PORKY’S II: THE NEXT DAY is a weird one – a foolish but also pretty enjoyable shot at catching lightning in a bottle. On one hand the gang from part 1 kind of seem like they’re your buddies, so it feels natural to go back to school with them. On the other hand the fresh feel of the first one came from trying to make a different kind of movie, and from basing it on stories from Bob Clark’s youth. For this one, to a certain extent, he’s trying to make the same kind of movie, and making up new stories that might remind you of the real ones. So it’s kind of forced. (read the rest of this shit…)
Archive for the ‘Comedy/Laffs’ Category
Porky’s II: The Next Day
Monday, September 28th, 2009Porky’s
Sunday, September 27th, 2009
PORKY’S is a monument to young men and the issues that interest them. It’s about trying to get laid, spying on naked girls, fake IDs, sneaking into titty bars, dick size, the proper use of condoms, practical jokes, convincing cops to let you go, getting in fights, standing up to fathers. But mostly it’s about giggling – lots of giggling about dicks and what not.
It also takes place in the ’50s, and it’s kind of a fantasized nostalgia where men play 16 year old boys (director Bob Clark points out that people looked older back then) and everybody’s friends with everybody else and the boys can pull of anything and get a fantastical revenge on a seedy character they really shouldn’t fuck with if this were real life because somebody would get their legs broken. So it’s a nostalgic look at their coming of age years but it’s not the same type of nostalgia George Lucas and others of this generation had. It mostly ignores the cars, the music, the dances, the hairstyles and all that shit that usually gets fetishized in anything about the ’50s. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Informant! and The Girlfriend Experience
Sunday, September 20th, 2009
Today I have a Steve Soderbergh double feature. I got his new one, THE INFORMANT! followed by his previous one, THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE.
Twenty years after SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE and Steve Soderbergh is still experimenting up a storm. This year he’s alternating a low budget improvised drama starring a porn star (more on that later) with this big studio comedy starring Matt Damon. But as far as Soderbergh’s commercial movies go THE INFORMANT! is on the weirder end. He takes the true story of a corporate crime whistleblower who helped the FBI crack open a huge price fixing scandal, but he plays it as a broad comedy. (read the rest of this shit…)
Extract
Sunday, September 20th, 2009
Somebody requested I review EXTRACT, even knowing that I have a hard time writing about comedies and whether they’re funny or not. But you know how I am, I strive to achieve excellence, make everybody happy and proud, etc.
EXTRACT is the new picture from Mike Judge who did cartoons, then OFFICE SPACE, then IDIOCRACY. It’s a low key comedy but made me laugh alot and gets better and better as it goes along. There’s not really a high concept to explain here, which was also true of OFFICE SPACE, but at least with that one you could say it was about the torment of being an office worker. This one is about a guy who owns an extract factory being sexually frustrated and dealing with a worker injury lawsuit. Does that sound awesome, or what? (read the rest of this shit…)
Teen Wolf Too
Friday, September 18th, 2009
Everybody knows there’s a TEEN WOLF TOO starring Jason Bateman. I know I personally have been aware of this fact for many years. But until this week it never really occurred to me to actually watch it. I decided to do just that, and here’s what I found.
TEEN WOLF was about a teen who turned into a wolf, and TEEN WOLF TOO is about a teen who turns into a wolf too. He’s the cousin of the Michael J. Fox character, whose whereabouts are not mentioned. Maybe they wanted to leave the possibilities open for a THREEN WOLF, or maybe they just wanted to avoid pulling a MATRIX RELOADED. The original MATRIX had such a nice open ending where you could imagine what happened next, but then they put a cap on that by showing what’s next in part 2. The TEEN WOLF saga doesn’t make that mistake, it lets Scott Howard continue his journey through your imagination. (read the rest of this shit…)
Teen Wolf
Monday, September 14th, 2009
TEEN WOLF is the story of a teen who turns into a wolf. But he looks more like those cavemen from the commercials, or the “dog-faced boy” from the cover of that old video about the different “freaks” (see diagram).
Michael J. Fox (CLASS OF 1989) plays Scott Howard, a weiner who has the hots for some bitch who hates him and who doesn’t notice that his female best friend adores him. To be fair her name is Boof so you can see why he wouldn’t take her that seriously, but still. One day when he gets a 
boner it brings out the changes in his body and then when there’s a full moon he turns into a wolf. So his dad reveals to him that he also is a wolf, an Adult Wolf, because it’s just this harmless thing that runs in the family.
That doesn’t comfort Scott. He’s real worried and embarrassed, but then he gets upset during a basketball game and wolfs out, and it makes him really good. Ain’t no rule says a werewolf can’t play basketball.
Being good at sports is the best thing anybody could do, so everybody accepts this wolf thing and thinks he’s cool now. They lift him up like a champion, bring him to the diner, chant his name. People cheer him on wherever he goes, they high five him. Being a teen wolf seems very similar to being Arsenio Hall. Also there’s a part where he spontaneously starts breakdancing in the hallway at school. (read the rest of this shit…)
Bulworth
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
Warning: this review talks alot about American politics that won’t matter to many of you, but then so does the movie so it should be fine.
Recently I was reading last month’s Rolling Stone article about the Democrats caving on all the meaningful parts of health care reform. It paints a convincing picture that if they give up on the public option then the plan won’t help much, could even make things worse, will hurt the Democrats politically and hurt the chances of real reform happening any time soon. I thought jesus, what is wrong with these people, we elected them for “change” and now the opportunity to do what we asked them to do makes them run around in a panic, peeing on the floor like a dog on the 4th of July. (Another American reference for you there.) Are they really all in the pocket of insurance companies? They have the majority, they have the majority of the people. You really worried those dumb fuckers at the town hall meetings are gonna be mad if you give them cheaper health coverage? I don’t think that’s worth losing sleep over. (read the rest of this shit…)
Synecdoche, New York
Saturday, August 29th, 2009
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is the most complex and convoluted movie that worked that I’ve seen in a long time. I loved it and you might too. But there’s also a good chance you’re not on its wavelength, and in that case it will be torture, like me watching WAKING LIFE.
P.S. Hoffman plays Caden, a guy who directs plays. He’s fat, unhappy and uninteresting and his wife (Catherine Keener) is obviously miserable. The opening is so mundane it’s almost hard to translate as a movie: he has trouble getting out of bed, reads the newspaper, mumbles to his wife that Harold Pinter died, they have sort of a conversation but aren’t listening to each other. It’s kind of nice that it begins so uncinematically mired in normal life, because as it goes along it becomes more and more fantastical. (read the rest of this shit…)
Soul Man
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
Well, I guess as long as we’re talking about race…
From the director of my two favorite FRIDAY THE 13THs (parts 2-3) and the star of THE HITCHER comes this comedy about Mark Watson, a white dude pretending to be black to get a scholarship to Harvard Business School.
Watching THE HITCHER reminded me about seeing this movie in the ’80s, and I thought holy shit, did they really make that movie? I didn’t imagine it? They really pretended anybody would believe C. Thomas Howell as a brother? And no, the idea is not that the whitebread kids at Harvard have never seen a black person up close so they can’t tell the difference. No, he also fools Rae Dawn Chong (put upon love interest) and James Earl Jones (no nonsense criminal law professor).
I mean seriously. Look at that picture. Squint. Take your glasses off. Stand across the room. Is there any way that would fool you? Would you even notice he was supposed to be black? I don’t get it, man. If anything he looks like an Indian guy with a perm. I mean, he could pass for not white, but I don’t think he could passing for black. He couldn’t pass for passing black, in other words. You really gotta suspend the ol’ disbelief on this one. (read the rest of this shit…)
Funny People
Monday, August 3rd, 2009
As a producer and an influence, Judd Apatow dominates the current comedy movie scene. His movies re-popularized the R-rated, filthy-mouthed comedy, they started a much-imitated improvised approach to comedy scenes, his TV shows and movies started or kickstarted the careers of Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Siegel, Jonah Hill and others. In a few years he’s completely changed comedy movies, started a few cliches, and gained the inexplicable antagonism of talkbackers.
But just a couple years ago he was a hard-working, mostly ignored writer and producer whose name you’d see on stuff like The Larry Sanders Show, ZERO EFFECT and ANCHORMAN. He was a behind-the-scenes guy for Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey. He rewrote THE CABLE GUY from Chris Farley vehicle to the weird stalker comedy it became. Apparently he wrote Jim Carrey some jokes for the AFI Salute to Clint Eastwood. Nobody hated him back then. He was just another joke writer who had been roommates with Adam Sandler. (read the rest of this shit…)
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