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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: Mini-review

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Tina Fey

Tina Fey plays it somewhat serious in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

C+Imagine that Liz Lemon, Tina Fey‘s character in the TV comedy series 30 Rock, had been sent to Afghanistan a decade ago to cover the war there. The results would probably look like Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, a movie that has a number of entertaining scenes but never quite coalesces as a dramatic whole.

Fey plays Kim Baker, a cable news journalist who tries to jumpstart a stalled career by taking an assignment in Afghanistan. She soon grows to love the mix of danger, sex, and partying that forms the lifestyle of foreign journalists. Eventually, she becomes more serious about a news photographer (Martin Freeman), a relationship that may end when her assignment eventually does.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is based on a memoir by Chicago Tribune journalist Kim Barker about her own experiences in Afghanistan. The film consists primarily of various anecdotal scenes featuring Kim with a variety of colorful characters, including an experienced Australian journalist (Margot Robbie) who shows her the ropes, a Marine general (Billy Bob Thornton) with a dim view of journalists in general, and a lecherous local politician (Alfred Molina). Many of these scenes, taken directly from the book, work quite well, especially the relationship between Kim and the general, who grudgingly comes to accept her. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot also paints a bizarre but fascinating picture of journalists partying like there’s no tomorrow in buildings that are oases of booze, rock music, and sex in the midst of a highly dangerous war zone lying just outside the exit door. Despite this often compelling imagery and a solid dramatic performance by Fey, however, Kim never feels like a real character. Instead, she’s a plot device whose character development is shown by montages of her partying in night clubs as the months go by. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot aims for emotional depth in a closing stateside encounter between Kim and a now crippled soldier she interviewed in Afghanistan, but the scene feels curiously flat. As a black comic depiction of the outlandish realities of modern warfare, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot succeeds, but as the story of an actual journalist, it ultimately misses the target. 
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Sisters: Mini-review

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Amy Poehler

Amy Poehler is the responsible sister for a change

B-Although many Saturday Night Live alumni have gone on to individual fame over the years, only one duo found success as a comedy team, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, and they are primarily known for their Blues Brothers personas. Now, the show has produced a second hit partnership, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who are every bit as funny together but just haven’t found the right big screen roles. As an example, their latest pairing, Sisters, while often funny, is no Blues Brothers,    

As the title suggests, Fey and Poehler play 40ish sisters Kate and Maura Ellis. Kate (Fey), the older, has made a complete wreck of her life, while Maura (Poehler) is too simplistically caring and good-natured. When their parents (James Brolin and Diane Wiest) tell the sisters that they’ve sold the family home, Kate and Maura decide to say farewell to the house “in style,” by throwing one last wild party, like they had when they were teenagers, and they invite all their old classmates.

Sisters is similar to every R-rated college party movie ever made, with an overabundance of sex, booze, drug, property demolition, and bodily function humor. The only difference is that the participants are over 40 rather than under 20, a distinction that does make a good bit of the humor in Sisters funnier than the norm for movies of this type. That distinction also adds a serious dimension to Kate and Maura’s growing-up issues, one that Sisters acknowledges but generally avoids in favor of cheap laughs. Maura’s attempts to get the new guy (Ike Barinholtz) she meets into bed resemble scenes from an American Pie movie, while Kate’s attempts to prove herself a worthy mother for her teenage daughter (Madison Davenport) seem like scenes from an episode of an ABC Family series. Sisters works best in the quieter moments in which the co-stars reminisce about their characters’ younger days or in zany song-and-dance routines. Unfortunately, director Jason Moore too often chooses to double down on the crude jokes, throwing out six or eight in a row when one would have sufficed. As a result, the movie lasts about 30 minutes longer than its material does. Still, Fey and Poehler’s comic bonds and perfect chemistry make Sisters considerably more lively than its plot would suggest.   
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Monkey Kingdom: Mini-Review

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Tina Fey

Tina Fey’s narration is as much fun as a barrel of monkeys

BDisneynature continues its parade of Earth Day documentaries devoted to the various animal species of this planet with Monkey Kingdom. It’s no surprise that the film has the same top-notch production values and often amazing visuals that we’ve seen in earlier Disneynature releases. What may surprise adults who wind up seeing it is that Monkey Kingdom probably has a better storyline than half the other movies currently playing on the other screens of the cineplex.

Once viewers get past an opening musical sequence featuring, pun surely intended, the theme song from The Monkees, they are introduced to the saga of Maya, a female member of a large clique of macaque monkeys living near an abandoned Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka. Macaques have a highly developed social hierarchy, and Maya is at the bottom of the totem pole initially. This means she doesn’t get the best food and has to fend for herself and look out for her son, Kip. It also means that when the rest of the clique gets temporarily booted out of their cushy home by a rival clique that Maya can help them survive in the wild (including a city filled with those most dangerous creatures, human beings) until they can reclaim their own territory. 

Disneynature has perfected its blend of narration and nature over the past decade, and Monkey Kingdom is a perfect example. The detail of the photography is amazing, especially rare closeups of monkeys swimming underwater. The stars of the movie are the monkeys themselves, whose curious antics and nearly human facial expressions make them natural comics. Tina Fey‘s deadpan narration adds to the humor. Monkey Kingdom doesn’t shy away from the harsh reality of the jungle, though, as a couple of simian deaths are depicted (although the grisly details are not shown). The breezy tone means that the film isn’t as educational as it might have been, and scenes where the monkeys scavenge for food in a farmer’s market and at a children’s birthday party raise questions about just how much staging was done here. Still, Monkey Kingdom accomplishes its two main goals: entertaining young and old alike while raising their awareness of our natural environment. And, in this movie at least, audiences can see that the world of the macaques is not all that different from our own.
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