Hollywood loves competing movie projects. Competing volcanos! Competing end of the world stories! Competing Titanics! (Okay, one was on the small screen.) Competing bug movies! I actually tend to believe that it’s more a case of “something gets into the water” rather than “oh gosh, they have a good idea, let’s get our own.” It’s too hard to make a movie in the first place without someone really being behind it.

So here we have Live Action Snow White #1. (#2, Snow White and the Huntsman, is coming this summer.) Mirror, Mirror starts with the conceit that this is the story of the Evil Stepmother, since she’s played by the biggest star in the movie, Julia Roberts. The Queen is evil, a handsome Prince comes to the kingdom, Snow White runs away to avoid Evil Stepmother Queen’s clutches, she gets rescued by seven dwarves, she fights the Prince, she defeats the Evil Stepmother, she rescues the Prince, the kingdom is saved.

If this is the Evil Stepmother’s story, you may have noticed a problem midway through my recounting this movie.

The movie’s kind of a mess. It doesn’t know who the main character is either.

It’s directed by Tarsem Singh, whose main notable attribute is his gift for visuals. Big splashes of colors! Fantastic scenery! If Tarsem Singh and Zach Snyder could just learn what a story was, they would really have something going. A problem both directors suffer from, however, is that they are more interested in the visual on-screen than in what the hell is going on in the story.

The movie is definitely geared toward kids most of the time — the Prince gets affected by a magical spell that makes him act very silly indeed — although there were a couple of moments for adults that made me say, “Really? Did you have to put that in there?” The seven dwarves are very amusing — I liked them most of the time they were on screen, and they had the best dialogue. My kids mainly talked about the dwarves after the movie was over, so I’m thinking that was their favorite part too. Lily Collins is Snow White, and she’s very sweet and demure, and Julia Roberts eats as much scenery as she dares. Armie Hammer seems to have a pretty good time, despite spending a third of the movie half-naked. (And as I tweeted yesterday: Seriously, what must it be like to look like that? Does he spend most of his waking hours staring at himself in a mirror? Because if I were a guy and I looked like that, I sure would. I don’t even find that type of guy attractive and I would lose my ability to speak around him.)

There’s nothing stunningly original or even funny about this movie though. Maybe if they’d stuck with the Evil-Queen-as-heroine story, or had some other twist in there that would make this original. But mostly it’s a matinee-with-the-kids-’cause-we’ve-seen-everything-else type of movie.

We’re all kind of wondering how Snow White and the Huntsman is going to be.

Jeff (Jason Segal) is a pothead who lives in the basement of his mother’s house and does little except smoke pot, watch informercials, and opine on what in his opinion is the greatest movie of all time, Signs. He believes that signs are everywhere, and if we learn to see them, we will discover our true purpose. He gets a mistaken phone call by someone looking for “Kevin”…and Jeff decides that this is instead an extremely significant sign.

His brother, Pat (Ed Helms), is a paint salesman whose marriage isn’t going so well and who isn’t helping himself out by taking 5 beer lunches at Hooters. He’s also bought a Porsche not only without the approval of his wife…but he might have killed his marriage by doing so. Their mother, Sharon (Susan Sarandon), is unhappy because she hates her kids and there’s no spark left in her life.

Movies are always about people being in the right place at the right time and benefiting from crazy, impossible coincidences. Jeff, Who Lives At Home out-and-out embraces this conceit. Jeff follows the signs, sometimes with great consequences, sometimes with terrible consequences. Pat doesn’t listen to the signs at all — and comes to believe that maybe Jeff is on to something. And their mom realizes that maybe everyone and everything is exactly where they’re supposed to be in this life.

In addition to being philosophical, believe it or not…this movie is very, very funny.

Okay, not in the rip-roaring “Did I just laugh at that?” way 21 Jump Street was last week. But it’s a comedy of a couple of very strange, and yet very ordinary, people getting through their day in the way that they’ve become accustomed to, and how in one day everything gets wildly shaken up. When Darin looked up the directors on IMDb and saw that they were the ones who did Cyrus, we both said, “Of course.” Those two movies fit together perfectly.

It’s crazy how movies we go to see in the theater really come down to money or art. That’s it. That’s the choice we make every week when we go to see a movie these days. Do yourself a favor and see one that isn’t just about getting the sequel green lighted.

Let’s get this out of the way: this is not a good movie.

It is, however, freakin’ hilarious.

I was in a terrible mood yesterday when we went to the movies — to the point where Darin wasn’t even trying to make conversation with me, I was so monosyllabic — and by the end of 21 Jump Street I was wiping tears from my eyes. (During the previews, I chuckled once, softly, during Men In Black 3 when Josh Brolin evoked Tommy Lee Jones perfectly, and the rest of the time I was like: Wow, what is a bigger waste of time — me trying to cheer up, or these awful, awful, awful looking movies?) I couldn’t believe the good reviews this movie got before I saw it, and now I’m like, Yeah, okay.

Channing Tatum is the good-looking, stupid cop who used to pick on nerdy, brainy Jonah Hill in high school. They both go to the Police Academy, where they help one another through. On their first assignment (as bike cops,in the park), they blow it so badly that Nick Offerman assigns them to undercover work at the high school. “You’re going to 37 Jump Street….Wait, that doesn’t sound right.”

They’re supposed to break up a drug ring at the high school, and they discover that high school has totally changed since they were there, 7 years ago: now everyone two-straps their backpacks, instead of only using one. The smart kids are now the cool kids! Our cops get assigned to the wrong classes! They throw wild parties! They blow up half the city with quite possibly the worst police work in history…but apparently no one notices!

Lots of drug humor. Unbelievably bad language — I think they went out of their way to see how much cursing they could get into this thing. Amazingly, no nudity. Every cliché about bad cop shows and cops working undercover and high school worked in, repeatedly. I had no idea who Channing Tatum was before this but I really liked him: he was hilarious.

We had a really good time at this.

The comedies they advertised before the movie though: ohmygod, they look awful. Why is anyone still hiring Adam Sandler?