‘Zoolander 2’ is awfully fun
Like cinematic malaria, ‘Zoolander 2’ drains your resistance with its fever-dream insanity.
Like cinematic malaria, ‘Zoolander 2’ drains your resistance with its fever-dream insanity.
How many foreign lives does it take to save a white American family? Thanks to the new chase-yarn, ‘No Escape,’ we now have an answer. The guiltiest of guilty pleasures, director John Erick Dowdle has expertly crafted a taut action-thriller crammed with enough white privilege to make The Donald blush.
Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb Written by David Guion and Michael Handelman Directed by Shawn Levy USA/UK, 2014 Getting the band back together for one final gig is almost never a good idea. In the case of Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, however, there’s enough ingenuity and fun to …
It’s not just that Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies tend to defy any one genre description; it’s that, often, it seems as if the writer-director is trying to play with many genres simultaneously. The only reason that Boogie Nights isn’t the best drama of the 1990s is that it spends a lot of time trying to be the best comedy of the 1990s instead. So Anderson’s newest, Inherent Vice, is a departure in that it mostly sticks to one style (sun-drenched film noir) and one tone (absurdist comedy). It’s also a fine film, which suffers only when measured against the insanely high standard that Anderson’s past work has set.
Even if you were not around during the 1970s, Inherent Vice comes across as a faded, nostalgic memory. Being a faithful adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel, the film recounts the dying days of the free love era, laced with the look, feel and paraphernalia of the subculture. Anderson’s comedic thriller peppers itself with restless, almost out of place laughter, while dedicating itself to the themes of the early Seventies. One is reminded of private-eye classics such as Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, with traces of Zucker-Abrahams comedies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun. For many, the homage to 1970s filmmaking will be a very real and thrilling look down memory lane. For others, it’ll be a history lesson like no other found in modern day filmmaking.
Much like what it portrays, with the war movie there is always a thin line between success and failure. There will always be those that fail to hit the target when victory was so surely within reach. Intention is undermined by incompetence.
More than perhaps any other director, the work of Ernst Lubitsch has been the most noticeable influence on Wes Anderson’s style. Though the great German-American writer-director, most prolific in the 1930s and 1940s, was never quite so aesthetically bold in the look of his sets, he too was preoccupied with meticulous staging for comedy within his chosen locales, be they the titular Shop Around the Corner or the Parisian hotel of Ninotchka; The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in a fictional European country, the Republic of Zubrowka, another Lubitsch trait from works like The Merry Widow and The Love Parade, though The Shop Around the Corner happens to be set in the city Anderson’s mountaintop lodging house takes its name from. He garnered the descriptor of ‘the Lubitsch touch’ thanks to the moving sincerity that always made itself evident within even his more broad comedic premises, and Anderson’s own best work is that in which a recognisable humanism always makes itself known and potent even within the stylised stiltedness through which most of his characters are written and performed.
Delivery Man Written and directed by Ken Scott USA, 2013 Somewhere in the last 10 years, Vince Vaughn decided to smooth out his edges, sanding down his hard exterior to a bland nub. His acidic work in films like Made, Swingers, and even something as outrageous as Old School is a thing of the past, …
The new animated film Free Birds lives in a strange purgatory of concurrently trying way too hard and not trying nearly hard enough. Though its high-concept hook—turkeys go back in time to right before the first Thanksgiving to devise a way for the settlers to not dine on their feathered brethren at the inaugural feast—is admittedly not something animation studios have tried before, the execution is tired, manic, exhausting, and nonsensical.
Following are some supplemental sections featuring notable director & actor teams that did not meet the criteria for the main body of the article. Some will argue that a number of these should have been included in the primary section but keep in mind that film writing on any level, from the casual to the …
The Internship is a movie very much like its stars, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson: it tries too hard to be your friend, it doesn’t know when to quit, and it believes that being slick and shiny is all that matters. But somehow, amazingly, it’s also got flashes of charm and wit, enough so that you almost—not quite—can forgive it its trespasses.
Midnight in Paris Written by Woody Allen Directed by Woody Allen USA/Spain, 2011 It has been a long while since Woody Allen has been a reliably strong filmmaker in spite of his yearly output of festival fodder. Midnight in Paris remains lightweight and cannot hold a candle to his best work of the last ten …
In its glorious and barreling 87 minutes, Anderson and Baumbach, have taken the gist of Dahl’s book and carefully expanded it into everything you would expect it to be. Fantastic Mr. Fox Directed by Wes Anderson Wes Anderson joins Spike Jonze in adapting a much beloved children’s literature in the same year. First Jonze delivered …