Top Five

Take note: I didn't wear a suit & tie

for Grown Ups 2.

Grade: B

Director: Chris Rock

Starring: Chris Rock, Rosario Dawson, Gabrielle Union, JB Smoove, Leslie Jones, Tracy Morgan, Romany Malco, Anders Holm and Cedric the Entertainer

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 41 min.

Incorporating loose elements from Cinderella, Top Five is writer-director-star Chris Rock’s fractured fairy tale about the travails of being black and famous in America. Part comedy, part confessional, the film’s eclectic Woody Allen echoes reverberate through an urban canyon, following a meandering path that nonetheless reaches a thoughtful and even poignant destination.

Rock plays the thinly-veiled Andre Allen, a former standup comedian turned film star in the midst of two professional/personal turning points. Allen yearns to transcend his star-making but ultimately humiliating recurring movie role named “Hammy the Bear.” So, he decides to make a “serious” film named Uprize, a humorless but misbegotten movie about Dutty Boukman and the bloody 1791 Haitian slave revolt. Meanwhile, Allen is poised to marry Erica (Gabrielle Union), a blond weave-wearing reality TV star who is coordinating the wedding as a ratings-grabbing event for Bravo.

The success of both endeavors is crucial for Allen, a recovering alcoholic who is one flop away from having to stoop to Dancing With the Stars, according to his agent (Kevin Hart). So Allen agrees to be interviewed for The New York Times by Chelsea Brown, a reporter and single mom unintimidated by Allen’s celebrity and dismissive demeanor.

Together, they traverse Allen’s life, starting with his new world of PR reps, groupies, opportunists, and a media that vacillates between unctuous and antagonistic. They make their way back to Allen’s old neighborhood, where his father (Ben Vereen) begs for money whilst branding his son as a sellout. Allen’s extended friends and relatives—played by Tracy Morgan, Leslie Jones, Sherri Shepherd, Jay Pharoah and others—sit around and argue endlessly about their top five all-time rappers.

These lists of hip-hop superlatives are the film’s refrain, the ties that binds Allen’s divergent circles together. Meantime, Allen grapples with the fact that he feels like a stranger in both worlds, with duplicity around every corner. Ultimately, the only place he feels utterly at home and can “keep it real" is the one place he vows to never return: the comedy stage.

Top Five is profusely profane, and the sexuality of several scenes straddles the line of being gratuitous—a hotel scene involving a hedonistic Cedric the Entertainer and two hookers springs to mind. Then there are the kinky proclivities of Chelsea’s closeted boyfriend.

Indeed, only a Chris Rock movie would tackle the pitfalls of an interracial relationship involving a closeted gay man, or show a bawdy Jerry Seinfeld making it rain in a strip club, or reel off a joke about Marilyn Monroe and JFK’s assassination. Despite its rather formulaic finale, it all works by somehow bemoaning the worries of the rich and famous without sacrificing its mainstream accessibility.

Death at a Funeral

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Grade: B –

Director: Neil LaBute

Starring: Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan, Regina Hall, Zoe Saldana, James Marsden, Luke Wilson, Danny Glover, and Peter Dinklage

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

For those wondering why there’s a remake of Death at a Funeral a scant three years after the original’s lackluster release, look no further than Neil LaBute. While the first film bore the novelty of a British comedy directed by an American – Frank Oz – and starring several American actors, the follow-up distinguishes itself in two principal ways. First is the African-American bent of a splintered, somewhat dysfunctional family brought together on the occasion of the passing of one of its patriarchs.

The other is LaBute, hardly a household name whose legacy as a director was cemented in the minds of movie critics and indie film fans by his audacious debuts, In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. His two-headed monument to modern-day misanthropy both conceded and laid bare a world of masculine survival of the fittest, where sadism and masochism thrive and the meek inherit nothing but personal and professional sorrow. They were depressing to watch only because they carried an uncomfortable, cynical truth. In the minds of many, they were brilliant.

Of course, even brilliant cynicism wears thin over time, for moviegoers, producers, and even the filmmaker himself. So, as LaBute has flailed about the last decade looking for different directions to point his talents, the quality of that work has precipitously dropped – Possession and The Wicker Man remake, for goodness sake?! Beginning in 2000 with Nurse Betty and resurfacing with Lakeview Terrace, LaBute has shown a recurring curiosity for the contemporary African-American experience, an interest he revives in Death at a Funeral.

On the day of his father’s funeral, Aaron (Chris Rock) finds himself at a personal crossroads. He is the older son who remained at home while his younger, more popular brother, Ryan (Martin Lawrence), made his way in the world as a somewhat successful author. Aaron and his wife, Michelle (Regina Hall), live in Aaron’s parents’ house under the mindful eye of his mother (Loretta Devine) and her blunt demand for a grandchild. The funeral also brings together an assortment of family and friends. There’s old Uncle Russell (Danny Glover), who basically eats, sleeps, and swears a lot (actually, everyone swears a lot; it’s a Neil LaBute film). There are family friends Norman (Tracy Morgan) and Derek (Luke Wilson), who still pines for Cousin Elaine (Zoe Saldana), who is now dating Oscar (James Marsden), much to the chagrin of Elaine’s dad (Ron Glass). And, then there’s a mysterious, diminutive stranger, Frank (Peter Dinklage, who starred in the British original), who reveals a furtive relationship with the dearly departed.

You get the picture, and so does LaBute, who gives lip service to a potpourri social dividing lines – racial, gender, age, class, sexual orientation, and familial strife. None of them are enough to give Death at a Funeral any particular import – it’s far too slapsticky for that. But, they strike enough familiar chords to conjure that edgy, discomfiting LaBute ethos.

The two most restrained actors are the ones you’d least expect, Rock and Lawrence. LaBute wisely leaves the hijinks to others, including Morgan, Glover, and especially Marsden, whose scene-stealing antics after Oscar unwittingly drops acid carry the movie until their 20-minute or so screen-life expires and begin testing the audience’s patience.

While the film is briskly paced at an efficient 90 minutes, its premise begins to wear thin by the last half-hour. And, LaBute too often goes the Farrelly brothers route by relying on the crutch of scatological snickers. Still, it’s an entertaining farce that works best when it thinks least. Death at a Funeral is anything but DOA, but it is hardly the long-awaited second-coming of Neil LaBute’s career.

Neil Morris

G-Force

I think we need more roofies

Grade: D +

Director: Hoyt Yeatman

Starring: Bill Nighy, Will Arnett, Zach Galifianakis, and the voices of Nicolas Cage, Sam Rockwell, Jon Favreau, Penelope Cruz, Tracy Morgan, and Steve Buscemi

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 29 minutes

It never ceases to amaze me that the worst animated kid’s movies seem to have the most screenwriters. Five ignominious credits are attached to Disney latest non-Pixar flop, G-Force. However, it is only important to note that the flagship writers, a husband-wife team who go professionally by The Wibberleys, have a resume that could not be worse if you made it up: Both National Treasure duds, The Shaggy Dog and I Spy remakes, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, and even Bad Boys II, for god’s sake.

All the 3-D animation and celebrity voice-work in the world cannot change the fact that G-Force is one dull, lifeless, and rather creepy waste of time. A specially trained squad of rodents and insects working for the government, along with their human minder (Zach Galifianakis, still too soon after The Hangover to take him seriously), are dispatched to thwart a megalomaniacal billionaire (Bill Nighy in human form, slumming for a paycheck) and his shadowy conspirators from world domination.

Photorealistic depictions of animated animals can work just fine – see Ratatouille. But, the sight of icky moles and crawling cockroaches is just plain discomforting when devoid of charm and a well-crafted screenplay. And, the quartet of cutesy special agent guinea pigs is just a high-pitched medley away from an Alvin & the Chipmunks sequel.

The digital 3-D animation provides a passing distraction, but even it is rather lackluster. Of all the voice-work, only an unrecognizable Nicolas Cage seems to grasp the medium as the nebbish Speckles the mole. Everyone else, even the reliable Tracy Morgan, is just reciting badly written lines.

There are inexplicable car chases and an effects-laden finale in G-Force. But, none of it makes the least bit of sense (something to do with marauding home appliances), and you find yourself wishing the villain would do us all a favor and just hire an exterminator.

Neil Morris