items tagged with Peter Farrelly

MOVIE 43

Ordinarily, Movie 43 would be the sort of unsatisfying, throwaway release that I’d dispense with in a paragraph, or maybe just a sentence or two. And it’s not as though its opening-weekend box-office intake – a meager $5 million, despite the presence of nearly every star in Hollywood – necessitates longer consideration of the film. But this anthology comedy in the style of those ’70s cult classics Kentucky Fried Movie and The Groove Tube seems to me a special case. How often, after all, do you get the chance to write about what might be your all-time least-enjoyable experience at the cineplex – including that time during the early ’90s when you had to leave a screening for emergency root-canal surgery?

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.

THE CHANGE-UP

The Change-Up, in which Jason Bateman’s discontented husband and father magically swaps bodies with Ryan Reynolds’ perfectly contented slacker dumb-ass, is an appallingly smutty and juvenile slapstick. In the segment that finds Reynolds (in Bateman’s body) preparing a late-night feeding for his pal’s infant twins – with one tot seen playing with butcher knives and the other reaching into the blender and sticking his tongue into an electrical socket – it features one of the most painfully unfunny scenes in cinema history, and I’m not excluding any given scene in Sophie’s Choice or Schindler’s List.

HORRIBLE BOSSES

It’s kind of a shame that the Farrelly brothers’ Three Stooges movie is currently in the process of filming. Is it too late for the directors to re-cast it with Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day in the leads?

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.