Remember that moment in Deep Impact, when Tea Leoni and her dad embrace on the beach as that looming, 1,000ft wall of water thunders toward them? I fear, that at next week’s box office, the pair on the beach may be Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and that JJ Abrams’s Star Wars will be their own personal extinction-level event.
Fey and Poehler co-star in Sisters a film that offers a perfect antidote to Star Wars, though, and stands to absorb the bulk of its overflow money from all those lightsaber-carrying fools who didn’t book tickets a month in advance. Odd, however, that they should choose to release their next-level movie against such a behemoth, since Sisters is obviously meant to count as something new for them.
It’s a step up from their previous movie efforts, together and apart, and their first co-starring vehicle since the middling Baby Mama in 2008. Fey has done some fairly forgettable film work since then, in Date Night and Admission, but as a writer she did imprint Mean Girls into the culture. Poehler’s last memorable movie role (bigger than a cameo, that is) was Blades Of Glory in 2007, but she had one bona fide smash this summer with Pixar’s Inside Out, even though voicework is more like being on the radio than in the movies. Sisters, more focused, on a bigger budget, and with a huge marketing push behind it, seems intended as a clean slate in movies for the pair of them, now resold as a two-for-one brand, because these days we think of them as more often together than apart, like besties. Or sisters.
But you have to ask if it’s really necessary or wise of them to conquer the big screen, since each has built a TV empire of her own in the last 10 years, Fey as long-time head writer at SNL, then as supreme being in the 30 Rock universe, and Poehler with her intensely beloved Parks And Recreation. Together, as hosts of the Golden Globes and elsewhere, shimmying onstage with their sweet’n’surly smiles, they have forged a near-perfect Hope-Crosby double identity that could last for decades, or at least until they have some fabulously venomous Bette-and-Joan-style falling out.
TV and its internet cousins are heaven right now for talents such as theirs: they’re hungry for competitive content, awash in money and generous with creative control; Fey got Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt off the ground at Netflix in a heartbeat. Meanwhile, the movies (where other people are in control) are an escalating nightmare, a tooth-and-claw jungle of cruelty that’s taken down big prestige movies one after another all year long. And, whether or not Fey and Poehler prove capable of surfing it, that Star Wars tsunami is still coming.
TV should remain their shelter from the storm. That way, we’d get to see them every week, not just every Christmas.
