By Colin Covert


FILM: Admission
CAST: Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Lily Tomlin, Gloria Reuben, Wallace Shawn
DIRECTION: Paul Weitz

Many comic film actors specialise in larger-than-life characters. Tina Fey has made her mark in roles that are agreeably human-scaled.
In Admission, she’s well cast as buttoned-up, overachieving college admissions officer Portia Nathan. She guards the entrance to notoriously choosy Princeton University, firmly and politely informing 99% of applicants they don’t measure up. Since she holds herself to equally strict standards, when her life goes off the rails she loses it, big time. But she freaks like a stressed-out control queen, not a berserk comedian grasping for laughs.
Portia’s life is a mix of small victories (she’s in the running to replace department head Wallace Shawn following his retirement next year) and petty disappointments (her academic boyfriend, Michael Sheen, treats her with the same affection he would show a fine Golden Retriever.)
While Portia’s routine is usually as meticulous as her office bonsai, she finds her life capsizing through a quadruple whammy. There’s backstabbery from her smiling-shark office rival Corinne (Gloria Reuben). Infidelity threatens the domestic front. John Pressman (Paul Rudd), the nonconformist do-gooder heading a crunchy-granola alternative high school, makes sincere but rabidly unprofessional overtures.
And most crucially, Portia discovers a relationship to ultra-smart, uber-awkward applicant Jeremiah (Nat Wolff) jeopardising her reputation for strict impartiality.
The story follows the narrative beats expected of a romantic comedy. After all, when your stars are as innately likeable as Rudd and Fey, it would feel like a mistake not to bring them together. Their courtship isn’t the central thread, though.
Portia, named for the wisest of Shakespeare’s females, finds herself in a serious ethical quandary as she pulls strings to advance Jeremiah through the admissions process. Confronting her own fallibility is one of the admissions she must make as she re-evaluates her personal and professional lives.
While most college-themed comedies aim for low-SAT yucks, Admission tosses out jokes and cultural references that aim higher. Director Paul Weitz (About A Boy) has a fine track record with this sort of lightweight but smarter-than-average fare.
Lily Tomlin sparkles as Portia’s mother, an old-guard feminist who warns her daughter against longstanding entanglements with men. After her character has been established, we notice that she has a shoulder tattoo of Bella Abzug. There are plenty of details like that, tossed in just to tickle whoever notices.
The laughs here are mostly honest, rarely forced, and triggered by our identification with misguided folks, this one overcompensating through workaholism, that one through wanderlust and that one through political pontificating.
Likable as Fey and Rudd are, their performances don’t break any major new ground. The acting honours go to a trio of winning supporting players. Sheen is blisteringly funny as Portia’s tweedy boyfriend, eyes wild with fear that she will trip over evidence of his indiscretions.
Reuben, so strong and noble as the first lady’s maid in Spielberg’s Lincoln, is exquisitely disingenuous as the office predator with her eye firmly on the dean of Admissions slot. And Shawn is perfect as the outgoing boss, a sincere but gnomelike product of a privileged class whose defence of hallowed intellectual traditions is a grown-up game of eenie-meenie-miney-moe.
Top marks all around. — Star Tribune/MCT

A cautionary tale
By Roger Moore


FILM: Temptation
CAST:  Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Lance Gross, Vanessa Williams, Brandy Norwood, Robbie Jones
DIRECTION: Tyler Perry

The thing that made Tyler Perry rich is much in evidence in Tyler Perry’s Temptation. It was called Confessions of a Marriage Counsellor when he toured with it on stage.
There’s no Madea here. But the women are beautiful, serious about clothes, makeup, hair and church.
Older women are “Wise Councils”, the name of a female-centric church in the movie. And they typically get all the funny, sometimes profane, always “you-listen-to-me-child” lines.
The men are shirtless, rapacious heels, or sensitive pretty-boy disappointments. That doesn’t matter, as these movies are first and foremost “chick flicks” - sermonettes about relationships, deserving more and eventually getting it.
The women, I mean.
But Temptation is a cautionary tale about wanting what you haven’t got. The marriage counsellor Judith (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) at the heart of it is young, gorgeous, in a glamorous job with a high-end D.C. dating service. She married her childhood sweetheart (Lance Gross), who is a serious stiff-looking at goals 10-15 years down the road.
And the Internet tycoon who may invest in the marriage counsellor’s business? He (Robbie Jones) has money, confidence and a passion for flings. Meanwhile, the husband might be tempted by a secretive and cowering new cashier (Brandy Norwood) at his pharmacy,
Ella Joyce, as Judith’s preacher-mother, and has the “Madea” role - sassy, testy and all-wise.
Perry clumsily frames this story as a tale a counsellor (Candice Coke) tells a young woman who’s thinking of cheating on her husband. The timing of the comic moments is off, and the film drags and drags before reaching a conclusion anybody can see from a mile off.
Casting Norwood, a vapid Kim Kardashian as a shallow, judgmental colleague in the dating service, and Vanessa Williams as the boss of that service suggests that Perry is drawn to women who have been media (and man) victims, from time to time. But the filmmaker has points to make, about wealth and the allure of the new.
“There’s nothing wrong with being rich and having nice things - so long as the nice things don’t own YOU.”
“We become a lot of different people before we settle into who we are.”
With homilies like that, I expected Perry to get into the talk show/advice game, until Steve Harvey leaped at that. But cranking out two formulaic movies like this a year show the Atlanta mogul’s true ambition — replacing all those soap operas TV is cancelling, two hours at a time. — MCT

(DVDs courtesy: Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha)