Spy

I’ve been slow to climb aboard the Melissa McCarthy bandwagon.  Her performance in Bridesmaids reminded me of Chris Farley, who made a string a successful movies built around fat jokes.  Sadly, Farley was consumed with self-loathing, and the drugs to which he turned eventually killed him.  Thus, it felt cruel to go to the movies just to laugh at the fat lady.  Cruelty is not my idea of a good time.

And yet, there I was: stuck in Coach on a long flight, having already seen most of the pictures the in-flight entertainment system had to offer.  I remembered that Spy garnered good reviews, so I decided to give it a (skeptical) shot.

I laughed all the way through Spy, from the first silly gag involving bats in the CIA Comm Center through the silly gags involving various sequel ideas that played through the closing credits.  Spy is not 90 minutes of laughing at the fat lady.  It’s 90 minutes of laughing with the clever, capable woman who just happens to be a little larger than normal.  Oh, and lots of laughing at Jason Statham.  Jason Statham.  Who knew?

Here’s the setup: McCarthy is a “back room” CIA agent along the lines of Mission: Impossible’s Simon Pegg.  Like Pegg, she winds up doing field work even though nobody (including her) thinks she’s up to the task.  Like Pegg, she turns out to be awesome.

Spy, of course, plays this setup entirely for laughs.  To do so, it recruits a murderer’s row of some of the finest supporting talent working in movies today, from Jude Law to Rose Byrne to Bobby Cannavale to Morena Baccarin to Peter Sarafinowicz to Allison Janney.  And this isn’t the kind of movie in which various big name supporting actors just turn up to cash a paycheck: each of them endows his or her character with enough personality, enough life, to make every moment pop.  Even the Big Bad, while dangerous enough to present a credible threat within the context of the film, exhibits just enough silliness to put a smile on our face.

I loved this movie.  Spy is raunchy and goofy and laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end, and it’s all that not only without demeaning its star, but with making her absolutely awesome.  Writer/Director Paul Feig nails it, and I’m now firmly aboard the Melissa McCarthy bandwagon.  I can’t wait to see what the two of them do with Ghostbusters.

Serenity

I watch very little TV. "Baseball Tonight," "The Daily Show," and "The Colbert Report" are pretty much it. When it comes to narrative entertainment, I prefer films - they're a fully self-contained experience.

So I never saw "Firefly" when it aired. I never saw it on cable. I saw it only when a friend was certain I'd like it that he drove to my home, dropped off the series DVDs, and told me to call him once I'd seen them all. And you know what? I liked it. I really liked it.

I liked the creatively imagined solar system of "Firefly." I liked the blending of American and Chinese argots. I liked that fact that, finally, here was a show about transport guys!

So I was happy to fire up SERENITY when it arrived at my door. I'm sorry to report, however, that it found it to be, well, just pretty good. While the movie tickled my imagination, it didn't quite capture it. There are too many "big moments." The resolution of the mystery surrounding the kung-fu psycho chick wasn't particularly satisfying, and I thought that these people had gone to all this trouble merely to uncover the scandal of the week.

Hey, "just pretty good" isn't all that bad. Catch SERENITY when it shows up on cable. But don't go out of your way for it.