It's Complicated

You're old...isn't that funny?

Grade: C

Director: Nancy Meyers

Starring: Meryl Street, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, John Krasinksi, and Lake Bell

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 58 minutes

“It’s Complicated” is, indeed, but just not in the way one would expect. At its rail-thin best, it is a leisurely tale about two former spouses who – years after he, Jake (Alec Baldwin), left she, Jane (Meryl Streep), for a younger set of abs with a conspicuously natty name, Agness (Lake Bell) – begin to rendezvous in secret at sundry bedrooms and her kitchen. Being that the ways to a man’s heart are through his stomach and other lower extremities, it is little wonder that Jake begins to long for the comforts of what might have been instead of weekly trips to the fertility clinic with his headstrong trophy wife. There is something relevant here to ponder: The vain hunt for eternal youth versus the earned dividends of hearth and home.

It’s a universal story, really. Oh, unless you don’t own a boutique bakery and live in a sprawling Santa Barbara ranch house that you want to remodel with a new kitchen and bedroom (sledgehammer irony alert…). Or, if you’re not a Porsche-driving attorney who can apparently spend every waking minute jetting from coast-to-coast to jump in the sack with your ex-wife. Or, unless your grown children aren’t a gaggle of lobotomized Stepford kids who can emote either hurt or hilarity, but only on cue, and who have married and/or graduated college but always seem to be around for dinner parties and sleepovers where the whole family dons their pajamas and munches popcorn while watching The Graduate.

In truth, It’s Complicated is more the insular perspective of writer-director Nancy Meyers, whose innocuous parables of independent women that she wrote while married in her 20s and 30s – Private Benjamin and Baby Boom –have given way to pseudo-feminist pap the now-divorced Meyers spins about high-strung, self-pitying SoCalers of privilege with “problems” the average moviegoer could only hope to have the chance to suffer – Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, and now this.

Poor Jane feels a bad case of empty nest syndrome coming on, despite her bustling business, creature comforts, dalliance with Jake, and the non-threatening advances of her architect, Adam, played by an emasculated Steve Martin. All the while, she is cheered on her middle-aged coffee klatch – including the suddenly ubiquitous Rita Wilson, happy to walk-through only her third-worst film of 2009 behind Old Dogs and My Life In Ruins.

Movies are about escapism, and perhaps some will identity with scenes in which Jane and Jake both mourn and guffaw how time (and, in Baldwin’s case, bad eating habits) have ravaged their once-youthful bodies. But, jokes like Jane and Adam rediscovering the joys of getting stoned are overbroad and simple-minded – usual only to allow Martin to flash some glimpse of his inner wild and crazy guy. Almost every one-liner, sight-gag, and screwball set piece falls flat, none of them advancing the film’s purportedly complex tableau.

Fans of Baldwin and John Krasinksi will barely recognize them as the same talented comic actors from 30 Rock and The Office, respectively. For her part, Streep is in full Mamma Mia mode, trying to use her trademark chortle to mask the film’s numerous cinematic sins. Alas, this task proves too complicated, even for one of our greatest film actresses.

Neil Morris

The Pink Panther 2

"I'm gonna wash this role right out of my hair..."

Grade: D
Director: Harald Zwart
Starring: Steve Martin, Jean Reno, Emily Mortimer, Andy Garcia, Alfred Molina, John Cleese, Lily Tomlin, and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
MPAA Rating: PG
Running Time: 1 hour, 32 minutes

I don't blame Steve Martin for making The Pink Panther 2. There is not exactly a wealth of plum film roles reserved for 60-something-year-old comedians, no matter their résumé ("paging Chevy Chase..."). And, although reviving the rather outmoded “Pink Panther” movie series seemed questionable when Martin assumed the role of Inspector Jacques Clouseau in February of 2006, the nearly $159 million worldwide box office gross that followed silenced many naysayers.

Martin is a talented entertainer who has parlayed his wild and crazy stand-up act into a well-rounded career that includes several seminal comedies and, lately, dramatic producing and writing credits (Shopgirl and the thriller Traitor). However, this is also the same guy who rose to fame telling jokes with a fake arrow piercing his head. So, one should not be surprised when Martin churns out lowbrow moneymakers like Cheaper by the Dozen and Bringing Down the House, especially if these films give him the financial wherewithal to pursue more esteemed interests.

In this context, it is almost ancillary that Pink Panther 2 is utterly awful. Whereas the Peter Sellers films succeeded, in part, by striving to absurd lengths to play its inanity straight, Martin's incarnation strains to act as though it is in on jokes that either do not exist or land like bunker-buster bombs. The result is far more in keeping with Roberto Benigni's woeful Son of the Pink Panther, which was so bad it drove Clouseau creator/director Blake Edwards out of the movie business.

Helmed by the director of One Night at McCool's and Agent Cody Banks, Pink Panther 2 finds Clouseau teaming with a group of international detectives to track down a cat burglar known as "The Tornado," who is stealing historic artifacts around the world, including the priceless Pink Panther diamond. For supposed laughs, there are the sad surfeit of exaggerated accents, unending pratfalls, and annoying reaction shots. An American plays a Frenchman, a Cuban (Andy Garcia) plays an Italian, and Alfred Molina ends up wearing a tutu. And, honestly, I thought gags involving pope lookalikes passed on with John Paul II.

The single-digit chuckles come during Martin and Lily Tomlin's brief scenes together. And, this film puts to rest any debate over whether Aishwarya Rai is the most stunningly beautiful woman in cinema, although in her role as a criminology expert, it's clear she left her acting skills back in Bollywood.

The film flatlines around the time Clouseau's faithful sidekick, Ponton (Jean Reno), washes his partner's hair, during which the two launch into a song-and-dance inspired by the pronunciation of Jojoba shampoo. Those responsible for Pink Panther 2 evidently thought this was hilarious; it, along with the whole film, just made me want to shoot an arrow through my head.

Neil Morris

Baby Mama

Listen girls, I was killing aliens when you
two were still catching the bus to school.

Grade: C +
Director: Michael McCullers
Starring: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Greg Kinnear, Dax Shepard, Romany Malco, Steve Martin, Sigourney Weaver, and Maura Tierney
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 36 minutes

The most cautionary – and perplexing – aspect about the Tina Fey vehicle Baby Mama is not the fact that its humor runs no deeper than its trite title, but that Fey did not write the screenplay. That (dis)credit goes to ex-Saturday Night Live scribe Michael McCullers (Undercover Brother and the second Austin Powers movie is the good news; Thunderbirds and the third Austin Powers movie is the bad), who also directs this surprisingly tepid take on pregnancy and surrogate motherhood.

To the extent Fey – herself a new mother and the scribe of Mean Girls and 30 Rock – appears more comfortable training her trademark acerbic wit on milieus with which she is both familiar and latently disdainful of (high school; the corporate world of broadcast television) than the miracle of childbirth.

When Fey’s Kate Holbrook, VP for a health food conglomerate headed by a middle-age uptown hippie (Steve Martin, hilarious in spurts), learns she is functionally infertile, she hires an uncouth woman, Angie (Amy Poehler, now definitively funnier on TV than films), to be her surrogate mother. Kate and Angie’s Betty & Veronica act traverses the well-worn travails of pregnancy, while banalities over who is really pregnant – and by who – dominate a film that also features a parade of SNLers marching to the beat of composer Jeff Richmond’s painfully saccharine soundtrack.

A welcome collection of second-tier celebrities populate the supporting roles – including Sigourney Weaver as head of a surrogate clinic, Dax Shepard as Angie’s white trash common-law husband, and Maura Tierney as Kate’s sister (will Tierney ever get a really good role?) – but they are given little in the way of workable material. Romany Malco gets the sharpest lines, but it is in the role of the proverbial black, jive-talkin’ doorman. Greg Kinnear proves perhaps the best of the lot as Rob, a juice-bar owner who falls for Kate, but even he looks as though locked in a one-man battle to elevate an otherwise uneven and underwritten role.

Long before the water starts breaking, this film meanders with the energy of an old river. McCullers’ idea of humor is a birthing instructor with a lisp, who McCullers returns to no less than three times for a comedic booster shot. In the meantime, the road to convert Fey into leading lady status proves a bumpy one, and while her brand of comedy is seen by many as the kindler, gentler alternative to the crass masculinity of Apatow oeuvre, what Baby Mama needs is a lot more Knocked Up and a lot less Baby Boom.

Neil Morris