In the 1930s, people had the Marx Brothers for their dose of wild farce.  In the early 2000s, they have SpongeBob Squarepants, considerably weirder and even crazier than Groucho and Co.  One look at that female squirrel in her Treedome under the sea and you realize that.  But this particular wild farce isn’t for everyone:  it’s animated—and now on a movie screen, not a TV screen, for the second time.

2015’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water serves up a plot too fanciful to keep up with and a bad-guy pirate (who runs his ship on Auto Pirate) acted by Antonio Banderas.  The cartoon farce rolls on until it is joined by a comparatively tame live action sequence on the beach, and then by some pallid “superhero” action.  So the movie isn’t perfect, but it is utterly, delightfully mirthful.  And it has a sweetly fey hero in . . . an underwater sponge.  

SpongeBob SquarePants (character) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So the arch-villain in Jane the Virgin is a woman—Rose (Bridget Regan).  What a campy show this is!  And what’s this about her husband getting killed by wet cement that Rose deliberately pours on top of him?

We love this show for its camp.  But in the Chapter 13 episode, we also witness a fairly earnest, somewhat moving account of how a couple confronts the threat of a miscarriage.  Yep, I’m talking about lovable Jane and hard-to-pin-down Rafael.  Jane, you’ll recall, was artificially inseminated by mistake and wants to keep the baby.  It was the mistake of a woman, Dr. Luisa:  When women here aren’t making serious blunders, they’re perpetrating evil!  There’s Rose but there is also Petra, albeit a sympathetic character now.  Not that there’s a real problem with ALL the women, though.  Jane is lovable; and so are her grandmother (Ivonne Coll) and, yes, once trampy mother (Andrea Navedo).

By the way, I have written that Yara Martinez (Luisa) has a conventional beauty and Yael Grobglas (Petra) an unconventional beauty.  Bridget Regan’s is somewhere between the two.

Adios.

Reality Bites is trashy inanity not even worth reviewing.

Among other absurdities, we are supposed to believe that, after she loses her job at a TV station, Winona Ryder’s Lelaina, the valedictorian of her college class, can’t even handle a job selling hamburgers at a fast-food joint because she isn’t good enough at math (she must settle for working at a filling station instead).  More, we are supposed to accept and condone that director Ben Stiller has Lelaina show up at a more or less respectable event wearing an elegant dress without a bra, so that of course her breasts will jiggle when she has an altercation with her boyfriend (played by Stiller himself) and angrily marches out of the building.  Or maybe it was the producers who were responsible for this.  Either way, it’s crass.

Cover via Amazon

Lacey Chabert plays Gwyneth—she whom God is pursuing—in Christian Mingle and is wonderful.  She delights by handling comedy even more confidently than she did in Mean Girls, and she is “natural” enough for a romance picture, for the role of lovelorn professional.  Her acting as varied as it should be, when she innocently declares, “I want Jesus in my life,” it is touching.  Unsurprisingly, there is too much product placement in Mingle—that of ChristianMingle.com—but not too much Chabert.

I say again that religious content in Bernsen’s film is very unsubtle, but how much does this matter?  Does it matter at all?  Unsubtlety here might have its own fascination, particularly since the film, for all its shortcomings, avoids becoming preachy.  Christian Mingle is sort of a curio.

English: American voice actress Lacey Chabert, former voice actor of Meg Griffin, a Family Guy character. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jesus to His followers:  “Ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.”

Well, not yet.  In America, there is often something different going on.  Gwyneth, the chief character in Christian Mingle (2014), signs up with Christian Mingle, an actual dating website for born-again folks, and meets regenerate Paul Wood, becoming infatuated with him.  This she does despite being secular and unchurched (she just wants to meet a decent guy)—a fact she hides from her beau-to-be lest he reject her.  Lest he reject her!

The pretense proceeds apace, and there are funny moments—Mingle is a low-key comedy—but Gwyneth can’t keep it up.  It’s a sure thing, even so, that nature has trumped the act of refusing a devout person.  Now it is time for spiritual awakening to trump nature.  The movie has less to do with Gwyneth’s romantic problems than with God’s pursuit of her.

Corbin Bernsen wrote and directed this picture, and in terms of religion it is very unsubtle.  Further, the denouement and the part before that are not as satisfying as what precedes them. . . I will write about the acting and more after I see Christian Mingle a second time.  Wait for the next post.