items tagged with Ed Helms

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.

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.

THE HANGOVER PART II

Todd Phillips’ The Hangover Part II is the sequel to the director’s box-office smash from the summer of 2009, and it’s just like the original.

Let me re-punctuate that: It is just. Like. The original.

LIMITLESS and THE LINCOLN LAWYER

At some point during my double-feature of Limitless and The Lincoln Lawyer, I was reminded, as I frequently am, that we filmgoers don’t really need more great movies from Hollywood. We just need more good movies – smart, strong, satisfying releases that only want to entertain, but manage to do so without attempting to overwhelm you, or demanding that you first check your intelligence at the auditorium door.

CEDAR RAPIDS

Prior my Saturday screening of Cedar Rapids, I’d seen 18 2011 releases, and my favorite of the mostly-slash-wildly underwhelming bunch – by a considerable margin – was Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. It’s tempting, then, to want to overpraise director Miguel Arteta’s raunchy yet genial comedy simply for being, you know, good.