There’s “staying in your comfort zone,” and then there’s Ray Romano making his directorial debut with a movie in which he plays a beleaguered outer-borough New York father who tries to look on the bright side of life and survive the slings and arrows that bond his large Italian-American family together even as they threaten to tear it apart.
On paper, the leap from “Jackass” the TV show to “Jackass: The Movie” might have been a greater creative gamble than the one from “Everybody Loves Raymond” to “Somewhere in Queens,” which essentially finds its everyman superstar at the center of a 106-minute sitcom.And yet, the film’s length isn’t the only reason why “Somewhere in Queens” avoids the stale whiff of syndication.
Liberated from the bumper lanes that are built into the sitcom format — from the oppressiveness of canned laughter, throwaway B-plots, and the steady drumbeat
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