Archive for the ‘Comedy/Laffs’ Category
Tuesday, December 10th, 2024
THELMA (2024) is a cute little comedy about a 93 year old lady (June Squibb, NEBRASKA) spending a couple days feeling like her life is an action movie. She’s widowed and lives on her own, but her very nice twenty-four-year-old grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger, EIGHTH GRADE) visits often, drives her places, helps her with checking her email and things.
Then one day she gets scammed by somebody who calls her pretending to be Danny in trouble. In fact Danny is fine, but sleeping in and not answering his phone, so she puts the whole family in a panic, and by the time they figure out what happened she’s already mailed ten thousand dollars cash to a p.o. box. The police can’t do anything except tell her don’t worry, you’re not the first to fall for this, and apparently “Zuckenborg” can’t even do anything even though they might’ve gotten her information from social media. She specifically asked about that. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Clark Gregg, Fred Hechinger, Josh Margolin, June Squibb, Parker Posey, Richard Roundtree
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs | 9 Comments »
Monday, December 9th, 2024
Just when you thought it was safe to get back into the holiday spirit, the cozy, crackling fire is back. ADULT SWIM YULE LOG 2: BRANCHIN’ OUT is a sequel to the brilliant 2022 Christmas surprise ADULT SWIM YULE LOG. If you’ve never heard of that, it was a yule log video that aired without explanation at midnight on Adult Swim, now viewable on [HBO] Max or on a special edition blu-ray from Dekanalog. As you watch the fire in the fireplace you start to hear conversations in the cozy cabin where it takes place, and someone comes to the door and there’s a murder. It becomes a found footage horror movie slowly zooming out to show more of the cabin and eventually changing format as the story turns increasingly absurd and surreal.
And now, in secret as far as I know, writer/director Casper Kelly (Too Many Cooks, the Cheddar Goblin commercial in MANDY) has made a continuation with a totally different, but still very impressive, Christmas/horror/comedy conceit. It centers on part 1 character Zoe (Andrea Laing, Step Up: High Water), revealed to have survived the massacre at the cabin (though her fiance did not). She wakes up in a hospital, haunted by hallucinations of the ultimate villain of the first film – the cursed yule log that flies around bashing people to death. Her failure to adjust to the trauma ends up costing her her job, so her fun gay friend Jakester (Chase Steven Anderson, “Ticket Booth Operator,” THE COLOR PURPLE [2023]) convinces her they should go to Cancun to get away from it all. But their car breaks down at the exit to a picturesque little town called Mistletoe, in time for “the festival.” You know – the annual yule log festival. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adult Swim, Andrea Laing, Casper Kelly, Chase Steven Anderson, Christmas, Jesse Malinowski, Jonathan Snipes, Michael Shenefelt, Sharon Blackwood, Susan Savoie
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 7 Comments »
Monday, December 2nd, 2024
NUTCRACKERS is a new David Gordon Green movie that went straight to Hulu. Since 2018 he’s directed four Blumhouse horror sequels (HALLOWEEN, HALLOWEEN KILLS, HALLOWEEN ENDS, THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER), at least three of them controversial/hated, plus 15 episodes of television. Personally I like his horror phase and wouldn’t mind if he kept going, but I’m also excited that he’s returned to standalone indie films.
Ben Stiller (NEXT OF KIN) stars as Michael Maxwell, an obnoxious Chicago real estate guy happy to tell you about the big deal he’s in the middle of or complain about the young guy Devon trying to steal it from him. Before he can get back to work he has to drive (in his yellow Porsche) to Wilmington, Ohio, he thinks to sign paperwork for his four nephews to be adopted after the death of his sister and her husband in a car accident. But as soon as he shows up the social worker (Linda Cardellini, CAPONE) tells him the foster family didn’t pass the background check so it’s on him to watch the kids until another one is found. Sorry dude. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Arlo Janson, Atlas Janson, ballet, Ben Stiller, Christmas, David Gordon Green, Edi Patterson, Homer Janson, Leland Douglas, Linda Cardellini, Toby Huss, Ulysses Janson
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs | 9 Comments »
Tuesday, November 19th, 2024
I’m trying not to overdo the horror movies during these times of dread, but I feel very strongly that I didn’t fit in enough Slasher Searching this October. In order to be the change I want to see in the world I intend to continue the mission periodically, free of holiday constraints. So today I have for you a double-header of wrestling themed horror movies. I thought it was a good gimmick when I reviewed WRESTLEMANIAC 16 years ago (!), but I didn’t realize until scrolling Tubi recently that it’s a whole subgenre now.
WRESTLEMASSACRE (2018) is a slasher movie of the SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT or Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN variety in that it follows the killer and gets into his psychology before he goes on a rampage. I guess it’s more of a grappler movie than a slasher movie, since he mostly kills with his bare hands. (But sometimes hedgeclippers.) Randy (Richie Acevedo, “Vendor (uncredited), SUPERFLY) is a timid Cuban immigrant who works as a landscaper but dreams of becoming a wrestler like his dad (Nikolai Volkoff). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brad Twigg, Channing Decker, Daniel Turres, Dee Snider, Glen Michael Grant, James Roberts, Jesse Buck, Joelle Farrow, Julio Bana Fernandez, Marqus Bobes, MIchael Therriault, Nicholas Yoder II, Nikolai Volkoff, Richie Acevedo, Rosanna Nelson, Shawn Roberts, Tara Spencer-Nairn, wrestling, wrestling horror
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 8 Comments »
Monday, November 18th, 2024
ANORA is a real knock out of a movie from writer/director Sean Baker, major indie voice of the 21st century known for style on a microbudget, authentic performances by non-professional actors, and being one of the first to shoot an acclaimed movie on an iPhone. I’ll be honest, I’ve only seen THE FLORIDA PROJECT, which I loved at the time, but for some reason haven’t caught up or kept up with the rest of his filmography. So correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression from that limited view is that this is him doing something a little more slick and mainstream than usual without abandoning what he’s good at.
Not that it’s 100% commercial or normal. It just feels that way. It’s pretty long, it’s about a sex worker, and it’s a somewhat odd combination of genres, but it’s really funny, it’s not super weird, and it has heart. It won the Palme d’Or, but I think it could pass as a fun movie for normal people better than recent winners PARASITE, TITANE, TRIANGLE OF SADNESS or ANATOMY OF A FALL. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aleksei Serebryakov, Brittney Rodriguez, Darya Ekemasova, Ella Rubin, Karren Karagulian, Lindsey Normington, Mark Eydelshteyn, Mikey Madison, Palme d'Or winner, Sean Baker, Vache Tovmasyan, Yura Borisov
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Drama | 19 Comments »
Wednesday, November 13th, 2024
Jody Hill’s OBSERVE AND REPORT (2009) was maybe a little ahead of its time. Or at least ahead of me. I guess I didn’t review it, but I remember being a little disappointed at the time, thinking it had kind of a fake darkness to it. I thought it was supposed to be a TAXI DRIVER type portrait of a mall security guard, and it seemed kind of forced to me.
Watching it now, though, it obviously got alot of shit right about a certain type of person that it really was important to be keeping an eye on. In fact it was right enough that now my issue is that maybe it’s treating the subject matter a little too lightly.
Seth Rogen stars as Ronnie Barnhardt, the jovial but completely deluded head of security at Forest Ridge Mall who sees an opportunity for glory when a serial flasher (Randy Gambill, production designer of Hill’s debut THE FOOT FIST WAY) keeps showing up and exposing himself to customers and staff. Ronnie treats it like a big murder investigation and becomes very competitive with the overqualified actual cop assigned to catch the guy, Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta, COP LAND). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anna Faris, Aziz Ansari, Celia Weston, Collette Wolf, Danny McBride, Jesse Plemons, Jody Hill, Michael Pena, Patton Oswalt, Ray Liotta, Seth Rogen, Tim Orr
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs | 11 Comments »
Thursday, October 3rd, 2024
At some point in the last decade or so the movie-discussers really latched onto the term “body horror.” They kinda act like if you can identify a movie as body horror that means it’s legit. But also when they say it they almost always mean one thing: it has some David Cronenberg-inspired New Flesh type stuff at some point. I kinda wonder how many of the people comparing any vaguely misshapen flesh to Cronenberg bothered to see his last movie, but I suppose that’s irrelevant.
THE SUBSTANCE definitely fits the category, and there are reasons to compare it to Cronenberg, but tonally, I gotta say, this is way more Frank Henenlotter and Brian Yuzna. Picture a movie that’s a descendent of SOCIETY and the BASKET CASE trilogy and makes you wonder what Screaming Mad George is up to these days, but that also boasts an acclaimed lead performance by Demi Moore, won Best Screenplay at Cannes and is distributed by MUBI. That’s what THE SUBSTANCE is.
For me it was a must-see because it’s movie #2 from Coralie Fargeat, writer/director of REVENGE (2017). It sucks that it took her 7 years to do another feature (with only the serial killer convention episode of The Sandman in between), but thankfully she struts into her delayed sophomore outing like she has diplomatic immunity. She brings along her stylish design, blood-smeared rich people homes and mythic battles between beautiful women with star-shaped earrings and awful men, but this time in a sci-fi vein and much broader, sillier and more indulgent. I’m not sure if I would’ve noticed it was 141 minutes if I didn’t know it going in, but I love Fargeat’s dedication to overdoing absolutely everything, beginning with its narratively redundant (but all the more beautiful for it) time lapse sequence about the lifespan of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: body horror, Coralie Fargeat, Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid, Margaret Qualley
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 39 Comments »
Thursday, September 26th, 2024
A sequel to BEETLEJUICE was first announced when part 1 was still in theaters. Director Tim Burton started developing it in earnest, went through a couple different ideas, it seemed like it was really gonna happen in the early ‘90s until he and Michael Keaton shifted their focus to BATMAN RETURNS. In my opinion that’s one of Burton’s best movies and one of the great sequels – it’s a continuation but reinvents so much of the first movie’s approach that it feels completely fresh and even more potent.
A bit of the song “Macarthur Park” echoes hauntingly over the production logos of the BEETLEJUICE sequel we finally got 36 (!) years later: “I don’t think that I can take it / ‘cause it took so long to bake it.” But after all that time in the oven, BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is no BATMAN RETURNS. It’s more of a getting-the-gang-back-together type of sequel, not as much of a shift as it probly would’ve been back then, or that it would need to be to be a new classic. To me it feels less aggressive about nostalgia than most of these types of things, but I gotta admit it’s built more on “remember this?” than “hey, check THIS out!” It returns to the afterlife but mostly just the same bureaucracy/waiting room stuff as the first movie. We get another sandworm, another non-consensual lip synch, another wedding. All fun stuff, but wouldn’t all-new stuff be better? I bet younger, hungrier Burton would’ve brought us somewhere totally different. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfred Gough, Catherine O'Hara, Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux, Michael Keaton, Miles Millar, Monica Bellucci, Sami Slimane, Santiago Cabrera, Seth Grahame-Smith, Tim Burton, Willem Dafoe, Winona Ryder
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 22 Comments »
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024
Well, my friends, it’s after Labor Day. Time to stop wearing white shoes according to Serial Mom, and time to wrap up the summer retrospective according to me. Some interesting movies that were released at the end of the summer include Richard Rush’s COLOR OF NIGHT (yet another legendarily hated movie at the time time, I thought it was kind of interestingly crazy when I watched it years later) and Roger Avary’s KILLING ZOE (which I’ve always sort of liked but never nearly as much as I wanted to), both released on the 19th. The 26th gave us another Tarantino-connected movie that was a huge deal at the time, Oliver Stone’s NATURAL BORN KILLERS.
I previously reviewed that one so thoroughly that I not only covered the movie, but the earlier script and the making of book, so I’m not going to rehash it much here. I do want to note that Oliver Stone was one of the directors most associated with boomer self analysis – rightly or wrongly, his movies were a big part of the way people my age conceived of the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination, and of course The Doors. But here in the summer of GUMP he was more interested in being contemporary, cutting edge, of-the-moment. I found the movie’s hyperactive collage style annoying at the time, but I can respect it more now, and it was obviously influential for other movies I initially and/or still find annoying like DOMINO and CRANK. His choice to recruit Trent Reznor to produce the soundtrack album proves that the movie is more Lollapalooza than Woodstock. It was also an early foray into cinema for the future Academy Award winning composer (though of course we all know he was in Paul Schrader’s LIGHT OF DAY in 1987, plus “Head Like a Hole” was in CLASS OF 1999 and PRAYER OF THE ROLLERBOYS and “Dead Souls” was in THE CROW).
This finale to the Summer of ’94 series will focus on a triptych of movies with this sort of generational torch passing as part of their plot. They are stories about young people and the lessons they learn from older mentors. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Boaz Yakin, Casey Siemaszko, Chris Conrad, Constance Towers, Ed Harris, Giancarlo Esposito, Hilary Swank, Malcolm McDowell, Melanie Griffith, Michael Cavalieri, Michael Ironside, N'Bushe Wright, Pat Morita, Richard Benjamin, Samuel L. Jackson, Sean Nelson, Walton Goggins
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Crime, Drama | 11 Comments »
Monday, September 2nd, 2024
I’ve seen THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT before, but haven’t reviewed it, and it’s one of those ones that I might come up blank trying to say something fresh about. It’s extremely well known and appreciated, I’m not sure who out there would need to know about it who doesn’t already, and I’m not qualified to speak on it either as a drag/trans film or as Australian cinema. But it was an unlikely international hit and has stood the test of time, so it would be a shame not to say a few words about it in this series.
Written and directed by Stephan Elliott (FRAUDS starring Phil Collins), it was released on August 10, 1994 in the United States (about a month before it came out in Australia, I guess?). It’s the story of three drag queens in Sydney who get a bus (Priscilla) and travel to central Australia together for a gig at a hotel. Bernadette (Terence Stamp, ALIEN NATION) is a wry older trans woman who ordinarily would avoid this sort of thing, but wants to take her mind off the recent death of her husband. Adam (Guy Pearce in only his fifth movie) is the diva of the group, kind of a pain in the ass but takes it well when they tease him. It’s Tick (Hugo Weaving, RECKLESS KELLY) who got the gig, and he’s nervous as hell because, unbeknownst to his friends, he used to be married to and have a kid with the owner of the hotel (Sarah Chadwick, GROSS MISCONDUCT), and he doesn’t know how it’s gonna go. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Australian cinema, Bill Hunter, Dave Foley, drag queens, Guy Pearce, Hugo Weaving, Jim Emerson, Julia Sweeney, Kathy Griffin, SNL, Stephan Elliott, Terence Stamp
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs | 10 Comments »
