SPAIN THRESHOLD

Opening this week:

The Trip to Spain--Two middle-aged British guys drive up the coast of Spain together. As they pass through breathtaking scenery, staying in exquisite, historically important lodgings and eating glorious-looking meals, they focus far less on these pleasures than on one-upping each with celebrity impressions.

That’s the central joke of The Trip to Spain, as it was the central joke of 2014’s The Trip to Italy and of 2010’s The Trip, all of them derived from a BBC series, and all of them directed by Michael Winterbottom. The premise is that it’s a working tour, that the comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are visiting these restaurants to review them. But the meat of the film is the pair’s nattering, a constant dyad of passive-aggressive digs and competitive movie and TV take-offs, of varying quality.

So while grilled anchovies or shrimp or chorizo or Iranian caviar are placed in front of them, we watch Coogan and Brydon’s fictionalized selves try to outdo each as Roger Moore, or Anthony Hopkins, or Ian McKellan, or John Hurt, or Russell Brand. They do David Bowie perusing Twitter, and they do Mick Jagger as Hamlet. They do some Americans, too—Woody Allen and DeNiro and Brando.

We see them pose in front of roadside dinosaurs, and visit the Alhambra, and, inevitably, we see them in front of windmills, in Don Quixote and Sancho drag. Just as inevitably, they riff on the Spanish Inquisition, treating it as a game show, and quoting the famous Monty Python sketch, although in Brando’s voice.

As in the earlier films, a subtle tension underlies this clowning around, a sense that at some level their competition is a serious attempt at dominance—the world’s most un-macho form of machismo. At one point Brydon manages to get Coogan to crack a smile at one of his shticks, and it’s like he’s scored a TKO.

There’s a wisp of nominal plot about the career fortunes of our heroes, and occasionally Winterbottom shoos another actor or two past the camera, just so we don’t overdose on the stars. He also repeats an effective technique from the previous film: Now and then, while Coogan and Brydon are in the thick of one of their routines, he cuts to the chef and kitchen workers, creating culinary masterpieces for two maniacs paying no more than cursory attention to them. These films are an unusually reproachful form of food porn.

Obviously The Trip to Spain isn’t for everybody, and it’s perhaps a hair overlong, but for anglophilic foodie armchair traveling pop-culture buffs, it’s often riotous. I’d be excited to hear that the pair were planning The Trip to Greece, The Trip to Japan and, for an epic finale, The Trip to America.

Leap!--This animated feature is set in France in the late 1800s--the Eiffel Tower is still under construction, and Lady Liberty is still waiting to be delivered to New York. Our heroine is Felicie (voiced by Elle Fanning), who escapes from a provincial orphanage with her friend Victor (voiced by Nat Wolff). The two head for Paris, where her dream is to become a dancer and his is to become an inventor.

A string of kid-movie cliches ensue, the central one being that old standby Hold Onto Your Dream. Felicie ends up training at the Paris Opera Ballet, where's she's in competition with a nasty rich-girl rival for a role in The Nutcracker. In her corner is a kindly cleaning woman (Carly Rae Jepsen) who walks on a cane but knows dance enough to tutor Felicie, but working against her is the rich girl's mom, a Disney-style wicked stepmother type, and...

I'm getting bored just writing this. The look and settings have some cheeriness and imagination, but dramatically the film is without originality and unusually brazen in its pandering. It's also a spectacular demonstration of the so-called "Uncanny Valley" effect--the premise that human beings, as opposed to cute little animals or trolls or toys, come across creepy when represented in CGI.

A Canadian and French co-production, Leap! was released overseas last year as Ballerina, with a slightly different voice cast. The version we get includes the likes of Mel Brooks, thrown away as an orphanage heavy, and Kate McKinnon, who plays three different characters including the villainess, for whom she seems to be channeling the voice of Susan Sarandon. This, I thought, was the most impressive feat in the movie.

In fairness, I should say that I saw Leap! with a large audience of kids, most of whom seemed to watch it reasonably attentively. And afterwards, I saw a few little girls attempting the Grand Jete on their way out of the theatre.

MAPQUEST

Opening this weekend:

Paper Towns—Orlando high school senior Quentin has been in love with his across-the-street neighbor Margo since they were little. One night Margo slips in through Quentin’s bedroom window and presses him into service on a spree of vengeful pranks against a cheating boyfriend and others she feels have betrayed her. We’re meant to see her acts, which include vandalism and sneaking into people’s homes, as whimsical and adorable, but they’re the sort of thing that could easily take an ugly turn and end up a Dateline NBC true crime documentary.

After this wild night, Margo runs away from home, but she leaves Quinten a string of implausible-to-follow clues—highlighted passages in Walt Whitman and the like—as to her whereabouts. Eventually he and his friends mount a road trip to locate her, joined, to their amazement, by a couple of girls.

Margo seems intended in the tradition of Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, Barbara Striesand in What’s Up, Doc? or, in a slightly darker vein, Melanie Griffith in Something Wild—the screwball heroine who pulls a stick-in-the-mud hero into wacky adventures. But Cara Delevingne, who plays her, isn’t Hepburn, or Stanwyck, or Striesand. She isn’t even Melanie Griffith.

She’s a vaguely sullen, unenergetic girl, and Quentin’s fascination with her is the least interesting and convincing strand of this adaptation of the 2008 novel by John The Fault in Our Stars Green. Near the end there’s a belated attempt to put some adult perspective on this adolescent conceit, but it’s still the hinge on which the movie has turned, and grownups in the audience are likely to feel that if it was our kid, we’d want to cuff him upside the head.

Fortunately, Nat Wolff, who plays Quentin, hits just the right balance between callow openheartedness and reflexive A-student anxiety. His scenes with Austin Abrams and Justice Smith as his pals Ben and Radar are truly funny, with their gentle, almost delicate ribbing of each other, and the unembarrassed affection it denotes. And since this ensemble work makes up the lion’s share of Paper Towns, the film is a good deal more digestible than it has the right to be.

The title, by the way, refers to a fascinating cartographer’s technique of which I had never heard—a fictitious location included on a map as a defense against unauthorized copying. The phrase is given a deeper resonance here through a speech by Margo which is essentially a rephrasing of the Malvina Reynolds song “Little Boxes.” Margo, of course, has the excuse of being a teenager, but that doesn’t make the judgment any less presumptuous.