2016 Spring Movie Lessons

Warning: May contain spoilers.

The Boss

1. It’s acceptable to have a convicted felon leading your daughter’s scout troop if it’s only white collar crime.

2. A town car will not automatically be provided after you get out of prison for insider trading.

3. Having a former flame/colleague attempt to murder you with a samurai sword can be a real turn on, as long as he fails in his original aim.

4. If you’re staying with your ex-employee and her preteen daughter, it’s best to lock the door when experimenting with spray on tanner.

Eddie the Eagle

5. The British Olympic Committee can make up a rule out of thin air to keep you from going if they don’t think you’re posh enough.

6. Ski-jumping coaches can be found in the most unlikely places, including the jaded alcoholic snowplow driver.

7. Practicing for a dirty dancing performance and a ski-jumping event have a few key moves in common.

8. You don’t need a jacket in frigid weather, as long as you’ve got your trusty flask.

The Bronze

9. “Camel toe” is not synonymous with “dismount.”

10. Third place finishers in national gymnastics championships can still get freebies a decade later, even if they have a mouth like a garbage disposal.

11. If your adult daughter needs to be instilled with a sense of responsibility, it’s okay to fake a will from her deceased former coach promising half a million dollars if she trains the new kid in town.

12. If you’re a former gymnastics champion going on a date, it’s okay to trade your warm-up pants for a skirt, but don’t remove your jacket unless you plan to have sex with another former gymnastics champion.

The Brothers Grimsby

13. Ask for more details than just the outfit color when going undercover to seduce a woman.

14. Be ultra-specific when talking to your children about drugs. Explain that they should only vape as preteens, not anything harder, if they must smoke.

15. Think twice before you take refuge in an elephant vagina, particularly if she’s feeling hormonal.

16. Think twice before you assume an overweight woman is pregnant, even if she’s surrounded by dozens of kids.

Everybody Wants Some!!

17. You could get a great tax write-off in 1980 by donating your house to a college which will then use it to house a sports team. However, the length of time it will remain standing will probably be shorter than the school year.

18. There’s apparently no irony in mocking your dorm’s one redneck hick mercilessly, then going out and dancing to “Cotton Eyed Joe.”

19. It pays to double check every one of your baseball team’s background because there could be a thirty-something attempting to masquerade as a freshman.

20. The key to finding out who you are is not being afraid to do things that are dumb.

Money Monster

21. It’s a really good idea to vet random people dressed as deliverymen before letting them into the inner sanctum of a TV studio.

22. Finding a hostage-taker’s pregnant girlfriend and letting her berate him is not a good way to de-escalate the situation.

23. Having your “talent'” held hostage is a great way of realizing that you can’t get along without him after all.

24. If you take someone hostage on TV, every minute will be televised, including if you move the hostage to another location.

The Nice Guys

25. If you and your partner are going to heave a fresh corpse over a fence, make sure no one’s holding a dinner party there.

26. Threatening to harm a thug-for-hire’s fish is a sure way to piss him off and ensure that he won’t cooperate with you.

27. Empty swimming pools that you don’t intend to fill make great giant ashtrays.

28. Private investigators apparently bring hair dryers with them on a case, since their hair looks perfectly dry after swimming in a fish tank.

The Meddler

29. Apple Stores are great places to hang out for hours and find new lives to meddle in, though not matches for your adult daughter.

30. Chickens are happiest when Dolly Parton is playing on the boombox.

31. Updating your daughter on every detail of your life via your cell phone is not conducive to getting your car home accident free.

32. If you’re going to scatter your loved ones’ ashes in the ocean, pick a time when the beach is deserted because otherwise you’ll get in trouble with the law.

Movie Review: The Boss

So this morning, I heard two DJs on the radio discussing new releases.

First: “This week we have ‘The Boss’ opening…”

Second: “Bruce Springsteen has a movie out?!”

Now that would probably have been a better movie than this one. If you want to describe as a hybrid, you could sum it up as “Troop Beverly Hills” meets every generic redemption Hollywood movie ever made. Like eating green eggs and ham, there are a number of ways an egocentric movie character can seek redemption. For example, Will Ferrell (who produced “The Boss”) has sought redemption on the racetrack (“Talladega Nights”), on the ice (“Blades of Glory”) and on the baseball field (“Kicking and Screaming”). Here, Melissa McCarthy, who co-wrote the movie along with director Ben Falcone, plays a Martha Stewart-ish self-made businesswoman, Michelle Darnell, who overcomes being raised in an orphanage (though the nuns don’t exactly resemble Miss Hannigan) to make it to the top but who’s been left with a pathological fear of closeness. If you’ve seen the trailer, or even just caught part of it, you have basically seen the whole movie – although they do leave out an exciting showdown involving samurai swords, two Dobermans and a high rise.

As is common in such films, Melissa loses everything that matters to her in a comically short period of time. “What? It’s just insider trading – everybody does it!” she protests, as she’s manhandled into a cop car, directly after being humiliated on a TV interview. But she gets sentenced to the same place that Leo DiCaprio did in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and so is out fairly soon. Melissa can, in fact, convincingly play an ordinary person on film (“St. Vincent”), but here she’s fully in her usual mode: raunchy, klutzy and over the top. “The Boss” co-stars another refuge from hit TV nineties shows, Kristen Bell, who plays Melissa’s long-suffering assistant, and who winds up letting Melissa crash at her place after Melissa is released from prison. Kristen has a refreshingly normal-looking/acting preteen daughter (Ella Anderson), who bonds with Melissa, while her mother is at work, dealing with an even worse boss and a nebbishly cute colleague who really wants to date her. Ella and Melissa attend Ella’s Dandelion Troop meeting, and after learning how low their cookie sales are, Melissa decides to start a “brownie empire,” using a recipe of Kristen’s. But trouble will rear its head in the form of a Dandelion mother who doesn’t take kindly to having her troop members “poached,” and an ex-flame/rival (Peter Dinklage) also is itching to take Melissa down.

The venture is an instant success, but of course, there needs to be friction, including the kind of misunderstanding that happens all the time in such movies. Melissa ends up dueling for her life, after she, Kristen and the boyfriend break into Peter’s place for contrived movie reasons. Hence the samurai sword fight. “The Boss,” shares some similarities to “Tammy,” mainly a main character who could have been a lot wittier than the script lets her, a cameo by Kathy Bates, and the mention of Doritos. I have to admit that if this is intentional product placement, it’s woven very well into the movie. Otherwise, this movie has some funny parts but isn’t the kind of thing you’d want to watch again and again.