{"id":11874,"date":"2019-05-15T16:00:55","date_gmt":"2019-05-15T23:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=11874"},"modified":"2019-05-15T16:37:23","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T23:37:23","slug":"review-wine-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/review-wine-country\/","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: SNL<\/i> Alumnae Comedy Wine Country<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

(On Netflix.)<\/em> The premise behind Wine Country<\/em><\/strong> is that SNL<\/em> alumnae Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, and Ana Gasteyer, and SNL<\/em> writers Paula Pell and Emily Spivey, wanted to make a movie where the six of them could hang out. (Don’t worry, there’s a part for Tina Fey, too.) This sounds a lot like the premise of Adam Sandler’s Grown Ups<\/em> movies, but I suspect you have already guessed the difference: In addition to wanting a vacation, the ladies also came up with a funny screenplay (by Spivey and Liz Cackowski, another SNL<\/em>\u00a0writer) and actually tried to make a good movie.<\/p>\n

They succeeded fairly well. Directed by Poehler, the sunny, relaxed comedy gets too wacky by the end but is generally almost as funny and comfortable as you’d expect a real-life hangout session with these women to be. They play six friends who met as waitresses at a Chicago pizza place 25 years ago, remained close as they scattered to live their lives, and are reuniting now at a gorgeous Napa Valley rental house to spend the weekend celebrating the Dratch character’s 50th birthday and drinking copious amounts of wine.<\/p>\n

Everyone around them — including the Airbnb owner (Fey) and a tarot-card reader (Cherry Jones) — assumes that six female friends sharing a tipsy weekend will end up at each other’s throats. The groundwork for that eventuality is laid by the six women’s well-established personalities, flaws, and quirks, which are realistically diverse and not jokey. Abby (Poehler) is a highly organized divorcee who has mapped out the entire weekend; Rebecca (Dratch) is a therapist whose husband treats her like a doormat; Catherine (Gasteyer) is workaholic CEO who’s always too busy; Naomi (Rudolph) is a harried mom of young kids who’s ignoring a voice mail from her doctor because it might contain bad news; Val (Pell) is a gregarious lesbian who befriends everyone, including Uber drivers; Jenny (Spivey) is the party-pooper who never wants to go anywhere or do anything, and is just as surprised as the other five that she actually showed up for this.<\/p>\n

The interpersonal beefs, grievances, and disagreements emerge naturally and are, of course, handled. (Spoiler alert: They’re still best friends at the end of the movie.) Along the way, the women laugh, drink, and sing; go on a wine-tasting tour where they exhibit zero interest in learning anything other than how to drink more wine; attend a pretentious art show where they almost have a rumble with a bunch of Millennial women; and marvel at how much older and tireder they’ve gotten since their Chicago days. Not surprisingly, some individual scenes have the level of reality of a comedy sketch (Fey’s character is very funny but not at all plausible as a person), which is frequently entertaining, before we come back to the simpler pleasures of fun people sitting around enjoying one another’s company. \"\"<\/p>\n

Grade: B-<\/span><\/h3>\n
1 hr., 43 min.; rated R for crude sexual content, language and some drug material<\/em><\/h5>\n
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(On Netflix.) The premise behind Wine Country is that SNL alumnae Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, and Ana Gasteyer, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":11875,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}