Category: Movie Comedies (Page 150 of 195)

“Who the hell is interupting my kung fu?!”

June 26, 2009 /

One side benefit of the busy, slightly weird and somewhat fouled-up time I’ve been having at the Los Angeles Film Festival is that I’ve only had time to watch films I’ve especially wanted to see. That’s prevented the joy (so far) of making an unexpected discovery, which is definitely part of the fun of film festivals. On the other hand, I’ve liked all the films I’ve seen (so far). “Black Dynamite,” a spoof of the seventies blaxsploitation genre, is one I’ve been wanting to see since the filmmakers’ commendably aggressive PR people sent me a trailer — and a very cool (but inexpensively seventies-esque) t-shirt — a couple of years back via my personal blog.

Fortunately, the wait, the slog through Hollywood traffic on the somewhat spooky evening of Michael Jackson’s death (not as bad as it could have been, actually), and even some technical problems on the first attempt to run through the film all proved to be very much worth it. Directed by Scott Sanders and co-written with actor and martial artist Michael Jai White (“Spawn,” “The Dark Knight“), this is just your basic story of a superhuman ex-CIA agent, able to take out a roomful of bad guys and satisfy a roomful of women, who sets out to avenge the death of his brother, stop the scourge of hard drugs at orphanages, and also deal with a brand of malt liquor that turns out to have a truly disturbing side effect.

The brilliance of Sanders and White’s approach here is the faithfulness they maintain to their source material while sending it up shamelessly. It happily exaggerates the cinematic flaws of actual blaxsploitation and its often unbelievable plots and absurd dialogue, taking several increasingly silly turns as the film unspools, but always with a completely straight face and an apparent complete lack of irony. The approach propels the comedy far further than less disciplined spoofs.

In a video interview conducted with writer David Poland after its debut at Sundance, Scott Sanders said he and White approached it not so much as a movie starring Michael Jai White as Black Dynamite and directed by Sanders, but a movie featuring Michael Jai White playing seventies-era ex-football player Ferante Jones playing Black Dynamite, and directed by Sanders “playing” a seventies director.

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Action Movies, Actors, External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movies, Reviews

Between Good & Evil: Hollywood Heavy Hitters Going Toe to Toe

June 25, 2009 /

There’s just something about two great actors going toe-to-toe that makes for some of the most memorable cinematic moments. Call it chemistry if you will, but these days, when you get a couple of Hollywood heavy hitters in the same room, it’s usually guaranteed to light up the screen like the Fourth of July. So when it was announced that Michael Mann had enlisted two of this generation’s greatest actors – Johnny Depp and Christian Bale – to star opposite one another in his new film, “Public Enemies,” we couldn’t help but be reminded of the many other classic face-offs starring the industry’s cream of the crop. Some are as simple as good versus evil, while others are a little more, well, complicated. Below you’ll find a list of our ten favorite match-ups (and what makes them so special), along with five more that just missed the cut.

Here’s a sample entry:

Cinematic showdowns don’t come any more highly anticipated than this. More than two decades after sharing billing (but no scenes) in “The Godfather II,” Robert De Niro and Al Pacino finally had a big screen showdown in Michael Mann’s sleek, stylish 1995 crime epic. Pacino is LAPD Lt. Vincent Hanna, a true-blue cop whose dogged dedication to his job has destroyed two marriages and is on its way to wrecking a third; De Niro is Neil McCauley, a brilliant thief whose ego goads him into attempting the final score that’s supposed to finance his retirement – even though he knows Hanna’s watching him. Though the two characters share just a few of the 171 minutes that make up “Heat,” Mann makes them count, serving up a deliciously tense tête-à-tête in a coffee shop that foreshadows the final showdown between Hanna and McCauley in the film’s last act. After all that buildup, some film fans were a little let down by such an understated clash of titans, but now that we’ve seen what can happen when Pacino and De Niro spend an entire movie together (2008’s “Righteous Kill”), those seem like awfully petty complaints.

Of course, the idea of doing a feature like this without including the most famous movie match-up is kind of like eating a PB&J sandwich minus the actual peanut butter and jelly, but not all of our inclusions are quite as predictable. Head on over to Bullz-Eye to check out the rest of the best.

Action Movies, Actors, Celebrities, External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movie Dramas, Movies

Blu Tuesday: Waltz with Bashir, Confessions of a Shopaholic and Inkheart

June 23, 2009 /

I’m not exactly sure how movie studios decide when to release their films on DVD and Blu-ray, because sometimes (like last week, for instance), competition can be so stiff that titles get lost in the background, while if they were released just one week later during a day like today, they’d likely be the highlight of the all the new releases. Whatever the reason, it really makes it hard to be a consumer, because though there are few decent titles available on Blu-ray this week, the selection could have been so much better if some smarter planning was involved on the studios’ end.

“Waltz with Bashir” (Sony)

It might not have won the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture like many industry insiders had it pegged for, but “Waltz with Bashir” would certainly have been deserving of such an honor for its innovative fusion of documentary and animation. Equal parts interview and flashback reenactment, “Waltz with Bashir” is the latest from Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman who, after a friend tells him about a recurring nightmare involving the First Lebanon War, decides to reconnect with old acquantainces in order to recover lost memories of the 20-year-old event. Though the movie isn’t as potent as 2007’s likeminded “Persepolis,” “Waltz with Bashir” is a cinematic achievement that’s only downfall is its incorporation of news archive footage at the end. Though this is the kind of film you can really only watch once, cinephiles will love the extras included on the Blu-ray release, including a making-of featurette that not only debunks the general belief that the film’s visual style was achieved through rotoscoping, but details the advanced method of how the movie was actually animated.

“Confessions of a Shopaholic” (Walt Disney)

Completely undeserving of its critical lashing, “Confessions of a Shopaholic” might not be the most original romantic comedy to come down the pipeline, but what it lacks in originality it more than makes up for with a great cast, a solid script, and the manic energy of star Isla Fisher that is so captivating, you could bottle it up and sell it in stores. Of course, it’s hardly a movie you can expect a lot from in the special features department, but Disney has still done a pretty good job of putting together a decent collection of extras. The Blu-ray exclusive six-part “Behind the Fashion” may only run a scant 13 minutes long, but it covers everything from costume and production design to filming on location in New York. That’s hardly going to convince anyone to buy the film, but if you’re looking for a fun little date movie that won’t have you scratching out your eyeballs, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to discover that “Confessions of a Shopaholic” isn’t quite as bad as you were lead to believe.

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External Movie DVDs, Movie Comedies, Movie Dramas, Movie DVDs, Movies

The boy-men of LAFF, Part 2: “Humpday.”

June 22, 2009 /

As stars Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard admitted during the post-screening LAFF Q&A on Friday night, Lynn Shelton’s improvisational comedy “Humpday” was “reverse engineered” from a premise that a lot of straight guys, at least, will no doubt have a hard time swallowing. However, if you take the film as it goes, it develops its premise believably.

The film opens from the point of view of Duplass’s Ben, a happily married guy trying for his first baby with wife, Anna (Alycia Delmore). At 1:30 one morning he is greeted with a surprise visitor, Andrew, an impetuous artsy type who has been traveling the world and having various sorts of bohemian adventures. The film sets up two simple ideas that, in a more normal world, should not come into conflict: Ben and Anna love each other quite a bit as husband and wife; Ben and Andrew love each other quite a bit as best friends.

The problem is that Ben may not be quite as thoroughly comfortable in committing to a lifelong domestic role as he might first appear. The following night, a party with Andrew’s cute new hook-up, her lesbian girlfriend, and various bohemian friends of various sexual preferences leads to a discussion of Seattle’s real-life amateur art-porn video contest, Hump Fest. In turn, that leads Ben, attending without Anna, to an inspiration. With pretty much everything under the sexual sun already committed to video, the only thing left with which you can make any kind of statement or push any envelope would be the spectacle of two straight guys somehow managing to have sex with each other.

Instead of dying the death you’d expected an idea like that to die once the booze and the pot wears off, it takes on a life of its own as Ben pushes Anna to the margins and winds up in the most humorously counterintuitive macho pissing contest ever committed to film. During a rough basketball game, he and Andrew nearly come to blows, and the issue somehow turns out to be who has the artistic/creative gumption to actually commit to the “project.” It’s an inherently funny premise for exploring the old issue of competition between close male friends, explored to more dramatic effect in “Jules and Jim,” Joachim van Trier’s “Reprise,” and probably a bunch of other movies I can’t remember right now. It’s also more poignant than you might think, because, for all his artistic aspirations, Andrew hasn’t actually completed any projects yet.

For an improvised film, this is a nicely-acted, witty, and thoughtful piece of work with plenty of laughs, even if Ben’s beyond-shabby treatment of the very tolerant Anna stretches believability for a guy who’d perhaps like to stay married.  The only real problem with “Humpday” is that this is a story with no satisfactory resolution. If the guys go ahead and do the deed, then we’ll likely always question whether they were both really all that completely hetero to begin with, and we’re left with no premise. If they don’t do the deed, it’s a bit of a cheat.

I won’t give it away, but it’s telling that, in a film where the plot points were laid out in advance but the dialogue was generally improvised with actors Leonard and Duplass (one half of the improv-comedy filmmaking Duplass brothers) effectively acting as writing collaborators, the decision was made to improvise the resolution as well. Naturally, the result was a let down. Like the rest of the film, however, it is funny and feels fairly real in its disappointment, which might actually be the point.

[Note: If you happen to be reading this on Monday afternoon, 6/22, at about 2:30 p.m., PDT, you have just over two hours to get to Westwood to see the second and final LAFF screeening of “Humpday.” Hurry.]

External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movies

Sunday box office update — “The Proposal” makes it to the altar

June 21, 2009 /

It’s a gorgeous and breezy afternoon as I type this from the relatively bare business center of the otherwise swanky W hotel which abides in the shadow of UCLA and, during the Los Angeles Film Festival, a small but select chunk of the film industry. That may include some of those who could be effected by the news, apparently first reported by the redoubtable Nikki Finke, that perceived poor management skills and excessively neurotic behavior have led studio chief Brad Grey to commit to a major management shakeup at Paramount. (The Hollywood Reporter has a considerably more staid version of the story up.)

I’ll finally start writing about some of what I’m seeing and hearing at the festival later tonight, but first it’s time for the numbers. Those were especially good for Ms. Sandra Bullock who, with the help of Ryan Reynolds and what Variety sees as “pent-up demand” for rom-coms, scored an estimated $34.1 million with “The Proposal.” That would be Bullock’s biggest opening ever.

Following with a really outstanding estimated $26.9 million in its third weekend, “The Hangover” dismissed it’s newer male-appeal comedy competition, “Year One,” which came in only at the #4 spot, but nevertheless managed $20.2 million in its first week. Ms. Finke described the hunter-gatherers-go-biblical film’s performance as “disappointing,” but The Hollywood Reporter deemed it “solid,” perhaps reflecting the  budget. In any case, it surely reflects that a perception of poor quality caused by bad reviews (as discussed on Thursday’s pre-weekend post) and perhaps more or less matching word-of-mouth might actually have some impact on a film’s performance.

“Up” did its bit for the power of family entertainment, remaining aloft at the #3 spot for yet another week with $21.3 million, say the estimators, and is within a hair’s breadth of the $225 million mark for its entire run.

Happy Father’s Day.

Actors, Actresses, External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movies, News

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