Like the comedy teams of old, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Fey and Poehler offer irresistible side splitting guffaws in Sisters, their new movie that opened this week at the Ziegfeld with a party at MoMA.
The art museum's lobby was transformed into a lavish party space with a tropical theme, echoing the party central to Sister's plot: James Brolin and Dianne Wiest play parents, still vibrant and sexy; their late-launching, 40-ish daughters stage one last adolescent Animal House-style fling in their just sold family house in Florida. Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph, Kate MacKinnan, and scene-stealing Bobby Moynihan pop up, providing SNL worthy laughs. The movie party gets raucous and raunchy, and the sisters grow up, sort of, in Paula Pell's superbly riotous script that hones close to home. Pell's parents came up from Florida for this premiere, attesting to truth in comedy.
While these funny women were not named for Golden Globes, others like Amy Schumer and Brie Larson for Trainwreck, Lily Tomlin in Grandma and Maggie Smith for The Lady in the Van were nominated by the foreign press. In this last, penned by Alan Bennett after a true experience about an elderly woman who literally was on the lam and lived in a van. He allowed her to park in his driveway for a short while that extended to 15 years, in an entrance within view of his writing desk, and a place where visitors became privy to her powerful odors. Of course you cannot really smell her, nor would you want to, but comic Maggie Smith gives off a whiff of the irresistible.
A version of this post also appears on Gossip Central.