Archive for the ‘Comedy/Laffs’ Category
Friday, July 8th, 2005
SPOILER ALERT !!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with our man Vern who is… mighty unhappy with a certain Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson comedy right now. You see, he… well… Shit, Vern can tell you…
Boys –
First off, congratulations on the kid, Moriarty. I hope he doesn’t have too many problems being named after some freak from FORBIDDEN ZONE. But congratulations and in my opinion some credit should also go to the wife, who I bet performed some of the more difficult aspects of the birthing process unless there is something Harry is not telling us.
Second order of business, I saw some movie called WEDDING CRASHERS. Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn play a couple of dickheads who like to sneak into weddings because somehow it causes them to automatically get laid. When I first saw the trailer for this one I felt insulted. It seemed like one of those premises that would maybe seem funny when you first think of it but then you would realize before you got a chance to even write it down that it was not funny enough for anybody to actually make or especially watch. The trailer didn’t show any of the plot but I assumed it would be one of those generic romantic comedies where the protagonist lies and tricks people but then to his surprise he meets someone who he really falls in love with, and there are montages and flirting and laughing and they become close but it’s all based on a lie so then suddenly she finds out the truth and he has to admit that he’s a scumbag but then he publicly humiliates himself and proves to her that he really loves her and then… oh shit, what if in this one they got MARRIED AT THE END? Would that be ironic or what? The hunter becomes the huntress, or whatever. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christopher Walken, David Dobkin, Dwight Yoakam, Isla Fisher, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Vince Vaughn
Posted in AICN, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews, Romance | 31 Comments »
Tuesday, June 14th, 2005
Hey folks, Harry here with Vern chiming in on the latest film from Alex De La Iglesia – who one day will be paired up with a perfect project that will launch him into world wide infamy – and goddammit, I wished it had been his FU MANCHU movie he wanted to make! Do yourself a favor and track down DIA DE LA BESTIA or 800 BALAS… then you won’t be able to stop tracking down all his films. Here ya go…
Boys –
Remember me, your friend Vern with one last review from SIFF, which is what I call the Seattle International Film Festival for short. That is the festival we have over here, in Seattle.
I didn’t see too many this year but the one I couldn’t miss was FERPECT CRIME because it was by Alex de la Iglesia. I went in knowing nothing about the plot or even the correct title. The schedule and tickets called it EL CRIMEN PERFECTO (THE PERFECT CRIME) which adds an extra THE and corrects a purposely incorrect spelling. So let that be a lesson to those who enjoy giving pointless and unsolicited advice about spelling to us artistical types. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alex de la Iglesia
Posted in AICN, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews, SIFF, Thriller | No Comments »
Monday, April 11th, 2005
Usually even if I see a movie like this I wouldn’t review it. Because you know, light-hearted romantic comedy is not my area of expertise. But if a movie critic is a bear then FEVER PITCH is a big pile of fish slathered in a barrel of honey, and I think you know why. Because it’s easy as shit to write baseball puns and metaphors. It’s fuckin tee-ball for the hack headline writers of the world. Sometimes they wonder how the fuck they gonna come up with a pun for a movie headline, but with a baseball movie you hit control-A for “strikes out,” control-B for “swings for the fences.”
Actually I don’t think either of those is true, FEVER PITCH is more like a double or a triple or maybe a real good double play. They never use defensive plays in metaphors but double plays are obviously important, also triple plays but those don’t happen enough to be a common phrase. I don’t think there is such a thing as a quadruple play but it would be cool though. Anyway this is a cute romantic comedy deal but what makes it worth mentioning is (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Drew Barrymore, Farrelly Brothers, Jimmy Fallon
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews, Romance | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005
starring Bruce Willis
So let’s say instead of being John McClane or somebody, Bruce was Joe Hallenbeck, a washed up, slightly overweight, cigarette loving, booze-sucking, wife-and-daughter-arguing, disgraced secret service agent turned low-life asshole private detective. Also, for the sake of argument, let’s say that Damon Wayans is Hallenbeck’s one-time favorite football player but his career was ruined in a gambling scandal and now he’s a drug addict dating a stripper (Academy Award winner Halle Berry, in a step up from her role as a crack ho in JUNGLE FEVER) who Hallenbeck was hired to protect by his former friend who he just found out was screwing his wife then saw get blown up by a car bomb and now Halle Berry has been murdered because she knew too much about a football team owner trying to blackmail a senator that Hallenbeck used to protect but punched out because he was torturing women and now they’re trying to legalize gambling. Also I forgot to mention that Hallenbeck once saved the president’s life, and some dudes are gonna set off a bomb at the football game, and there was this fucked up part at the beginning where an NFL player pulled out a gun on the field and started shooting everybody then said “Ain’t life a bitch?” (to be or not to be, that is the question) and blew his brains out. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Willis, Damon Wayans, Shane Black, Tony Scott
Posted in Action, Bruce, Comedy/Laffs, Mystery, Reviews, Thriller | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, March 8th, 2005
This is the sequel to GET SHORTY. Based on another book by Elmore Leonard, but this book was made after the GET SHORTY movie and with the idea that it would become a movie too. So this is a movie about sequels based on a book that was a sequel to a movie based on a book. Which means there’s all kinds of metapostmodernistical type business running around calling attention to itself. Hey, look at me, I’m a character in a sequel talking about how sequels are bad. Now I’m a character in a PG-13 movie talking about how if you say fuck twice you get an R.
(John Travolta, as badass loanshark turned movie producer Chili Palmer points this out and says, “You know what I have to say about that? Fuck that.” And if only he had repeated “fuck that” again for emphasis I guess he would’ve gotten the R and I could’ve seen this movie in a quiet theater full of adults and not a fuckin high school cafeteria. But that’s a subject for a separate rant.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andre Benjamin, Cedric the Entertainer, Elmore Leonard, F. Gary Gray, Harvey Keitel, John Travolta, The Rock, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Crime, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Friday, February 25th, 2005
SPOILER ALERT !!
Hey folks, Harry here to bestow upon you the glory and the greatness that is the mighty Vern. He wades through films and text like the Grim Reaper in a Corn Field…. shitting out the husks of material that dreams of better days. Now he turns his excellence at Wes Craven’s troubled latest. A film left hemorraging from the Dimension process, but with a pedigree of cool otherwise. Let’s see what Vern says…
Harry –
Don’t know if you’re sick of me yet this week but I just saw CURSED one day early, so what the fuck man you know what happens next. A review, some belligerent talkbacks, etc.
This is the new one from Wes Craven, who in my eyes at least still has some small amount of credibility. I know he tries his damndest to piss it away on executive produced projects like DRACULA 2000, WISHMASTER, WES CRAVEN’S SO-CALLED CARNIVAL OF SOULS, etc. And he’s done some bad ones all throughout his career. Like DEADLY FRIEND and DEADLY BLESSING. I forget which one is which. One of them involves a robot. And VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN. And THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Joshua Jackson, Kevin Williamson, werewolves, Wes Craven
Posted in AICN, Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Reviews, Thriller | 11 Comments »
Thursday, February 10th, 2005
Hey folks, Harry here with a review of a pretty darn fun movie. I haven’t seen the dvd yet, that’s why it isn’t on my list. But by all means, Vern is right about the film, this is one I must pick up!
Dear Harry,
Congratulations on the robot leg, bud. I never thought of getting one of those. Sounds like a good gimmick though, hope it’s working out there.
that’s all bud,
Vern
On second thought, shit, as long as I’m writing you I might as well review this movie THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT that I just saw on a convenient DVD type format. It officially comes out on February 22nd (or 15th if you wanna order it from the web sight). What this is is a very independent low budget absurdist comedy deal that was made in 2000 and has been touring the land ever since. You ran one glowing review of it years ago and a couple other minor references, but since it’s a real good one that will probaly get almost no advertising, I thought maybe it was worth revisiting as it comes to DVD and therefore within reach of your average citizen. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: musicals, space loneliness
Posted in AICN, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Sunday, December 26th, 2004
So there’s these two middle aged dudes, Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (some dude from a sitcom they used to have). Jack is an ex-soap star who’s about to get married, Miles is a depressed middle school english teacher who can’t get his novel published and is obsessed with wine. Together they have to stop a criminal mastermind who is poisoning the wine supply in the San Fernando valley and turning wine drinkers into an army of zombies.
Actually I made that last part up but what it’s actually about is they go on a trip into wine country the last week before the wedding. The idea is for Miles to show Jack “a good time” which to him means going around tasting wine and showing off that you know how the grapes were grown and what year it is and stupid crap like that. I mean in this movie you got people talking on and on about Pino this and 1961 is peaking and all this shit, they might as well be talking backwards, you got no idea what these idiots are blabbing about. Except when they start talking about how fragile the grapes are or something, and it is obviously a parallel to their own emotional state or their dreams or something. But I’m sorry, metaphors are not a good enough excuse for that kind of talk. Anyway, it works for the movie because they are good characters. You are not supposed to think their wine talk is cool. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alexander Payne, Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews, Romance | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 13th, 2004
[NOTE: this review was sent to The Ain’t It Cool News, but they never ran it. Sometimes pieces like this just fall through the cracks. Or sometimes movies starring and directed by Pauly Shore should not be written about. It only encourages them. sorry about this one guys.]
Dear Harold,
You better be lying about BLADE 3 you motherfucker or I got nothing to look forward to. I need a light at the end of the tunnel Harry and you’re trying to black it out on me. Also I hope you had a nice stay in Seattle.
Anyway I’m writing to you due to the fact that I just seen yet another straight to video movie, this one called PAULY SHORE IS DEAD, by star/subject/director/co-writer Pauly Shore, a former inexplicably famous comedian. What this movie is about is he has run out of the money he made in the early ’90s and can’t get any jobs so he made a “personal” independent movie about his career to bear his soul and/or beg for attention. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Pauly Shore
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Friday, December 10th, 2004
OCEAN’S 12 is a sequel to OCEAN’S 11 (the 2001 version [not the movie 2001, I am referring to the year 2001, the year the movie OCEAN’S 11 was made {the remake, not the original, that is why I brought up this year thing originally}]) so this will be the sequel to my review of that movie.
It turns out that the eleven do NOT die horribly as I predicted. But their past (the other movie) does catch up with them, and the sequel is all about them doing various heists in order to pay back the money, plus interest, that they stole the first time around. So that means that Ocean’s 11 actually have a net loss across the two pictures. I mean, think about that. That’s terrible! What does that say about the current state of doing a job right? You want to do the impossible, so you bring in 11 of the greatest experts from around the world, you pull it off, you win back your ex-wife, and you have a fun time doing it. And your reward is horrendous debt and threat of life and limb. That’s how this world rewards you for ambition, talent and dedication. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, heists, Matt Damon, Steven Soderbergh
Posted in Bruce, Comedy/Laffs, Crime, Reviews | 4 Comments »
