THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS (2018)

It's not just that son of Jim Henson Brian Henson crapped on his father's MUPPET SHOW legacy by making a crude comedy where crude puppets are actually part of the human world... It's the fact that making puppets into quasi-people deletes the magic of what puppets are in the first place, and what they aren't are cartoons, hence the WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT  theme with fictional beings existing with real ones and making no sense in THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS, where puppetry looks more CGI within a modern-time Noir Narrating-Gumshoe has a crass private eye puppet going from scene to scene swearing (from Jesus's name to...you name it) or beating people up, partnered reluctantly with former partner/human cop Melissa McCarthy, who also swears and fights and... While the stout actress has gotten the most blame for this train-wreck, and her casting does take away from what Henson obviously intended to be a different kind of puppet movie instead of a the same kind of different kind of McCarthy movie (it's basically THE HEAT), the script's to blame here: each scene is overlong and ponderous while the body count plot... puppets from a former popular TV series are being picked off one-by-one... runs out of steam, and long before murder one Rating: *

THE GHOST OF PETER SELLERS

Year Film: 1974 Doc: 2018 Rating: **1/2 

Watching THE GHOST OF PETER SELLERS it feels like Spike Milligan, not Peter Sellers, is at fault for the Peter Medak's doomed pirate movie GHOST IN THE NOONDAY SUN being so bad since it was Spike who talked his former Goon, Sellers, into doing a movie that he hardly even had developed on the page.

In one reflection, Medak, who also directs this very documentary, says that both he AND Sellers cried on the phone together after having read what there was to read of the script. Then, when Sellers becomes a pain to the director on set, Spike shows up to write the last half of the script, and acts like the hero for bringing Sellers back to the set when in reality, it was a set that should have never been built because the script wasn't even finished from the very beginning. A screenplay is the most important "set" of a movie. It's everything. Seeing parts of the movie, that is, the ACTUAL movie of NOONDAY SUN, it doesn't seem all Sellers fault despite Sellers being absolutely horrible in it. The direction looks like test shots for rehearsals or casting auditions, so this supposedly brilliant young director wasn't really directing but rather just pointing his camera and filming. So perhaps the fault isn't just on Peter Sellers here. And at the very end of the doc, when Medak is sitting next to Spike Milligan's statue, praising him after defecating on Sellers for two hours, it makes very little sense.

BOOK CLUB (2018)

Old age is handled funny in movies. These people have had children and grandchildren, and in this case, the generation that was all about sex during their Sexual Revolution, wind up acting like silly old folks who seem to be discovering sex, and, even though the movie is intentionally showing that they are in fact rediscovering it, they sound like 13-year-olds who've never had it at all...

In that, BOOK CLUB is not a bad film. That is, it's not completely unwatchable. It's an older persons' date flick that uses the niche of its four stars: Bergen a kind of strong lioness who is insecure deep down; Jane Fonda is basically the same thing but slightly more confident and experience up-front, and prettier now than Bergen, who looks her age the most here; Keaton's her usual quirky neurotic that Woody Allen invented for ANNIE HALL; and Mary Steenburgen is the least well-known and not an iconic actress like the others, and also, like Fonda, has aged nicely (and tap dances to rock music like MELVIN & HOWARD)...

Their men are paper mache and the book being read, Fifty Shades of Grey, is promoted in what seems like a 2-hour commercial masquerading as a rom-com.

But this propaganda fades out after the first act when the usual problems arise. Followed by a pat Hollywood ending. Either way, this is vapidly enjoyable viewing for those who aren't expecting anything actually good or solid. Let's call it, passable time-filling emptiness. Or as Woody Allen said (while married to Keaton) in LOVE AND DEATH: an empty void. MAINSTREAM GRADE CURVE: C

LIFE OF THE PARTY

year: 2018
rating: **1/2

There are way too many remakes, especially of Eighties flicks, so Melissa McCarthy and actor/director husband Ben Falcone remade the Rodney Dangerfield classic Back To School and took all the credit — despite having the same basic premise: after a divorce, a parent decides to go to college with her kid. In that case it was a large funny dad and skinny serious son and here it's a fat (though skinny for her) almost-funny woman with a standard-size semi-cute daughter. But Melissa McCarthy trades in her usual blunt and gross self deprecation for a character much too optimistic and cheerful to relate to, or to feel for, providing absolutely no obstacles along the way. A much too easy/breezy comedy with no real laughs. On the plus side, it's a relaxing time-filler delivering 90-minutes of brainless entertainment. That's also what's wrong with LIFE OF THE PARTY, which does live up to its name, several times; party after party; sameness. More a divorced middle-aged mother's fantasy since McCarthy — taking one more year of Anthropology in the same college she dropped out of years earlier — hooks up with a handsome college kid. The only suspense is in the utter disbelief.

I FEEL PRETTY

Year: 2018
Cast: Amy Schumer, Lauren Hutton, Michelle Williams
Rating: **1/2

In SHALLOW HAL Jack Black saw all women as beautiful, even and especially ones who weren't. In this copycat, overweight and this time, not-so-proud-of-it Amy Schumer finds herself to be gorgeous, hence I FEEL PRETTY, and basically becomes as confident as a plain looking girl that a plain looking girl with confidence would be in a normal situation, and that Amy is in other movies, like TRAINWRECK. The only acting occurs when her character is so pathetically shy, it just doesn't seem natural so, when the transition occurs, it all seems contrived, forced. That said, it's not bad for a sick day movie to pass the time, and since all girls feel ugly deep down... hence Amy's fame as a younger, partying Melissa McCarthy... Amy's really teaching a two-hour lesson, one so obvious it repeats itself throughout the immensely predictable romantic comedy where the film's sensitive "sweater wearing" nice guy mars what the TRAINWRECK sensitive guy did there, slowing Amy down from the blunt persona that made her... semi-famous.

BLOCKERS (LESLIE MANN)

In BLOCKERS, three parents try messing up... or attempt to block... each daughter from partaking in the plot of almost every 80's sex comedy, especially LITTLE DARLINGS since this particular "lose our virginity by the end of the movie" movie is about the girls, who all act in what's usually the cinematic "guy minded mode," wanting it more than their dull, reluctant dates and especially (and of course) their parents: Never has a comic-relief-within-a-comedy been as horrendously ineffective as screwy-toothed Ike Barinholtz, whose five-o'clock shadow hardly covers up the fact he's also terribly miscast — resembling more of a college fraternity clown, which doesn't make it all that ironic when he crashes a high school prom, and then a few parties: Though he's not alone as muscular "White Dwayne Johnson" John Cena is a realistic looking parental, getting more emotional than expected of such a giant, while mom, played by the usually-hilarious Leslie Mann, leads this complete disaster where instead of cocks being blocked... due to an awkward pace, stilted one-liners and a horrible lack of chemistry between actors... the laughter is, again and again: So avoid this Rooster — it's a real Turkey!