The route that Weird: The Al Yankovic Story took to the screen is, well, weird. The feature is based on a short film that was originally released on the comedy website Funny or Die back in 2010, which presented a faux trailer for a Walk the Line style movie about Weird Al, as played by Breaking Bad‘s […]
Of all the major American animation studios to have dominated computer animation in the 21st Century, Blue Sky Studios has almost always had to settle for being the scrappy, hopeless one. And this has only become more pronounced since the 2019 takeover of 20th Century Fox by the Walt Disney Company, which makes Blue Sky […]
The best parodies, I have mentioned here and there, come not from a place of superiority, but of love; they are never motivated by the desire to mock, but by a great deal of love for all of the fiddly little details of the thing being made the butt of jokes. In that spirit, let […]
The script for what eventually became the simply awful comedy Holmes & Watson was first announced in 2008. After a couple of cast changes, the project was shot in 2017 and delayed twice before appearing as one of the least-merry films that could possibly have opened on Christmas Day, 2018. That decade weighs heavily on […]
By all means, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is a goofy and dumb kids’ movie. But there’s goofy and dumb, and then there’s Goofy and Dumb, and there’s something positively dazzling about how much inspiration screenwriters Aaron Horvath (who co-directs with Peter Rida Michail) & Michael Jelenic – also the creators of Teen Titans […]
A review requested by Not Fenimore, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! Of Mel Brooks’s first four feature-length comedies, which are also his four best, 1974’s Blazing Saddles is […]
I have mentioned, once or twice in the past, my theory that superhero franchises are uniquely likely to produce sequels that improve upon their predecessor. And I’ll stick by it, while noting with some annoyance that the 2010s most visible superhero franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, seems largely resistant to this trend. For here we […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: director Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword reminds us of the wide range of approaches that filmmakers […]
A review dedicated to T. Rice, as part of the to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. In 1966, stand-up comic and television comedy writer Woody Allen wrote a new dub script for the 1965 Japanese spy comedy Key of Keys, at the behest of U.S. distributor American International Pictures. The result (somewhat […]
The Lego Batman Movie is not at all perfect, and in some particular respects its not-perfection strongly suggests that the returns on theatrical Lego movies are going to start diminishing pretty damn quickly (coming in less than eight months: The Lego Ninjago Movie). But it’s got this going for it: for the first time since […]
“This movie is too long” is something I complain about to the point of self-parody, but seriously, The Love Witch is too long to a degree that makes most “too long” movies seem painfully efficient. It’s a pastiche – a pastiche so good that it feels like we need some other word to describe how […]
Any movie that openly courts direct comparison to the 1984 rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap is all but begging us to find fault with it. So it’s all the more impressive that Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping should be such an exceptionally rewarding comedy, given the giant breathing down its neck. I’m not sure […]
