Comedy Archives - Page 19 of 76 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

MHHFF ’13: Shorts Program #4

October 20, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror, Music, Short Films

Next Exit **/**** (UK, 14 mins., d. Benjamin Goodger) A light bit of nothing, Next Exit is a little Ludditism along the lines of that one episode of the American "The Office" where Michael Scott follows the bad instructions of his GPS directly into a lake. The performances are good, the direction is fairly pedestrian, and the story, about a girl who accepts a ride home from a pub one night, has a couple of decent twists but is ultimately more mildly clever than disturbing or compelling. In its short time, it does manage to cover the bases in terms of going out of cell-phone range and the suggestion of a cyclical ending, but it fails mostly in terms of generating much in the way of horror or comedy. Mostly, I had trouble with the idea that anyone would think a hotel–or a hospital, or anything–is located in the middle of the woods.

Slacker (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 15, 2013****/****, 1990s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Richard Linklater, Rudy Basquez, Jean Caffeine, and a whole bunch of people
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Jefferson Robbins Before it became a lazily-applied shorthand for my generation in particular, Slacker was a film about doom. It’s pervasive throughout this seemingly casual, meticulously constructed, 24-hour baton-pass through bohemian Austin, Texas, in which characters confront intimations of death, their own or that of the species in general, and respond with rhetoric, bemusement, a fatalistic shrug, or a joyride. Writer-director Richard Linklater awakens from vivid dreams on a bus in the opening scene, then unspools his vision to a Buddha-silent cab driver (Rudy Basquez). His most memorable dreams, he reports, often feature sudden death: “There’s always someone gettin’ run over or something really weird.” Fair enough to wonder if we’re not dreaming along with him, in some dress rehearsal for Waking Life, when he quickly happens upon a mother (Jean Caffeine) sprawled in a residential Austin boulevard, freshly driven over by her disturbed son (Mark James).

MHHFF ’13: Big Bad Wolves

October 10, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, Israel, Thriller

***/****
starring Tzahi Grad, Llor Ashkenazi, Rotem Keinan, Dov Glickman
written and directed by Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado

by Walter Chaw A winning, stylish mixture of black humour, perversion, and character study, Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s Big Bad Wolves presents a popular moral quandary in a way that would make Park Chan-wook proud. Indeed, it would fit comfortably in a conversation with that director’s “Vengeance Trilogy” as a companion piece in theme, even execution, to Sympathy for Lady Vengeance that finds a father and a rogue police officer brutally torturing an unassuming schoolteacher because they both suspect he’s responsible for the death of a little girl. With the question of guilt beside the point, the real thrust of the piece is the toll that some actions take on the soul, no matter why they’re undertaken. Crucially, it’s not a product of the United States or South Korea, two cultures married to a specific kind of morally relativistic nightmare that have produced films like this for years, but of an Israeli movie industry that marks this as only their second “horror” release. (The first, incidentally, was a product of this same writing-directing team: 2010’s Kalavet.) For an Israeli thriller to tackle the issue of the zero-sum game of rendition and torture without due process feels dangerous–particularly with the ancillary character of an Arab man on horseback who is wry, handsome, and utterly normal, nay, the only normal one in the entire film.

MHHFF ’13: Ghost Team One

October 8, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror

*½/****
directed by Ben Peyser & Scott Rutherford

by Walter Chaw Kind of a cross between Paranormal Activity and American Pie, Ben Peyser and Scott Rutherford's Ghost Team One is buoyed by a game cast and a certain relentlessness but let down by an extended conclusion that finally crosses the line from offensive-but-funny to offensive-offensive. Before that, there's virgin Sergio (Carlos Santos) and his horny, neo-Stiffler buddy Brad (J.R. Villarreal) outfitting their pad with cameras and enlisting a third, largely-unseen buddy at the handheld in the pursuit of ghost-hunting–or so they tell the beautiful Fernanda (Fernanda Romero). Really, this project seems designed around the chance of maybe capturing some uploadable gonzo porn. This promises oodles of nudity in a supernatural-tinged sex-romp, but, alas, what we get are a lot of masturbation jokes and an Asian burlesque from otherwise-hilarious frat-boy Chuck (Tony Cavalero), which starts in a bad place and descends to a very bad place during an extended exorcism scene. Opportunities to attack Mormons are squandered along with the chance to craft something with the sort of '80s lawlessness of The Last American Virgin. The film can't even take a successful swipe at The Blair Witch Project, though it tries.

MHHFF ’13: Cheap Thrills

October 7, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

***½/****
starring Pat Healy, Sara Paxton, Ethan Embry, David Koechner
screenplay by Trent Haaga & David Chirchirillo
directed by E.L. Katz

by Walter Chaw A lean, mean, pleasantly unpleasant little clockwork from first-time director E.L. Katz, Cheap Thrills feels and acts like the best kind of noir–the kind where you don't like anyone very much. Reuniting Pat Healy and Sara Paxton from The Innkeepers (another movie that disproves the maxim that genre film is in trouble), this is a fairly stunning, if a bit on the nose, parable of our recessionary state, as car mechanic/aspiring writer Craig (Healy) is faced with the eviction of his young family from their tiny apartment and a layoff from his already-not-paying-enough job. Drinking his sorrows away at a bar, he runs into an old buddy, Vince (a fantastic Ethan Embry), and an odd couple, Colin (David Koechner) and Violet (Paxton), celebrating Violet's birthday. Mysteriously wealthy, it seems that Colin is looking to solve the puzzle of what to get the impossibly pretty younger wife who has everything, and the answer is to stage a series of increasingly sadistic stunts between Craig and Vince for various bounties. $200 for saying something to the meth-addict at the bar to make her slap you; $500 if you hit the strip-club bouncer first. The stakes escalate, tensions rise, and it all ends with probably the single best expression of the current state of manhood in the lower-middle-class United States circa 2013.

The Hangover Part III (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

October 6, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Road Movie

click
any image to enlarge

*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
starring
Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, John Goodman
screenplay
by Todd Phillips & Craig Mazin
directed
by Todd Phillips

by
Angelo Muredda When Project X
spilled forth from its amniotic
septic tank last spring, I
read it as a prime example of a
producer-driven form of auteurism pioneered by Judd Apatow. That
found-footage
chronicle of a house party-turned-apocalypse, I suggested, was a
monument to
producer Todd Phillips's equally noxious Hangover
series, where the same Dionysian impulses and
deep-seated hatred of the different–whether female, trans, queer, or
disabled–were championed by a trio of middle-aged men. What a
difference a
year makes. If Project
X was a brand
consolidator and The
Hangover Part II
was a morbidly curious recalibration of its predecessor, displacing
Phillips's
demonic impulses and scarcely controlled misogynist rage from Bradley
Cooper's
Phil to Ed Helms's Stu, Part
III is an actors'
contract negotiation sputtered to life. Since the previous instalment,
Cooper has
become a respectable leading man and Oscar nominee and Helms has been
savaged
for the degeneration of his irritating Andy Bernard character on "The
Office", while co-star Ken Jeong's fortunes have inexplicably risen.
Consequently, gone now are the days of Phil's "Paging Doctor Faggot,"
along with Stu's loveable dude-rage and the Wolfpack's infinite jokes
about Mr.
Chow's shrunken Asian manhood. In their place is a surprisingly
neutered, if
inarguably more ethical, product with very few laughs and no reason for
being.

TIFF ’13: Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

September 18, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, TIFF

***/****
written and directed by Sion Sono

by Angelo Muredda Two of the funniest films at TIFF were, of all things, elegies. Like the doppelgänger duo of The Double and Enemy and the misdirected-revenge double-bill of Bastards and Prisoners, Raya Martin and Mark Peranson’s La última película and Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play In Hell? seemed to be sharing a direct line, commiserating over the demise of celluloid while huddled together in an abandoned cinema, bracing for the digital apocalypse in mock terror. Tonal and thematic overlaps aside, however, the films diverge in their cases for the relative importance of filmmakers at this moment of crisis. La última película directs its satirical energies towards Alex Ross Perry’s self-satisfied hero, a director on a mission. Sono’s by turns delirious and sentimental film goes the other way, all but deifying its energetic schlockmeister, who prays to the Movie God as a teen that he might one day make something worthy of 35 mm and finds his prayers answered ten years later, when a pair of warring yakuza clans commission him to turn their grand battle into a cinematic time capsule, to be screened at the homecoming for one of the mobster’s jailed wives.

TIFF ’13: Bad Words

September 16, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, TIFF

½*/****directed by Jason Bateman by Bill Chambers While the concept of an "open source" film franchise, one to which any Joe Schmo can contribute, is not a new one, it's more common in Europe and Asia, where intellectual property laws are considerably more relaxed. The homegrown "bad" series--much to Harvey Weinstein's chagrin, no doubt--has somehow transcended that, spinning off from Bad Santa's core desire to milk the shock value of giving an absolute cretin some measure of responsibility for the welfare of a beatific child. A mild disappointment at the time, Bad Santa looks more sophisticated through the prism of…

TIFF ’13: August: Osage County

September 14, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

*/****
directed by John Wells

by Bill Chambers "Don't go all Carson McCullers on me!" a character admonishes in August: Osage County, John Wells's film version of Tracy Letts's Pulitzer-winning play. I think the line is meant to be ironic, because Letts, author of demented southern gothics like Bug and Killer Joe, is an obvious heir apparent to McCullers. In the context of this timid adaptation, however, it sounds like a studio note. August recently made headlines because the ending may change from what audiences saw at TIFF, and that would be for the better–I somehow doubt that reassuring viewers of Julia Roberts's indomitable spirit ever crossed Letts's mind as one of his goals for the piece–but it wouldn't be enough to take the Garry Marshall tang out of the film. Chewing scenery with her mouth open, Meryl Streep is Violet, the gargoyle matriarch of an Oklahoma dynasty, hooked on pills because of mouth cancer and, let's face it, in obeisance to a certain theatrical tradition. Violet's sister Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale) and daughters Barbara (Roberts), Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), and Karen (Juliette Lewis) have gathered together along with their own families to mourn the passing of Violet's husband and confront some awful truths laid bare by Violet's condition and drug-fuelled compulsion to spill secrets and push buttons. Casting like a kid in a candy store (what in God's name is Benedict Cumberbatch doing here–as the holy fool, no less) and shooting in a functional non-style that 'opens up' the play by going in for the kinds of close-ups you couldn't get without opera glasses, Wells is a producer-turned-director through and through. About his ability to marshal big egos there can be little doubt, but his camera bobs all over the axis of action like a first-year film student, and he shows almost no command of tone, reducing the material's vaguely satirical detours into perversion (incest! statutory rape!) to schematic twists both eye-rolling and curiously palatable. But it's finally the casting of 500-pound gorilla Roberts that kills this thing, throwing its centre of gravity so off-balance that August: Osage County feels not much different from a tailor-made ego trip like Something to Talk About, even before that contentious epilogue.

TIFF ’13: All Cheerleaders Die

September 7, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, TIFF

*½/**** written and directed by Lucky McKee & Chris Sivertson by Bill Chambers I suppose they've both been campy at times, but I think Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson might be too grim for something like All Cheerleaders Die (or as the closing title card ominously puts it, "All Cheerleaders Die, Part One")--a title that at the least augurs fun schlock tinged with the alarmism of '50s hygiene cinema. After capturing the dubious--but funny--death of the head cheerleader on tape, standoffish Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) remodels herself as a Heather and earns a spot on the squad, much to the dismay…

Telluride ’13: Nebraska

September 6, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Road Movie, Telluride, Telluride 2013

***½/****
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It’s easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.

TIFF ’13: Don Jon

September 6, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**½/**** written and directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt by Bill Chambers Formerly Don Jon's Addiction, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's feature writing and directing debut is a cheerier, lower-stakes Saturday Night Fever. Simultaneously lampooning and humanizing The Situation in the title role, Gordon-Levitt plays a Jersey boy who has no trouble getting laid but never finds the real thing as satisfying as jerking off to Internet porn. (In a very funny opening voiceover, he admits to getting insta-wood, Pavlov-style, at the startup sound of his laptop.) When he begins dating Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson, having a good year), he hears the swoony music of…

Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

August 26, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Q
***/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C
starring Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, Richard Roundtree
written and directed by Larry Cohen

by Bryant Frazer Writer-director Larry Cohen makes exploitation look easy. His iconic Black Caesar was basically a remake of Little Caesar with a black cast; his mutant-baby flick It’s Alive amplified the generational rift created in families by the social revolutions of the 1960s and early-1970s to horror-movie proportions. Cohen is so commercially savvy that his screenwriting career has continued, in earnest, into the 21^st century, placing projects like Phone Booth, Cellular, and Captivity at the Venn-diagram intersection between high-concept appeal and low-budget execution. He also has an instinct for character, and it never served him better than it did in Q, which is the story of a little criminal in a big city as much as it’s the story of a huge feathered serpent lording over Manhattan. Q was set up quickly (in two days, to hear Cohen tell it), after Cohen was fired from an adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury, and it features a terrific cast (Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree) improvising many of the scenes in a screenplay that was being written as the shoot progressed to take advantage of whatever New York locations Cohen was able to secure. The result isn’t quite a great monster movie, but it gets maybe 80 percent of the way there.

Prince Avalanche (2013)

August 22, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch
screenplay by David Gordon Green, based on the film Either Way by Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson
directed by David Gordon Green

by Angelo Muredda The
standard line out of Sundance on Prince Avalanche, David Gordon Green's
tragicomic stop between the puerility of The Sitter and the Southern
Gothic of his upcoming Joe, was that it was a return to form after some
time spent in the wilderness. That's true enough insofar as its dashed-off
buddy travelogue, a loose adaptation of the Icelandic movie Either Way,
is sweet where The Sitter is cynical, but one has to wonder at this
point whether any of Green's studio trifles can be considered outliers when their worldview
is so consistent with the ostensible real deals. Even the least of his films
shares a thematic interest with the others in redeeming wayward losers; by that
token, Prince Avalanche isn't a triumphant comeback so much as a familiar
motif recapitulated in a more pleasant, minor key.

In a World… (2013)

August 15, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Theatrical

***/****
starring Lake Bell, Demetri Martin, Fred Melamed, Rob Corddry
written and directed by Lake Bell

by Angelo Muredda If In a World… seems a bit busy, it’s because it has a lot on its plate. The feature debut from “Children’s Hospital” star, narrator, and sometimes-director Lake Bell, the film displays all the classic calling cards of an under-appreciated multi-hyphenate talent’s break for the mainstream: a plum starring role, punchy dialogue, and a high concept. That conceit, of a female voiceover artist moving up within the ranks of a tetchy, male-dominated industry, comes with its own baggage, instantly reminding us of the relative scarcity of high-profile American comedies shepherded by women. It’s a lot for a first feature to take on, and what most impresses about In a World…, which manages the neat trick of being both funny and thoughtful without tipping into melodrama, is its apparent effortlessness–the impression that Bell is casually navigating complicated territory.

Blue Jasmine (2013)

August 1, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, Louis C.K., Bobby Cannavale
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda Woody Allen’s forty-third directorial effort begins with a one-sided conversation on a plane that will seem familiar to anyone who’s seen any of the previous forty-two. Jasmine (Cate Blanchett, on a brief hiatus from her Galadriel duties) spouts anecdote after anecdote to a placidly-smiling elderly woman, cycling from the banal origin of her name to the story of how “Blue Moon”–“You know the song”–was playing when she met her husband. Our poor audience surrogate is held captive by this narcissist, with whom we’re fated to spend the rest of the picture, until she meets her husband at the baggage claim and instantly spills about the stranger who “couldn’t stop babbling about her life.” It’s a curious start, not so much for the arch reveal that the women are strangers, via a rack-focus shift at the airport from this interloper to our real protagonist, as for the faintest hint of auto-critique.

Computer Chess (2013)

July 18, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Patrick Riester, Myles Page, James Curry, Robin Schwartz
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

by Walter Chaw Sneakily, the best science-fiction film of
the summer is Andrew "Godfather of Mumblecore" Bujalski's decidedly
lo-fi Computer Chess, shot with a late-'60s, made-for-home-video Sony
AVC-3260 analog tube video camera that approximates the very look and feel of something you'd
find in a box in someone's garage. It endeavours to tell the story of a weekend
tech convention where proto-hackers engage in mortal combat over who will be
the first to create a computer chess program that can defeat a human master
(Gerald Peary (!)) and, incidentally, collect a $75k booty. The money, though,
is incidental to the glory of scientific discovery, of being the first to push
the limits of artificial intelligence to the point of…what? Aggression?
Sentience, perhaps? It's telling that Bujalski, at the forefront of a specific
DIY subgenre of independent cinema reliant on largely-improvised performances
with no budget nor, theoretically, affectation (it's like the American version
of the Dogme95 movement), has produced the most affectless, genuine artifact of
the dogme philosophy through his greatest feat of affectation: he's
created a time capsule of an era in a film about the eternity of the human
instinct to create simulacra first and deal with issues of functional
equivalence later. In its way, Computer Chess works like a sprung, found-footage diary of the birth of Skynet. It's Mary Shelley, and Blade Runner, and it
gets to being about what it's about without being an asshole about it.

The Newsroom: The Complete First Season (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

July 18, 20132011, 2012, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A Sound B+ Extras B
“We Just Decided To,” “News Night 2.0,” “The 112^th Congress,” “I’ll Try To Fix You,” “Amen,” “Bullies,” “5/1,” “The Blackout, Part 1: Tragedy Porn,” “The Blackout, Part 2: Mock Debate,” “The Greater Fool”

by Jefferson Robbins The more I think about Aaron Sorkin’s chimerical HBO beast “The Newsroom”, the more I think it would work far, far better as a Broadway musical. That may be because Sorkin loads the ranks of his ensemble drama with accomplished theatre vets, or it may be because of the endless dialogue references to stage classics, beginning and ending with Man of La Mancha. But it’s also a matter of timing: The show offers strange eruptions of relationship palaver, set in the midst of world-altering sociopolitical changes and the daily churn of building a TV newshour around them. They arrive oddly, maddeningly, and frequently, just when the storylines involving real-world events are beginning to compel, and they feel almost uniformly dishonest and manufactured. What I’m saying is, they’d go down easier if they were sung.

The Producers (1968) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray and DVD Combo Pack

June 30, 20131960s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Music, Satire, Scream/Shout! Factory

Mel Brooks' The Producers
*½/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, Kenneth Mars
written and directed by Mel Brooks

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw A seminal year for film, 1968: Once Upon a Time in the West, Rosemary's Baby, Planet of the Apes, Night of the Living Dead, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barbarella, If…, Targets, Faces, Danger: Diabolik…and, some would say, Mel Brooks's The Producers, a film back in the limelight thanks to the record-breaking, award-winning Broadway play on which it's based now coming out as an extraordinarily ill-advised feature film of its own. Unlike Brooks's other classics (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, even High Anxiety), The Producers has aged pretty poorly. It's played broad, which is to say that everyone acts like they're being defibrillated every five minutes, leading to a lot of high-decibel screeching and running around in circles. And I don't really understand what the film is about: Is it an attack on the theatre, or is it an attack on Nazis? If it's neither, if it's instead some kind of vaudevillian farce about the last days of Jewish entertainment hegemony, then perhaps that's as good an explanation as any for why its prehistoric rimshots, timing, and attitudes strike me as puzzling. Maybe it's a satire of being a Jewish comic.

This Is the End (2013)

June 12, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Horror, Theatrical, Zombie

**½/****
starring James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel
written and directed by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg

by Angelo Muredda Whatever its dramatic hiccups, This is the End can at least boast that it’s one of the better full-length adaptations of a trailer. In 2007, Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel starred in a 90-second sizzle reel–co-scripted by Rogen and Superbad collaborator Evan Goldberg–about their efforts to stay alive amidst an unspecified global catastrophe. As scrappy comedy skits go, “Jay and Seth versus the Apocalypse” was pretty good, a charming riff on the actors’ schlubby personas as well as a pitch for more time and a bigger budget to drive home their unlikely survival story. The trouble with This Is the End, a funny but belaboured riff on that premise, is that it’s still trying to close the sale long after the project’s been greenlit, ingratiating itself to an audience already on board. In their joint directorial debut, Rogen and Goldberg show a knack for characterization but seem anxious about where to go from there, squandering a gifted ensemble in a procession of spotty “what if” scenarios that don’t resemble a movie so much as a glimpse into a celebrity edition of charades in Judd Apatow’s basement.