Well, I’ve finally seen The Interview and, let me just tell you, it’s a pretty decent little comedy. Cause for international furor? Not really. More like a modern Rat Pack kind of thing where a bunch of guys get together and make a movie for the hell of it.
Continue reading The Interview Is Much Ado About Barely More Than Nothing!
Back in 1978, National Lampoon’s Animal House introduced the crude-with-a-heart frat house comedy. Since then no one has done it better, but with Neighbors, there’s a new wrinkle that comes very, very close: college fraternity versus the previous generation. It features – among other things – career performances from Seth Rogan, Rose Byrne and Zac Efron.
Continue reading Neighbors: Animal House vs. Post-Animal House!
This is the End is loud, obnoxious, crude, lewd, profane and brilliant! I haven’t laughed this hard since Superbad.
Continue reading This is the End – It’s the End of the World as We Know It and That’s Hilarious!
The Guilt Trip is a decent road trip movie featuring Barbra Streisand as Joyce, the Jewish mother taken to the nth degree, and Seth Rogen as Andy, her far too grounded, no-risk-taker of a son.
Continue reading The Guilt Trip: The Mother-Son Road Trip From Hell!
50/50 mixes comedy and cancer, but it’s the drama that will win you over.
Paul is an affectionate parody of all things geek – comics, skiffy [which is how you pronounce sci-fi if you’ve been reading it forever] and pop culture. Two British nerds/geeks have an alien encounter as they tour America’s UFO hot spots and weirdness – and hilarity – ensue.
I like to start my reviews off by getting my bias out in the open. The Green Hornet is a film I walked into not inclined to like because of two elements – I strongly dislike Seth Rogen and I hate 3D movies. With that said, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked The Green Hornet. It’s not a movie that I loved by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a fun, competent movie that is almost ruined by the pointless addition of 3D. The movie works largely because Rogen comes is very natural and not over the top as Britt Reid. He’s a likeable guy who desperately wants to do good: but he ‘s also kind of a lazy hero.
Here’s your first look at the upcoming sci-fi comedy, Paul, written by Nick Frost and Simon Pegg.. Directed by Greg Mottola and starring Frost, Pegg and Seth Rogen [voicing Paul], it is the story of two British comic book geeks who pick up an unusual hitchhiker while on a road trip across the United States.
Paul will be released in North America on March 18,2001, by Universal Pictures.
For his third film as a director, Judd Apatow wanted to tackle something a little deeper than a one-night stand that resulted in a baby or a sexual late bloomer with goofy friends. I can almost see him in the “reading room” when the proverbial light bulb goes off above his head and he shouts, “Imminent death! Of course!”
And so we have a film about a crisis in the life of America’s most beloved comedian, George Simmons [Adam Sandler], who gets the news that he has the rare and usually fatal disease, AML. To balance the darkness of George’s plight, we get a look into the life of wannabe stand-up comic, Evan Wright [Seth Rogen] who works at Otto’s Deli alongside a fellow named Chuck [RZA] who thinks so little of his skills that Evan has to pay him to attend his next performance.
Continue reading MOVIE REVIEW: Funny People – Life, Death & Penis Jokes!
The trailer for Observe and Report makes it look like a raunchy romp. Instead, it’s as bi-polar and off its meds as main character, Ronnie Barnhardt [Seth Rogen], head of security in as generic a mall as we’ve ever seen in a movie.
When a flasher exposes himself to a number of mall customers – and Ronnie’s personal crush, cosmetics salesgirl Brandi [Anna Faris] in the parking lot – it sets off a competition between Barnhardt and Detective Harrison. But, while Ronnie isn’t bright to realize that his second-in-command, Dennis [Michael Pena], isn’t the cool, laid back guy he appears to be, he is tough enough to make Harrison’s set up in a very bad neighborhood backfire [a sequence that suggests Rogen will be up for the action sequences in The Green Hornet].
Unfortunately, outside of terrific performances by Faris and Collette Wolfe [as fast-food server Nell, who has a sweet crush on Ronnie, who is completely oblivious], Observe and Report completely fails to reach its target as a spectacularly dark comedy. Mostly, it’s just spectacularly dark… with intermittent laughs – very intermittent… Even Celia Weston, as Ronnie’s alcoholic mother, is completely wasted. Worse, as the film moves farther into the darkness of bipolar-Ronnie-off-his-meds, even Rogen ceases to convince.
Writer/director Jody Hill keeps things moving, though – which is a blessing, as the movie wraps up in a very quick eighty-six minutes. That’s eighty-six minutes you would be advised to skip in favor of, say, counting molecules or picking your toenails. Seriously, Observe and Report is far less enjoyable than either of those options – Paul Blart: Mall Cop is a better movie!
Final Grade: D+
I’ve had my review copy of Freaks and Geeks: Yearbook Edition for awhile – but only now have I managed to get through all of its many features. This is the kind of DVD package that you have to actually see, full-size, to really appreciate.
Freaks and Geeks, of course, is the classic one-season wonder set in 1980 that revolved around siblings Lindsay [Linda Cardellini] and Sam Weir [John Francis Daley]. Unlike other shows that used metaphors for “high is hell” [Buffy the Vampire Slayer], or “high school is cruel” [Veronica Mars], Freaks and Geeks proud asserted that high school is real – and it may seem earth-shattering while you’re, but in the end? It’s high school. By using siblings who were at different ends of the school population’s periphery, the series [all eighteen episodes] gave us a look at an institution that was far more real than we’d seen before – and because we saw it through the filter of a newbie freak [Lindsay] and an entrenched geek [Sam], it brought back all the epic highs and devastating lows of that period of our lives.