04-15-10 Movie Review:  Date Night

Noncommercials celebrate life both low and high this week. The low begins tonight, with Tallgrass’ Third Thursday feature, Green Porno, Isabella Rossellini’s Sundance Channel movie on the mating rituals, a polite term for the sex lives, of animals, which will console you with the awareness that we humans are not the only ones who have made a complicated mess of basically simple matter of sex. Porno shows at 7 tonight at the Fisch Haus, that’s F-I-S-C-H , fish, haus, 524 South Commerce downtown. And higher life will be revealed by the Murdock Theatre tomorrow with Wings of Desire, Wim Wdenders’ 1987 German superhit with Bruno Ganz as an angel who needs angelic help. Wings of Desire plays at 7:30 Friday in the Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway.

Or, just for fun, you could go see Tina Fey and Steve Carell in Date Night.

Date Night is one of those silly comedies that just want to make you relax and laugh, and it does it without a lot of adolescent vulgarity about bodily functions or bad language or satire about much of anything, and WITH a car chase that looks pretty much unlike any other car chase I’ve ever seen and that is really funny on top of all the bang-crash.

Fey and Carell are a married couple who aren’t unhappy so much as just stuck in a rut; their only real problem, to me, seems to be a pair of those Hollywood toddlers who are supposed to be cute but whom I was happy to find leaving the screen after a few minutes. Since Carell is a sympathetic husband, he decides to relieve their monotony with a night out at the currently hot restaurant, without having made a reservation. And thereby hangs the tale, because not only do they steal the reservation of a couple who don’t show up, but they choose the very wrong couple to steal from. What follows is one of those old-style farces where the cops chase the crooks and the big crooks chase the little crooks and nobody really knows who anybody is so they wind up chasing each other, with narrow escape following close call all kinds of property damage but no permanent harm done except to the ones who finally turn out to deserve it. Just barely on the sidelines are Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig, and very much involved are James Franco and Mila Kunis; and bewilderedly harassed are shirtless Mark Wahlberg and his sexbomb girl friend, Jimmy Simpson and somebody named Common are a couple of bad guys who, like so many others are mere caricatures, and some are downright frightening.

But Fey and Carell are, almost alternatively, matches for any occasion, really smart at some times and seriously frightened at none, ingeniously tracking down clues and adopting disguises and never losing intelligence or charm. They could be really welcome new series couple, and I hope we see as many of them as we do of Spiderman.