Rough Night’ Practice on Complex Litigation, Compliance, Board Governance and Specialized Is One of the Fiance’S Friends

Home , Lucia Aniello, Rough Night, Zoe Kravitz

CHICAGOLAWBULLETIN.COM FRIDAY, JUNE 16, 2017

Volume 163, No. 117 Serving Chicago’s legal community for 162 years

head against a stone countertop. Now they are faced with the Jam-packed comic dilemma of disposing of a corpse, and they are too afraid to call the p o l i c e . There is so much comic talent RE B E C CA in this movie —Ty Burrell and cast can’t revive L. FORD Demi Moore have small roles as sexy neighbors trolling for a threesome, Dean Winters (May- Rebecca L. Ford is counsel at Scharf hem in the Allstate commercials) Banks Marmor LLC, and concentrates her plays a robber and Hasan Minhaj ‘Rough Night’ practice on complex litigation, compliance, board governance and specialized is one of the fiance’s friends — employment issues. She is the former director Aniello could have simply executive vice president for litigation and let them run loose. Just in time for wedding season, film intellectual property at MGM. She can be Instead we watch them pluck reached at [email protected]. along, hurtling from joke to joke falls flat even with plenty of talent to tap with no clear path beneath them. The pace improves in scenes in- their undergraduate foursome, volving fiance Peter. They’re fresh he prewedding caper numbers rise with every Anthony Blair (Zoe Kravitz, daughter of in a weak-is-strong kind of way. “Rough Night”is as Weineresque tweet. Cosby kid Lisa Bonet and mu- Peter embarks on a quest to find underdeveloped as an Her metrosexual fiance, Peter sician Lenny Kravitz) and Frankie Jess when her phone drops and he improv sketch —w i t h - (writer Downs), is not what you’d (Ilana Glazer, “Broad City”), they misinterprets the breakup of their out the benefit of a call high-testosterone, and he be- are primed to spend a glorious connection as the break-off of their two-drinkT minimum. longs to a friendship circle of aes- South Beach weekend at the mod- engagement. Coached by his sen- A pseudo-feminist concatenation thete straight men with similar ernist glass-walled villa of a cam- sitive friends, Peter is resourceful of sex jokes, “Rough Night”has a t e m p e r a m e n t s . paign benefactor. and heroic in his hapless way. Per- few big laughs, relying heavily on haps this subplot works as well as sight gags and pratfalls. it does because Downs is perform- “Broad City”writers Paul Downs Even the most physical comic actors need ing his own material. and Lucia Aniello —Aniello as Two of the girlfriends, Frankie writer-director, Downs as writer- textured characters to work from. Don’t look and Blair, were lovers in college actor —have taken a stellar and the movie deals thoughtfully comedic cast and underutilized all for them here. with the premise that participants of its soldiering members. Even in such campus experimentations the most physical comic actors In college, Jess was best friend J e s s ’Australian pen pal Pippa still carry a torch. need textured characters to work to chubby outsider Alice (Jillian (Kate McKinnon), joins them as With its June launch, “R o u g h from. Don’t look for them here. Bell). Now 10 years after grad- well, arousing Alice’s rivalrous N i g h t ”is in theaters just in time Scarlett Johansson’s Jess is an uation, it doesn’t take Freud to instincts. to kick off a slew of wedding- earnest, uptight candidate run- figure out that needy Alice has The ladies hire a stripper to cap season bridesmaids’parties —but ning for state Senate. Viewed by planned the girl trip of her own off a drug- and alcohol-fueled i t ’s no “B r i d e s m a i d s .” her constituency as low-charisma, dreams under the guise of throw- night on the town. When Alice Besides, all the badass Je s s ’campaign is flailing. She ing a bachelorette party for Jess. takes an exuberant flying leap at b a c h e l o r e t t e s w i l l b e o v e r a t trails an opponent whose poll With two other members of the handsome hunk, she conks his “Wonder Woman.”