Old man boners. Did you laugh? Because if you didn’t laugh, I can’t think of any reason at all to bother with Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, a film for which “old man boners” is very largely the only joke it has up its sleeve. “Old man projectile shits”, as well, but that’s for just one […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/16 & 10/18 World premiere: 10 May, 2013, India You tell me if this sounds appealing or hopelessly stupid: modern stoner comedy classic Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle meets infamously terrible video game adaptation House of the Dead. I can’t actually say what it sounds like to me at this […]
There is literally zero reason for This Is the End to work as well as it does, and I say this as someone who has entire run out of anything except for sullen tolerance for at least three members of its six-man lead ensemble. For anybody that can hear the name “James Franco” and not […]
I would like to think that I’m pretty close to the exact polar opposite of the ideal viewer of Ted: writer-director Seth MacFarlane’s trademark non-sequitur humor is like nails on a chalkboard to me (unlike many people, I don’t even like the allegedly good early seasons of Family Guy); I find that the current trend […]
Allow me to begin with a surprising revelation, followed by a qualification. The surprise is that American Reunion, despite the seemingly insurmountable difficulty of being the first theatrical American Pie picture in nine long years (discounting a canonically dubious franchise of spin-offs released direct-to-video and featuring none of the main cast), is not just the […]
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas doesn’t take very long to let us know its intentions: within the first five minutes, we have encountered a scene in which a heavily bearded and altogether worn-out Kumar Patel (Kal Penn) and a mall Santa Claus (Patton Oswalt, the first of many immaculately-placed cameos in the movie) […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/15World premiere: 11 March, 2011, Poland 2011 is really much too late for anybody to still be amazed that there are cartoons – not “animated features”, which sounds like something stately and artistically ambitious by Miyazaki, but crude, brightly colored cartoons – made expressly for an adult audience; even so, […]
“Samantha Baker is turning sixteen and she’s fallen in love for the first time. It should be the best time of her life. “But… her family is so preoccupied with her sister’s wedding they totally forget her birthday, the boy she loves doesn’t know she exists and the class clown is putting the make on […]
To later generations, John Hughes is all but indistinguishable from the genre of teen angst comedies that he helped to create in the 1980s, but it was not ever thus. Hughes began his career as a joke writer for stand-up comedians, and an advertising copywriter, and eventually a staffer on the National Lampoon magazine during […]
There is a little game I often play with myself, in which I try to determine which classic director of film comedy would have been able to redeem or even make a masterpiece out of whatever unexceptional or bad or completely fucking unwatchable new “comic” film I’ve just stumbled out of.* Sometimes it’s hard and […]
It is surely my fault that I held out the hope, however slight, that Bad Teacher would end up being an okay movie. Certainly, nobody that I ever discussed it with – and some of these are people that I would politely describe as having aggressively indiscriminate tastes when it comes to R-rated comedies – […]
When The Hangover opened in 2009, a lot of people – including myself – were a great deal gentler with it than it deserved. I cannot speak for anyone else, but in my particular case, it was a matter of sheer, untrammeled joy that there was a comedy that was actually funny, and moreover a […]
