Archive for the ‘Comedy/Laffs’ Category
Wednesday, August 20th, 2025
I think NOBODY (2021) is a minor action classic of the 2020s, and honestly kind of a miracle in how well it accomplished its task of turning the most unlikely actor – Bob Odenkirk, “Concert Nerd,” WAYNE’S WORLD 2 – into a credible action star. It’s a good enough story and gimmick that he might’ve gotten away with okay action scenes, but he trained like a motherfucker to do actual great ones. The only former SNL writer or DR. DOLITTLE 2 voice actor to do so to date. There’s nothing quite like it.
NOBODY 2 is merely a fun sequel to that. But that’s okay.
It’s notable as the Hollywood debut of one of my favorite working directors, Timo THE NIGHT COMES FOR US Tjahjanto, and though it’s a for-hire work that can’t compete with the impact of his bloody Indonesian epics, it shows his sensibilities for hectic combat and imaginative gore fused with a genuine care for his characters. Crafted to zip by in 89 minutes means it lacks his usual scope, and there’s also none of his John Woo-esque melodrama. In fact it leans even a little more comedy than the first NOBODY, and maybe that tonal difference is why none of the action scenes thrilled me as much as the bus scene in the first one. But they’re good scenes, and grounded in simple story and character ideas that really work for me. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 87North, Aaron Rabin, Bob Odenkirk, Christopher Lloyd, Colin Salmon, Connie Nielsen, Daniel Bernhardt, Derek Kolstad, Elisabet Ronaldsdottir, Greg Rementer, John Ortiz, Kirk A. Jenkins, RZA, Sharon Stone, Timo Tjahjanto
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs | 12 Comments »
Tuesday, August 19th, 2025
July 29, 2005
I reviewed STEALTH when it came out and, though I was alone on this, I really enjoyed it. I didn’t believe I was entirely receiving it in the spirit intended, but maybe it sorta knows what it’s doing? Doesn’t matter – death of the author. These days director Rob Cohen is disdained for allegations of sexual assault, but back then it was just for the quality of his movies. Since I only knew about the movie part I was okay with him, ‘cause I always liked DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY and THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS started a run of increasingly stupid movies that I got a kick out of (after this there was THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR, ALEX CROSS, THE BOY NEXT DOOR and 
).
I was pretty excited to return to it, expecting my original verdict to hold true, but I hyped myself up too much. This time it had a few laughs but the aerial spectacle (involving lots of animation and green screen cockpit acting that might’ve been a little ahead of its time) gets pretty repetitive. I did like that Cohen has virtual shots going through the circuitry of the jet, repeating his trademark move from THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: based on a TV show, BT, Burt Reynolds, Dan Bradley, Darrin Prescott, David Koechner, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Jamie Foxx, Jay Chandrasekhar, Jessica Biel, Jessica Simpson, John O'Brien, Johnny Knoxville, Josh Lucas, Lynda Carter, NASCAR, Rob Cohen, Scott Rogers, Seann William Scott, W.D. Richter, Willie Nelson
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs | 22 Comments »
Friday, August 8th, 2025
As some of you are aware I am an avowed triple-A (Ari Aster Appreciator). I loved his two hit horror movies (HEREDITARY and MIDSOMMAR) and then I loved his flop comedy (BEAU IS AFRAID) even more, so obviously I was gonna see his new one EDDINGTON no matter what. When it was announced it was described as a western, which is a stretch – nobody would put this in the westerns section at a video store. But yeah, it has feuds and jurisdictional disagreements between a small town sheriff, the mayor and the Native law enforcement just over the border, trouble in a bar, various groups trying to profit from a big construction project, things devolving into a big shootout. I get it.
Of Aster’s other movies it’s closest to BEAU, but it’s less surreal and, to me at least, not nearly as funny. In fact it might’ve made me laugh less than any of them. But there are certainly some good ones in there and I did laugh just thinking about some of its ideas while discussing it with friends.
What it definitely does achieve is a stressful portrait of what our lives have become in the last half decade. It’s set in May of 2020 and begins with a series of confrontations over mask ordinances. Eddington, New Mexico Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix, U TURN) doesn’t want to wear a mask when officers from the Pueblo tribe insist he follow the law in their jurisdiction. Later he forces a grocery store to allow in a guy who refuses to mask (James Cady, “Train Conductor,” HOSTILES). Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, THE EQUALIZER 2) happens to be there and tries to calmly reason with Joe, who then goes outside and does a livestream announcing that he’s running against him in the next election. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amelie Hoeferle, Ari Aster, Austin Butler, Cameron Mann, Clifton Collins Jr., Darius Khondji, Deirdre O'Connell, Emma Stone, Joaquin Phoenix, Luke Grimes, Matt Gomez Hidaka, Pedro Pascal, William Belleau
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Thriller | 35 Comments »
Monday, August 4th, 2025
The last super hero movie of summer 2005, and maybe the last kids movie too, is Disney’s SKY HIGH. It’s directed by Mike Mitchell (DEUCE BIGALOW: MALE GIGOLO), with a script originated in the ‘90s by Paul Hernandez, later rewritten by Bob Schooley & Mark McCorkle (creators of the cartoon Kim Possible, plus they wrote 7 episodes of the New Kids on the Block cartoon).
It’s a play on comic book super heroes, but not based on any existing ones, so it’s your basic dollar store super heroes with standard abilities, generic names and no real origins, they just genetically inherited powers. It’s the kind of comic book movie where the opening credits have to be in comic book font and there are drawings that do not look worthy of a comic book that dissolve into the live action shots. You know – like a comic book! Have you seen these? A bunch of little squares with stuff drawn in them.
Michael Angarano (last seen in LORDS OF DOGTOWN) stars as Will Stronghold, a kid whose parents are the world’s most famous super heroes, The Commander (Kurt Russell, last seen [briefly] in JIMINY GLICK IN LALAWOOD) and Jetstream (Kelly Preston, FOR LOVE OF THE GAME). He’s about to start attending Sky High, a secret school floating in the sky for the children of super heroes. But he’s kinda terrified because he hasn’t developed super powers, which seem to be related to and/or a symbol for puberty. So he’s very self conscious. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bob Schooley, Bruce Campbell, Danielle Panabaker, Dave Foley, Dee Jay Daniels, Jill Talley, Jim Rash, Kelly Preston, Kelly Vitz, Kevin Heffernan, Kevin McDonald, Kurt Russell, Mark McCorkle, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michael Angarano, Mike Mitchell, Nicholas Braun, Steven Strait, Tom Kenny
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Comic strips/Super heroes, Family | 15 Comments »
Thursday, July 31st, 2025
FIGHT OR FLIGHT – which is not called FLIGHT RISK, I keep getting those two titles mixed up in my head – has been advertised as “from the makers of JOHN WICK.” In this case it doesn’t mean the directors, the writer or 87Eleven, it means Basil Iwanyk’s company Thunder Road, who also backed 24 HOURS TO LIVE, SILENT NIGHT and TRIGGER WARNING. Specifically it’s part of their lower budget arm Asbury Park, who did BLACK SITE and RED RIGHT HAND.
Director James Madigan said in a Q&A that “Everybody wants to make ‘JOHN WICK on this’ and ‘JOHN WICK on a plane’ and ‘JOHN WICK goes to Bangkok,’ or whatever it is. You can’t make JOHN WICK unless you’re Chad, and you shouldn’t try.”
I have in fact seen this called “Josh Hartnett’s JOHN WICK,” which would be a completely unfair quality comparison, but I accept it in the spirit it was intended: to convey that it’s an absurd assassin-related action movie where Hartnett (HALLOWEEN H20) clearly did a bunch of training to pull off some good choreography. It’s sort of low rent and tonally messy but I like this type of movie and I like Hartnett so I had fun with it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alain Moussi, Asbury Park, Balazs Lengyel, Brahim Chab, Brooks McLaren, Charithra Chandran, Danny Ashok, DJ Cotrona, James Madigan, Josh Hartnett, Juju Chan, Katee Sackhoff, Marko Zaror, Matt Flannery
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs | 8 Comments »
Monday, July 21st, 2025
July 22, 2005
I have a confession to make: I don’t think I’ve ever seen the original BAD NEWS BEARS movies in full. Parts, maybe. I know people love the first one. I don’t remember it. So this review comes from the rare perspective of a person who saw Richard Linklater’s remake in theaters and is returning to it after 20 years of still not seeing the original to find out why nobody seemed to think this stacked up to it. Ignorance is bliss!
For me the main movie to compare it to is BAD SANTA, which came from the same screenwriters, Glenn Ficarra & John Requa (CATS & DOGS). Obviously it’s not as good, but it’s the second best movie at presenting Billy Bob Thornton as an alcoholic asshole in a way that is somehow really funny and ultimately sweet in a way that doesn’t seem too phony because the guy is still an asshole, he just made a small gesture that shows he’s trying. This is a PG-13 family-friendly-ish sports movie, so the change is a little bigger than just wanting to give a stuffed elephant to a child after getting shot by the police, but it still maintains his acerbicness to pretty uncomfortable levels until the last couple innings of the big game. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: baseball, Billy Bob Thornton, Glenn Ficarra, Greg Kinnear, John Requa, Marcia Gay Harden, remakes, Richard Linklater
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Family, Sport | 26 Comments »
Monday, July 14th, 2025
July 15, 2005
WEDDING CRASHERS is kinda like an old nemesis of mine. I reviewed it very negatively on The Ain’t It Cool News twenty years ago and though mostly people believed me there were some talkbackers who also saw it in preview screenings who got kinda mad at me. It wasn’t as controversial as my THE TRANSFORMERS pan or anything but I was applying a similar (in retrospect overblown) destructive fury to it – the headline was “Fuck WEDDING CRASHERS.” It was being hailed as a new comedy benchmark, or a return to the raunchy R-rated comedy, but I swore it would fade instantly. I made a challenge to one guy to meet back in two years and see if he still considered it a “comedic gem.”
If we had followed through on that bet I’m sure I would’ve lost. Its popularity lasted at least five years, which I can clock by realizing in hindsight that this movie is the reason my wife’s younger cousins asked us to play “Shout” by The Isley Brothers at our wedding. But by then THE HANGOVER had come out and I think it quickly replaced WEDDING CRASHERS as the bro comedy of record (no judgment for that – I’d say it’s a funnier movie). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bradley Cooper, Christopher Walken, David Dobkin, Dwight Yoakam, Isla Fisher, Jane Seymour, Keir O'Donnell, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Rebecca De Mornay, Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Romance | 37 Comments »
Tuesday, June 24th, 2025
June 24, 2005
If you’re like me you knew there was a Bewitched movie, but you didn’t know it used a weird meta premise. It turns out that yes, it’s a fantastical romantic comedy starring Nicole Kidman as a pretty blonde witch trying to live among the normies without cheating too much by using her magic, and Will Ferrell as the non-witch she falls in love with. But they don’t exactly play Samantha and Darren, the characters from the sitcom that ran from 1964 to 1972 but that I did in fact watch sometimes as a kid, on Nick at Nite or something. They play the people starring as Samantha and Darren in a 2005 revival of the show.
So I started the movie thinking that director Nora Ephron (writing with her sister Delia, who also wrote THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS) just thought it would be cute to have Nicole Kidman do that nose-wiggle thing Samantha does when she casts a spell, but pretty soon I was thinking no, they just liked the logo and the theme song, and needed an excuse to keep using them throughout. They’re also able to show a bunch of clips from the original show, show a gift basket full of its merchandise, animate the expressions on an officially licensed Samantha Barbie doll, and remake the animated credit sequence with Will Ferrell’s likeness. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: based on a TV show, Carole Shelley, Delia Ephron, Jason Schwartzman, Kristin Chenoweth, Michael Caine, Nicole Kidman, Nora Ephron, Shirley MacLaine, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Will Ferrell
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Romance | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, May 20th, 2025
One movie that came out on May 6, 2005 was Ridley Scott’s crusades epic KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. It was poorly received in the U.S. at the time but later had a widely-considered-superior director’s cut, which I have reviewed. Today I’ll consider a different May 6th release that has not yet had its director’s cut re-evaluation moment.
I don’t remember if I knew about JIMINY GLICK IN LALAWOOD when it came out in its limited release, during which according to Box Office Mojo it collected $36,039. (I assume they rounded to the nearest dollar – the real total could be as much as 49 cents higher.) But there was no chance I would’ve gone to see it then. I confess that as much as I’d loved THREE AMIGOS and Ed Grimley growing up, in the aughts I did not think Martin Short was funny anymore. I was also instantly turned off by fat suits (which I wasn’t really wrong about), so I turned my nose up to Primetime Glick, the Comedy Central show where this hack entertainment journalist character did sort of Space Ghost Coast to Coast style awkward improvised celebrity interviews.
But let me point you to a historical note. Two weeks before JIMINY GLICK IN LALAWOOD came out, the first ever Youtube video, Me at the zoo, was uploaded. During the intervening two decades, through the medium of Youtube clips, I have become aware that Jiminy Glick does in fact make me laugh, so I was actually excited to watch the movie version.
Well, the character is still funny. And it seems like a great idea for an improvised movie: he goes to the Toronto International Film Festival. They were able to improvise scenes with actors attending the actual festival, and debut the movie there the following year. There is a plot and new characters and what not, but most of the laughs come just from Jiminy saying ridiculous things to real celebrities. They take advantage of the setting to interview actors on the red carpet (Kiefer Sutherland, Sharon Stone, Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Susan Sarandon) and even film some bits with Jiminy at parties (annoying Kevin Cline by following him around, thinking Whoopi Goldberg is Oprah Winfrey). They also cheat by having in-studio interviews like the show, including Steve Martin, Kurt Russell and Rob Lowe. All of these people get the joke, but some are better at playing along. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aries Spears, Darren Shahlavi, David Lynch, DeRay Davis, Elizabeth Perkins, Gary Anthony Williams, Jan Hooks, Janeane Garofalo, John Michael Higgins, Linda Cardellini, Martin Short, Paul Flaherty, Vadim Jean
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs | 3 Comments »
Monday, April 7th, 2025
LOVE HURTS is a trifle, a truffle, a little treat meant to be devoured quickly and forgotten. But that’s much better than I’d heard (one critic called it “nearly unwatchable,” I remember), so I feel kinda guilty that I listened to the conventional wisdom and skipped it in theaters. Ke Huy Quan got his 87North-produced action vehicle, an even greater honor than his Academy Award if you ask me, and I waited for video. For that I apologize.
Quan (BREATHING FIRE) stars as Marvin Gable, a corny realtor who rides his bike to work, toting the heart-shaped cookies he baked for Valentine’s Day, and spreads joy like his name was Ke Huy Quan, so his co-workers would never guess that he was once a brutal and feared assassin. But some old associates and other dangerous people come crashing through his comfortable suburban life when a woman he was supposed to have killed resurfaces to leave them all taunting love notes. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 87North, Andre Eriksen, Ariana DeBose, Cam Gigandet, Can Aydin, Daniel Wu, Drew Scott, Elisabet Ronaldsdottir, Jonathan Eusebio, Josh Stoddard, Ke Huy Quan, Lio Tipton, Luke Passmore, Marshawn Lynch, Matthew Murray, Mustafa Shakir, Phong Giang, Rhys Darby, Sean Astin
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs, Martial Arts, Romance | 7 Comments »
