Jennifer Aniston

I get complaints from some of you when I go off on irrelevant tangents about the Decline of Culture and the Meaninglessness of Everything that really don’t have anything to do with some very nice, very rich people from Los Angeles who are working as hard as they can to make the same movies over and over again that you may laugh. In recognition of those nice people and our shared admiration of their labor, let’s divide this review into useful and nonuseful portions. Here’s what you need to know: “Horrible Bosses” is a lot funnier in theory than in practice, but it won’t ruin your Saturday night. As the trio of put-upon nitwits who decide to rid the world of their respective employers, Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis have an enjoyable and effortless comic chemistry. They even seem to like each other, and whether or not that’s faked it’s a key element of ensemble comedy. The cast of “The Hangover Part II” seemed massively irritated with each other’s company the entire time, and the bad vibes between Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis in “Due Date” permeated the entire production with a funky, bad odor, like bong-water and old socks mixed with spoiled sweet-and-sour chicken.

It’s a very good thing that those three guys cutting up, mocking each other and getting into embarrassing scrapes is fun to watch, because the script they’re reading (credited to Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein) is miscellaneous nonsense, and implausible even by the standards of who-cares Hollywood absurdity. To me, Bateman is the star here as much as he was opposite Aniston in last summer’s mediocre rom-com “The Switch,” where he totally stole the show. He never overplays even the stupidest comic situation, delivers a deadpan comeback with the best of them, and never compromises his basic likability. He plays Nick, a financial professional who’s way more successful than his buddies but is being sadistically strung along by Dave Harken (Spacey), his manipulative, micro-managing boss.

If Spacey starts out deliciously, in full-on flaming-driven-asshole mode, before Dave dissolves into an unconvincingly dumb cascade of evil, Farrell and Aniston’s horrible bosses never remotely resemble real people. Maybe that’s not a bad thing in itself; it’s not like director Seth Gordon (who made “Four Christmases,” along with episodes of “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and “Breaking In”) is pushing toward ruthless realism in this relentlessly sitcommy picture. Farrell plays a cokehead degenerate who’s using the small-time chemical company where Kurt (Sudeikis) works as his personal ATM, and that’s a whole bunch of shtick that never goes anywhere.

Aniston, as you may have heard, plays a leggy dentist with a fetching brunette ‘do and a deep stem-to-stern studio tan who craves a little personal attention from Dale (Day), her nerdy, nervous assistant, and won’t take no for an answer. There are so many things to say about this that I don’t know where to start, but, oh yeah, we’re still supposed to be in the useful portion of the review: Aniston might not seem like an automatic choice for this kind of slutty, man-eater role, but she’s ingratiating, funny and medium-sexy, and seems to enjoy herself far more than she ever has playing an anxious, boring sweetheart in romantic comedies.

That said — and here’s where we cross into nonuseful territory — Aniston’s psycho-bitch DDS character is just one of the countless ways that “Horrible Bosses” flirts with troubling or forbidden subject matter while still reassuring its youngish male target demographic as to their masculine coolness. Of course it’s possible for a female boss to sexually harass a male employee. In fact, I’m sure it has happened — in, like, 0.1 percent of harassment cases — but the perpetrator has rarely (or more likely never) resembled Jennifer Aniston. I hardly need to point out that mainstream filmmakers aren’t going to cast a fat woman or a much older woman or a woman who isn’t conventionally attractive in that role, because it wouldn’t be titillating and it would make them look like sexist creeps. In fact, Aniston’s character in “Horrible Bosses” goes well beyond unethical or inappropriate conduct into felonious sexual assault, but it all stays within the realm of comedy because A) it’s ridiculous and B) she’s hot.

I suppose it’s true that Nick, Kurt and Dale hatch a homicidal plan, only it’s more like they have a bunch of Three Stooges misadventures on the road toward having a plan, which involve Kurt sticking a toothbrush up his butt while the other two accidentally ingest loads of cocaine. They also travel into a scary neighborhood (i.e., one where African-Americans live) and meet a guy with a shaved head, prison tattoos and a pseudo-intellectual goatee whose name is Motherfucker Jones (Jamie Foxx). It’s a throwaway role for Foxx, but he gets to play a racist caricature and subvert the white boys’ instinctive racism at the same time, while delivering life lessons drawn from Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” and the 1999 Ethan Hawke vehicle “Snow Falling on Cedars.” (“I love that movie!” Sudeikis says brightly.)

This tiptoe-dance around racial attitudes is reflected in the film’s attitude about homosexuality, which is to dude comedy as that big-ass iceberg was to the Titanic — disastrous but also irresistible. (I won’t spoil a weird cameo appearance by Ioan Gruffudd, but it’s definitely on topic.) Sudeikis’ character is supposed to be an inveterate lady-killer who bags any chick he wants (which doesn’t seem likely, but never mind), but he catches himself checking out another guy’s butt in a big-box store, and becomes embroiled in a running debate with Bateman’s character about which of them will be more “rape-able” if they end up in prison. This is at least the fifth guy-comedy I’ve seen in the last year to mine the ever-hilarious topic of prison rape for laughs, and in its own screwy, accidental way maybe “Horrible Bosses” is taking on the ambivalent, narcissistic quality of post-metrosexual masculinity. No self-respecting straight guy wants to go to prison and become somebody’s bitch (except for the protagonist of David Mamet’s “Edmond”), but it would be even worse to go to prison and be ignored.

It’s tempting to suggest that Sandler makes such horrifyingly vacuous films, in which absurd gags float around in a killing void resembling outer space, because he is cynical or does not care. I think this is verifiably false. On the contrary, the marketplace has repeatedly proven that the public prefers Sandler in laid-back, recovering-doofus roles where he barely pretends to act, and where such minimal plot and characterization as exist serve only to get us from one ridiculous comic setup to the next. Occasionally Adam gets the drama-school bug and works with some director who isn’t his longtime crony Dennis Dugan, and the results, as in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love” or James L. Brooks’ “Spanglish,” are hotly debated by film critics and ignored by everybody else.

Whatever about its froggy-theatrical-Ingrid Bergman roots, “Just Go With It” is a Sandler-Dugan movie all the way, which means it includes a hula-dancing throwdown between Jennifer Aniston and Nicole Kidman in a Honolulu lounge (officiated by sportscaster Dan Patrick), Dave Matthews picking up a coconut with his ass cheeks, and a small boy taking a crap on an adult man, who then screams about it in a fake German accent. I will not claim that none of those things made me laugh. But I cried too, partly at the realization that Sandler’s particular brand of evil genius lies in taking a painfully stupid joke and pushing it so far that it sometimes transforms into its opposite, like some quantum-physics particle or that Hall & Oates song you hated the first 800 times and now totally love.

You want an example? Damn right you do — I inflicted this movie on myself and now someone’s got to pay. For reasons that don’t even begin to make sense, the 10-year-old that Sandler’s surgeon character pays to pretend to be his daughter in the film (played by Bailee Madison) starts to do her “role” in an atrocious Eliza Doolittle English accent. You know, “Wo’ a bloody bovver” and all. It’s terrible and not funny and a total overload of toxic fake cuteness. But then a supporting character named Eddie (Nick Swardson) shows up, wearing Coke-bottle glasses and doing the aforementioned fake German accent (he is supposedly called Dolph Lundgren, but he isn’t that Dolph Lundgren). And listening to him is so intentionally sub-”Hogan’s Heroes” bad, so inducing-death-wish-in-the-audience bad, that it’s a positive delight to get back to Bailee Madison addressing people as “guvnor” and “mumsie.”

Now, it’s not that the parts of this movie are more significant than the whole, it’s more like there is no whole (unless you take off the “w”). Sure, there’s kind of a plot: Sandler’s lizard-like Dr. Danny Macabee convinces his saucy single-mom assistant, Katherine (Aniston), to pretend to be his almost-ex-wife, so that he can explain the presence of a wedding ring in his jeans pocket to Palmer (Brooklyn Decker), his hot new pile of barely legal hotness. In a scene where people are confessing things that make them sad, Palmer bursts out: “Why did ‘N Sync have to break up?” And let’s show some love for screenwriters Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling, because that’s pretty funny! If you’re guessing that Danny will start to have feelings for the more mature Katherine he can’t possibly have for bodacious Palmer, you’re on the right track, of course — and those shards of adult emotion, along with a winning and unassuming performance from the oft-dissed Aniston, make “Just Go With It” feel like the work of Ernst Lubitsch, at least compared to such previous Sandler-Dugan fare as “Grown Ups.” (That was my personal worst film of 2010. This one won’t even be close.)

But I can feel Sandler peering over my shoulder saying “Ernst Lu — what did you just call me?” And he’s right. “Just Go With It” is more than a nonsensical title for a haphazard romantic comedy, it’s almost a divine injunction. Watching Nicole Kidman shtick it up in full ice-bitch mode, wearing a hideous dress that seems to have been assembled from the machines that crush Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times,” or Swardson (as not-that-Dolph Lundgren) giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a sheep, is ever so much more the point of this movie than waiting for Sandler and Aniston’s characters to reach the perfunctory happy-ever-after. I’m not even going to tell you what Kidman is doing in the movie, or why her character’s first name is a euphemism for feces, or why Dave Matthews has to pick up a coconut with those rock-hard glutes. Not because I’m protecting spoilers, or because I’m claiming it’s not funny, in an awful way. More because I choose to start the long process of forgetting right now.

Here’s the thing: Simply by trying to break free of the hoariest situations and archetypes, and to create characters who talk and behave somewhat like actual young (or at least youngish) middle-class Americans, director Nanette Burstein and her cast have made the year’s best mainstream rom-com. But seriously, consider the competition: Two “comeback vehicles” for fading stars named Jennifer, both of them self-fulfilling prophecies about the difficulties faced by American actresses over 40, both of them encouraging the media to be both observers and enablers of Hollywood sexism. (Yeah, mea culpa on that one.) “Sex and the City 2,” a genuinely idiotic film that got beaten up out of all proportion. “Eat, Pray, Love,” which of course doesn’t really qualify as a rom-com, but would have been a lot better if it did. And I can’t go back to February and revisit the fact that I actually spent a little bit of my life watching “Valentine’s Day.” I just can’t.

So awarding a prize to “Going the Distance” in this context is a little like giving an A for effort to the only student in your class who isn’t dropping out to take a job at Chick-Fil-A. It’s the only romantic comedy to emerge from Hollywood this year that doesn’t feel completely defensive and cynical. It doesn’t condescend to its audience or shamelessly yank the emotional chains of middle-aged female viewers. It isn’t set in Romcom USA, that mysterious alternate universe where the clothes and cars look convincing but everyone’s apartment is three times too large and the conversations and situations all seemingly belong to the Mary Tyler Moore era.

Most impressively, Burstein and screenwriter Geoff LaTulippe do not seem to share the widespread assumption that romantic comedy is a contemptible if economically necessary phenomenon, based entirely on feeding over-35 women a steady drip of the dumbest possible clichés about guys and gals and that joyous-yet-painful thing that happens between them. (Besides home mortgages, I mean. And pubic lice.) “Going the Distance” doesn’t always click but has a distinctive, sardonic voice and vision. It at least tries to capture the social world of Erin (Barrymore) and Garrett (Long), a couple of smart but underemployed post-collegiate types who meet over the Centipede machine in a New York bar, smack dab in the middle of a shrinking economy.

Now, am I claiming that “Going the Distance” is a Zeitgeist-capturing yarn of love in our hookup culture, one that may capture the mood of an entire generation? I am not. It has a little of that ambition, which is admirable and all. In bringing together a documentary filmmaker (Burstein made the docs “American Teen” and “The Kid Stays in the Picture”) with an unknown screenwriter, this film’s producers seem to be splitting the difference between conventional rom-com and more “alt” fare, like the films of indie auteurs Joe Swanberg or Andrew Bujalski. But I strongly suspect the skeptics are right. Of course romantic comedy could come back, and it undoubtedly will. But at the moment it’s a moribund genre, with little appeal to the “Twilight” generation of girls and young women. All a pleasant, offbeat movie like “Going the Distance” can hope to do is swim halfheartedly against the ebbing tide.

I spent a little while after watching “Going the Distance” trying to puzzle out its flaws and limitations — the directing is better than the writing, the actors rise above a pedestrian plot, etc. — before arriving at the perfect summary: It’s kind of good, but not all that great! (Hear that sound? That’s the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, whooshin’ toward me.) Thing is, Barrymore is so terrific as Erin, a ballsy, physical, foulmouthed guys’ gal who’s universes away from your average neurotic rom-com heroine, that you keep thinking a movie built around her ought to be awesome. So the fact that is isn’t is continually surprising.

When Erin and Garrett go home together after their little contretemps at the Centipede machine — she was about to hit a high score before he screwed it up — neither one of them is exactly thinking about a great romance. He broke up with somebody else quite recently (OK, minutes earlier). They do bong hits and make out. She pretends to be outraged that Garrett’s hopeless roommate Dan (comedian Charlie Day) is “DJ’ing the hookup,” i.e., playing the “Top Gun” score through the flimsy apartment walls while they get it on. They actually have breakfast together the next morning, complete with sincere conversation — but when Garrett calls Erin later, she still doesn’t know his name.

This whole sequence of scenes around the couple’s first meeting is so charged with tenderness, toughness and combative, outrageous humor — and that brash, braying Barrymore laugh — that one can only wish the rest of “Going the Distance” lived up to it even halfway. But as Garrett and Erin fall in love, Burstein almost immediately resorts to a montage of, God help me, the couple frolicking on the beach or strolling Manhattan’s streets hand in hand. See, their idyll is to be short-lived: Erin’s a summer intern at a New York newspaper who’s heading back to grad school in California, while Garrett works at a record label that used to be hip and is now hoping to survive by finding the next Jonas Brothers.

Yes, the fact that they both work in crippled or dying industries is meant to be significant, but like a lot of other things in LaTulippe’s script it comes off as intriguing but a little half-baked. Why is Garrett and Dan’s other buddy, Box (Jason Sudeikis), so interested in finding a girlfriend over 45 who will, in some epistemological sense, not be a cougar? Why must we learn strange but irrelevant details about the sex life of Erin’s unhinged married sister (played by Christina Applegate, who is very funny)? I think the only reason is that screenplays in the post-Tarantino, late-Apatow era must garnish their supporting characters with all kinds of potentially symbolic eccentricities.

Inescapably, “Going the Distance” gets more flaccid and ordinary as it manages the highly predictable yuks emerging from Garrett and Erin’s efforts to keep their relationship going across 3,000 miles of low-budget separation. I never lost interest in this couple, who have a relaxed and natural chemistry together (as I guess they should). If Long’s no match for Barrymore, he’s still a genial comic performer, and even the most ordinary parts of the film deliver plenty of laughs. You never have the feeling that “Going the Distance” got made because of econometric projections; the people involved actually like it, and that counts for a lot. Can it save the rom-com? Definitely not, but I’m not sure anything can.