Posts Tagged ‘comedy’

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Heartbreaker

Heartbreaker

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

“Don’t be offended but you look like a bit of a…”
“…Dickhead.”
“…Exactly.”
“…I feel good with you too…”

I feel a little guilty for not watching this sooner… if you know me at all you should know by now I’m a devout Vanessa Paradis fan and will always watch anything she’s in eventually, but the marketing for this that I saw didn’t really make out her role to be much at all; made the movie out to be a romantic comedy of the likes that I frankly feared could even turn me off her; and the Facebook page was the worst offender, reaching out to Vanessa Paradis fans (who hadn’t yet “liked” the film’s page) with competitions aimed directly at (I can’t think of a better way of saying this; either you know me and it won’t matter or you don’t, in which case, trust me, I mean well) tragically girly girls… y’know, the kind that think no men are capable of liking a movie like this so don’t even give them a chance? (I point to one of the more recent posts on that page: “This movie comes out on DVD in the US, on my birthday!!! :) I have already alerted my husband…”) (ugh… and since I first drafted this review months ago, the wall is now full of promo for the William and Kate movie… who the f**k is running that sh*t?)

Then there was Mark Kermode’s review… he somehow between watching the movie and talking about it managed to turn it in his memory into a typically xenophobic “French man: romantic; Englishman: evil” tale which it simply isn’t. Andrew Lincoln is in no way made out here to be a bad guy… an infuriatingly good guy, sure, and simply not the right guy in the end. He plays Vanessa Paradis’ fiancé. Romain Duris plays a guy who splits couples up for a living. Don’t let that concept put you off though – like Léon in The Professional, this guy has rules. He only goes to work if the woman is truly unhappy. We can tell when we meet Paradis and Lincoln that she’s not necessarily unhappy, and he’s certainly not the monster we’ve seen Duris work on in the prologue (looking for cracks, at one point Duris is disguised as a homeless man, staking out the couple at a restaurant – Lincoln gets a doggie bag to take his food home in – “Aha! a Cheapskate!” Duris happily proclaims, before Lincoln brings the doggie bag out to give the homeless people…). He usually wouldn’t take this job. But it turns out he likes the girl and he needs the money.

This movie made me laugh tons more than I expected, in fact I feel pretty safe saying it’s the most unashamedly enjoyable movie of 2010. With the Vanessa and the story and the comedy, this movie was already good enough even before the Dirty Dancing stuff came in. At first it’s little nods (Vanessa’s character is a big fan of the movie, Duris tries to acquaint himself with it to win her over)… but it builds to a sequence where they really do the full “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” dance. This would’ve thrilled me any time, but I’ve been really quite particularly into that movie lately and I’m not ashamed to say that this moment I damn near wet my pants with glee. Of course, not everyone will have this response to the movie… but sometimes a movie just comes along where that kind of thing just doesn’t matter, and for me this was that movie.

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Mr. & Mrs. Smith [1941]

Mr. & Mrs. Smith [1941]

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

Hitchcock said he did this unexpected genre piece (one of his few romantic comedies) because he admired Carole Lombard so much and she asked him. He told François Truffaut, “Since I really didn’t understand the type of people who were portrayed in the film, all I did was to photograph the scenes as written…” but you have to appreciate that for a romantic comedy it also stems from a solid concept: a couple who detest each other find out they were never actually legally married in the first place. The couple in question even have rules in their relationship, for example that neither of them will leave the room if they have a quarrel until the conflict is resolved. Sure, it’s hard to imagine how any kind of story can rise out of this, but it’s more than most rom-coms begin with…

There’s little here to recommend it but Hitchcock does what he can with the material. There’s a very fun use of sound early on which I’m always surprised isn’t done more often in movies (perhaps because it goes against how music is applied at the last minute to movies these days – the only recent examples I can think of are animated, Monster House and Bolt) – out of the blue, the husband starts whistling exactly in sync to the movie’s music score. There’s an amusing scene with a cat in a restaurant which seems like a more workshopped version of the rather darker cat/dinner scene in Rich and Strange, and that’s very much the Hitchcock that’s on display here… I find something, though perhaps not as cinematically relevant, about Hitchcock’s least “Hitchcockian” movies that seem they might somehow say the most about his concerns. It would be very interesting to one day sit down and only watch these “lesser” works of his and see what picture of him emerges. In the simplest terms what it shows is that this man who introduced some of the darkest thoughts into the 20th Century was not averse the finer, simpler pleasures in life.

This is an unbelievably light movie, really, but considering, as I said in my The Farmer’s Wife review that I don’t usually get along with this genre at all, there must be something to this one to make it perfectly watchable to me. The “jokey” hatred between the two leads here is something that, especially in my eyes, is very hard to do right (I can’t stand when people try to do it in real life… like Maria in West Side Story, I have never learned to joke that way); but there are certainly times here when Lombard and Robert Montgomery almost match the finest example of this kind of relationship: Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney’s “Bitch.” “Bastard.” exchange in Two for the Road …and that from me is very high praise indeed.

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The Lady Vanishes [1938]

The Lady Vanishes [1938]

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

It’s actually not that long since I last watched this (though I didn’t review it that time – the old review below is ancient, lol) but I enjoyed it so much that time that I couldn’t wait to reach it and watch it again in this Hitchcock run. Again, I don’t feel it’s right that this is lumped together in this 6-film thriller run in Hitchcock’s filmography, though in this case for a different reason. There’s a slick consistency to the flow of the story here that to me makes it as much a leap in Hitchcock’s development as The Lodger, Blackmail, or the first in this so-called cycle, The Man Who Knew Too Much. Much of this is due to the perfect framing device of the central train journey, which quite literally gives the movie momentum even in the few instances where it’s otherwise lacking. The story hangs on it, never letting up for a moment from start to finish.

The story will be familiar even to some of those who have never seen it (or indeed, any of the remakes) because it’s been redone many times in different modes of transit (Flightplan, for example) or just in parody (no examples occur to me right now, but I’m sure they exist). A young woman meets a sweet old lady while waiting for a train, but once on board the train… well, the lady vanishes. The young woman determines to find the old lady while the rest of the passengers on board deny she ever existed.

One of the many things I love most about The Lady Vanishes is that it is simply so British. This is not limited to the obvious Charters and Caldicott, the cricketing fanatics who provide much of the comic relief in the movie (though one can’t really call it comic relief – comedy is woven throughout the dialogue of all characters)… There’s a wonderful moment when one character enquires of another what the time is and, after looking at their watch, comes to the conclusion that it’s “tea time!” Most brutal of all is the man who’s so sure no one will shoot upon the British that he walks directly into gunfire in the film’s climactic scene.

But even in this dimwitted character there’s the same endearing trait that unites all the passengers on this trip – enthusiasm. Take the doctor, who says of his patient who seems woefully sick but whose “complications” he describes as “fascinating!” And dear old Mrs. Froy herself who, in a hail of bullets quietly carries on her secret mission, calmly explaining to the girl, “Well, I must be getting along now…” (this line got the biggest laugh from me this time round, incidentally, it’s just so random in context…)

The Lady Vanishes also includes one of my favourite things in any film, and that’s that the main character hits her head within the first 30 minutes, right as she steps on the train. Even this moment doesn’t escape the infectious humour, when the girl later explains the incident to her leading man, “Something fell on my head,” he immediately asks, “When, infancy?” But I love moments like this in films like this – what it does (and it’s reinforced by disorienting camera effects) is place the audience entirely in the heroine’s head so we find ourself completely participating in her own doubts that follow – was there a Mrs. Froy? Was it all in her mind? Is this whole train journey only in her mind?

The answer of course is that none of this matters… it is all just a wonderful, hilarious, British mystery that ends with a quaint old lady holding out her arms for an embrace. I adore this movie, it’s the best of Hitchcock’s British output by far, a movie so great that even its obviously phony opening model shot signifies 90 minutes in the company of a storytelling genius.

17th June, 2004:

This is one of my favourite Hitchcock movies. It’s so simple, so British (those two proper gentlemen whose only interest is the cricket score – so British they express genuine surprise when a foreign lady “doesn’t understand” a simple sentence), but also quite terrifying in places. It has a lovely memorable theme tune that turns out to be a huge part of the story, and some fantastic comedy moments.

People talk about “old-fashioned” movies and innocence and “They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” and this movie is a true example of what they’re talking about. From the man who ended up most famous for a horrific shower scene, a sweet old lady on a train with a tune.

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The Farmer’s Wife

The Farmer’s Wife

Friday, September 24th, 2010

It took me a while after the last in my “Hitchcock marathon”, Downhill to get up the energy, as it were, to watch this one. There hasn’t been a truly disappointing movie yet in my first experiences of Hitchcock’s early work, but being an avid multi-tasker, I do tend to find feature length silents fairly exhausting even at their best. Yet – as seems to be an emerging theme in my movie watching – now that I’ve seen it, I really wonder why I put it off so long.

To read a summary of this movie, it really doesn’t sound like much, and certainly not the kind of thing you’d expect from the man who came to be known as the Master of Suspense, etc. A widowed farmer seeks to marry again without much success with a series of local spinsters, not realising until he’s learned through rejection that the answer was right on his doorstep all along.

It has a slow build to the comic series of meetings with the prospective new wives, where the admirably limited dialogue (it was apparently a very wordy play) struck me as embarrassingly patronising of country life, and it takes as long to adjust to its highly inappropriate and dated attitudes about the place of men and women. Once the farmer sets out on his blundering, overconfident mission to wed, however, I don’t think a feature length silent movie has ever made me laugh so much in my life.

This isn’t just the funniest silent movie I’ve seen however, nor even the funniest Hitchcock (I remember really laughing through The Trouble With Harry, but it’s been a while, we’ll see if it works so well on me when I get to it on this marathon)… it’s genuinely one of the best romantic comedies I’ve seen, and it’s not a genre I get along with well. For while the middle section is pure hilarity, Hitchcock always comes back to the soulful Lillian Hall-Davis as the farmer’s maid at home, who we slowly come to know might be exactly the lady the farmer is looking for. There’s one scene in particular where she’s alone at the fireplace and begins almost caressing an empty chair, the same chair that plays a part at various points as a symbol of the farmer’s need for company, and it really broke my heart.

There are two things you could call “wrong” with the movie, I guess, and one’s far larger than the other. It’s a very long movie like many of Hitchcock’s early work. I’ve read of a version that runs over 2 hours, but learned that this version may simply be the version I saw today (around 95 minutes) played at the wrong speed. Well, even in a form closer to 90 minutes, it does feel long and could probably benefit from a few heavy cuts.

The other thing, I almost don’t want to mention because really I feel Hitchcock kept the balance better than most movies of the time (certainly mostly thanks to his real life leading lady Alma Reville). Like I said, the gender politics of the movie are highly questionable to anyone watching the movie today. The farmer’s approach to his prospective new partners, though completely hilarious, is just as inappropriate. He tells one of them, “I’ve come here, like those foxes you’re so fond of… to catch myself a fat hen!” Another he asserts dresses her “mutton lamb fashion”, laughing at the idea she should call herself a “girl”.

But it can’t be said that the ladies in question don’t get to fight back, and they do, laughing at his efforts, relishing in their refusal, and one even laughing right in his face, “Marry you? At your age?!” And it’s a credit to Jameson Thomas’ performance that in the final scenes he genuinely convinces that he’s learned the error of his ways and is more than deserving of young Minta. This is a genuinely sweet and well-meaning movie with some of the funniest silent comedy I’ve ever seen. That it comes from Hitchcock makes it all the more surprising, and I recommend it even to those slightly averse to a silent feature.

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Batman: The Movie [1966]

Batman: The Movie [1966]

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

I watched this as part of a weeklong HD re-watching of all the more recent Batman movies, from Burton to Nolan (no new reviews of those, alas, I have too many others to catch up on: I’ll do it again maybe when I get the blu-rays, maybe before the next one hits cinemas). I was kind of excited to see this old one, having watched the TV series quite a bit as a teenager, and having kind of missed a little (just a little, mind) of Joel Schumacher’s inclination to the old school camp in Nolan’s darker masterpieces.

The fun gets started early here, right in the credits, in a note from “The Producers” flatly stating where the movie is coming from, which pretty much anticipates the bulk of any criticism the movie will ever get, as follows:

“We wish to express our gratitude to the enemies of crime and crusaders against crime throughout the world for their inspirational example. To them, and to lovers of adventure, lovers of pure escapism, lovers of unadulterated entertainment, lovers of the ridiculous and the bizarre — to funlovers everywhere — this picture is respectfully dedicated. If we have overlooked any sizable groups of lovers, we apologize.”

Thereafter we are plunged quickly into the end of a typical Batman and Robin scenario, a structural technique we’d become used to in the likes of the Bond and Indiana Jones movies, which here involves Batman literally punching a shark (which is clearly made of rubber) in the face. If you’re still hoping to take the movie seriously at this point, then it’s really not the movie’s fault lol. If you’re still having issues later when exchanges like “Holy hallucination!” “I wish it were, but it’s not! It’s 3 dehydrated pirates… rehydrated!” are being thrown around, then you should probably stick to picture books.

I’ll be honest. This isn’t as much of a riot as I’d hoped for. It’s been over a decade since I saw the TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward, but I have vague memories of scenarios even wilder than this movie has. I remember the crazy fight scenes (all the Biff! Baff! titles etc) bizarrely turning into dance sequences in some episodes, for example, and there’s none of that here (do comment if I have merely dreamt this lol). Lee Merriweather’s Catwoman has nothing on the Eartha Kitt or Julie Newmar version I remember, too. But it’s still seriously worth checking out for a wildly different approach to Batman than we’re used to today. I’d love to write more on this but it’s better perhaps to simply link to this page which says all I want to say and more on the subject. The new movies are near perfection as cinema, it’s true, but this one has a place that urgently needs defending.

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Penn and Teller Get Killed

Penn and Teller Get Killed

Monday, August 9th, 2010

I guess I was on a roll with “movies I’d intended to watch for ages” by the time I got to this one, lol. I was kinda crazy for Penn and Teller when I was a teenager and they were first becoming popular on UK television. I even bought their book, I seem to recall, but then they seemed to vanish for years until their recent newfound popularity with the “Bullsh*t” series and now back to doing stage magic around the world.

The reviews I’d read for this were overall so-so, even those coming from apparent fellow fans of the duo, and despite there being a decent director at the helm (Arthur Penn, of Alice’s Restaurant, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Miracle Worker, albethey years before this) I guess this is why I’d passed on it for so long (in addition to its being widely unavailable outside of pricey imports).

So to the movie, and I have to start with the brilliant tagline (as seen on this poster)… “What more do you want?” with which I couldn’t agree more. This movie within minutes took me back to my excitement as a teenager whenever these guys were on TV. It opens with them on a late night talk show doing their “upside down” gravity-defying table trick, after which Penn idly comments to the host that he wishes someone were trying to kill him. In the scenes that follow it is entertainingly set up that Penn and Teller are fond of pranking one another (and not just small pranks either; early in the game Teller sets Penn up at airport security getting through the metal scanner). The stakes get higher as the movie progresses, the pranks escalating to the point where the line between fake and real begins to blur, and, without trying to spoil anything too much, let’s just say this movie really does deliver what it promises, lol.

The final scenes had me laughing so much, actually out of shock I think more than anything, that I really couldn’t believe my eyes when I read so many disappointed opinions on the IMDb message board and comments. As the tagline suggests, I really don’t know what more anybody could expect from a Penn and Teller movie. It’s brisk at 90 minutes, it has a few magic tricks, a lot of fake blood, a healthy lesson in skepticism, and finally an all-out f**k you in its finale. It really is worth checking out.

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Cop Out

Cop Out

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

“Paul, did you just punch a little child?”
“There’s things you don’t know about me, Jim, I’ll fuck a little kid up if he kick me in the dick!”

I seem to be a strange Kevin Smith fan, though perhaps in fact that’s the norm. Like the bulk of his fans, I love his most early and iconic work, the Jersey trilogy of Clerks., Mallrats, Chasing Amy and from there the other of his works set in the “View Askewniverse” – Dogma, to a lesser extent Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back (meh, it’s fun), and most recently the surprisingly brilliant Clerks II. And I’m among the very few who actually think Jersey Girl was one of his best – a genuinely moving homage to John Hughes with some of the best performances he’s had in any of his films.

Where I get strange is: I really felt like he dropped the ball when it came to Zack & Miri Make a Porno …stepping on the heels of the Apatows that came before and producing something that, while it had its moments, felt distinctly un-Smith-like. At the same time, however, I’ve found myself enjoying the heck out of the even more culturally insignificant SModcast that he produces… and even all the spin-offs thereof (Tell ‘Em Steve-Dave, Mo & Glo, and Highlands: A Peephole History).

That long intro isn’t just to pad this review. It’s kind of there to clarify just how odd it was, then, that when I heard about Cop Out – the first movie Smith has directed that he didn’t write – my expectations weren’t entirely shot to pieces. At the risk of sounding like the kind of fanboy I really dislike… the more you appreciate Smith’s recent attitude and philosophy toward life that comes over in its purest form in his podcasts and tweets, the less inclined you’ll be to pick this movie apart for the relative waste of time it really is.

For me, it’s far from the great nod to old 80s actioners that I hoped for (the great Harold Faltermeyer of Top Gun and Beverley Hills Cop even does the score), but it still made me laugh a heck of a lot (Scott taunting Morgan in the car, Essman abbreviating her language in front of her son while waving a gun around, then cussing the heck out of the following scene; the aforementioned son’s altercation with Morgan that ends in the line I quoted above…), even when I watched it a second time to refresh my memory before writing this.

I’m told the Blu-ray’s “Maximum Comedy Mode” makes the movie an even more enjoyable experience, and I’ll be very tempted to get the disc just for that. I loved seeing Michelle Trachtenberg as Willis’ daughter and Jason Lee as the stepfather rivalling for her admiration, and there are nice little casting surprises elsewhere in the movie like Kevin Pollak, Seann William Scott and Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Susie Essman (being, as there, wonderfully shouty).

This is by no means to say the movie’s great. Kevin Smith is capable of far more than this and while it can be argued that maybe he’s simply peaked and has the right to enjoy making a simple movie like this, I simply don’t believe it. I hope either Red State or Hit Somebody (which he says will be his “greatest movie” and possibly last) outdo everything we’ve seen from him so far. But I can’t be too down on him… SModcast alone has given me hours of laughs over the last year or two, and in those Askewniverse films I genuinely believe he has probably already done quite enough.

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Hot Tub Time Machine

Hot Tub Time Machine

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Mark Kermode has said a few times of this on his weekly podcast that it’s “not as funny as the title”, and frankly, I still don’t find the title even remotely funny, so aside from the fact that I always love John Cusack in anything (yes, even High Fidelity), I really didn’t expect much from this movie. I certainly didn’t expect to find that, actually, the only bad thing about the movie is the title, lol.

This is essentially Back to the Future meets Superbad, in the best way possible. On the time travel front, I’m not exaggerating when I say this is among the best of the genre, doing pretty much everything right in my opinion in addition to doing just a few things a little different. On the gross-out guy comedy front, I was careful to select Superbad in the earlier equation, because that was one of the few comedies of its kind over the past few years (and from the Apatow stable to boot) that I actually enjoyed because it actually had marginally endearing characters. I think I saw the “Unrated” edition of the movie so I can’t tell you exactly which parts but to say, this definitely goes “too far” in places but – and again it’s hard to really explain so you just have to trust my judgment – it’s done in a way that’s actually funny.

For example – I’m sure this is in any cut of the movie as it’s a huge part of the plot – one of the heroes decides to call his (in the present) ex-wife when they are back in 1986. She’s 9. He yells at her like it’s “today”, potty words and all, and it cuts to her astonished little face in bed. Later, we get the following killer exchange when this guy is having sex with another girl (the gang having decided to just enjoy themselves in the past):

Guy: [crying] “Courtney!”
Girl: “Tara!”
Guy: [more intense] “Courtney!”
Girl: [slows] “Seriously, it’s Tara.”
Guy: “Naw, my wife.”
Girl: [stops] “You’re married?”
Guy: “No… I mean, not yet. She’s 9 right now…”

That’s probably a decent benchmark as to whether you’ll like the movie as much as I did lol… if that kind of thing is funny to you, you’ll be fine. But it’s really not all dumb/dangerous gags like this… like I said, and what surprised me most about the movie, is that it actually has just as much heart in the end as the very best of the time travel genre.

There is a wonderful character in the form of Lizzy Caplan (who I loved in 2004’s Mean Girls but I admit didn’t even recognise here). It’s what I’d call a kind of Zooey Deschanel character. She kinda “gets” that something odd is going on the minute she lays eyes on John Cusack (she’s native to 1986, the year to which they’re transported) and she runs with it almost like it’s an every day occurence. The quirky romance that blossoms between her and John Cusack is as cute to me as any love story Cusack has been involved with.

There’s a lot more to be said about this movie but I feel like I’ve lost my way in this review and I’m way behind. I will only add a little something about Chevy Chase’s part in the movie. He essentially plays the mystical old man you find in a lot of stories like this – the guy with the remote in Pleasantville, or the truck driver in Small Soldiers, come to mind – and he’s written very tongue in cheek. The thing is, he’s seriously funny, almost brilliant, and considering I thought Chase had pretty much gone away, this was a seriously pleasant surprise and just one more reason to recommend the movie. I feel confident in saying no matter what you’re expecting of this movie, you will probably be just as surprised as I was.

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