Archive for the ‘Comedy/Laffs’ Category
Wednesday, May 1st, 2024
BOY KILLS WORLD is a new action/dystopia/comedy goof that I could’ve guessed would annoy the shit out of many people even if I hadn’t already seen the evidence. You know, it’s got that splattery paint, sarcastic smiley face type of aesthetic. From the trailers I wondered if I might be one of those people, but I actually really liked this thing until almost the end. I found its brazenly show-offy oddballery pretty charming. It looks at you like yeah, I know this is alot of unnecessary gimmicks and trinkets, but I like that shit, what’re you gonna do about it?
Uh… nothing. Please – continue! I think Glaive Robber called it accurately in the REBEL MOON PART TWO: THE SCARGIVER comments when he wrote, “Old Vern would have PASSIONATELY hated it. But maybe not Contemporary Vern.”
It’s a frenetic, hyper-active, smart-alecky and casually violent movie, so every review besides this one compares it to a Ryan Reynolds comic book movie that’s not BLADE TRINITY or GREEN LANTERN. If you must compare it to modern super hero movies I’d say it’s more SUICIDE SQUAD, THE SUICIDE SQUAD and BIRDS OF PREY, but that didn’t even occur to me until now. I was thinking more along the lines of POLAR, SMOKIN’ ACES, ACCIDENT MAN, a little SHOOT ‘EM UP, a little KINGSMAN. Hell, maybe a little CRANK and CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE. I hated those but some people swear by ’em. Actually the comic book movies it made me think of are those ones we used to get in the ‘90s where you never heard of the comic before or again but they created a whole stylized alternate universe for it on a medium-sized budget. I always appreciated them for that, and this is better than many of them.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Koji, Arend Remmers, Bill Skarsgard, Dawid Szatarski, dystopian futures, El Michels Affair, Famke Janssen, Francois Chau, H. Jon Benjamin, Isaiah Mustafa, Jane de Wet, Michelle Dockery, Moritz Mohr, Quinn Copeland, Sam Raimi, Sharlto Copley, Tyler Burton Smith, Yayan Ruhian
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, April 30th, 2024
April 22, 1994
When we first met director Matty Rich (in my summer of ’91 retrospective) he was the 19 year old who made STRAIGHT OUT OF BROOKLYN on $450K of credit card debt and donations, and won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature over fellow nominees Wendell B. Harris Jr., Todd Haynes, Michael Tolkin and Richard Linklater. By 1992 he was name-dropped in Ice Cube’s “Who Got the Camera”,” in which Cube has a run-in with cops and says “I’m looking for John, Matty or Spike Lee.”
And in 1994, when he was still only 22, he made his big sophomore followup THE INKWELL, an $8 million movie distributed by Buena Vista Pictures. That’s a bigger budget than SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT, SCHOOL DAZE or BOYZ N THE HOOD, but smaller than POETIC JUSTICE. John and Matty (considered gen-xers since they were born in 1968 and 1971) were the new younger guys coming in after the success of Spike Lee (who, like Robert Townsend and Mario Van Peebles, was born in 1957). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adrienne-Joi Johnson, Bicentennial, Duane Martin, Glynn Turman, Jada Pinkett Smith, Joe Morton, Larenz Tate, Mary Alice, Matty Rich, Morris Chestnut, Paris Qualles, Phyllis Yvonne Stickney, Suzzanne Douglass, Trey Ellis, Vanessa Bell Calloway
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Drama | 13 Comments »
Monday, April 29th, 2024
SERIAL MOM is a comedy I loved when it came out thirty years ago, in April of 1994. I think at the time I’d probly seen CRY-BABY, possibly POLYESTER, but I was fairly uninitiated into the films of John Waters. I just knew that at that moment he offered the perfect combination of what-we-need-right-now and what-no-one-else-is-making.
Kathleen Turner (V.I. WARSHAWSKI) stars as Beverly Sutphin, good old fashioned middle class mother, home maker, bird lover, cookie baker. She lives in a huge house with her dentist husband Eugene (Sam Waterston a few months before starting on Law & Order), college-age daughter Misty (Ricki Lake, filming right before she started her talk show) and high schooler son Chip (Matthew Lillard, who had only been in GHOULIES III: GHOULIES GO TO COLLEGE). They’re a family who get along well, and eat breakfast together every morning, sharing the newspaper. Beverly knows the garbage men by name and waves to them through the window. She hates flies and gum to a possibly unhealthy extent, but she seems like a nice lady. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: John Waters, Justin Whalin, Kathleen Turner, Matthew Lillard, Mink Stole, Patricia Hearst, Ricki Lake, Sam Waterston, Scott Morgan, Suzanne Somers, Walt MacPherson
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs | 45 Comments »
Wednesday, April 17th, 2024
And lo, the forces of boredom and time or what have you separated the Coen Brothers temporarily, and gave us a clearer view of what each brings to the team. First was Joel Coen’s THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH, a beautiful but straight forward black-and-white rendition of the Shakespeare jam. What struck me most about it other than the look was how naturally Denzel Washington could say the original dialogue and still sound exactly like the modern Denzel we know and love. I hope some day we get to hear him do that with some Coen dialogue.
Now we have Ethan Coen’s first solo directing joint*, an original piece written with his wife Tricia Cooke, who’s also editor (as she was on THE BIG LEBOWSKI, THE NAKED MAN, O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? and THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE). Titled HENRY JAMES’ DRIVE-AWAY DYKES on the credits, this is a goofy lesbian road comedy about a pair of mismatched friends doing a drive-away (getting paid to drive someone’s car one way) from Philadelphia to Tallahassee.
*he says he and Cooke both directed but they didn’t really care about the credits and he was already in the DGA (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ari Wegner, Beanie Feldstein, Bill Camp, C.J. Wilson, Colman Domingo, Ethan Coen, Geraldine Viswanathan, Henry James, Joey Slotnick, Margaret Qualley, Matt Damon, Miley Cyrus, Pedro Pascal, Tricia Cooke
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs | 15 Comments »
Wednesday, March 20th, 2024
EL CONDE is a pretty simple idea: what if Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile from 1974 through 1990, was in fact a vampire? Sort of the opposite of our “what if Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter?” It’s kind of a horror movie in that it shows us graphic bloodlettings, beheadings of both humans and animals, eating a cat, crushing a skull, and it puts even more revolting imagery into our heads through verbal descriptions. It also gets a classic horror atmosphere going with its gorgeous Academy Award nominated black and white cinematography by Edward Lachman (LIGHT SLEEPER, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, THE LIMEY, CAROL). But mostly it’s a satire hitting on a very old, very obvious, but still very relevant point: the rich and powerful are monsters. You could say we’re all human, we’re all petty, but that doesn’t make us all the same. These people are fucking weirdos, the bad kind. I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but it seems like more often than not the type of people who seek power, and the families who inherit it, and feel it is their right, there’s something very wrong with them. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, but also it attracts a bunch of freakos in the first place. I mean, part of the joke of this movie is that the fucking guy wears a cape. Like Dracula. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfredo Castro, Augusto Pinochet, Chile, Clemente Rodriguez, Edward Lachman, Gloria Munchmeyer, Guillermo Calderon, Jaime Vadell, Pablo Larrain, Paula Luchsinger, vampires
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 3 Comments »
Monday, March 4th, 2024
Note: in conjunction with this review I also made my third appearance on I MUST BREAK THIS PODCAST, discussing the movie with Sean Malloy. Thanks for having me, Sean! Always a fun time. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE.
WANTED MAN is the latest film by director Dolph Lundgren (MISSIONARY MAN). If you’re not aware, Lundgren is also an actor, so he stars as Mike Johansen, a way-past-his-prime cop. He’s introduced taking a morning beach jog, and of course he’s Dolph Lundgren (or stunt double – his hood is up), but he’s kinda limping, lumbering around. He has to take a bunch of pills. Later we find out he needs ankle surgery.
And he’s also in hot water. When he pulls up to the station and the protesters and media say, “That’s him!,” we realize oh shit… he’s the cop they were talking about on TV, the one that brutally assaulted a “migrant driver.” He sees the protesters and kinda does a whoops! and comically turns his pickup truck around. Later we see the indefensible bodycam footage, where he repeatedly slams a car door on the poor guy, yells about Mexicans and punches another officer trying to pull him off. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron McPherson, Christina Villa, Daniela Soto-Brenner, Dolph Lundgren, Erma Giron, James Joseph Pulido, Jesus "Rocko" Reyes, Jose Trujillo, Kelsey Grammer, Mexican border, Michael Pare, Michael Worth, Roger Cross, Tony Messenger
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs | 8 Comments »
Thursday, February 22nd, 2024
Seeing LISA FRANKENSTEIN pushed me to do something I’ve been meaning to do for years – rewatch JENNIFER’S BODY (2009). Uncharacteristically, I came right home from the theater and put it on. It made a good double feature.
In a way it doesn’t seem like that long ago, but in other ways it seems like ancient history. It was Diablo Cody’s second movie, coming two years after JUNO, which won her the best original screenplay Oscar. Director Karyn Kusama was on her third movie, trying to make a comeback after AEON FLUX (2005), her one studio project after the indie smash GIRLFIGHT (2000). Since then she’s done THE INVITATION (2015) and DESTROYER (2018) and lots of acclaimed television. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Brody, Amanda Seyfried, Diablo Cody, Greg Nicotero, Howard Berger, J.K. Simmons, Johnny Simmons, Karyn Kusama, Kyle Gallner, Megan Fox
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, February 21st, 2024
I’m a fan of the Academy Award winning screenwriter Diablo Cody. I enjoyed JUNO and TULLY and her directorial debut PARADISE, but it was YOUNG ADULT and its more friendly cousin RICKI AND THE FLASH that made me a die hard. Two movies about women who are assholes. My life is so different from either of theirs, but somehow Mavis Gary and Ricki Rendazzo are two characters I relate to deeply.
Of course she’s also got a foot in horror world – she wrote JENNIFER’S BODY for Karyn Kusama and even did some script revisions on the EVIL DEAD remake. She’s said she didn’t have to do much on that, but I still wonder if she was the one who named the dog Grandpa. Now she’s returned to the genre, sort of, with LISA FRANKENSTEIN, a teen movie with a zombie and some murders, directed by Zelda Williams (KAPPA KAPPA DIE). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: '80s nostalgia, Bryce Romero, Carla Gugino, Cole Sprouse, Diablo Cody, Frankenstein, goth, Henry Eikenberry, horror comedies, Kathryn Newton, Liza Soberano, Zelda Williams, zombies
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, February 6th, 2024
I feel a little guilty for reviewing more Netflix movies than usual lately. But I’ve been catching up on some stuff and I think THEY CLONED TYRONE (2023), if not the best of them, is still the kind of thing that sinister corporation owes us as a civilization and culture. They gotta balance out their ills a little by spending money on movies by new directors, that have interesting ideas. Give them a name cast and some production value but let them make something that’s not necessarily very commercial, at least not enough that they would’ve made it if they were in the movie business, looking for paying customers.
This one they actually promoted more than most of their stuff and they still didn’t give a fuck, they released it on the same day as BARBIE and OPPENHEIMER! It’s distinct from the typical Netflix joint both structurally and stylistically – structurally because it has the confidence to let you be confused for a while before it starts to reveal what’s going on, or even that there is something going on; stylistically because it avoids that modern digital cleanness, instead having a beautifully grainy 16mm sort of texture to it. I assume they shot it digitally and did that in post (would it really have cigarette burns on the reel changes if it was never meant for projection?) but it works just the same. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: conspiracy, Desmond Murray, J. Alphonse Nicholson, Jamie Foxx, John Boyega, Juel Taylor, Kiefer Sutherland, Leon Lamar, Netflix, Pierre Charles, Teyona Parris, Tony Rettenmaier, Trayce Malachi
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Thriller | 9 Comments »
Tuesday, January 30th, 2024
Man, what am I doing leaving all these Johnnie To movies unseen? Whenever I watch one I seem to fall in love. Case in point, THROW DOWN (2004). As far as I knew it wasn’t even one of his more popular ones when Criterion released it in 2021, at least not in the U.S. It was just a forgotten Tai Seng DVD from the aughts. But now it is the recipient of the prestigious The Best Thing I’ve Seen Lately award.
Most of To’s movies I’ve seen have been crime movies. They have good action but they’re more notable for their visual beauty and operatic emotion. They usually feel more poetic than badass, though they can be both. THROW DOWN technically has some crime in it, but that’s not the main topic, and to my surprise this is largely a comedy. Not the broad type of humor I associate with Hong Kong cinema, but a very dry, offbeat sort of humor of different characters matter-of-factly following their idiosyncratic pursuits into strange situations and never making a big deal out of it. Never mugging, never underlining. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Kwok, Calvin Choi, Cherrie Ying, Eddie Cheung, Haitao Li, Ho Sai-Man, Johnnie To, judo, Lo Hoi-Pang, Louis Koo, Tony Ka Fai Leung, Yuen Bun
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs, Martial Arts | 18 Comments »
