19 Oct 2014

Tanks. A Lot.: "Fury"

By Mike Schulz

FURY

Granted, I haven't seen Birdman yet, but it's hard to imagine any movie this year featuring a more kick-ass title character than the one in writer/director David Ayer's Fury. A battered but still indomitable Sherman tank plowing through Nazi Germany at the tail end of World War II - its name imprinted, twice, on the tank's cannon - Fury is both an amazing destructive force and a desperately needed safe haven for its five-man platoon. Our heroic tank also boasts more personality than any human on-screen, but in the case of this particular film, that's relatively easy to forgive.

03 Aug 2009

Bombs Away: "Funny People," "The Hurt Locker," and "G-Force"

By Mike Schulz

FUNNY PEOPLE

Leslie Mann, the wife of comedy kingpin Judd Apatow, is unfailingly awesome, and I love her in her husband's first two outings as a film writer/director: 2005's The 40-Year-Old Virgin and 2007's Knocked Up. So it pains me to say that I would've enjoyed Apatow's third auteurist venture - the current Funny People - a whole lot more if Mann's character had been excised from it completely. Of course, that would've made the movie almost a full hour shorter than it is. That would've been all right, too.

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