According to Colwell

The consensus among movie critics about Date Night seems to be that it is a big disappointment: Tina Fey and Steve Carrell are two of America’s funniest comic writers and actors, and here they are in a very ordinary comedy. Okay, maybe I’m using the word consensus a bit loosely, since I’m basing that on exactly two reviews, and both from New York at that (the Times and the New Yorker). But there’s a general tendency among movie critics to have a hard time appreciating movies that are not radically new and surprising. This probably has something to do with seeing a couple hundred movies a year, most of them crap, and most of the rest painfully familiar. Having been a 75-movies-a-year critic myself for a few years, I can empathize with those critics’ desire for true originality. I think it’s safe to say that unless you’re going to 100 movies a year or so, you’ll enjoy Date Night.

Carrell and Fey play a typical suburban couple with a couple of exhausting kids and an exhausting routine that finds them in a rut, the spark and romance sapped from their daily lives. The news that their friends are divorcing motivates them to go on a date at a trendy new restaurant in Manhattan. What follows is, to be sure, a relatively formulaic fish-out-of-water comedic plot, featuring the hapless couple on the run from gangsters for a madcap night of ridiculous adventures in Manhattan. But it does have an intelligent edge, and even the big preposterous gags are funny. Mark Wahlberg’s character never appears without a shirt, something that seemed to annoy the New York critics who mysteriously failed to recognize that that was a satirical comment on genre movies with hunks like Wahlberg showing off their buff bods. Carrell even finishes by begging Wahlberg to put on a shirt, using up the PG-13-rated Date Night’s one allotment for an F-bomb in the act.

Fey and Carrell are believable as a long-married couple, but more important, they are believable as an intelligent and witty couple saddled with the weight of routine. In addition to Wahlberg, Ray Liotta, James Franco and Kristen Wiig have funny bit parts. While Date Night does not break comedic ground, why should it have to? It’s simply funny.

Somewhere in The Runaways, the story of the pathbreaking all-girl rock band in the mid-1970s, are a few photons that were reflected off my daughter Aylia, who spent a day as an extra on the film. Sadly, those photons are indistinguishable from a blurry background. Nevertheless, the movie, starring Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Runaways singer Cherie Currie, was an interesting an entertaining tale of an overlooked part of rock history. While Jett has continued as the lead singer, songwriter, and guitarist of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Currie has been in and out of music, done some acting, and has frequently been out of show business since leaving the Runaways in 1977. The movie is at least as much Currie’s story as it is Jett’s, and in fact is based on Currie’s autobiography, Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story.

The young women of the Runaways are promoted by producer Kim Fowley, a flamboyant loudmouth who pushes Currie to flaunt her sexuality. While Fowley fantasizes about the Runaways being as transformative as the Beatles, as portrayed in the movie, he irresponsibly pushes them, exploits them, and foments controversy within the band. Not surprisingly, drugs become a major part of their lives. One wonders what might have become of the band had they had a producer like the Beatles’ George Martin instead of the narcissistic and irresponsible Fowley.

The movie is directed by Floria Sigismundi in her feature debut. Her inexperience shows perhaps in a general lack of sense of place or passage of time in the movie. When the girls are on the road playing concerts in dives, we don’t get a feel for where they are. On tour in Japan, it feels like LA with asian extras (the cars are shown driving on the right, unlike Japan’s left-side driving, for example). But she does an excellent job of capturing the mood of the girls, their band, and drawing great performances out of Stewart and Fanning.