To call the writing in “Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj” path-of-least-resistance storytelling is an insult to the path of least resistance. Indeed, I would argue that the writer (David Drew Gallagher, hang your head in shame) actually wore blinders while writing his screenplay, so he couldn’t see the myriad of plot threads, gaps in logic and ponderous exposition that stood in the way of his seemingly endless list of ethnic stereotypes and euphemisms for genitalia. Never mind how embarrassing this stuff looks in a post-“Wedding Crashers”/”40-Year-Old Virgin” world: the filmmakers don’t appear to have seen a sex comedy…
Author: David Medsker
Ah, the stoner comedy. Many movies have tried to capture the stoner brass ring, only to fall off the horse due to a complete lack of motor skills, realize they have the munchies, forget about the brass ring altogether, and head for the taco stand (“Half Baked,” I’m looking in your direction). What most filmmakers forget is that it takes a special brand of smarts in order to make a movie that’s dumb without actually being dumb, and also be really funny at the same time (“Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,” take a bow). A slippery slope if…
“Déjà Vu” is a near-mirror image of most Jerry Bruckheimer popcorn flicks: the logic, by and large, works (which is really saying something for a time-travel movie), but watching it unfold isn’t terribly exciting. Compare that to, say, “The Rock” or “Con Air,” which are brain-dead but also tons o’ fun. Maybe director Tony Scott got so wrapped up in the groovy new F/X shots the movie employs, and how he was going to serve up some stunning split-screen imagery that no one’s ever done before, that he lost track of some of those other important ingredients to making a…
As I walked out of the theater after seeing Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain,” I spent the next hour in what felt like a drug-fueled haze, unsure of what I had just seen and with no idea what sense, if any, was to be made of it. In that sixty-first minute, however, something clicked, and that epiphany made sitting through what is arguably the longest 96-minute movie in history worthwhile. Of course, my theory about what really happened in “The Fountain” could be completely and totally wrong, but it gave me closure, damn it. Those who see the movie and do…
What is it about adapting a play for the screen that seems to trap a movie when it should be setting it free? I enjoyed the adaptation of “Proof,” but it was by no means perfect, and even the musicals like “Rent” and “The Producers” looked awkward in the one medium that would allow them to make the kinds of shifts in location and time that theater people dream of. “The History Boys” gets lost in translation as well, but not in the same way; if anything, the problems are not stage-restricted problems but simple conventions-of-moviemaking problems. The story comes…
The one thing that a lot of people will assume about “An Inconvenient Truth,” sight unseen, is that the movie is a pile of liberal propaganda, and that is a shame. Al Gore, the movie’s star, stresses repeatedly that global warming is not a political issue, and only occasionally makes mention of the Republican Party, outside of his great opening line about how he “used to be the next President of the United States.” The issue, he contends, is a moral one, which is surely something that the conservatives can get behind, right? The setup for the movie is pretty…
Let’s be perfectly clear right up front: this is not your older brother’s Will Ferrell movie. “Stranger than Fiction” doesn’t contain a single pratfall or butt shot (well, actually it does, but it’s not Ferrell’s), and is more snicker-snicker funny than ROTFLMAO funny. Most critics will draw comparisons to “The Truman Show,” and it’s an apt one in several ways, not the least of which is the fact that each movie features the first dramatic lead by a comedian. A better comparison, though, would be “I Heart Huckabees,” David O. Russell’s delightfully loony movie about one man’s hunt for the…
“Flushed Away” looks and sounds like an Aardman movie (“Chicken Run,” “Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit”) in every way, but it doesn’t exactly feel like one. It hits all the right notes, sports some wonderful performances from the voice talent, and emphasizes clever over easy, but there’s an intangible missing. It’s as if the movie was made as a tribute to Aardman, not by Aardman. And as tributes go, it’s a home run. As an original, however, it’s good, but Aardman is capable of much, much better. Hugh Jackman is the voice of Roddy, the pampered…
Sweet Jesus. “Hostel” has just killed the “Saw” franchise. What began two years ago with a grisly thriller has turned into a sadistic death trap that has completely lost its moral center. To their credit, the makers of “Saw III” are fully aware of this loss of morals, to the point where they worked it into the plot. But you can’t have it both ways, guys. If you want to torture people, then torture people. But don’t pretend to be above such things when all is said and done, while wallowing in it in the meantime. The movie begins right…
So you go to a comedy club, and you see a comedian that makes you laugh so hard that you can’t make a sound…or they suck so badly that you actually feel sorry for them. But have you ever wondered what things looked like from their perspective, from the hostile crowds and cheap club owners to unstable fans and angry hookers? Well, wonder no more, because “I Killed: True Stories from the Road from America’s Top Comics,” the new book from Ritch Shydner and Mark Schiff, compiles anecdotes from literally hundreds of comedians, and everybody is bringing the funny. Bullz-Eye…