30 May 2010

Manhattan-ite Transfer: "Sex & the City 2" and "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time"

By Mike Schulz

Kim Cattrall, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis in Sex & the City 2SEX & THE CITY 2

Sex & the City 2 begins with a multi-million-dollar gay wedding at which Liza Minnelli serves as officiator and headliner, and somehow manages to grow even more over-the-top, garish, and belief-defying over its next two hours and 20 minutes. It should be said that writer/director Michael Patrick King's follow-up is only rarely dull, mainly because the act of repeatedly lifting your jaw up off the floor can't help but keep you awake. Yet S&TC2 is still an obscene and desperately unfunny ordeal, even if - maybe especially if - you derived occasional or continual pleasure from its six-season HBO forbear or King's 2008 big-screen offshoot.

11 Oct 2009

Beach Bums: "Couples Retreat," "Van Gogh: Brush with Genius," and "Anvil! The Story of Anvil"

By Mike Schulz

Carlos Ponce, Vince Vaughn, and Malin Akerman in Couples RetreatCOUPLES RETREAT

The trouble-in-paradise comedy Couples Retreat may be criminally inane, yet you can't say that co-writers/co-stars Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau aren't smart as tacks. Together with collaborator Dana Fox, they scripted a breathtakingly lazy and insipid vehicle that guaranteed them a two-month vacation on locales in Bora Bora and Tahiti, and somehow convinced Universal Pictures to pick up the tab. How ever did they do it? And how can we ensure that they never, ever do it again?

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