A movie about Navy SEALs in which the soldiers are played by real SEALs. It sounds like a recipe for authentic action and horrible acting. But maybe the soldiers are actually decent actors, and even if they aren’t, then maybe the action can make up for it. But neither of those was the case for Act of Valor.

Abu Shabal is a bad guy. While in the Philippines, he managed to blow up a bunch of kids, along with a US ambassador, with a bomb-filled ice cream truck, and to pick up a bunch of wannabe martyrs in the process. Christo is also a bad guy, and while in Costa Rica he orchestrated the capture of Dr. Lisa Morales because he knew that she was also working at gathering intelligence on a link between him and Abu. And when Lisa is captured, the Americans learn about it almost immediately and call in an elite force to rescue her. It’s an intense mission involving snipers, machine guns, RPGs, armored boats, and a multi-car chase, but the good guys prevail and Lisa is rescued. But more important than that, Lisa’s cell phone is rescued, because it contains not only proof of a collaboration between Abu and Christo, but information about a plot to infiltrate the United States with jihadists wearing lethal bomb vests that are thin enough to wear under clothes without arousing suspicion and won’t set off metal detectors. Now it’s necessary to find the bad guys and take them out before they make it into the country.

To call the real-life Navy SEALs bad actors would be a tremendous compliment. They are truly awful. Unfortunately, the actors in other roles don’t get to use the “this isn’t my real job” excuse, nor the writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, and others involved with the production, but they are all equally horrible at what they do. Many of the action scenes are good, and the fight near the beginning in the rescue is a lot of fun. Unfortunately, there is far too much time spent in the film when fighting isn’t happening, and it really suffers as a result. There are a lot of filler scenes that aren’t important to the plot. There is a surplus of scenes showing the SEALs’ comradery, and others showing them as real family men. There is an excess of voiceover. And yet with all of this stuff-between-the-fighting scenes, we still miss out on key parts of the story. The SEALs are just handed information with no explanation for how it was obtained that allows them to show up at exactly the right place at exactly the right time in order to complete the next step in the mission. There’s a laughable “interrogation” scene in which a bad guy goes from blithely mocking a soldier to telling him everything he knows with no more prompting than having his desk cleared off forcefully. And the end is so thick with pandering that it’s simply revolting.

Early on, I still held out hope that the action would be strong enough to overcome all the negatives, and the first rescue mission even served to bolster that prospect. I was willing to overlook the large number of first-person shots making the film look like a video game. I was OK with the stupidity of a covert night mission in which all of the soldiers had their easily-visible laser sights on and eliminating any possibility of stealth. But there is an obvious turning point in the quality of the action where something so stupid happens that it elicited a simultaneous groan from everyone in the theater, and all the fighting that happened after that was tainted with ridiculousness. And when the big climax finally comes, the film chooses to hunker down and get even more stupid rather than make an attempt at redeeming itself.

This is a film that was doomed long before the decision to use real soldiers instead of real actors, and in fact that decision is probably the only thing it has going for it. If they had used real actors with the same script and crew, there’s no way it could have been anything but a complete flop. But the press generated from the “real soldiers” gimmick and the general expectation of sub-par acting allowed the film to make back its budget a few times over which only raises the real and scary possibility that they’ll try something like this again.

My interest in movies has led me to read a number of books on film analysis and screenwriting and other related topics. One of the points that these books keep hammering home is that a film needs to have conflict in pretty much every scene in order to stay interesting. Another is that all of the story lines need to connect back somehow to the main plot. Oka! is kind of an enigma for me because it fails at both of these and yet it still managed to hold my attention.

Larry Whitman (played by Kris Marshall) is a tall, gaunt, white man, and yet he has managed to become the world’s leading expert on the music of the Bayaka tribe of Pygmies in the Central African Republic. Despite his standing head and shoulders and chest above the Bayaka people, and despite the notable difference in skin color, he has managed to earn their trust over the years and has been accepted as a kind of unofficial member of their tribe. But he’s still an American and during his most recent trip home, he began to notice health problems. His doctor told him his liver was pretty much gone and he was in pretty desperate need of a transplant, and that his traveling days were over. But Larry disagreed, and was intent on going back at least one more time. He’d managed to record a lot of different samples of Bayaka music, but one extremely rare instrument, the molimo, managed to elude him. Some say the molimo doesn’t even exist, but Larry was going to prove them wrong.

Before long, Larry finds himself back in Africa and is surprised to learn that much has changed. The Bayaka tribe, which had primarily lived deep in the forest, was now in a village with the Bantu people who were not particularly kind to the Bayaka. In particular, the Bantu mayor Bassoun loved to exert his power and introduce bureaucracy into everything, even going so far as to require the Bayaka people to obtain a permit in order to leave the village and enter the forest. Westerners had come in and set up a sawmill, eliminating large swaths of forest and creating all kinds of noise. If the molimo does exist, then it’s certainly not going to be found anywhere near this urbanized nightmare.

This film is based on a true story, which probably explains why it is simply a recounting of events and not so much a classic narrative. Larry’s quest is to ultimately reconnect with the Bayaka and find the molimo, but there are some half-baked side stories like Bassoun’s opposition at every turn which ultimately has no effect at all because Larry and the Bayaka simply ignore him. And there’s also a completely baffling subplot about Mr. Yi, a Chinese businessman who wants to shoot an elephant, which only briefly intersects with the story of Larry and the Bayaka, and not in any meaningful way.

I suppose on the larger scale, there is conflict of the new world versus the old and technology versus tradition, but while it is present it doesn’t really factor into the outcome. Larry does occasionally deal with health issues, and with not completely fitting in with the tribe, and not being as adept as the natives at life in the forest, but these too are all inconsequential. What’s left is just a series of things that happened to the people in the story and an ending that’s a little confusing. And yet somehow I still kind of enjoyed it.

I know it may not be a popular opinion, but I have to admit that I really like Alfred Hitchcock. I think the guy was one of the greatest directors that has ever lived, and I’ve seen an awful lot of his films. If a film markets itself with a quote like “A crime tale with twists worthy of Hitchcock”, then it’s going to have to be pretty gosh-darned spectacular just to stay out of blasphemy territory. Thin Ice is not pretty gosh-darned spectacular.

The film opens with Greg Kinnear as Mickey Prohaska as an insurance salesman with a small office in Kenosha, Wisconsin, not too far north of Chicago. He does well enough for himself professionally, mainly because he’s a complete sleazeball with no morals, but his personal life is a mess, mainly because he’s a complete sleazeball with no morals. When he learns that the parent company is going to be sending its best sales people to a conference in Aruba, he deftly poaches a promising new hire (Bob, played by David Harbour) away from one of his main competitors, only to find that Bob is an honest-to-goodness nice guy who cares about people and wants to help them instead of taking them for as much as possible. On his first outing with Mickey, Bob steered a potentially-lucrative truck driver to another agency, but then zeroed in on Gorvy (a mostly senile old man played by Alan Arkin) for a bare-bones, bottom-dollar policy.

Mickey deftly slides Bob out of the picture and manages to talk Gorvy up to a more full-featured, and full-priced, policy. As they’re finalizing the details, Mickey happens to learn that Gorvy has an old violin that he’d asked to have appraised. Mickey intercepts the results of that appraisal and learns that the violin is worth a fortune, and begins scheming about how he might acquire that violin for himself to sell at a huge profit. But as events unfold, things just keep going wrong and Mickey finds himself in ever-hotter water.

Despite the film’s praise for itself on its poster, the film doesn’t really have that many twists. Most of the time, it’s just heaping more problems onto Mickey as a direct result of his own actions. Some of these problems are things that neither Mickey nor the audience would have been able to see coming, but that still doesn’t make them twists. The only real twist comes at the end, and it’s one that is easier to spot ahead of time, and also one that the film spends way too much time explaining after the fact. It would have been far better for the film to have simply ended as soon as that twist was revealed, but it spends a good five minutes showing all of the effects that twist has on the rest of the story, and then another couple of minutes showing Mickey in its aftermath.

Until the disappointing and overly-long ending, the film is actually quite enjoyable. It’s funny and very well acted, and even when it does descend into the realm of the ridiculous, you’re having so much fun that the problems are easy to forgive. But I think that its impressive cast (which also includes Billy Crudup, Bob Balaban, and Lea Thompson) is actually its downfall, because their roles (or at least those of Crudup and Balaban) make it too easy to suspect what might be going on. It’s the kind of thing that might be suspicious on its own, but when the film just comes out and tells you that there’s going to be a twist ending, it’s almost never the case that the surprise manages to stay hidden until the big reveal.

But despite the surprise not being as surprising as the filmmakers wanted it to be, I still think that the movie could have been salvaged if it had known when to end. But the more the film stretched out its downward spiral, the harder it became to remember as a good movie.

There’s something impressive about long continuous shots in film. They’re usually not something I catch the first time through a film (at least, not if it’s any good), but they can further enhance my appreciation on subsequent passes. My love for the iconic hallway scene in Oldboy somehow found new heights to reach when I realized it was a single shot. And I managed to find new ways to love Hitchcock’s Rope when I learned that it was composed as a sequence of ten-minute shots (the amount of film that could be loaded into a camera in those days). But the first several mentions of Silent House dealt only with its being filmed in one continuous sequence, and that created something of a distraction for me because it made me watch the film more intently for possible edit points (and there are several), which prevented me from becoming as engrossed in the story.

Elizabeth Olsen and her cleavage star as Sarah, a college dropout helping her dad (John, played by Adam Trese) and uncle (Peter, played by Eric Sheffer Stevens) renovate an old house that’s been in the family for years. They’re fixing it up so they can sell it, so there are a lot of objects covered with dust cloths and construction tools lying around, and the electricity and telephone service has been disconnected. They have to light it with candles and batteries, and it’s remote enough that cell phone coverage is nonexistent, and all this makes for a pretty spooky place. It’s also not very fun when John and Peter get into an argument and Peter drives off into town for some time away.

Shortly after Peter leaves, Sarah starts to hear noises upstairs, but her father is working on the ground floor. At first, he dismisses it the normal cracking and creaking of an old house, or maybe rats, but she persists in her claims and they go to investigate. Their cursory look through the upstairs finds nothing, but the noises persist and she becomes even more convinced there’s someone else in the house. But when she finds her dad lying unconscious on the floor with a bloody face, there’s no more room for doubt.

I’m not entirely sure why the film is called Silent House, since hearing noises where there aren’t supposed to be any people is part of what’s supposed to make it scary. I have to confess that I didn’t find any parts of the film particularly scary, but that’s at least in part because I was more focused than usual on trying to identify potential cuts and less engrossed in the story. However, given that the film doesn’t really show us anything new, I’m not sure that any hardened horror fan would find much of the film even remotely frightening. The ending is something that we’ve seen before, and the movie ultimately paints itself into a corner where there isn’t much room for alternatives, so it’s something that you’ll probably see coming in advance, but they do at least try to throw in some red herrings along the way.

In addition to distracting my focus from the action, the attempt to present the film as a single continuous shot is harmful because it results in action which is occasionally jarring (because whoever is carrying the camera is bouncing quite a bit, making for a very unstable image), and there were several occasions in which it was at least briefly out of focus. Further, there were a couple of cases in which the camera follows Sarah into a relatively small space, and there is some unnatural movement required (both from Sarah and from the perspective of the camera) in order to get out of that space without the need to cut.

It seems that Silent House is yet another casualty of the gimmick that gets in the way. Like found footage and 3D and CGI and similar audiovisual elements, if the gimmick is intended to make up for a weak story or interferes with the way that story is experienced, then the gimmick needs to go.

Hollywood movies have some pretty hard and fast rules when it comes to relationships between men and women. If a woman ever gets nauseous, it’s because she’s pregnant. If a man has lots of meaningless sex, then his life will be just as meaningless. And if a man and a woman are best friends, then they’re going to have sex and make things awkward.

In this year’s version of that story, those best friends are Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt, who also wrote and directed the film) and Jason (Adam Scott, playing a character very similar to his last role in Our Idiot Brother). They’re nearly inseparable, but there’s no sexual tension between them, allowing them to sleep with whomever they want and share the details with each other. They’re also friends with two married couples, Leslie and Alex (Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd) and Missy and Ben (Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm), and they all have lots of fun together. But that all changes when the married couples start to have kids, and those kids start to dominate their lives.

On the one hand, Jason and Julie see what their friends’ lives have become are glad they don’t have to deal with this. On the other, Julie’s biological clock is ticking and she doesn’t feel like she’ll be able to have a truly great relationship with a man with the pressure of her wanting a baby hanging over them. So of course the best solution for this problem is to have a baby first and then go looking for Mr. Right. And Jason is right there for her and vows he’ll be totally committed in his role as baby daddy.

The basic story is one that’s been told many times before, and usually as a comedy, so there aren’t too many surprises lurking in Friends with Kids. I’d say the biggest surprise for me was just how inconsistent the comedy was, with long stretches that didn’t seem to attempt any humor at all, and several of the comedic scenes not having their intended effect. I’d heard a lot of comparisons made to the 2011 smash hit Bridesmaids, but other than sharing a few of the main characters (Wiig, Hamm, Rudolph, and O’Dowd), there’s not a whole lot of commonality. What comedy there is in the film exists primarily between Westfeldt and Scott, and Wiig and Hamm were largely unfunny and generally disruptive to the overall flow of the movie. The film would have been stronger if the characters played by Wiig and Hamm had been cut out completely, as the purpose they serve is largely duplicated by the characters played by Rudolph and O’Dowd, and the latter couple was much less unenjoyable.

Removing Wiig and Hamm would have also helped cut down on the film’s runtime, which is about fifteen minutes too long. Removing the weaker characters and concentrating the comedy would’ve resulted in a much more fun 90-minute film. But the predictable plot and inevitable conclusion make all the flaws in Friends with Kids more readily apparent and harder to overlook.

I have a strict personal policy that I don’t walk out of movies. Most of the time, it’s really easy to adhere to this policy, but occasionally I’ll encounter a movie so bad that it’s a challenge to stick it out. But John Carter may be the first to put my will power to the test within the first two minutes, and then repeatedly thereafter for the next two hours.

To be fair, I usually try to avoid learning about a movie before I go to see it, so I really didn’t know much about John Carter except that it was set on Mars. But I really wasn’t expecting the absolute stupidity of the opening sequence, nor of the remainder of the film. That shot featured a flying ship setting down and unloading a whole bunch of gladiators to attack their enemies with swords. These people (or I guess technically Martians, but you’d be hard-pressed to distinguish them from Roman soldiers during the time of Christ) have the technology to make ships that fly on light and yet their weapons haven’t progressed beyond the Iron Age.

Things don’t get much better when we meet John Carter (played by Taylor Kitsch) for the first time and he is magically transported to Mars from late 1860s Arizona by a mysterious amulet he found in a cave. Before long, he finds himself in the middle of a three-way battle between the original human-looking Martians, a whole different set of human-looking Martians (with a really hot princess, played by Lynn Collins), and a third set of Martians who mostly look like humans except they’re green and they have tusks and four arms instead of two (one of whom is played by Willem Dafoe). The future of the planet is at stake, and that’s a big deal to all the Martians, but John just wants to get home to try to find his gold-filled cave.

It’s pretty clear that John Carter really wants to be Star Wars. Like Luke Skywalker, John returned home to find his family dead and house burned to the ground. Like Han Solo, John doesn’t care about the plight of those in the fight but just wants to get his gold, although he ultimately falls for the princess. Like young Anakin, he gets into a dangerous, high-speed pod race. There’s a magical force called the 9th ray. There are some poorly-conceived CGI creatures which will only have any appeal to children (or those with child-like intelligence). And yet I don’t think that even George Lucas in his most insane fever-driven bouts of revisionist madness would come up with something this lame.

The problems with the story of John Carter reach well beyond its poor choice of weapons and lack of originality. It’s made exceptionally clear in the film that they’re on Mars (when they could have just as easily made it a fictional location), and yet that world bears little resemblance to what we know about the planet, including its breathable atmosphere and healthy supply of water. John has the unique ability to jump incredible differences when no one else can, and this is a subject of quite a bit of fascination among the others, but only a halfhearted “maybe he has greater bone density” explanation was offered. The Martians were all initially speaking some alien language, and then all of a sudden everyone’s speaking English with nothing more than an “oh, I can understand you now” comment, and yet even after they’re all able to communicate they still can’t seem to get his name right. Wood and fabric are plentiful in the world, and yet vegetation is nonexistent.

I can appreciate trying to remain faithful to the source material, but in this case the source is literally a century old (published as a set of short stories in 1912). Our knowledge of Mars and flight and science fiction screenwriting has made dramatic strides since then, and it’s lazy and careless to ignore obvious problems. Even the work of a master like Jules Verne needs some updating on its way to the big screen, and Edgar Rice Burroughs is no Jules Verne.

There are tons of movies out there which point out the ways in which mankind is destroying (or has destroyed) the environment. Most of them are all doom-and-gloom and go really heavy on the guilt, and very few of them have vibrant colors and animals that sing and dance. But Dr. Seuss, and those who turned his book into this most recent version of the movie, apparently realize the value of trying to catch flies with honey (or bears with marshmallows, as the case may be).

The town of Thneedville is a pretty nice place to live, if you don’t mind thick smog and radioactive water and battery-operated trees. But it’s been that way for so long that most people don’t know any other way of life. But Audrey (voiced by Taylor Swift) has somehow learned about how things used to be and has become obsessed with seeing the kind of tree that runs on light and dirt rather than Duracell. She just happens to live next door to Ted (Zac Efron) who’s got a serious crush on her and just happens to be in the mood to get wood. His wise Grandma Norma (Betty White) tells him he needs to go see a man called the Once-ler (Ed Helms), and so he makes cautiously ventures out of the city and into the wasteland that is the larger world.

It doesn’t take Ted long to find the Once-ler’s house, but he’s not given a particularly warm welcome. It seems the Once-ler is a recluse and not much of a people person, but he perks up when Ted mentions his quest to find a tree. That’s enough to get the Once-ler to overcome his shyness and start talking, but rather than just tell Ted what he wants to know, he’s intent on telling his whole life story. He talks about how he’d set out into the world to seek his fortune and encountered a natural paradise, full of musical wildlife and beautiful fuzzy trees. He goes on to tell of a creature called the Lorax (Danny DeVito) who is the guardian of the forest and wants to ensure the trees are protected. And eventually we learn how that forest was destroyed and how the world that is came about.

The Lorax really is a film that should be fun for all ages. It’s so light and quick-moving that even the most hardened hippie-hater might be caught off guard and manage a smile or two. It’s not particularly deep, and perhaps its very cartoonish nature allows its eco-message to float by without sinking in (if you’re not already saturated with that message from the countless other attempts to hammer it in), but you’re not likely to get bored or offended by the content.

The movie has a handful of songs that are good enough while you’re watching them, but that aren’t so catchy that you can remember them after the film is over. With The Muppets, I was belting out the songs in my car on the way home, but with The Lorax I can barely remember the topics for the songs, let alone their tunes or lyrics. In fact, fun but forgettable is kind of a good summary for the entire movie.

Cartoons are for kids. Sure, there are edgy ones like The Simpsons or South Park which are more targeted at older audiences, but even then when kids watch them behind their parents’ backs, they’ll find plenty to like beyond just the forbidden fruit aspect. But with Chico & Rita, the Spanish have created an animated feature that is completely devoid of interest for young viewers. Probably because it’s completely devoid of interest for everyone, except apparently the handful of idiots who can get things nominated for Academy Awards.

In 1940s Cuba, Chico was good at two things: playing jazz piano and discarding women after one-night stands. Most of the time, the women are young, drunk American tourists (and this was before the revolution that turned Cuba into an island of Communists and imprisoned terrorists), but one night he met a Cuban woman so beautiful and intriguing that he dumped his American hotties even before sleeping with them. Rita had an amazing voice and loose morals, so the night ended with them in bed together (complete with animated nudity), and it may have been a long and happy life together if Chico’s girlfriend hadn’t barged in and thrown Rita out.

What follows is a story better suited to the pages of craigslist missed connections than the big screen. As Chico pursues, Rita shies away. And when Rita decides she wants Chico, he dismisses her. Their entertainment careers begin to take off (separately, of course), and as they find the professional success they so desperately want, it only becomes harder for them to find each other.

It’s a tragic love story, but the vast majority of the tragedy comes from their own selfishness, stubbornness, and stupidness than from external forces beyond their control, so the tragedy doesn’t really create a whole lot of conflict. And when a bigger obstacle finally does present itself, the nature of that obstacle is so out of proportion with the inciting incident that it’s hard to take seriously. All this makes for a pretty boring story about a couple of people in which there is no emotional investment, and I started looking at my watch as early as 30 minutes into the film.

If there isn’t much enjoyment to be had from the story, then one would hope to be able to extract some entertainment value from the quality of the animation. Unfortunately, Chico & Rita disappoints there, too. It’s functional enough that you’ll be able to understand what’s going on, but it’s just not exciting. The images are largely flat, non-shaded, and fairly minimalist, so that’s a refreshing departure from the computer-rendered 3D crap Hollywood animation studios put out, but it still lacks something that other recent films (like fellow Oscar nominees A Cat in Paris from 2011 and The Illusionist from 2010) manage to capture. Whereas some people find hands hard to draw, the Chico & Rita animators can’t seem to get lips right — they’re all abnormally large and oddly colored, and it only serves to distract from what little story the film manages to provide.

Without a good story or pretty eye candy, I’m really not sure what appeal Chico & Rita is supposed to have. Apparently someone felt differently than I did in order to give it a nomination for best animated feature, but these are the same people who considered Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close a real contender for best picture and only managed to find two candidates for best song, so perhaps we should just stop giving any consideration to what they have to say.

There are some medical conditions that are so embarrassing or uncomfortable to talk about that they are commonly just referenced by their initials. I think that some movies deserve that treatment, so I will henceforth only refer to Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie as BDM. And unfortunately that’s not the only thing it has in common with IBS.

Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (playing the same version of themselves as on their self-referential TV show) have decided to try their hand at filmmaking, and they signed up with the Schlaaaang Corporation, led by Tommy Schlaaang (played by Robert Loggia), to finance the film. After blowing through an exorbitant amount of money, and it’s not hard to guess how much, they managed to produce only three minutes of content and some livid investors. But being the financial geniuses that they are, the contract they had signed with Schlaaang left them on the hook for repaying the costs of the film if it failed to be a financial success. And in this case, that’s the whole billion.

But fortunately they didn’t have to despair long because they soon saw a late-night television commercial featuring Damien Weebs (Will Ferrell) offering a billion dollars to anyone who would come to S’wallow Valley (and yes, there is an unexplained apostrophe) and run his shopping mall. Naturally, Tim and Eric jump at the chance and arrive to find something resembling an indoor version of Detroit on a bad day. The floors are littered with trash and homeless people, the food court with the rotting remains of what they had once served, and a lone wolf roams the halls. And yet at least one store (a sword shop run by a character played by Will Forte) is open for business. Whipping this mall into shape wouldn’t be an easy task for someone of even above-average intelligence, so the odds are pretty stacked against these idiots.

BDM is definitely the kind of movie that isn’t for everyone, and that seems to be supported by the high walkout rate that at least some theaters are seeing for the movie. It does seem that the film is better received by people who have watched and enjoyed their television show, although even that is not universally the case. I’ve never seen an actual episode of their show, but I have seen clips, some of which were genuinely funny, so they at least have the capacity for humor even if they don’t display that anywhere in this movie.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about BDM is its ability to take some funny people (and the cast also includes John C. Reilly, Zack Galifianakis, and Jeff Goldblum) and some fairly funny premises and produce something which is actively unfunny. There was not a single joke or occurrence in the film that even broke into the realm of amusing. The sparsely-populated theater in which I watched the movie did have some people laughing, but I think that is more at the suggestion of what could have been rather than what actually was presented. In many film genres, it may be a good thing to avoid explicitly spelling out what you’re trying to say, but it’s probably not a good idea to require your audience to complete the jokes in a comedy for themselves because there’s a good chance they’ll do it aloud. But honestly, there’s not much room for the experience to get any less enjoyable, so this may be a rare film in which the audience could help make it better. But I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re already a die-hard fan of their other stuff.

Comedy trailers are tough because it’s important to make the movie look funny without giving away all the best jokes. Unfortunately, the trailer for Wanderlust fails on both counts.

George and Linda (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) are happy New Yorkers who have just bought their first apartment, perhaps living at the edge of their means. But when George and Linda both find themselves out of work at the same time, they can no longer afford their exorbitant mortgage and they’re out on the street. George’s brother Rick (Ken Marino) makes a pretty good living in Atlanta, so they head down to stay with them until they can get things sorted out. But it’s a long trip, and when they need to stop for the night, they use their GPS to find a nearby hotel and are directed to the Elysium Bed and Breakfast. This particular B&B just happened to be co-located with a hippie commune, and George and Linda are taken aback when they’re greeted by a nudist. But they find themselves there for the night, and with the help of a little music and marijuana, they actually kind of enjoy it.

The next morning, they’re on their way again and soon find themselves at Rick’s house. Rick has no qualms about making it clear how well things are going for him, or about berating George for his current situation. It doesn’t take long with George working for Rick, and Linda hanging out with his wife Marissa (Michaela Watkins), for them to realize that this is not going to be a pleasant arrangement. They’re soon back at the commune, and although they have immediate regrets, they agree to give it a couple of weeks to see how things go.

If Wanderlust was better than I anticipated, it was only because I went in with very low expectations. It is purportedly a comedy, but most of the time it’s just mildly amusing. Most of the best gags are given away in the trailer, so it wasn’t until about two thirds of the way through the film that it actually managed to get a laugh out of me (although to be fair, it was a good one). Nearly all of the jokes they use are grossly overused, so something that appears even a little funny initially quickly loses any entertainment value, and most of these aren’t the kind of thing that become funny again after a while and only serve to make the film utterly predictable near the end. The brief sequence of outtakes that appear during the end credits is funnier than just about everything else in the film, so if you see the movie, make sure to stay for them.

The quality of the overall story is also suspect. It’s not hard to accept that someone would have second thoughts about moving to a commune, but the speed with which George and Linda change their minds isn’t completely believable. There’s also a rather contrived subplot about rich people trying to take over the land in order to build a casino which doesn’t stand up to any degree of scrutiny. This isn’t a movie that you see for its logic and reason, but it seems like that entire story line could have been removed without any harm done to the overall plot.

If you’re in the mood for something that doesn’t require any thought and might make you laugh a few times, then perhaps Wanderlust is for you. It’s probably quite a bit better if you haven’t seen the trailer, which seems to have been the case for most of the audience at the screening I attended.