Posts Tagged ‘Bob Odenkirk’
Thursday, August 15th, 2024
Do you know about THE PEOPLE’S JOKER? It’s an unauthorized, extremely D.I.Y. riff on DC Comics about a trans woman Joker/Harley Quinn combo (director/co-writer/editor Vera Drew) trying to make it as a comedian in Gotham City. I may not have ever known about it if not for it somehow premiering at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival before receiving a firmly worded letter from Warner Brothers. After many cancelled screenings they somehow convinced the evil corporation that it was fair use/parody, the movie got a limited theatrical release and now it’s on VOD and on blu-ray and DVD from Altered Innocence. For THE PEOPLE!
I think the main reason it has lived beyond that initial grabbing of headlines is that beneath the gimmick and the many layers of goofiness it’s a very heartfelt autobiographical story about, among other things, coming of age as a trans woman. It’s dedicated “To Mom and Joel Schumacher,” and I strongly suspect that both the strained relationship with her mother (Lynn Downey) and the youthful confusion ignited by seeing Nicole Kidman in BATMAN FOREVER come from Drew’s real life. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Altered Innocence, Bob Odenkirk, Bri LeRose, David Liebe Hart, DC Comics, Maria Bamford, parody, Robert Wuhl, Tim Heidecker, trans, Vera Drew
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Comic strips/Super heroes | 18 Comments »
Thursday, December 1st, 2022
Here’s a story I may or may not have told before. It takes place on February 28, 2001. A few minutes before 11 am there was a 6.8 earthquake epicentered in the southern Puget Sound. I was at work and I saw some shelves wobble and a few things fall down, but nothing serious. Downtown there was some damage – some vehicles got crushed by falling bricks, and I remember a couple clubs where bands used to play in Pioneer Square (OK Hotel and Fenix Underground) were wrecked enough they went out of business. I called my roommate at home to make sure none of my stuff broke, and he made fun of me.
After work I went to Pacific Place to see this movie MONKEYBONE. All the advertising looked cheesy, but I was hoping it might be interesting because it was from Henry Selick, the director of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. Unfortunately the advertising was pretty accurate. I remember a couple times during the movie something playing on a bordering screen made a loud rumble that vibrated the whole row I was sitting in. I thought about the three escalators I took up through the mall to get to the theater, and the fourth escalator inside the theater that goes up to the floor where this one was showing, and I thought, “That’s an aftershock, and the building is gonna collapse, and I’m gonna die watching fucking MONKEYBONE.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bob Odenkirk, Brendan Fraser, Bridget Fonda, Chris Columbus, Chris Kattan, Dave Foley, Doug Jones, Giancarlo Esposito, Harper Roisman, Henry Selick, John Turturro, Lisa Zane, Mark Ryden, Megan Mullally, Sam Hamm, Sandra Thigpen, stop motion animation, Thomas Haden Church, Whoopi Goldberg
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Fantasy/Swords | 21 Comments »
Monday, April 19th, 2021
Yes, it’s true – the makers of JOHN WICK have turned Bob Odenkirk (DR. DOLITTLE 2) into an action star. NOBODY (now on VOD) comes from WICK screenwriter Derek Kolstad (ONE IN THE CHAMBER, THE PACKAGE) and is produced by WICK co-director David Leitch, and it has many obvious similarities to JOHN WICK. The premise is a variation on a retired super-killer in a “Yeah, I’m thinking I’m back!” situation. It mines the same entertaining territory of depraved Russian gangsters having the shock of their lives when they discover that somebody they assumed was just a random regular person is in fact a preposterously elite warrior who’s about to fuck up their whole existence. The dry, dark humor and gory, painful, expertly choreographed violence are certainly in the same ball park.
So if anybody has a bad thing to say about this movie that might not make me spit out my drink it would be “it was too much like JOHN WICK.” But I don’t agree that it’s a problem at all, because its strongest similarity is that it was another trailer that seemed to come somewhat out of the blue and made me say “Holy shit, where have you been all my life?,” and then when the actual movie came out it was simultaneously exactly as promised and so much more than anticipated. I don’t hesitate in saying that NOBODY is a new classic. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 87Eleven, Alain Moussi, Aleksey Serebryakov, Bob Odenkirk, Christopher Lloyd, Connie Nielsen, Daniel Bernhardt, David Leitch, Derek Kolstad, Evan Schiff, Gage Munroe, Ilya Naishuller, Kirk A. Jenkins, Michael Ironside, Pawel Pogorzelski, RZA, William Yeh
Posted in Action, Reviews | 53 Comments »
Friday, January 17th, 2020
Little women, walking down the street. Little women, bonding with their sisters but also struggling to establish their individual identities in order to find a path in life that brings them happiness
In her joyous new version of LITTLE WOMEN, writer/director Greta Gerwig (LADYBUGS) cleverly acknowledges that the book by Louisa May Alcott may be more appealing to (or more understood by) women than men. When freelance writer Jo (Saoirse Ronan, HANNA) sends stories about her and her sisters to her publisher (Tracy Letts, U.S. MARSHALS) he snidely dismisses them… until his daughters find the manuscript and freak out like it’s a new Twilight. The scene is inspired by reality: Alcott and her publisher didn’t really believe in her work-in-progress until the publisher’s niece read it and loved it.
What I’m saying is not that I, as a male individual, don’t get the appeal of this movie. I loved it. But Little Women is a “girl story” I never knew to open myself up to. I had never read or seen it, not even when it had Winona Ryder in it. I only did it this time because I loved Gerwig’s first film as a director, LADY BIRD (she didn’t direct LADYBUGS, I don’t know why I said that a paragraph ago, but it seemed amusing at the time). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bob Odenkirk, Chris Cooper, Eliza Scanlen, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Greta Gerwig, Laura Dern, Louisa May Alcott, Meryl Streep, Saoirse Ronan, Timothee Chalamet, Tracy Letts
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 19 Comments »
Monday, February 12th, 2018
THE POST is Spielberg’s newspaper movie. Specifically it’s about the Washington Post in 1971 struggling for relevance, banned from a first daughter wedding, in the process of taking an inherited family business public, when suddenly their more exalted rivals the New York Times get a court injunction for breaking the story of the Pentagon Papers (a secret study proving that the government had known for years that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable and stayed in just to put off the humiliation of a loss). Can The Post’s reporters get ahold of these Papers for themselves, will they have the balls to print a story about them, and will they get away with it? I think you know the answers, but tune in to find out how it goes down.
Like LINCOLN or MUNICH, this is one of Spielberg’s very good grown up movies that doesn’t necessarily light the world on fire, seems destined to be buried in his catalog of iconic classics, but gets some nice reviews and an “it’s an honor just to be nominated” slot in the best picture category at the Oscars. Another movie like that was BRIDGE OF SPIES, the year SPOTLIGHT won best picture. SPOTLIGHT was a good movie with a big cast doing great work in a story about the importance of journalists uncovering dangerous secrets and standing up to powerful institutions that have covered up their own complicity in atrocities. THE POST is all those things with the added bonus of being thrilling and cinematic. Spielberg might be doing a smart-people-talking-and-figuring-things-out movie, but he’s gonna do that with an eye for imagery, period detail, and visual explanations of processes: stealing and reproducing a massive document, puzzling together the order of said document when the pages get mixed up, delivering a message across town, creating the plates to actually print a newspaper, running the printing press, the list goes on.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alison Brie, Bob Odenkirk, Bruce Greenwood, Carrie Coon, David Cross, Jesse Plemons, Josh Singer, Liz Hannah, Matthew Rhys, Meryl Streep, Michael Stuhlbarg, newspapers, Pat Healy, Sarah Paulson, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Tracy Letts, Vietnam
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 18 Comments »
