Bryan Cranston and James Franco in Why Him? 
 
 It’s been a while since we’ve seen an onscreen character as thoroughly repulsive as Laird Mayhew, the grody, obsequious, and obscene tech millionaire played by James Franco in Why Him?. Perhaps this is a testament to Franco, an actor who’s often criticized for biting off more than he can chew; this time, he seems to be trying hard to craft a distinctive comedic personality. His success is our misfortune. 
 
 Covered in questionable tattoos, clad in baggy sweatpants, and prone to yelling about his dick at the top of his lungs, Laird is irritating both to look at and listen to. He has no chemistry with his college-aged girlfriend Stephanie (Zoey Deutch of Everybody Wants Some!!), preferring instead to hit on Stephanie’s mother (Megan Mullally, a trooper). To compensate for his overwhelming toxicity, Laird throws around his video-game fortune with Muammar Gaddafi–like abandon: His compound features TV-famous personal chefs, a home office that resembles an underwater lair, and tacky paintings and sculptures of animals having sex. What a catch. 
 
 As a gesture of good faith, Stephanie’s beleaguered father, Ned (Bryan Cranston), and the rest of the family — Mullally’s cheery matriarch Barb and well-mannered teenage son Scotty (Griffin Gluck) — decamp from their home in Grand Rapids to spend Christmas at Laird’s sprawling Silicon Valley mansion. The images that ensue might haunt you for all your days: a dead moose suspended in a pool of its own urine; a child motorboating his own father; a crude animation of a man being anally raped by a three-headed dragon with a rocket for a penis. Laird’s home is a Xanadu of vulgarity, absent any of the wit and comic timing that distinguishes Franco’s collaborations with Seth Rogen. You know all traces of goodwill have left the building when even Keegan-Michael Key, as a crisply efficient manservant with pointy sideburns, can’t muster much. 
 
 Director and co-writer John Hamburg also co-wrote all three Meet the Parents movies, and because Why Him? repeats that movie’s formula, the plot is eventually supposed to arrive at a plausible answer to its own question. We never get there. We do get Ned, quite reasonably, worrying that his daughter might be throwing her life away for a freakishly impulsive manchild. A better movie might have given Ned enough flaws to balance the equation, but all we see here is that he’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, and, because he runs a printing company, is also pretty tech-averse. Honestly, if guys like Laird are behind every iPhone app, more of us should go back to handwritten correspondence. 
 
 The question in this movie’s title gets a lot of use. A version of it could also apply to pretty much everyone involved, especially Cranston. The actor, who once brilliantly crafted the slow-burning tragedy of Walter White, is forced to mug helplessly through scenes where he’s sprayed in the face with toilet water. Why him? 
 
 You could keep asking “Why?” to the movie’s co-writer Jonah Hill (he has story credit) and producer Ben Stiller, both of whom have put their names on much better studio comedies than this one. You could even ask why the filmmakers had to drag in the great state of Michigan, which has been through enough already. 
 
 Like The Internship, the 2013 film that saw Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson attempt to get jobs at Google, Why Him? finds the tech lifestyle endlessly amusing. But apart from some bits about a smart home and a painful cameo by Elon Musk, the film doesn’t get its gas from the Valley itself, as much as from weak jokes about the stupid things that rich assholes spend money on. Laird wants Ned’s blessing to propose to Stephanie, and he’s so eager to please that he installs a bowling alley in his basement for the guy. “Regulation-sized,” muses Ned, whose own company is in the red. “That’s rare.” 
 
 Yeah, but so what? The only way this movie knows how to depict its hero as a good man is by showing that he occasionally spends his fortune on other people; redemption as a diversifying of assets. Wealth does not confer decency and should not excuse noxious behavior, and it is not a replacement for a soul. But it is, apparently, the final answer to the question in the movie’s title. ||||| As 1995 slouches into 1996, winter holds Montreal in an unrelenting grip. Adding to the chill are a series of unsolved rapes and murders occurring in the west-end neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, all of which, it seems, have been perpetrated by the same man. That’s the set-up for Jacob Tierney’s third feature, using a self-penned screenplay adapted from Chrystine Brouillet’s novel Chère Voisine. The action revolves around three tenants of a run-down apartment: a cat-obsessed waitress (Emily Hampshire) working in a Chinese restaurant that never seems to have any customers, a wheelchair-bound widower (Scott Speedman) whose suite is filled with aquariums, and an emotionally needy, newly arrived elementary-school teacher (Jay Baruchel). Tierney, who scored big at TIFF last year with The Trotsky, garners great (and not a little creepy) turns from each of his leads to concoct a twisty tale that’s part-mystery, part-psychological thriller, part-comedy. His assured mise-en-scène echoes Polanski’s The Tenant and Boyle’s Shallow Grave. J.A. 
 
 Sept. 18, 12:45 p.m., AMC 6 
 
 Trigger 
 
 Bruce McDonald (Canada) 
 
 3 STARS 
 
 Sometimes an on-screen pairing just clicks. Though filled with recognizable faces – Sarah Polley, Don McKellar, Callum Keith Rennie, Caroline Gillis – Trigger leans almost entirely on its leading ladies, Molly Parker and the late Tracy Wright. They play reunited rocker chicks who have taken widely divergent paths in life and are wrangling demons born of a youth spent with sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Looking gaunt, Wright is splendid as Vic, the sharp and sarcastic half of the duo wasted by a taste for heroin. Parker is a charming and convincing foil as the cheerier Kat, now a well-paid TV executive still battling demons of her own. Trigger was rushed into production after Wright was diagnosed with cancer, but it doesn’t feel that way. Shot simply but compellingly, it feels like a polished and practised portrait of rekindled bonds. J.B. 
 
 Sept. 18, 12:45 p.m., Scotiabank 2 
 
 Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries) 
 
 Kiran Rao (India) 
 
 3 STARS 
 
 Move over Bollywood, because India is going indie. More precisely, it's showing some early signs of returning to the auteur-driven sensibilities of a director like Satyajit Ray. Here, making her feature debut, Kiran Rao takes us to teeming Mumbai in the monsoon season, then glides fluidly through the urban strata embodied in her three principal characters – an affluent Indian-American woman with photographic ambitions; a dour artist with a troubled marital past; and a hunky laundry boy (a dhobi) keen to climb out of the slums and into the movies. Perched on their different rungs, each is looking up or down the social ladder and doing the same thing but from different motives: peering, either curiously or enviously, into the lives of others. As they do, the film means to be the cinematic answer to Suketu Mehta's book, Maximum City – that is, it wants to draw a vibrant portrait of Mumbai in all its cruel beauty. Wants to, and almost succeeds. R.G. 
 
 Sept. 18, 12 p.m., Bell Lightbox 1 
 
 Stone 
 
 John Curran (USA) 
 
 3 STARS 
 
 Does sin come naturally to human beings? That, and how to look to be forgiven for it, is at the heart of Stone, especially where crimes that never reach a courtroom are concerned. Edward Norton steals the show as Gerald (Stone) Creeson, a convict of eight years looking for freedom through his parole officer, Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro). Norton is thoughtful and clever, but reptilian and rough. As Mabry, De Niro grapples ably with his own demons, entangled with the efforts of Lucetta Creeson (Milla Jovovich), a seductive manipulator trying to spring her husband. This film isn’t without flaws: For example, its religious overtones, framed by the devout rituals of Jack’s wife Madylyn and squawked out over Christian radio, don’t quite strike the right chord. But it’s worth the price of admission to see Norton and De Niro sparring across a prison-house desk. J.B. ||||| FILM REVIEW 'Why Him?' 2.5 stars (out of 4) MPAA rating: R for strong language and sexual material throughout Cast: Bryan Cranston, James Franco, Zoey Deutch, Megan Mullally Director: John Hamburg Run time: 111 minutes 
 
 "Why Him?" is silly and derivative, a reverse-riff on "Meet the Parents" featuring more Japanese bidet-toilet jokes and moose-urine gags per square inch than any movie being released this week, easily. I recommend it with reservations, although I am also reserving the right to feel, someday, probably sooner rather than later, embarrassed for laughing at it as much as I did. 
 
 So it goes. This lighthearted, but never mean-spirited film, crass as it is, although not as crass as it could have been, features just enough inspired chemical comedy to elevate it a notch or two above others of its ilk. The blame and credit lies not with the same-old writing and jokes, but its principals. Bryan Cranston, who some would argue is better than this, is an uptight, non-ironic-sweatervest-wearing Midwestern dad, Ned Fleming. He butts heads with James Franco's West Coast, heavily tattooed, young-millionaire video-game developer dingbat, Laird Mayhew, who wants to marry Ned's sweetheart daughter, Steph (Zoey Deutch). 
 
 The Fleming family - Ned, his wife Barb (Megan Mullally) and teenage son Scotty (Griffin Gluck) - flies from their dork town of Grand Rapids, Mich. to Southern California, where they'll stay in Laird's ultramodern manse and celebrate Christmas. Their first impression of Laird was not great: a video chat with Steph featuring more of Laird's nude hindquarters than they wanted to see. When they finally meet "the man behind the crack" In person, they're appalled to hear him dropping F-bombs like he's a pigeon dropping droppings, i.e., constantly. He serves the Flemings edible paper and sea urchin burritos, and puts up mom and pop in a room decorated with paintings of rutting capybaras and creepy cat faces that make Van Gogh's self-portraits look like "Family Circus" comics. 
 
 Do hijinks ensue? Do pigeons like to drop droppings? Laird's manservant Gustav is the film's resident Scene Thief, played by Keegan-Michael Key, endearingly ridiculous as ever. Gustav is teaching Laird jiu-jitsu and parkour self-defense techniques by attacking him randomly and without warning - absurd slapstick scenes that are funnier than they have any right to be. Laird gets a huge back tattoo of the Fleming family's Christmas photo; Laird throws a banging Christmas party attended by Elon Musk; Laird mildly corrupts young Scotty, transforming him from Young Republican stiff to loose dope dude; Laird is a walking, talking, living, breathing hijink. 
 
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 Cranston fluffs his feathers into a full fluster as Laird tries to bond with Ned, and win him over. Ned has difficulty embracing the guy's contradictions - Laird is a grating, big-hearted, loony weirdo with sympathetic parental issues, no filter, few personal boundaries and a very generous, gregarious soul, which all comes out in Franco's effortlessly funny performance. Laird is also disarmingly old-fashioned in some ways, bringing Ned to his office - a wigwam in the woods, of course - and asking for his blessing to marry Steph. 
 
 Laird may as well be asking for the moon, because Ned likes to keep Steph locked into his Fort Knox of an overprotective father's heart. See, Ned and Steph used to be two peas in a pod, but she's now an adult, 22 years old, and keeping secrets from him, Laird being the big one. Father and daughter share a few moments of heartfelt sincerity that ground "Why Him?", preventing it from being just a gag parade. Sure, they're fleeting moments, but not insignificant. 
 
 Otherwise, the women in the film are given very little to do. Barb gets wasted vaping weed, requiring Mullally to drops trou in an attempt to seduce her husband, who's too troubled by his daughter's choice of mate (or maybe those staring cat paintings) to go with it. And Deutch's bland character is nothing more than the Switzerland of the plot, negotiating between warring parties. 
 
 Of course, Ned is the lone stick in the mud, the odd man out, because he's the one with the struggling printing business, visiting an entirely paperless household. (I take that back. Laird's paper is edible, served as a side dish to the bear meat.) And yet, Ned sometimes seems to be almost enjoying himself at Laird's place, especially when he sees the twin-lane bowling alley he had installed just for his hopeful soon-to-be father-in-law. Is this inconsistency or complexity of character? Does it matter? Not really, as long as we laugh every so often. That's the only consistency we ask from movies like "Why Him?", which is funny in spite of its adherence to so many familiar generation-gap comedy tropes. It's at least better than "Son In Law," a comparison I make very, very lightly. 
 
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 'Collateral Beauty' review: Will Smith anchors trite howler of a melodrama ||||| You could sketch out the story of "Get Him to the Greek" on the back of a cocktail napkin -- that's probably how it was written in the first place -- and you'd get most of it right. Take a preening English rock star on the down slope of a once-huge career and a shlubby American talent agent trying to make his bones. Give them 36 hours to get from London to New York to a concert at L.A.'s Greek Theater. Interrupt as necessary with booze, drugs, trashy nightclubs, unscheduled visits to Vegas and floozies of various nationalities. Give the agent a hard-ass boss with the affect and personality of Sean "P. Diddy" Combs. OK, make it be Sean Combs. 
 
 Then add the celebrity cameos required by all zany comedies these days: Say, Meredith Vieira, Lars Ulrich, Paul Krugman. Wait -- hello? I must have had too many myself; for a second I thought you said "Paul Krugman." No, it's true. The Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist appears in writer-director Nicholas Stoller's dudealicious comedy, conversing with vomit-streaked talent agent Aaron Green (Jonah Hill) in the green room of the "Today" show. "My dad really loves your shit," Aaron assures him. 
 
 Krugman's presence goes some distance toward illustrating the oddness of this Judd Apatow-produced wannabe summer hit, which blends healthy doses of debauchery and potty-mouth humor into a sweet-tempered, absurdist road yarn. In its better patches, "Get Him to the Greek" is closer to '30s screwball comedy than to stereotypical balls-out guy-farce. Granted, I don't remember any films by Ernst Lubitsch or Preston Sturges that involved splashy toilet-cubicle sex scenes, or gags involving someone stashing a balloon full of heroin in his "bottom-hole," to use the delicious phrase of rock god Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), a character first seen as the title character's boyfriend in Stoller's debut film, "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." But ask yourself honestly: If jokes like that had been conceivable back then, wouldn't Sturges have used them? 
 
 OK, that line of inquiry gets us nowhere. What I'm reaching for is the idea that "Get Him to the Greek" is an uneven but surprising movie, often outrageously funny and just as often completely flat. It almost works better as a dramatic bromance than as a comedy, thanks to the wonderful chemistry between Brand, a feline, intelligent English comedian who's still in search of American stardom, and Hill, a rotund Yank with a strangely powerful screen presence. (Hill is sneaking up on stardom himself; he's also terrific as Marisa Tomei's sinister adult son in the Duplass brothers' forthcoming comedy, "Cyrus.") 
 
 A nebbishy bottom-dweller in the L.A. talent agency presided over by tyrannical Sergio Roma (nice work by Combs -- and no, I don't know why his character has an Italian name), Hill's Aaron comes up with one big idea. He wants to drag one-time rock idol Aldous Snow out of quasi-retirement for the 10-year anniversary of his 1999 Greek Theater show, and turn the spectacle into a social-media phenomenon, streamed on Facebook, broadcast on HBO, and so on. Even grumpy Sergio agrees this appeal to arena-rock insta-nostalgia might become a huge cash cow, but Snow is lost in a London drug haze, following his disastrous venture into third-world compassion with an album called "African Child" and the implosion of his relationship with a pornographic pop-dance strumpet named Jackie Q (Rose Byrne, very funny). 
 
 Here's the thing about "Get Him to the Greek": The setup isn't especially interesting or original, but the movie gets better as it goes through its paces. At first blush, Aldous seems like a moronic Brit-rocker in the Spinal Tap vein, and Aaron like a clueless nerd who's out of his depth around cooler people. It's almost as if Stoller's screenplay is at war with itself, or with his directorial instincts, because both guys wind up being more complicated than that. 
 
 Aldous is vain, deluded, pretentious and probably chronically depressed, but definitely not stupid. Brand plays him as a self-centered Londoner from a lower-middle-class background, with a laconic drawl and an autodidact's intelligence, more like a 30-years-younger Mick Jagger than like any contemporary rock star I can think of. When Aaron tells Aldous the truth about the hideousness of "African Child," Aldous responds carefully: "I respect your honesty. But the content of what you say makes me hate you. So there's a layer of respect, but under that, hate." Yes, Aldous wants Aaron to transport narcotics in his bottom-hole and join him in all-night sessions of soulless debauchery, but in his not-so-hidden heart, he's also cravenly grateful for a friend who doesn't bullshit him all the time. 
 
 As for Aaron, he may lack worldly confidence and anything approaching adult judgment, but he's a resourceful, irrepressible guy, happy to talk to Krugman and Vieira while wearing a jacket streaked with yellow clumps of barf. When Sergio taunts him about being easily manipulated -- "I'm mind-fucking you right now. Can you feel my dick fucking your mind?" -- Aaron tries to develop a line of swagger appropriate to the occasion: "I hope you're wearing a condom, 'cause I've got a dirty mind." 
 
 Add in a whole roster of convincingly terrible Aldous Snow and Jackie Q musical numbers, gags about Cher and string cheese and "The Biggest Loser," and a terrific supporting cast that features a lovely performance from Elisabeth Moss (that's Peggy Olsen from "Mad Men") as the baffled medical-intern girlfriend Aaron leaves behind in L.A., and you end up with an awkward, intermittently hilarious and mostly enjoyable mishmash. (Yes, it's another Apatow-produced film in which a pudgy guy has a cute girlfriend, although the relationship here is at least moderately plausible.) A huge hit? Probably not. But however many shots of absinthe it took to get Paul Krugman to play along, he doesn't need to feel bad about it in the morning.
– "Maybe just see Rogue One again" seems to be the consensus from those who sat through holiday comedy Why Him?, which opens Friday. The Bryan Cranston and James Franco vehicle from a co-writer of Meet the Parents is currently 40% rotten on Rotten Tomatoes. Here's what critics are saying: Why Him? fails in part because it lacks Meet the Parents' patience with building comedic tension, according to Darren Franich at Entertainment Weekly. "The film wants to be a comedy of excess, but it just feels excessive ... You want toilet jokes? You got them. Dozens!" One of a handful of relatively few positive reviews, Bruce DeMara of the Toronto Star found Why Him? to be a "wildly entertaining jaunt" as long as you're "looking for light seasonal fare" packed to the gills with "ribald, gross-out humor." Richard Roeper at the Chicago Sun Times disagrees, to put it mildly, saying Why Him? is "in the bottom 1% of movies I've ever seen." It's "not funny, not funny, not funny, not funny, not funny" despite starring "two of the most gifted and versatile actors on the planet." And those actors have something to answer for. At the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis says the film proves "definitively that slapping Mr. Franco's scenery-eating grin on any old drivel doesn't guarantee entertainment," especially when the script is "shoveling expletives into the holes where jokes ought to be." Meanwhile, Andrew Lapin at Vulture finds the film's title could rightly be asked of Cranston. "The actor, who once brilliantly crafted the slow-burning tragedy of Walter White, is forced to mug helplessly through scenes where he's sprayed in the face with toilet water. Why him?" Ending on a more positive note, John Serba at M Live recommends Why Him? "with reservations" and with an asterisk, saying he's also "reserving the right to feel, someday, probably sooner rather than later, embarrassed for laughing at it as much as I did."