Movie Review: Sisters (2015)

A raunchy comedy, Sisters benefits from sharp timing and chemistry of the two leads, but is otherwise one long endless scene of adults behaving badly.

Maura and Kate Ellis (Amy Poehler and Tina Fey) are sisters still trying to sort out their lives. Maura is divorced and has always placed everybody else's happiness ahead of hers. Kate is irresponsible, cannot hold a job and is a single mom to teenager Haley (Madison Davenport). They are both shocked and disappointed when their parents (James Brolin and Dianne Wiest) announce plans to sell the family home in Orlando.

While cleaning out their childhood rooms Maura and Kate decide to have one final bash in the big house and invite all their friends, but pointedly exclude Brinda (Maya Rudolph), Kate's frenemy since high school. The party is well attended but muted, until the alcohol and drugs start flowing and it turns into a raucous event. Kate is desperate to hook up with hunky handyman James (Ike Barinholtz), but the night will only get wilder and there are many scores to settle.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are a funny and fearless couple, share undeniable rapport and are unafraid to let loose and laugh at themselves. However, Sisters is unfortunately beneath them. The Paula Pell script works its way in fits and starts to the big party scene, and that is where it stays. There is some fun to be had with adults partying as if they were 20 years younger, but once the rowdy and juvenile antics take over the film quickly runs out of steam.

The funnier moments are the side quests burrowing deep into irreverence, such as Maura and Korean aesthetician Hae Won (Greta Lee) descending into an ill considered but hilarious pronunciation duel, or bad girl Kate drooling over tree trunk armed drug dealer Pazuzu (John Cena).

Every 15 minutes or so director Jason Moore briefly pauses the raunchiness for a brief interlude featuring more tender interaction, either between the sisters or exploring the dysfunctionality dominating the mother-daughter bond between Haley and Kate. The attempts to tackle themes of growing up and settling down appear slapped together and never convince, with James Brolin and Dianne Wiest reduced to caricatures in the parent roles.

The Sisters are ready and willing to deliver laughs, but need a more ambitious venue than one long night of irresponsibility.

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Movie Review: Mean Girls (2004)

A high-school comedy about girls fitting in, Mean Girls brings plenty of edgy attitude and delivers a funny, uncompromised story about the perils of the pack.

Sixteen year old Cady (Lindsay Lohan) has been home-schooled all her life, Now her parents have relocated from Africa to Evanston, Illinois, and Cady has to face the wilderness that is her local high school. She meets two happy independent-minded students in semi-Gothic Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and openly gay Damian (Daniel Franzese), but Cady is soon exposed to the most envied girl trio in the school: the pretty, fashionable, cool and snooty Plastics. Their queen bee is Regina (Rachel McAdams), and her clique consists of the submissive Gretchen (Lacey Chabert) and the quite dense Karen (Amanda Seyfried).

Regina sizes up Cady and gives her a chance to join the troop. Janis seizes the opportunity to use Cady as an informant to reveal the secrets of the Plastics. Cady starts to develop a crush on classmate Aaron (Jonathan Bennett), but learns that he's off limits because he was Regina's former boyfriend. It does not take long for Cady to be both horrified and seduced by the mean-spirited behaviour of the Plastics, and to learn that belonging means making difficult choices.

Directed by Mark Waters and written by Tina Fey (who gives herself a small but shiny role as a teacher with problems of her own), Mean Girls pulls no punches. Life in suburbia is portrayed as a hazardous jungle with the animals barely concealed beneath a veneer of civility, and Cady's challenge is to adapt to her new environment or be eaten alive. Waters keeps the laughs coming in a compact 97 minute package, and the humour is continuously juiced with the poison spewed by teenagers defining their turf and individuality to scare away the perceived competition.

Without fully escaping the limitations of the high school comedy genre, Mean Girls manages to stretch. Cady makes every mistake in the book, attempting to be nice, having a foot in a couple of camps, and trying to join the Plastics while simultaneously spying on them. She is of course doomed to fail in the most spectacular way, and Mean Girls gets the environment right: the long-established rules of place will dominate the individual, redefining social norms is bound to fail, and belonging to competing herds is not smart: it is treason.

Cady flirts with the dark side and demonstrates to herself how easy it is to transition from eager wannabe to a broadly despised pretender. To regain her balance she will need to learn to carve out her own niche, rather than try to change the evolutionary order. Fey does struggle a bit with the final chapter, as Cady's attempts at atonement are clumsily (and literally) run over by a bus.

Before Lindsay Lohan embarked on her career-destroying lifestyle, she was one of Hollywood's most promising young actresses, and here she proves why. Lohan finds the space for Cady to be both the smart outsider and the eager wannabe, grounded by a stable family-oriented upbringing but not immune to the seductive forces of cheap popularity. In contrast Rachel McAdams did use early roles like Regina as fuel for a successful career, and here she goes all-in as the embodiment of haughty entitlement. Regina has the perfect role model in her mom (Amy Poehler), a woman with all the money she needs to not care about what it means to be a parent.

Mean Girls is smart, sassy, real, rude, and often, a riot of laughs.

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Movie Review: Inside Out (2015)

An animated drama-comedy about the inner workings of a young girl's brain, Inside Out pushes all the right emotional buttons but also suffers from Disney's frustratingly formulaic "journey" clichés.

Riley Anderson (voice of Kaitlyn Dias) is a girl from Minnesota, and her brain headquarters is controlled by five emotions. The dominant Joy (Amy Poehler) does her best to keep Riley happy, but she is often hampered by Sadness (Phyllis Smith). They are supported by occasional interventions from the combustible Anger (Lewis Black), the perpetually frantic Fear (Bill Hader) and the snooty Disgust (Mindy Kaling). Riley grows into a generally happy child who loves hockey, her family, and friends, with Joy working hard to create and store mostly cheerful memories within Riley's brain.

When Riley is eleven, her father (Kyle MacLachlan) and mother (Diane Lane) decide to relocate the family to San Francisco. This turns into a stressful experience, and Joy struggles to keep Riley positive. Sadness becomes more influential, and a struggle between her and Joy results in both of them inadvertently ejected out of the brain's headquarters and into the cavernous, complex areas of the brain where long-term memories and long-forgotten experiences are stored. Riley slips into a depression as Anger, Fear and Disgust unsuccessfully struggle to maintain control while Joy and Sadness embark on a complex journey to make their way back to HQ.

A Disney / Pixar production directed by Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen, Inside Out is a polished children's tale, aimed at the pre-teen market with enough edge and humour to also keep their parents well entertained. For the intended target, the premise is relatively original and the animation imaginative, with Riley's brain proving to be expansive, rich territory to house a story about what makes us human.

Docter co-wrote the script, and does not shy away from some sensitive topics. The complications that come with major life changes, stressed parents unintentionally straining their kids, and the perils of depression come to the fore, and as much as Inside Out is a comedy, it offers avenues for serious conversations about somber challenges triggered by life's milestones.

As a movie, the first half is by far stronger. Docter has breezy fun establishing Riley's emotional-drivers and the brain's workings, finding winning metaphors in shiny globes representing memories, a vault-like system for storing core, foundational events, and suspended islands that bring to life her various personalities. Joy is the tireless leader of Riley's emotions, the pursuit of happiness usually able to dominate other, less constructive emotions. Amy Poehler delivers a dedicated and energetic voice performance to convey Joy's irrepressible attitude.

But the more serious second half gets bogged down in one of Disney's all-too-familiar journey treks, Joy and Sadness having to find their way back to HQ through the deep recesses of Riley's brain. Here events, locations and characters are much more hit-and-miss, long-lost imaginary friend Bing Bong (Richard Kind) only partially successful, a short-cut through an abstraction chamber missing the mark entirely, while a cut-out boyfriend image also drops in and out with little context. The film bogs down, intermittently tiresome and sometimes repetitive as Riley's personality islands suffer the effects of her dysfunctional emotions.

Regardless of some shortcomings, Inside Out deserves enormous credit for steering away from any kind of antagonist, both in Riley's real life and in her brain. There are no bad guys or villains; Riley's troubles are triggered by everyday events, her balance tipped by unintended pressures. The perils lie within, as do the solutions. And the film moves towards a clever, unexpected outcome, with a mature lesson about the complementary role of all that makes us function emotionally.

Inside Out peeks inside the brain and finds familiar organized chaos helping to create moments both funny and sad, and fertile ground for the human process of emotional growth.

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