items tagged with Comedies

BATTLESHIP

In the latest effects-heavy entertainment by Hancock director Peter Berg, a group of heroic U.S. Navy and Japanese-military officers team up to fight a race of marauding aliens, four of whose spaceships have crash-landed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Battleship? This thing should’ve been called KerPlunk.

DARK SHADOWS

Dark Shadows, director Tim Burton’s take on the 1966-71 gothic soap opera that remains a cult favorite, is gently satirical and totally watchable, and filled with inventive fringe touches. Led by Johnny Depp, its cast features a bunch of terrific comedians – a number of whom don’t often get the chance to be comedians – and the visuals are thoroughly impressive. All told, it’s probably Burton’s best film, and certainly his best live-action film, in more than a decade. So why, in the end, doesn’t all of that mean more than it actually does?

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

Hollywood’s been leading toward it for decades, and with the blithely enjoyable, exceedingly clever The Cabin in the Woods, it’s finally happened: A movie has been released in which practically everything about it – its plot, its twists, its performers, its characters, its themes, its jokes – could be considered a spoiler.

AMERICAN REUNION

You know that feeling you get when you receive a Facebook friend request from someone you went to high school with, and you don’t quite recognize the name, and a smile slowly forms as you think, “Oh, ye-e-eah ... that guy!” That, in a nutshell, was my reaction to American Reunion, the third big-screen sequel to the beloved coming-of-age slapstick American Pie, and easily the most endearing of the lot. It took me a while to succumb to the movie’s charms, but in the end I not only liked it; I would’ve happily “liked” it.

MIRROR MIRROR

Mirror Mirror is a slightly modernized, family-comedy version of the Snow White fairy tale, and offhand, I can think of few directors less suited to the material than this film’s Tarsem Singh, the music-video veteran whose big-screen credits include those wildly baroque (and decidedly adult) spectacles The Cell and Immortals. Yet every once in a while, when a director is spectacularly wrong for a project, the results can be much more interesting than if he were right for it, and that certainly seems the case here; this aimless, pointless little trifle is mostly a drag, but I can only imagine how deadening it might’ve been without Singh at the helm.

21 JUMP STREET

As an undercover police officer who, in 21 Jump Street, can say to his platonic partner “I cherish you, man” in a way that’s both hysterical and intensely touching, Jonah Hill possesses a rare gift for completely unembarrassed sincerity. By now, it should go without saying that Hill is a sensational verbal comedian and a fearless physical one. But as in his bro-mantic scenes opposite Michael Cera in Superbad, the actor brings to this action comedy something few others would think to: absolute honesty and emotional transparency. Hill is funny as hell here, but his character is never a joke.

Yet the delightful shock of this parody of and homage to the late-’80s TV drama – a series that famously cast Johnny Depp as a pretty-boy cop who infiltrates schools and youth hangouts disguised as a student – is that Hill’s co-star actually matches him in earnestness and hilarity, and his name is Channing Tatum.

SILENT HOUSE

It’s entirely possible that you’ll need to have seen an awful lot of horror movies – particularly an awful lot of awful horror movies – to be jazzed by Silent House, considering that it’s basically just 90 minutes of a young woman being terrorized by barely glimpsed figures and startling noises in her family’s lakeside summer home. (Contrary to the title, this house is anything but silent.) Yet if you can get past the paper-thin storyline and a climax that’s less “Aa-a-a!!!” than “Hu-u-uh?!?”, the movie proves to be a terrifically nerve-racking and utterly fascinating scare flick, because from first shot to last, the action not only takes place in real time, but seems to have been filmed in one continuous take.

PROJECT X

In director Nima Nourizadeh’s teen comedy Project X, three nerdy high-school pals in North Pasadena decide to make names for themselves by throwing a wild party, and then throw the party.

Now that we’ve dispensed with the plot, let me try to explain why, through almost its entire running length, this movie made me want to repeatedly plunge an ice pick through my skull.

WANDERLUST

If I could pick one show-biz personality with whom I could be best buds, I’m pretty certain I’d choose David Wain, the director of Wet Hot American Summer, The Ten, and the new fish-out-of-water comedy Wanderlust. Can you imagine how awesome a Wain-hosted party must be? Even if there were awkward moments, and draggy moments, and things weren’t quite as wild as you hoped, he’d still invite the likes of Paul Rudd, Justin Theroux, Ken Marino, Michaela Watkins, Malin Akerman, Kathryn Hahn, and Joe Lo Truglio. Whatever your qualms, wouldn’t the hilarity they provided make the experience totally worth it?

THE GREY

Whenever I watch a movie such as Alive or The Thing or director Joe Carnahan’s The Grey – especially in January – I ask myself the same question: Is it worth it? I know about cinematic sleight-of-hand, of course, and that the performers and crew aren’t enduring anywhere near the nightmarish conditions suffered by the characters on-screen. I also presume that a fat Hollywood paycheck instantly makes any location shooting, including The Grey’s outdoor shoot in wintry British Columbia, a lot more bearable. But still, all that ice and wind and trudging through thigh-deep snow ... . Is any movie experience worth spending three months in fear of losing your digits to frostbite?