Strangers With Candy

A 47-year-old ex-con (Amy Sedaris), who ran away from home at 15, tries to put her life back together by going back to high school and picking up where she left off—even though the years of booze, drugs and prostitution have left her mind ravaged, and she probably wasn’t that smart to begin with. The big-screen version of the cult-hit Comedy Central sitcom—directed by Paul Dinello and written by Dinello, Sedaris and Stephen Colbert (Dinello and Colbert also co-star)—is silly, amateurish and often inept. A movie this bad shouldn’t be this funny, but a few good guffaws can cover a multitude of sins, and there’s no denying that it delivers quite a few outlandish laughs. Plus, Sedaris’ character is a true original, a bizarre mixture of streetwise raunch and starry-eyed ingenuousness.