Category: Comedy
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The Man with Two Brains does not age well. It’s a case study in not aging well, even more so because when the three writers—director Reiner, star Steve Martin, and George Gipe—can’t figure out how to do an ending so they just do an extended fat joke… well, it’s hard to continuing giving the film…
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I really didn’t want to bag on Clueless when I watched it this time, the first time since the theater, almost twenty-four years ago. It got good reviews on release, which I fully disagreed with—I’d forgotten how much audiences in the eighties and nineties liked farcical sitcom-level characterizations. Particularly in the nineties with the lusterless,…
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If IMDb is correct, there have been only ten other adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma, and I’m including the modernizations. So it’s not so much Emma is oft-adapted, maybe just it’s got a very memorable story. Memorable enough even I was anticipating how—oh, wow, it’s director de Wilde’s first feature. Like, remember when music video…
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There are two profoundly well-directed scenes in the third act of The Daytrippers, including the last one, so you really want to give what you can of it a pass. Daytrippers is very straightforward, even through the various complexities of the third act, but just because Mottola (who wrote as well as directed) knows what…
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Erik the Viking is a great example of when the director doesn’t know how to direct the script. What makes it peculiar is… director Jones wrote the script. The film, an absurd comedy about a group of Vikings trying to end Ragnarok so they people will stop killing each other, starts with the the very…
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Every once in a while, The Ref lets you forget it’s just a comedy vehicle for stand-up comic Denis Leary and so doesn’t need to actually be a good drama and just lets you enjoy the acting. Demme’s direction is simultaneously detached, thoughtful, and sincere. He and editor Jeffrey Wolf craft these wonderful comedic scenes.…
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The Spy Who Dumped Me has, rather unfortunately, a punny title. It’s an accurate title—the film’s about spy Justin Theroux dumping his civilian and not aware he’s a spy girlfriend Mila Kunis—but it doesn’t capture the mood of the film. No doubt, it’s a hard one to title—because even though it starts with Kunis going…
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The first half of Grumpier Old Men is such an improvement over the original, it could be a paragon of sequels. Director Deutch knows how to showcase the actors amid all the physical comedy. There’s a lot of physical comedy and sight gags in Grumpier. There’s Walter Matthau doing the Saturday Night Fever strut while…
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If Grumpy Old Men weren’t so scared of its ribald humor—giving almost all of it to dirty oldest man Burgess Meredith, who’s just there to make sex jokes and serves no other purpose in the film—you could probably just as well call it Horny Old Men. At least in Jack Lemmon’s case. He hasn’t gotten…
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Troop Zero is heartwarming but not too heartwarming. It doesn’t promise the stars as much as it promises a gradual slide to fairness; it promises redemption to some but not the ones who really need it. It avoids any seriousness to instead provide consistent, constant entertainment. Often in the form of amusing montage sequences with…
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Catch Me If You Can is a spectacular showcase for Leonardo DiCaprio. Unfortunately, the rest of the film doesn’t exactly rise up to meet him, not the filmmaking, not the writing, not his costars. With the exception of co-lead Tom Hanks, who’s a whole other thing, the direction, the writing, the supporting cast, they’re all…
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Roxanne is a charming romantic comedy. Wait, I think it might need an additional qualifier—it’s a charming romantic situational comedy. I’m not one to sit around and debate stakes with romantic comedies, but even for a romantic comedy… Roxanne’s got some low stakes. Maybe because of how closely screenwriter (and leading man) Steve Martin followed…
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Nobody’s Fool takes place during a particularly busy December for protagonist Paul Newman. He’s got a lot going on all at once, but mostly the reappearance of son Dylan Walsh and family. They’re in town at the beginning for Thanksgiving, but Walsh’s marriage is in a troubled state—we’re never privy to the exact details, as…
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Emma keeps misplacing things. For a long stretches, it misplaces second-billed Toni Collette (who goes from being the subject of the first half to an afterthought in the most of the second half to just a plot foil in the third act). There’s also lead Gwyneth Paltrow’s painting. The film opens with Paltrow’s paintings of…
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The Happytime Murders is exceptionally foul and exceptionally funny. It’s set in a world where animate puppets and humans co-exist, with the human bigotry eradicated because they’ve all decided to hate on the puppets instead. There’s no explanation of how the puppets came to be or when they came to be or whatnot; they just…
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Outstanding comedy about overachiever seniors Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever determined to finally break bad–the night before high school graduation–and show their classmates (and themselves) just how much fun they can be. Great performances from the leads and the supporting cast; the film’s a mix of good writing, great acting, and ambitious, thoughtful direction from…
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Constantly charming if not particularly ambitious coming of age story about eighties British Pakistani teenager Viveik Kalra (in a great lead performance) and his discovery of Bruce Springsteen at just the right time in his life. The film does a fine job showing how working class travails can be utterly unrelated to geography or ethnicity,…
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Uneven but charming tale of Matthew Broderick (an analogue for writer Neil Simon) and his time, in 1945, at Army boot camp in, you guessed it, Biloxi, MS. Simon’s adapting his stage play, which explains the stagey plotting; however, the film itself never feels stagey in the scenes, probably because director Nichols takes the whole…
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Initially middling–and very dated in rather cringe-y ways–comedy about high school track coach Goldie Hawn talking back to her male boss (a cartoonish, but great, Bruce McGill) and getting transferred to be a football coach in the (eighties mixed race) ghetto high school! Too bad her literally evil ex-husband James Keach is pissed off about…
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Outstanding comedy (with a healthy dose of drama) about small-town waitress Keri Russell; trapped in a terrible marriage (to abusive Jeremy Sisto), she’s just found out she’s pregnant. Mostly a character study–Russell’s phenomenal. Great supporting performances: Cheryl Hines, writer-director Shelly (Russell’s waitressing comrades), Andy Griffith as her favorite regular; Sisto’s terrifying. It’s got third act…
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Affably performed but charmless ninety draggy minutes of Jeff Goldblum as an American actor in London who can’t catch a break because he’s a… tall American. When the movie’s about Goldblum wooing seemingly proper British nurse Emma Thompson, it’s all right. When it’s about Goldblum trying to manage absurd stardom–or at least steady work–and his…
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Two hours plus personification of the phrase, “I guess that was okay,” which–given the twenty-five years director Gilliam’s been trying to get it made–is a bit of a letdown. Both Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce are fine in their lead roles, but neither are anywhere near charismatic enough to carry the film. Supporting damsels Joana…
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Singularly hilarious teen comedy about best friend Jonah Hill and Michael Cera having their last chance to hook up with their dream girls before they graduate high school and go off to college. Juxtaposed with their adventures trying to get to the right party, their third wheel Christopher Mintz-Plasse goes off to have a wild…
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Gentle, delightful, idiosyncratic comedy about the teenage boys in a Scottish New Town deciding it’s time to stop being weird about it and finally talk to the girls. They’re almost graduated after all and football’s not everything, after all. John Gordon Sinclair’s interest in female footballer Dee Hepburn kicks off the trend; unfortunately his only…
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Atrocious “family” “comedy” about Tony Randall dragging his family into his experimental underwater house of the future to prove the validity of the project to boss Jim Backus. Janet Leigh plays Randall’s wife (she could’ve done a lot better); she’s terrified of water. Their kids are in a band. The band comes along (including very…
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Beautifully directed “man in [madcap] crisis” movie with writing professor Michael Douglas dealing with his wife leaving him, his girlfriend getting pregnant, his agent snooping for his overdue and overlong new novel, one student trying to seduce him, and another student killing his boss’s dog. All those threads overlap too. It’s a bit of a…
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Charming comedy about an Autistic man (Colin Friels) who comes out of his shell in unexpected ways when he takes on lodgers John Hargreaves and Lindy Davies. Friels makes various contraptions–starting with model trains, then all the way up to his own version of a car. The script’s uneven, the pacing’s off, and director Tass…
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Pitch black comedy about TV media personality-obsessed, burgeoning sociopath Nicole Kidman’s rise to fame and the damage she wreaks along the way. Director Van Sant and screenwriter Buck Henry (adapted the Joyce Maynard novel) embrace the story’s lack of potential for not-uneasy laughs and go for every awkward, creepy laugh they can get. Great performances,…
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What We Do in the Shadows is strong from the first scene. An alarm clock goes off at six. A hand reaches over to hit snooze. Only it’s six at night and the hand is reaching from a coffin. Shadows’s a mockumentary (though I sort of want to start calling them docucomedies after this one);…
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A Shock to the System is almost a success. It’s real close. It has all the right pieces, it just doesn’t have enough time at the end to put them away in their new arrangement. Everything’s in disarray because the film changes into a thriller—with a different protagonist—for a while in the third act. After…
The Stop Button 