Actor Vince Vaughn (a libertarian Republican?) knows perfectly well we have a sub-par economy these days and has co-written, and stars in, The Internship (2013), about two watch salesmen whose company folds and thereby leaves the gents jobless.  Afterwards Billy (Vaughn) and Nick (Owen Wilson) decide to become unpaid interns for Google—oh, let us glorify Google; wall-to-wall product placement is here—in the hope of getting hired by the lucrative company.  The pair learn a thing or two about computers and how to sell the Internet while blithely taking the young interns who are their co-competitors out of their insulated digital world for a while (not invariably in ways I condone).

Shawn Levy directed, and it is an indubitably superior flick to Levy’s Date Night (2010).  Alas, to me it is not much funnier than Date Night but neither is it a total loss as comedic cinema.  Far from it.  The cast is fun, Vaughn and Wilson most of all—and pretty Rose Byrne and Tiya Sircar are on hand.  A few hokey bits pop up, and I regret that the Byrne character is such an easy lay for Nick, but the movie is good at thrusting us into the Contemporary Scene, consisting of young adult worries about employment no less than of computer apps.  It’s a genial piece with workmanlike directing, editing and cinematography behind it.  In addition, I’d call it . . . libertarian.

English: Vince Vaughn at CMJ Festival 2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The comic movie Bachelorette (2012) is slight.  Not slight-but-good, in my view; just slight.  And it shouldn’t be.

The three main women in the film (based on a play by Lesyle Headland, the movie’s director) are obnoxious and distasteful, two of whom (Isla Fisher and Lizzy Caplan) are cokeheads and one of whom (Kirsten Dunst) is simply bitchy.  Motivations for Fisher’s drugged-out behavior are naught but a mystery, and not much is done with Dunst’s character either.  Some of the movie’s scenes are amusing, and the acting is spot-on, but too often the film tries to get its laughs merely through obscene talk.  It’s a unremittingly profane film.  Indeed, profanity or not, for Regan (Dunst) to urge an overweight friend to adopt a vindictive “F**k everyone!” attitude is, or should be, offputting.

The very pretty Miss Kirsten is a good actress now, deserving better pictures than she has been in lately, Bachelorette included.

Kirsten Dunst (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Notwithstanding I am one who never wants to see chickens escape their farmyard concentration camps, I had a good time observing the efforts of all the freedom-seeking fowls in Chicken Run (2000), by the creators of the well-known “Wallace and Gromit”—viz. Peter Lord and Nick Park. 

A family picture, it serves up conventional and wholesome humor as well as clay animation not exactly at its most attractive (I’m thinking of the chickens).  Oh well.  Nearly everything about CR comes off.  Screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick manages the one-liners skillfully.  Consider:  it is a frightful, awful place, this chicken farm, and by and by the fowls find out they are to be ruthlessly transformed into chicken pies.  “I don’t want to be a pie,” blurts out a dumb but sweet chicken called Babs.  “I don’t like gravy.”  Even funnier are many of the nonchalant utterances of Rocky, an American rooster on whom the chickens depend for salvation.  I note that he’s American because all the other animated figures are British, which leads me to an observation:  Emanating from Brits, this picture depicts British know-all and American muscle (Rocky’s), but never American know-how.

Cover of Chicken Run

World War Z (2013)—Z stands for zombie—is a war movie.  Or, at any rate, it is until it reaches the World Health Organization facility where it proves itself to be a medical thriller as well.  But, yes, the film displays the continual military firing upon fast-moving zombies, as if Allied warriors were fighting supernatural Nazis.

At first, though, Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) struggles to protect his family from the zombies in a well-executed busy street sequence.  Later, Gerry is called upon by his old employer, the U.N., to help look for a solution, and sheer mayhem and desperate soldiering follow.  An adaptation of a novel by Max Brooks, the story eventually becomes more far-fetched than it should—what makes Gerry so sure the people the zombies are leaving alone are sick?—but the good news is this:

1. The stupidity that exists in the entertaining Fast and Furious 6 does not exist here.  2. Director Marc Forster keeps the movie kinetically thrilling and visually compelling.  The looted supermarket stuff is an example, as are the shots of undead critters climbing the high wall of Jerusalem and soon getting shot at by Israeli aircraft.  Just as powerful, however, is a relatively quiet scene where Gerry tries to fend off a zombie at the WHO facility.

World War Z is quite the dreadnought.  But, hey, Mireille Enos (The Killing) has too small a part as Gerry’s wife.  Moviemakers, let’s see what Enos can do.  We’ve long been aware of what zombies can do.

Brad Pitt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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• World War Z Review

Written and directed by Neil LaBute, The Shape of Things (2003) is based on LaBute’s play of the same name.  What the four-character piece tells us is that amatory love is squalid, innocence is repulsively assaulted, and contemporary art—yes, there’s even something about art—or pseudo-art is ludicrous, sometimes hurtful, folly.  Indeed, it is something for the Messalinas of the world to obsess about.

Unfortunately LaBute has wrought a specious plot, thus causing a misshaping for The Shape of Things.  But at least the film isn’t frivolous or boring.  The bulk of the acting I l like since, for one thing, Gretchen Mol, like Rachel Weisz (the film’s Messalina), knows how to be nuanced.  Paul Rudd, on the other hand, does not quite convince as a man who changes into something other than a shy naif. 

Cover of The Shape of Things