalmed embodiment of a romanticized era, where men were men and women, well, can be men, too.

Mistress America

I am Jill's Meet Cute

Grade: D

Director: Noah Baumbach

Starring: Lola Kirke, Greta Gerwig, Heather Lind, Matthew Shear, Jasmine Cephas Jones and Michael Chernus

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 24 min.

There’s a path Mistress America could have taken early that might have salvaged this pretentious farce. Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke) is a college freshman suffocating inside the social circles of Barnard College in New York City. After being rebuffed by a would-be boyfriend, Tony (Matthew Shear), and the snooty campus literary society, Tracy rings Brooke (Greta Gerwig), her 30-year-old stepsister-in-waiting. Tracy’s mom is about to marry Brooke’s dad, and the effervescent (and lonely) Brooke is happy to introduce the doting Tracy to the verve of Brooke’s cosmopolitan lifestyle.

Tracy’s lit life, as dour as her ever-present pullover sweater, throws the autodidact Brooke’s dinner parties, bar crooning and grand plans to open a restaurant/hair salon into such sharp relief that you wonder if you’re observing a Fight Club-style conceit, with Brooke embodying Tracy’s illusory id.

”I am Jill's Spinning Classes.”

Alas, Brooke proves all too actual as Mistress America aims to lambast millennial angst through the construct of a screwball comedy. The script soon settles into Tracy and Brooke’s insufferable byplay (eventually spreading to the rest of the cast), yammered without the use of pesky punctuation. The rapid-fire repartee in screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s was largely the consequence of writers and performers still geared towards the vaudevillian stage. This screenplay by Gerwig and director Noah Baumbach is pure pastiche, written with a tin ear for the way sentient beings actually community with each other.

Brooke speaks of starting a cabaret called “High Standards,” in which she’ll perform songs about lofty moral aspirations and ambitions. Discussing an ex-boyfriend who was a geologist, she observes how “it’s weird that someone so into rocks can be into Jesus.” On and on it goes as the bon mots land like bunker busters, and when Brooke makes intentionally awkward references to sending “a tweet on Twitter” and “a gram on Instagram,” it make Baumbach sound like an old man yelling at clouds.

“I am Jill's faux Woody Allen.”

Tracy soon realizes that Brooke’s flighty countenance masks an arrogance and insecurity feeding her arrested adulthood. Brooke incessantly discusses a frenemy named Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind)—yes, everyone calls her that—who once stole her boyfriend Dylan (Michael Chernus), her cats and her idea for “really hard-looking” flower print T-shirts. The film shifts its third act to Dylan and Mamie-Claire’s mod Greenwich, Connecticut home so Brooke can beg for restaurant startup funds. The result is a parlor scene in which the inane dialogue amps up. A panoply of inconsequential supporting characters join in, including Mamie-Claire’s pregnant attorney friend, a nosey neighbor and Tony’s outlandishly paranoid girlfriend (Jasmine Cephas Jones), who believes he wants to “sext” every girl he meets.

Everyone soons discovers that Tracy has turned Brooke’s flighty, unfulfilled life into a short story designed to finally get Tracy admitted into that lit society. “You don’t read fiction,” Mamie-Claire reminds Dylan. “I do when it’s about my friends,” he responds. *rimshot*

“I am Jill's Warby Parker Spectacles.”

It all goes nowhere except a cloying climax not befitting the film’s supposedly edgy façade. Beyond the annoying script and unlikeable characters, the gnawing problem with Mistress America is that while Baumbach and Gerwig make passing attempts at skewering millennials, it feels like a New York milieu with which they are both intimately familiar and fond. It’s self-effacement bordering on self-referential, resulting in a work so farcical that it’s insulated from offending anyone, except the audience.

Where’s Tyler Durden when you need him?

“I am Jill's Smug, Strained Social Satire.”

Run All Night

I think we missed the early bird special

Run All Night

Grade: C +

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

Starring: Liam Neeson, Ed Harris, Joel Kinnaman, Common, Boyd Holbrook and Vincent D’Onofrio

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 54 min.

In Run All Night, Liam Neeson plays a father thrust into protecting his child from harm threatened by a criminal syndicate. Novel concept, huh?

Yes, Neeson is another man with a particular set of skills, in this case Jimmy Conlan, an aging ex-mob hitman now subsisting off booze and the charity of Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris), head of an Irish crime boss in Queens and Jimmy’s old pal-cum-boss.

Taking place over a 16-hour period, Jimmy and Shawn’s pledge to one day “cross the finish line” together assumes a different meaning when Michael (Joel Kinnaman), Jimmy’s estranged son, spies Shawn’s bad-seed son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) rub out some Albanian drug traffickers. When Danny hastily tries to eliminate his witness, Jimmy is forced to protect Michael by putting a bullet through Danny’s neck.

Shawn vows vengeance against both father and son, so Jimmy must kill as many people as possible over a single night to buy Michael time to escape the city and Det. John Harding (Vincent D’Onofrio), the proverbial “last honest cop,” time to clear Michael’s name, even though Harding wants nothing more than to see Jimmy rot in prison for all the buttons he’s pushed over the years. Along the way, Jimmy must navigate an obstacle course of mob heavies, crooked cops and a professional assassin (Common) who would love to off Jimmy for free.

Run All Night falls squarely in the post-Taken period of Neeson’s film career. Director Jaume Collet-Serra has been a key collaborator, helming Neeson’s Unknown and last year’s Non-Stop before this film. There’s little new here, beginning with several obvious riffs from The Godfather and Michael Mann’s Heat. People hide out where any sensible foe would look, and Jimmy/Michael’s ability to elude all pursuers (and their bullets) strains even the most pliable bounds of credibility.

Stylistically, the overlong narrative is padded with a few too many firefights, chases and stare-downs. Cinematographer Martin Ruhe adopts an irksome Google Earth pan-and-zoom technique whenever the locale shifts between scenes, and composer Junkie XL bombards the audience with a cacophony of blaring brass.

Still, the pace is brisk and occasionally exhilarating, while the milieu is steeped in gritty pulp. But the undoubted high points are the recurring  tête–à–têtes between Neeson and Harris, old pros in life and art who relish their hardboiled byplay. Better use of Nick Nolte, who wanders through as Jimmy’s brother, and a virtually silent Bruce McGill, who plays Shawn’s leftenant, would have only heightened the film’s grizzled vet cachet.

As it stands, Run All Night is a serviceable B-movie, full of action, ammunition and family angst for flavor. While Neeson’s movie children are forever in peril, his film career remains safe and sound.

Fifty Shades of Grey

 

Is that a metaphor or are you

just happy to see me?

Grade: D

Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson

Starring: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Eloise Mumford, Luke Grimes and Marcia Gay Harden

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 50 min.

“Don’t forget your safe words,” Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) warns Anastasia 'Ana’ Steele (Dakota Johnson) before the tamest bondage montage this side of a Miley Cyrus video. Unfortunately, it’s the audience for Fifty Shades of Grey who need a safe word designed to rescue them from this film adaptation of writer E.J. James’ nightstand potboiler.

Although director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Kelly Marcel mercifully scrub the bulk of Ana’s Twitter-worthy internal monologue that litters James’ prose, what remains is a flaccid affair with little plot, even less character development and kinkiness rendered into kitsch.

When Ana visits boy billionaire Christian to interview him for her college newspaper, there’s an instant attraction between them. Why is anyone’s guess. Because Ana is a terrible questioner? Because she’s a dowdy dresser? Because Christian is a rich, depraved misanthrope? Because he’s just rich?

What ensues is a Twilight-esque game of will she or won’t she allow let herself to be transfigured by a forbidden paramour. In this case, it’s signing the dotted line of a contract to become Christian’s submissive. Beguiled by Ana’s diffident innocence, Christian lavishes her with gifts, including a laptop, new car and first edition of “Tess of the d'Urbervilles” (though, strangely, nothing to replace her woefully outdated flip phone). Never mind that she’d be the 16th different occupant of his playroom of ropes, belts, shackles and riding crops.

A bevy of supporting characters quickly come and go. Marcia Gay Harden pops up as Christian’s mother, but little is made of their clearly tenuous relationship. Same with Ana’s roommate Kate (Eloise Mumford) and her dalliance with Elliot (Luke Grimes), Christian’s adopted brother. Much mention is made of the older woman who molested Christian as a youngster and instilled his predilection for sexual domination, but she’s never seen or even identified (named Elena Lincoln in the book). And the one instance Christian becomes rattled by a work-related crisis evaporates without resolution once he and Ana blow off some steam in the playroom.

But the fatal flaw of Fifty Shades of Grey is that we never understand, and thus never accept the inextricable sexual tension between the two leads. There’s nothing particularly special about Ana that should upset Christian’s deep-seated misogyny for the sake of a game of hard-to-get. Conversely, arrested emotional development is the only discernible reason Ana would remain in creepy Christian’s presence for longer than five minutes.

“Fifty shades of fucked up,” Christian mutters while self-diagnosing his psyche. He may as well have been describing this antiseptic, bawdy bore.

Annie

I think I'm gonna to develop vertigo here

Grade: B –

Director: Will Gluck

Starring: Quvenzhané Wallis, Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz, Rose Byrne, Bobby Cannavale, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and David Zayas

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 58 min.

It’s hardly surprising that Annie opens with a chipper, carrot-topped moppet giving a manically cheerful report to her school class, a presentation capped by a sudden soft shoe flourish. But Annie 1.0 is quickly jettisoned by her eye-rolling classmates, making way for Annie Bennett (Quvenzhané Wallis), whose curly locks come more natural and whose very appearance lends new resonance to an old story.

Those who decry the modern updates to this Annie, directed by Will Gluck and co-produced by Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith and Jay-Z, perhaps conveniently ignore the charming but hopelessly anachronistic elements to the original 1924 “Little Orphan Annie” comic strip, drawn before the Empire State Building was even built. A cruel orphanage produces a protagonist so plucky she warms the heart of not only a hardened industrialist but also FDR himself, inspiring the New Deal in the process.

An analogous update would go something like this: Annie, languishing in poverty, contracts spinal meningitis, or, I dunno, the mumps. Daddy Warbucks takes in Annie, who refuses to abandon her optimism, telling everyone how happy she is and how much harder the rest of the hoi polloi have it. Warbucks funds the medical attention needed for Annie to make a full recovery, and President Obama, inspired by Annie’s example, proposes the Affordable Care Act. Of course that doesn’t happen in this today’s Annie, as such a plot would be laughed off the silver screen.

So it hardly seems rash for the actual rework to incorporate contemporary references to pop culture and social media to modernize its setting. The urban update is set to the syncopation of jackhammers and car horns, filled with Citi Bikes and set against the backdrop of the now-completed One World Trade Center.

Annie’s orphanage is now a foster home somewhere above 96th Street, run by Miss Hannigan (Cameron Diaz), a former pop star who was kicked out of C+C Music Factory before they made it big. The embittered Hannigan sips incessantly on an “Arsenio Hall Show” tumbler and collects weekly $157.00 checks for each foster kid in her reluctant care.

Annie pines to reunite with her birth parents, traveling every Friday night a neighborhood Italian trattoria named Domani (Italian for "Tomorrow,” natch) where they once promised to return.

One day, Annie literally runs into Will Stacks (Jamie Foxx), a germophobe telecommunications tycoon who is locked in a misbegotten campaign for mayor of New York City. Stacks saves Annie from an oncoming truck, and the ensuing YouTube video of his heroism spikes his poll ratings. Moreover, it gives Stacks’ oily campaign manager Guy (Bobby Cannavale) a bright idea:  temporarily move the destitute Annie into Stacks’ swanky bachelor pad and watch the votes roll in.

What’s different in this version of the story is that Annie is wise to the hustle and plays along since she gets the benefit of living in Stacks’ luxuriously mod penthouse. And per Annie, she believes Stacks is actually nice, “he just doesn’t know it yet.”

Beyond the opening ginger-haired hoofer, there are several allusions to Annies past, from a sight gag involving Stacks’ secretive chrome dome to Annie’s mut Sandy, now named for the superstorm (a change that nudges the boundary of good taste).

The most notable numbers from the Annie stage musical remain, many with reworked lyrics, including “It’s a Hard Knock Life,” “I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here,” and an especially wistful rendition of “Tomorrow.” While the musical productions are energetic, let’s just say these actors weren’t cast for their vocal chops. Foxx can certainly carry a tune, but his silky smooth rendition of “The City’s Yours,” one of three original songs written for the film, is incongruous with the fussy and fastidious Stacks. The rest of the singing is gratingly Auto-Tuned, particularly Diaz and Cannavale—their rendition of “Easy Street” is, well, bad. Just as warbly is Rose Byrne as Grace, Stacks’ personal assistant and Annie’s surrogate mommy figure.

Acting-wise, the cast is quite capable and witty, including the charming Wallis, who burst onto the cinematic scene in 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. The exception, again, is Diaz, who confuses Carol Burnett's boozy comic caricature from John Huston’s 1982 film adaptation for an overbroad, obnoxious dingbat.

The final act lumbers along, as a subplot to send Annie away with parental imposters segues into a pointless car chase and a regrettably tepid climactic song and dance number. Yet overall, this Annie breathes zeitgeist into an old fable. And if you don’t like the changes, hey, the sun’ll still come out tomorrow.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Cowa-Bungle

Grade: D +

Director: Jonathan Liebesman

Starring: Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner and Whoopi Goldberg

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 41 minutes

For all the promises of a new and improved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT), this Michael Bay-produced reboot is an exercise is generic, industrial line sameness. The budget is clearly bigger, but precious little of it was allocated to competent screenwriting. Or acting coaches.

The film is officially directed by Jonathan Liebesman, but if you played the Michael Bay drinking game and downed a shot for every windblown, zoom-in closeup, you’d be drunk inside the opening 10 minutes. Then imagine a Transformers movie where all the Transformers are Wheelie/Skids and, well, turtle-bots.

The contrivances start early, when the little girl who once rescued four genetically-altered turtles from a burning lab just happens to become April O’Neil (Megan Fox), the adult TV reporter who eventually stumbles across the quartet of talking, crime-fighting reptiles and their man-sized rat sensei, Splinter.

The secret, sewer-dwelling turtles—Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello—are busy protecting New York City from the dastardly Foot Clan and its leader, Shredder. Shredder wears a multi-bladed suit of armor and is the sort of villain who says things like, “Tonight, I will dine on turtle soup,” and “Activate the toxin release procedure.”

Ah, of course there’s always some toxin or mutagen or cellular alteration. And the grand plan of Shredder and nefarious industrialist William Fichtner … er, Eric Sachs (William Fichtner) is to release a deadly gas kept inside their skyscraper's spire, then clean up selling the antidote derived from the Ninja Turtles’ mutated blood. However, the baddies didn’t even know the TMNTs were alive until mere hours before turtle-napping them and revealing this plan, so when exactly did they assemble and erect this gas-filled spire? Was the poisonous gas always there, and if so, why didn’t the Foot Clan release it long ago before the TMNTs arrived instead of spending years committing petty street crimes? Or was it always an early investment in a get-rich-quick scheme just waiting for the right catalyst?

The rest of TMNT is a series of interchangeable set pieces and head-spinning visual effects, all punctuated by bad puns and faux-seriousness. And if by film’s end you have a sudden urge to scarf down pizza from a prominently-placed chain, well, that’s no accident either.

The motion-capture process used to render the turtles is quite striking. But to what purpose? "Cowabunga?" More like Cowa-bungle.