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Comedy

Our Idiot Brother – 3.75 Stars

April 10, 2012
2011, 3 stars, Comedy
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Our Idiot Brother movie review (2011) | Roger Ebert

A ridiculous feel good comedy about a sweet, trusting stoner (Paul Rudd, so open he sells marijuana to a uniformed policeman who professes to having a bad week) forced to live at home with his mother and then with his witches brew of sisters (Emily Watson, Parkey Posey and Zooey Deschanel).  Hijinks and family drama ensue.

Admittedly, not a great sell job for this picture.  But the movie is carried by Rudd, whose innocence and good-naturedness are both attractive and believable.  There are also some pretty amusing scenes.  The drug bust is deft, and Rudd’s meetings with his jaded parole officer are also funny.  Deschanel, who plays the artistic sister who wants to be some sort or stand-up comic, is winning, and her performances in what appear to be a NYC basement bar have a real authentic feel (she is not funny and the crowd of 7 people watching her is 85% family).   Adam Scott, as the love interest of Posey, is also excellent.  I’m not sure there is a funnier guy in formulaic comedies than Scott (his asshole brother in Step Brothers is legend).

Unfortunately, Posey, as the unscrupulous celebrity interviewer (yet again, high strung) and Watson as the earth mother sister whose husband (an unpleasant Steve Coogan) is cheating on her are tedious cartoons, but once Rudd re-enters the movie, all is well again.

The film, however, is stolen by T.J. Miller as a stoner who replaced Rudd by taking up with his woman when Rudd went to jail.  Miller is a gentle soul, just like Rudd, and that they pair up at the end of the picture to start a candle making business is not a spoiler.  It just had to be.

Crazy Stupid Love – 3.75 stars

April 2, 2012
2011, 3 stars, Comedy, Romance
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A nice ensemble “bromantric” comedy.  Steve Carell plays the schlub husband thrown over by the “wife in mid-life crisis” Julianne Moore after she flings with an office colleague.  Despondent, Carell retreats to the local singles bar to lick his wounds, where the charming, suave ladies man Ryan Gosling takes him on as a project, ala’ Henry Higgins.  Carell is soon quite the ladies man himself but still pining for his wife, while Gosling learns the merits of deeper love with the electric but gawky Emma Stone.

There are some glitches: Carell’s sad-sack/nice guy routine is getting a bit stale; the friends of the broken-up Carell and Moore and Stone’s lame-o boyfriend are ridiculously stock and unrealistic; Carell’s 8th grade son is a little too cloying and hip; and Moore is reprising her flustered role in last year’s excellent The Kids Are Alright.

Still, this is cute and mostly funny, and Gosling, who I have been very hard on for his work in The Ides of March (confused) and the wildly overrated Drive (catatonic) is the engine.  His repair work on Carell provides some of the best scenes, and he and Stone have very convincing chemistry.

Also, Marisa Tomei plays a one-night stand who ends up being a teacher of Carell’s son.  Tomei just keeps getting better and better looking and more charming to boot.  She can be very dark, as she’s shown in The Wrestler and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, but she’s also a deft comedienne, as she showed here and in Cyrus.

Midnight in Paris – 1 star

February 25, 2012
1 star, 2011, Comedy, Drama
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The movie starts off trying your patience with an overlong introduction of clarinet music and scenes of modern Paris. We are then introduced to American screenwriter Owen Wilson and his nagging, dispiriting fiancee, Rachel McAdams. Wilson is nervous and nasally and a noodge. McAdams is flat out hostile to Wilson. The idea that these two would ever be engaged is absurd. I kid you not, McAdams says to Wilson, “You always take the side of the help.” So, Wilson is married to a monster, doesn’t seem to know it, and yet, Allen wants us to care about him.

Worse, McAdams travels with her ugly American parents, who are (gasp) Republicans, distrustful of the French and country club obnoxious.

Allen makes the modern so unpleasant you can’t wait for Wilson to be transported to the 1920s. Sadly, we have to go to the 1920s with Wilson. And he’s doing Woody Allen, but whinier. He meets F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali, and Gertrude Stein says, “I was just telling Pablo . . .”

The greats are condescending, self-satisfied characters and they lord their superiority over all. Allen does the same thing, hiding it in his puny, nebbish persona, so his portrayal of them makes sense.

This movie is terrible. Perhaps Allen can still make a good picture. Match Point (2005) was a revelation and Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008) was charming, but he’s about done, and the nomination of this movie as best picture is ridiculous. The nomination as best screenplay is an affront. Perhaps Allen’s digs at Bush and The Tea Party explain it, but if not, and the Academy wanted to give him an unwarranted accolade, isn’t that why the Irving Thalberg award was created?

Some gems: “How long have you been dating Picasso. I can’t believe I’m saying that.”

Hemingway: “Have you ever shot a charging lion . . . Who wants to fight!”

“I wouldn’t call my babbling poetic, though I was on a roll there.”

“500 francs for a Matisse? I wouldn’t mind getting five or six.”

“The present is unsatisfying because life is unsatisfying.”

Yeesh.

There are some funny moments when Wilson lapses into Seinfeldian chatter and the folks from the 1920s look at him funny. Adrien Brody is a hoot as Dali. The movie is also very pretty.

That’s not enough, notwithstanding the Academy and a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Blast from the Past – 2 stars

February 24, 2012
2 stars, Comedy, Romance
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Brendan Fraser plays a 35 year old man mistakenly vaulted in a bomb shelter with his parents (Sissy Spacek and Christopher Walken) since the early 60s. Now, he’s out in modern L.A., and he’s wearing a windbreaker and calling black people “Negroes.”

While Fraser is pretty funny, and Walken and Spacek are properly “kooky” as conservative parents who took to the fallout shelter and never came out during the Cuban Missile Crisis, this romantic comedy lags.  Alicia Silverstone, as the love interest, is dull and plump, a bad actress with weak comic timing (didn’t she come and go in a hurry?). Dave Foley, of “Kids in the Hall,” plays Silverstone’s gay, advice-dispensing roommate, but he’s forced, and he’s given none of the snappy patter of a Cam or Mitchell from “Modern Family” (and if you needed someone to play the gay roommate from “Kids in the Hall”, why not Scott Thompson?)

In the end, fish-out-of-water can only get you so far.

200 Cigarettes – 0 stars

February 23, 2012
0 stars, Comedy
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From IMDB: “A collection of twentysomethings try to cope with relationships, loneliness, desire and their individual neuroses.”

Oh goodie.

A ponderous picture about one New Year’s Eve in the early 1980s and the intersection of a bunch of New Yorkers in the city on that night. They chatter and say cute things and go on and on about the meaningless of it all. They also over-emote and incessantly navel-gaze.

They started making these ensemble/group hug/chit chat/why are we here? movies after the insidious The Big Chill which spawned the terrible Reality Bites.

Nothing is funny – save one Janeane Garafolo line (“These matches are disappointing me”) and one Ben Affleck attempt at a pick up line (“How do you like your eggs in the morning? Scrambled or fertilized?”). Other than that, the film is awful. Everyone is bad, but special merit for over-the-top histrionics goes to Christina Ricci, Martha Plimpton, and Paul Rudd.

The director, Risa Ramoan Garcia, wasn’t given another film to helm for 11 years. He has, however, paid the bills as a casting director for CSI.

The writer, Shana Larsen, never wrote another movie.

Enough said.

Jawbreaker – 1.5 stars

February 21, 2012
1 star, Comedy, Drama
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Jawbreaker. The hot chicks run the high school. The top hot chick is kidnapped by her three cohorts as a prank. She is accidentally killed in the process. The murder must be covered up. The veneer of high school politics is exposed in the process. And the queen bee (Rose McGowan) –

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well, things go poorly for her.

This is a retread of the Winona Ryder-Christian Slater satire Heathers. Heathers, however, was funny. Jawbreaker is merely nasty, which is not all bad, but close. The film has a self-satisfied manner, constantly congratulating itself on its advanced perceptions of popularity and social standing, but never veering to far from the titillating trash it pretends to mock. I prefer the titillating trash without the condescension.

It does have a young Judy Greer who turned in a great performance as the cheated-upon wife in the Oscar-nominated The Descendants.

Galaxy Quest – 4 stars

February 8, 2012
4 stars, Comedy
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Galaxy Quest is a consistently amusing film. Two or three laugh out loud lines and consistent good chuckles and/or smiles throughout. The smartest part of the movie is finding a good sight gag, i.e., the Thermians, who enlist a Star Trek-like crew of actors into a real space adventure . . . their walk and facial expressions are pretty darn funny (I was reminded of the sight gag of people falling out of the sky in Being John Malkovich – no matter how many times I saw it, I laughed, and the gag was used a lot). And one of the Thermians is none other than Rainn Wilson of “The Office” fame.

Dwight

Tao of Steve – 4 stars

February 8, 2012
4 stars, Comedy
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The Tao of Steve. It is a simple, engaging comedy about a serial one night stand artist in college, 10 years hence, who has now become fat kindergarten teacher, but remains a master at bedding women in the college town. His “Steve” is McQueen, at whose feet he prays. His technique and precepts are shaken when he meets a woman from his past.