Raunchy fun on menu at ‘Dinner’
If you and your ( girl?) friends enjoyed “Girls Trip,” and it was not too raunchy for you, you might also want to sample Alethea Jones’ “Fun Mom Dinner,” which takes the same premise of a wild (OK, maybe not quite as wild, but profane enough to get an R rating ) girls’ night out.
Set in Los Angeles, although you could have fooled me, since the film’s award-winning director and the wonderful Toni Collette, a leading cast member, are both Aussies, and the hills are often alive with the sound of shrimp hissing on the barbie. The divine Collette is Kate, wife and mother of four, and she has no time for loudmouthed crossing guard Melanie (comic Bridget Everett), who works at Kate’s kids’ school.
When Melanie and divorced mother-friend Jamie (Molly Shannon) invite the sweet and pretty, but neglected wife and mother Emily (Katie Aselton) for a “fun mom dinner,” Emily insists on bringing her friend Kate, even though Kate has no other friends and a reputation for being a you-know-what.
What results is not exactly “The Godfather” of girls’ night out movies or even “The Hangover” of such offerings. But the cast is talented, and the film is sweet, funny, occasionally quite raunchy (the word “rosebud” has a whole new meaning here) and full of surprising appearances by the likes of Paul Rudd, whose wife, Julie Rudd, wrote the serviceable screenplay, as a yarmulke-clad recreational pot dealer; Adam Scott as Emily’s husband, who has lost the marital spark; Marsai Martin of “Black-ish” as a tart-tongued, disapproving little girl and (really?) Adam Levine as a supposedly irresistible bartender.
Everett, who once performed a duet of “Me and Bobby McGee” with Patti LuPone at Carnegie Hall and wears a chicken suit through half the film for no good reason, gets up on a karaoke stage at one point and starts rocking the house. Collette (“Krampus”) amusingly turns the eyeroll take into a form of ocular jiu- jitsu. Aselton (TV’s “Legion”), a Miss Maine Teen USA 1995 and former Boston University School of Communications student, is an appealing presence, and Shannon and Everett are both gifted comic actors. “Fun Mom Dinner” — you could do lot worse on your girls’ night out.
(“Fun Mom Dinner” contains profanity, lewd language and drug use.)