[8] Tim Robbins (The Shawshank Redemption) stars as an unwitting mail room clerk thrust into the office of CEO at a mythical uber-corporation when the board members decide to send the company’s stocks into a nose dive. But the board, headed by a coolly evil Paul Newman, doesn’t count on their newly anointed dim-wit to invent the next materialistic rage — the hula hoop. Under …
[6] Mel Brooks sends up Alfred Hitchcock in High Anxiety, a spoof centered around a psychiatrist who uncovers shenanigans at ‘The Psychoneurotic Institute for the Very, VERY Nervous’. Brooks plays the shrink, a man who must cope with his own ‘high anxiety’ while getting to the bottom of a murder mystery before the Institute’s nefarious head nurse and former administrator order him killed! Cloris Leachman …
[7] Future Oscar-winner (I’ve been saying this since 2001’s Manic) Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes an auspicious writing/directing debut with Don Jon, a character study of a young New Jersey guy whose addiction to pornography takes its toll on his relationships with women. Gordon-Levitt pumped up to play the title character, but I hope he drops the muscle mass soon — his head’s too small for a …
[6] A nasty heiress (Goldie Hawn) falls off her yacht and gets amnesia, only to be discovered by a handyman (Kurt Russell) she once screwed over. To get revenge, he convinces her that she’s his wife and the mother of his three unruly sons. Overboard‘s screenplay mines the tried-and-true ‘fish out of water’ scenario to great effect, but make no mistake about it — this …
[5] Three charlatan filmmakers try to save a studio from corporate takeover by uniting all of Hollywood’s biggest stars into one big movie — a silent one! And the title of this Mel Brooks yuk fest isn’t an empty boast — Silent Movie is indeed devoid of dialogue, though not without plenty of whacky sound effects and an energetic score by John Morris. At first, …
[3] A team of L.A. college tennis players try to pull their shit together to win a championship before the dean pulls the plug on their program. I’m all for a good teen sex comedy, but Jocks is neither funny nor sexy enough to satisfy on either level. Instead, you get scenarios out of ’70s sitcoms and one-liners that feel like they were written by …
[3] Ill-conceived both corporately and creatively, Grease 2 lacks any reason to keep you watching. The plot is basically a gender-reversal of the first film’s storyline, but without any interesting characters to latch onto. The songs are horrendous. Repeat: the songs are HORRENDOUS. The only reason to watch Grease 2 is to gawk at the beautiful faces of Michelle Pfeiffer and Maxwell Caulfield. It ain’t …
[6] Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd star as two 40-year-olds struggling to balance the demands of their marriage, children, parents, and jobs. This Is 40 is billed as a ‘sort of’ sequel to Knocked Up, where Mann and Rudd originated the roles. Both films were directed by Judd Apatow, and both take a more pastiche approach to their narratives. On one hand, I like the …
[5] A light, fluffy, inconsequential comedy about a man who dies and is given the opportunity to return to life in another man’s body. The movie works best during it’s ‘fish out of water’ scenes, where Warren Beatty interacts with the people in his affluent host-body’s life, including some charming house servants, a duplicitous wife, and her murderous lover. For all the Oscar attention this …
[4] It must have been a weak year at the movies for this to have been the winner of the Best Picture Oscar. Tom Jones is a meandering mess of a narrative, with no strong through line and a bizarre sense of humor that I can only describe as a hybrid of Oscar Wilde, Woody Allen, and Benny Hill. I like Albert Finney, but his …
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