Skip to main content

Life of the Party

😝😝😝😉😉
      This most recent Melissa McCarthy vehicle is just another example of the Peter Principal in play. The Peter Principal, in a nutshell, says that an individual's advancing career often rises to a level of incompetency...more simply put: just because you're good at one thing doesn't mean you'll be good in something related.
      McCarthy, at age 48, has grown into a first class comedic actor. She takes a plainly cute pudgy face and a body challenged by gravity and molds them into a variety of roles from male political figures to hilarious debs. However, this movie, her second failed attempt at screenwriting, screams out her limitations. The same is true for the comedic actor Ben Falcone, director and co-screenwriter for Life of the Party.
      If you subtract McCarthy from the film you're left with essentially nothing. Nothing funny, nothing clever, no story, horribly bad timing, and an hour and 45 minutes of "why am I sitting here".
      It is the screenwriting and timing that are the major culprits. McCarthy and some other character roles land a decent size cornucopia of jokes, mostly aimed at the 20 to 30 crowd, but they're dropped into scenes of tedious dialog that each end like a slow curtain in a Middle School play.
      The story, what there is of it, is painfully predictable especially as it concludes. The notable exception is the odd, mostly sexual, cougar relationship McCarthy is handed. It was likely written to fit the screenwriter's "cool idea" of the funniest way for a woman to get back at her ex-husband. Sorry...it didn't work.
      If there is a lesson here it's for Melissa McCarthy: don't even think about directing,


3 Stinks 2 Winks

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Deadpool 2

😝😝😝😉😉       If you are the least bit saturated with "action" films then wading into Deadpool 2 will simply leave you ever more damp.       Even with all its campy dialog, humorous one-liners, and clever sub-scenes this Deadpool, more than the first, adds tons of "action" that only supplants what little story there is.       Am I the only one? Whether it's Marvel or DC, as the bodies are being blown up, dismembered, liquidated, or simply punched, I can no longer see how one differs from another. Deadpool and Deadpool 2 come close to satirizing the Action genre, but don't quite get there. There is just as much emphasis on severed hands and heads as John Wick blowing holes in a virtual army of foes. It's just all too numbing.       The writing, on the other hand, is filled with snappy gags (for example comments directed at the theater audience...

Godless

😉😉😉😑😑 On : Netflix Original, Genre : Western, Length : 7 Episodes, If you missed Netflix’s Western mini-series Godless when it premiered last November, as I did, it’s worth a belated discovery. There are so many points of cinematic quality that even when the storyline bordered on the implausible it retained its embrace of dramatic entertainment. Jeff Daniels, who plays the dark and cruel antagonist Frank Griffin, is (as usual) superb. His persona, borne of religious psychosis, sets the stage for a clash of good versus evil that culminates in the final episode. The panorama of landscapes and “Big Sky” made me yearn for extended travel to the West without regard to the story. The role horses played was even endearing. There was little evidence that the producers nickel and dimed their reproduction of the period. Character studies were deftly portrayed by (among others) Michelle Dockery (Downton Abby) and Jack O’Connell, the protagonist, leavi...