Tag: comedy
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De Niro and Grodin are somewhere between Toledo and Cleveland in Martin Brest’s Midnight Run
Martin Brest’s Midnight Run is an appealingly loose comedy built on a solid premise. It’s a classic, almost cliched Hollywood scenario: Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) is one of the world’s last honest cops, rewarded for his integrity by divorce and demotion to the humiliating (and dangerous) level of bounty hunter. His handler Eddie Moscone…
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H&K drop LSD with NPH in Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay
On the way to a hoped-for idyll in their spiritual home Amsterdam, our two beloved stoners Harold and Kumar take unintended detours through Cuba (as collateral damage in the War on Terror), Florida (where they drop trou’ for a “bottomless” party), Alabama (rudely interrupting a Klu Klux Klan klatsch), and Texas (whereupon they pass the…
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Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby fails to amuse
What was I thinking when I rented this turd? Oh yeah, that Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby might be a funny, entertaining diversion. One can’t always watch grim tales of abortion in Communist Romania or the death of a small town’s entire generation of children. I had long since tired of Will Ferrell,…
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Malcolm McDowell tries not to die like a dog in Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man!
Over the course of its truly epic length of 177 minutes, Lindsay Anderson‘s O Lucky Man! (1973) picks up the continuing saga of Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) from If…. While If…. used a British public school as a metaphorical microcosm with which to satirize British class culture, O Lucky Man! widens its lens to take…
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Malcolm McDowell plays public school war-games in Lindsay Anderson’s If….
If…. is the first in director Lindsay Anderson’s trilogy of films featuring Malcolm McDowell as the Mick Travis, whose misadventures continue in O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital. Everything I read about the trilogy repeats the same word to descibe Travis: “everyman.” On the evidence, I take this instance particular of “everyman” to mean Travis…
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Who do you think you are, Mr. Big? Sex and the City: The Movie
Yep, I saw it. I work for the movie company that produced it, so I got to go for free. The standard line with Michael Patrick King’s now decade-old Sex and the City franchise is that it has always appealed mostly to gay men and the women that love them. Even though this blogger more…
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Tina Fey raids her rolodex for Baby Mama
As a true comedy auteur, Tina Fey’s acting has always come in tandem with her own writing. This double act has progressed from improv comedy at The Second City, to head writer for Saturday Night Live, to supporting player in the feature film Mean Girls, (for which she wrote the screenplay), and finally to executive…
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Téa Leoni clings to the menacing Ben Kingsley in You Kill Me
The first thing to say about You Kill Me is to give props to Ben Kingsley, if for no other reason than my fear that he will break my kneecaps if I don’t. Even after his terrifying turn in Sexy Beast, it’s still a surprise to see how perfectly natural for him to inhabit a…
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Cleavon Little is the new sheriff in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles
On rewatch as an adult, Blazing Saddles didn’t quite live up to my childhood memories. For instance, I recall the infamous bean-induced fart sequnce being a veritable symphony of bad taste; alas, the real thing is just a minute or so long at most. But it turns wonderfully crazy near the end, finally becoming funny…
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Bad Santa utterly wallows in its bah-humbug tone
This from the director of Crumb and Ghost World? The big pleasure of Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa is definitely that it utterly wallows in a bah-humbug tone, a welcome tonic to the seemingly perpetual holiday season. I write this in June, and I’m afraid to so much as blink, lest the plastic Santas and X-mas…