Tag Archive for 'Comedy'

The Bad Reviewer

Published on May 21, 2011 in Movies and Review. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Okay, I’ve been really bad with reviews lately. Like unbelievably bad. So here goes on the last batch of movies we rented.

You Again, with Sigourney (spell check thinks that should be Eastbourne, Swinburne, Dourness or Glyndebourne – I think we’re still a far hail from a robot uprising, so we can all relax for a few years) Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis in a family ‘coming of age’ blah story. My personal edits would have left the movie with Weaver and Curtis and it would have been a hilarious, albeit short, movie. To put it succinctly they stole the show. The younger women’s story was probably around a 6/10 because while it wasn’t bad, it really wasn’t worth paying attention to and the story given to them to act was rather highschool-imaturity crap. Weaver and Curtis’ parts of the movie were easy 8/10 possibly even a 9.

Overall I’d say 6.5/10. Unless you like Weaver and Curtis in their comedy roles, you’ll get zero out of this movie beyond a bunch of young adults acting immaturely.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was great, but Nicholas Cage and Jay Baruchel are both actors you can’t go too far wrong acting. Baruchel is actually one of my new favourite actors (I watched him in Undeclared so I really can’t say favourite new actors, although certainly favourite new lead actor). The story is typical young-adult sci-fi of nerd likes girl, impresses girl = love. Albeit the story surrounding it is actually well put together and planned.

Overall I’d say 8/10. It’s fun to watch and is original enough to feel new. The acting is good quality so nothing kills your engrossment. It also very discreetly left an opening for a sequel rather than the typical BTW SEQUEL SET-UP RIGHT HERE like you get out of many young-adult targeted movies. Heck it’s Baruchel, 8.5/10.

The Switch was a good all around romantic comedy that wasn’t just about cheap and easy laughs. Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston played their roles excellently, plus Jeff Goldblum was good comic relief throughout. Like a lot of Bateman’s comedic roles, he lets you find the humour. This was what I got from Arrested Development, his role in Juno and many others. He’s funny, but he’s not trying to be zany to get laughs.

Overall I’m giving this another 8/10. It was a good all around movie that only helped its own story. It was funny, it was touching and most of all it didn’t feel like the happy ending was being forced on the characters.

Country Strong again was a good movie. Gwyneth Paltrow played the alcoholic country star good. The best actor in the movie was Garrett Hedlund (IE Tron Legacy) as I fully liked the character before I caught why he felt familiar and IMDB’d him. He played a guy in the middle of it all quite expertly and he managed to make his character feel real.

Overall it’s a 7/10. Kelly Canter’s (Paltrow) twist ending was rather forced. I know things are predictable when both me and my wife are guessing it before it happens. I like a good twist, but it has to be well executed and in this case it wasn’t. So it ended with me feeling rather cheated as up until they pulled the ‘twist’ card I would have given it an 8, but don’t piss me off with the damn ending. They could have played straight into it, but didn’t.

Club 54 and a Blizzard

Published on April 17, 2011 in Personal. Closed Tags: , , .

We went to Comedy at Club 54 last night for one of their charity fundraisers and saw the hilarious Ben Guyat. It was a great night, the acts weren’t as funny as Guyat, but that’s always to be expected (don’t show up your host). Although whomever was up first was quite funny, I can’t recall names (the Molson brewers are responsible for another memory lost to a good time, I hope they can live with themselves!), in a crude way.

We also just randomly got a blizzard, in the middle of April. There’s no evidence, or trace left. But for some bat-shit crazy reason we got an hour long blizzard when they’ve been calling for virtually no precipitation for today all week.

Mother Nature – that bitch is crazy.

Sixteen Candles

Published on October 3, 2010 in Movies. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Just saw sixteen candles for the first time today, surprising I know. I’m personally surprised that it took so long for me to see a movie I had heard was great and actually turned out to be great.

The Dongona need food! (The wife’s making peanut-butter-chocolate-chip cookies)

Easy A

Published on October 1, 2010 in News and Personal. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Just did a 10-hour work day yesterday, up at 5:20AM and didn’t get home until 6:20PM and had to rush to get ready. Was it worth it? Hell yes.

Easy A was great, Emma Stone was hilarious, Amanda Bynes yet again played another crazy girl, this time a religious psycho. This was a class act, they didn’t use up all the good material in making the trailer as the movie is easily 10 times funnier than the trailer makes it appear.

Going the distance – pre-review

Published on September 14, 2010 in Review. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Just saw Going The Distance with Justin Long and Drew Barrymore, and absolutely loved it. It was hands down hilarious, you just don’t get those kinds of jokes in a Rom-Com. It was also refreshing that it wasn’t the same old monotonous ”he/she cheated on him/her but they forgive each other and aww they’re back together”.

Considering I went through this with my wife, it was actually damn close to what real life is. If reality is why this movie got a not so great rating, then I like bad movies. Reality, for me, trumps farce every time.

It’s a definite must see movie.

Review: Kick Ass

Published on May 16, 2010 in Review. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Not only seeing this movie, but finding the time to write this review has been a difficult task. It took almost two weeks for us to actually get to go see Kick Ass, but once we had our pet hedgehog managed to escape. No one, nowhere had pre-informed us that hedgehogs are escape artists, had we known we would have probably kept with the original idea for his name of Harry, instead we have Henry, apparently Houdini reincarnate.

We also had a fun visit from my wife’s cousin, and spent this weekend attending another one of her cousins weddings, all amongst a regular schedule that doesn’t usually include time for review writing. We also saw the Nightmare on Elm Street during this time, which will be receiving a dutifully short review (for better or worse), and I will be keeping this review as succinct as possible. Anyway, onto the movie.

What I liked:

Well pretty much everything. Matthew Vaughn is one of my favorite directors and despite a very short directing list, I’m anticipating his future works (another by the writer of the Kick Ass and Wanted comics). He has a great ability to make scripts Hollywood-acceptable, without making the content Hollywood. An eleven-year-old girl kills, maims and dismembers people and people showed greater concern over her characters potty mouth.

I’m sorry, I’d have more problem with my children being mass murderers before hitting pubity than hearing them use ‘cunt’ in an insult. Perhaps my moral values are off from society, but I generally rate vulgarity below violence on the ranking of character vices to avoid. I would have thought the religious right would be with me on this, Blasphemy is not as big a sin as Murder, and vulgarity isn’t explicitly a sin in and of itself. It’s also worth noting the 3rd commandment isn’t a proclivity against swearing as in vulgarity, but against oath swearing under the name of the lord.

The action scenes were awesome, especially Hit Girl’s main scene. The choreography was great, and the first-person view through her night-vision goggles is possibly the only fan-play to FPS gamers that was executed in a good way, usually any first-person perspective in a film is horrific even when it’s not done artistically as fan-play.

What I disliked:

Was honestly virtually nothing. I would have preferred Mark Millar’s ending to the story, however that ending isn’t well suited to film. I can understand why Vaughn would use a more commercial ending, after all he does need to earn a living and he’s selling to an American market, not the British market where unfortunate endings are more accepted.

My other problem with it was that the flow of the film died a little bit with the sequel setup, which I know was in the original material, but could have really been cut out for the film. Although, story wise, I can understand the inclusion because it’s an illustrating point that’s often discussed in comic works that the existence of Super Heroes/Villains will cause need for the rise of the other.

Overall: 9/10

This is one of the greatest movies I’ll see all year, and I don’t even need to know what else is coming out to claim this. However, it certainly isn’t going to be the greatest movie I’ll see this decade, although I don’t preclude Vaughn taking that title.

Judgement: Buy it, rent it, watch it in theaters, whichever you choose, it’ll be worth it.

Review: Repo Men

Published on April 2, 2010 in Review. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

This was a strange one, not because of the whole sci-fi artificial organ repossession deal, which I can buy into. This was strange because of a random mixture of sex, gore and an odd twist for the end. Jude Law and Forest Whitaker made this an interesting action movie, but it was really little more than a good action movie.

What I liked (caveat edition):

Law and Whitaker made this fun, and funny, to watch. They played their parts well and were passable as life-long friends, which is what made the twist at the end believable – not worthwhile, just believable.

The story overall was good, however it seemed like there was a lot of avenues the story could have gone down that would have been potentially better, but didn’t. The story kept hitting intersections, but it never seemed apparent why it never took a left or a right. It had a plot similar to ‘The Island’ with Ewan McGregor, however it had neither Ewan McGregor nor a meaningful ending, just a bizarre twist that left me wondering why I’d bothered to sit through the last forty-minutes of action.

The action scenes were a Matrix part 2/3 affair with choreography spewing from every knife hole, which consumed a lot of time that could have been used for either more comedy or more story.

What I disliked (unfortunately without caveats):

A hallmark of a bad writer is the reliance on a Deus Ex Machina to resolve a plot problem. We’re not talking Lord of the Flies usage where the entire novel revolves around them trying to get rescued and right at the crucial time they do, I don’t have a problem with that – if anything it’s less of a plot twist because it’s now frequently expected and can in fact be a rewarding end. No, I’m talking this is a War of the Worlds (Tom Cruise movie) ending where there’s no mention of disease and suddenly all the aliens die from influenza like they’re a bunch of Red Indians dragged into a Pox House, it was sheer irrelevance. Aside from a pre-mention or two of the literal ‘machina’ the twist comes out of nowhere.

I suppose the writer didn’t want a happy ending to the movie, which I can give kudos for but his form of a tragic ending was as irrelevant to the story of the movie as if the movie Bambi had ended with the faun taking a shell of buckshot to the chest. As many can probably assume, the twist was so horrendous that I’m actually taking personal offence to it because not only I could have done better, but anyone reading this could have done better and a monkey hammering away gibberish on a typewriter would have produced a more sensible ending.

Another thing that bugged me was the random sex scenes that appeared to have been contrived solely for the purpose of upping the rating. Yes we get it the bible thumping rednecks at the MPAA can’t stand to see sex and violence in the same movie let alone the same scene, and a sure fire way to get the highest rating is to put sex and violence in the same scene. Of course instead of killing someone and harvesting their organs while they’re rolling around with a hooker in the sack to offend the MPAA, the writer and director for Repo Men decided it would be excellent to have the main characters have a sadomasochistic sex scene while they cut each other open for no apparent reason other than one of the many plot adventures of “well we can’t think of anything else” that this movie frequently took.

The plot is akin to The Lord of the Rings without the ring, they just travel to Mordor to say “fuck you viewer!” It’s good until you realize Frodo left the ring at home because he just wanted some alone time with Sam in a scary place to see if the whole fear-of-death aspect would help get them to share a sleeping bag like it seems to every woman in any Hollywood movie.

Overall: 6/10

This is my lowest review score so far for two reasons. One is because I usually can tell if a movie is going to suck out loud, and this one didn’t suck out loud per se, it just sucks in hindsight. The other reason is that while it was an entertaining romp with multiple action scenes that were enjoying to watch and Whitaker’s believability is the only reason this didn’t get a 4/10 for pissing me off.

A review is supposed to be impartial, and I am. I don’t judge on film makers past works, their reputation or anything I judge a movie solely on its merits and I believe I’d have been less annoyed if you’d have strung every pun against the British from every Simpson’s and Family Guy episode together – in fact I can see myself giving it a far higher review than this movie. Standing on its own merits, if they’d have followed their non-sense policy of ignoring all the crossroads available to them in plot development and followed it to its logical conclusion it would have probably hit around a 7.5/10, but after skipping many logical plot alternatives they decide to take a completely illogical plot twist at the end in a Douche Ex Machina move by the writer and director.

If I can recommend anything to anyone on this movie is that it likely isn’t worth the price to rent it from blockbuster, and probably isn’t worth wasting one of your Netflix discs on when you could get an actual good movie.

Judgement: Wait till it hits TV or a movie channel.

Review: Alice in Wonderland

Published on March 19, 2010 in Review. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , .

My greatest fear for this movie was the huge threat of no originality that frequently plagues remakes of classics. However for better, or some might argue worse, Burton didn’t stick to the books like they were a religious text.

What I liked:

The story was excellent, it was a merger between Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, with new material. One of my biggest problems with the books, and thus the faithful recreations in movies, is that they were written to be easily red to children. The divisions in the story are so alarmingly strong that you could cut the spine of the book between certain chapters and never know the two belonged together, quite frankly it’s a book of short stories. However what Burton achieves is a contiguous and seamless work, there’s no concrete divisions. It’s fluid, and it’s elegant, which allows the story to be gripping.

Despite many complaints that the movie is lacking emotion (it’s based on a Victorian Era book, are you serious? Lack of emotion? Who’s a moron? Lots of incompetent reviewers working for prestigious newspapers that can’t be bothered to research a movies source material even though 99% of them will have read the book and likely noticed its lack of emotion) I found it to have ample amounts for its source material. Also, I believe some people really need to look up what really falls under the category of ‘emotion’. The movie had great optimism to it, while also providing the overwhelming feel of pessimism in the face of daunting odds. Burton’s Red Queen is the deepest I’ve seen of any Alice creation, she’s consumed by jealousy but reveals she’s actually got good in her but her life and upbringing have guided her away from being good.

Acting was top notch, but then every actor has a credit list the length of my arm so that’s expected. The art and direction were amazing, better even than Burton’s previous works, which is a commendation itself.

What I disliked:

There were a few lines that were hard to understand, this wasn’t a real problem for me (fast spoken lines in a Scottish accent don’t fool me easily, I had to deal with a Scottish substitute teacher in a French lesson in highschool, since then I’ve never had a problem understanding the Scots) as I’m English and have first hand experience with the accents. I know my wife had difficulty with many of the lines, as I was acting as translator. So I can only imagine the trouble some people had. However, as a Brit I’ve had to learn American accents, so I can hardly criticise a movie for making Americans learn accents from Briton. If you expect to sell your culture globally, you should damn well be open to getting some back.

Beyond a few lines people may find inaudible, I can’t criticise the movie on much. Anne Hathaway played the White Queen well, she just looked exceptionally gaunt beyond her usual… gauntness. Something about her bugged me, I’ve still not put my finger on it. It just feels like something’s not right about her as the White Queen. I believe a bit more attention to the make up could have likely resolved it to my satisfaction.

Overall: 9/10

This is the best Alice in Wonderland I’ve seen or read, basically because it feels like an adult story. Even when I originally read Alice in Wonderland, I believe I had surpassed the stories age target. I’ve got about a decade and a half on my original reading of the story, and I doubt a faithful reproduction would have held my attention beyond the first twenty minutes. This kept my attention locked until the finish.

Judgement: Buy it! (see it in theatres if you can)

Groundhog Day

Published on February 2, 2010 in News. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , .

Those damn rodents are telling us what to do again! According to the Pennsylvania marmot it has predicted six more weeks of winter, thank you very much! Or, in an alternate take, it has cursed us with another six weeks. Could this groundhog have the means to control the planetary climate?

I believe it’s safe to say, yes. We must all hail this furry mammalian until its winter spell is complete so that we can venture out of our properties in T-shirts and shorts. Or, perhaps, we could just wear winter coats like we have been all winter and ignore the little varmint.

In related news, I may conduct a scientific test on the foresight capabilities of small mammals using Baxter and see if I can get an accuracy rate nearing that of an 8-ball. Or not, you know, depending on how the day goes and depending on whether or not I want to anger the rabbit.

Review: The Princess and the Frog

Published on January 23, 2010 in Review. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I was pleasantly surprised by Disney’s return to traditional animation. It was funny, witty and well written; something we haven’t seen much of from Disney lately. The movie is genuinely deserving of being in the Disney Classics.

Here’s why I liked it:

Most importantly, the voice acting was very well done. The voices suited the characters, they weren’t just planted in the role because of who they were; I didn’t realise I knew Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos) from as many things as I did. There were, obviously, some name-drop extras, however John Goodman and Oprah Winfrey fitted their roles well.

The story was strong, with a few good twists. Not necessarily unexpected twists, but they’ll certainly be a delight for the young children this movie is targeted towards. It is enjoyable for adults, which the Disney Classics usually are. The emotions in the movie feel genuine, which is a must for any romance.

The musical numbers were excellent, and I’m talking Aladdin & The Lion King good. The plot existed and wasn’t as holy as Swiss cheese, it made sense throughout the entire movie for the characters to be doing exactly what they were.

And here’s what I disliked:

The key problem in this movie was pacing. The beginning was fun, however progress through the bayou felt a little stuck in the mud. It had its humour, but the start of the middle section had a serious pacing issue. This resolved itself and recovered for a good ending, however here’s a message to Disney: You’re selling this to small children, I didn’t want to sit still during the slow period, why would an 8 year old?

Other than pacing, there weren’t any glaring problems. The action and adventure felt genuine and not forced. The romance between Prince Naveen and Tiana had feeling. Most notably, this felt like an actual movie, it didn’t feel like it was created to play for a black demographic because it’s an ‘untapped market’ by Disney. It’s a romance set in New Orleans, end of. The fact Tiana is African-American is as irrelevant to the story as it should be, it’s a story about love.

Overall: 8/10

This is a great family-film, and not one that the parents have to sit on either end of their children so they don’t escape while the adults sleep. It’s 97 minutes, and about 85 of them will keep you genuinely interested. Most importantly, it is well worth spending the money on if you’ve got children under 14, and worth it regardless of age if you’re a Disney fan.
The Princess and the Frog is a movie that should be seen in theatres with the kids, and should be bought on DVD/Blu-ray by any fan of Disney’s Classics. It’s worthy of dropping the cash on.
Judgement: Buy it

© 2010-2012 Nik Gregory All Rights Reserved