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.

Green Zone, which brings together reunites Bourne director Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon, has some of the same gritty tension from the streets of Baghdad that made The Hurt Locker so gripping. But unlike Locker, which concentrated on the personal and battlefield experiences of a handful of soldiers, Green Zone is wrapped in a package designed to tell the story of the whole sorry mess of how we got into the war in the first place and how we got on the path that led Iraq to years of sectarian violence. It’s an ambitious goal for what is superficially an action movie, and if one accepts the simplifications of that story as legitimate artistic license, it is a goal that is pulled off quite neatly.

It is painful to watch Chief Warrant Officer Miller (Damon) and his team going into dangerous sites in and around Baghdad looking for the infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction that will never be found. In spite of pointed directives from his superiors that his is not to question why, his is but to dig and try, Miller wants to understand why the intelligence reports are consistently wrong. When an Iraqi informs him of a suspicious meeting of high-ranking Iraqi military in a nearby house, Miller takes part of his team “off the reservation” to go after a target that won’t turn out to be a figment of everyone’s imagination. This leads him into a power struggle between the cocky young mastermind of Iraqi reconstruction, Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), an underling and proxy for Paul Bremer - the man behind the policy of de-Baathification, and one wizened CIA agent, played by Brendan Gleeson, who had the sense to see the turmoil that was about to ensue.

With Greengrass’s characteristic fast-moving handheld camera tracking chaotic chases and action, and Miller’s dogged pursuit of the truth behind the faulty intelligence reports, Green Zone manages to make you believe for a time that things might turn out differently. And it is smart enough at the same time to emphasize that even a different outcome, perhaps better by some standards, would have been a bloody, and a moral, mess.

Full disclosure: my brother was the First Assistant Director on this movie, and somewhere in the background of one scene is the back of my daughter’s head. Like many of Nancy Meyers’ movies (Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday), It’s Complicated concerns the relatively uncomplicated problems of middle-aged people with beautiful houses, exquisite taste, and a bit of relationship trouble. Here, Jane (Meryl Streep) and Jake (Alec Baldwin) are the long-divorced parents of a trio of perfect children, the youngest of whom has just graduated, and another of whom is about to be married to Harley (John Krasinski). Jane has a classy bakery, while Jake has a classless younger wife, Agness, whose five-year-old son she had with another man while married to Jake. While Agness (yes, two s’s) drags Jake to fertility treatments to get another baby, he begins to long for the life he left behind. Just as Jane begins to entertain the idea (perhaps, post-mid-life crisis, she can reconnect with the Jake she first fell in love with), a less-complicated option in the form of Steve Martin’s architect, Adam, appears. Adam is designing a major addition to Jane’s already splendid Santa Barbara mansion. He is careful, quiet, and a bit unsure of himself, which is a fun casting against type of Martin, while Jake is brash, a bit reckless, and far more sure of himself than he probably should be.

Jane and Jake’s grown kids are confused by the sudden reappearance of their father in their mother’s life, and Jane is confused about her feelings for Jake and Adam, and Adam is confused about whether or not Jane is actually available. Jake, played with typical mischievous glee by Baldwin, is the one who seems pretty sure about what he wants, namely, to lose the complications of his young wife and her manipulative kid and regain the comfortable security of his original family. Krasinski, as the future son-in-law, provides a number of funny moments, and the movie garners an R rating for an extended scene where Jane and Adam are stoned at a party. It’s Complicated has a number of funny scenes and managed to keep me guessing about just how Jane, who is the central character of the movie, would decide to deal with her complications.