Unfortunately, Tina Fey is playing Tina Fey.
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The film has preview screenings beginning on Thursday evening, March 3 and opens wide in theaters across North America on Friday, March 4.
During a New York Times panel series at Manhattan’s Florence Gould Hall on Wednesday evening, New York Times’ culture reporter Melena Ryzik asked Fey about the possibility of a “Mean Girls” musical one day coming to fruition. Fellow reporter Tanya (Margot Robbie) is more interested in bed hopping than hunting for scoops, informing Kim she’s nearly a 10 in Kabul although she’s maybe a 6 in NY.
At one point, Kim refers to “the real world” as if Afghanistan was somehow a piquant detour, which might capture her own journey into the hothouse atmosphere of war reporting but also speaks volumes about the film’s own solipsism. But beyond Kim, the characters in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” are written in broad strokes and feel undeveloped.
“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”, an amenable, easygoing version of the story starring Tina Fey, is the least objectionable of the bunch, though it falls prey to some similarly regrettable assumptions. The war and the local people are treated a bit like set dressing as our heroine finds love, fights for her work and eventually comes to her senses about it all – you half expect Fey to toss her camo helmet in the air with insouciance. The movie, was inspired by Barker’s largely humorous memoir, “The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan”, and she noted its translation to the big screen was something of a fluke.
“It’s about a woman who is sort of making a choice to blow up her existing life and go on this adventure, for lack of a better word”. “My husband, Jeff Richmond, and I [and lyricist] Nell Benjamin have been working on it”, she said.
Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (the team who made the con-game thriller “Focus” and the romantic comedy “Crazy, Stupid, Love.”) capture the constant grit and random horrors of a war zone.
When Kim finally gets clearance to ride along with a Marine unit, the first order the general (a deft Billy Bob Thornton) gives her is not to sleep with his soldiers (lending new meaning to the term “embedded”). “She was always saying, once you get there, there’s no time to not be courageous, you just gotta go along and do anything”. I might be a producer so that when a role is too young for me, I hand it off to someone else but I’m still part of the movie. Time to think carefully about where her life will take her next. “And we need to acknowledge that black people are funnier than white people”, she said.
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For all those shortcomings, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot manages to be more good than bad.
