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Showing posts with the label ben stiller

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES - REVIEW

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Written and directed by Noah Baumbach, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)  was released on Netflix this month after a respectable performance at the Cannes Film Festival. The film stars Dustin Hoffman as Harold Meyerowitz, an ageing sculptor whose children have grown up resenting him somewhat based on their divisive upbringing. Harold constantly confuses his own sons' childhoods since his art was and still is always at the forefront of his mind with his daughter Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) trailing far behind. Danny (Adam Sandler) and Matthew (Ben Stiller) are very different from each other as a result of Harold's lack of interest: the former is a down-and-out musician with a limp, the latter is a successful yet high-strung private wealth expert. The film follows this family as they are forced to reconnect when Harold suffers a significant health scare. These are "New and Selected" stories in that, while the film is mostly linear, it skips through portions of

THE HEARTBREAK KID - REVIEW

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The Farrelly Brothers and Ben Stiller reunited in 2007 for The Heartbreak Kid , a loose remake of the screwball 70's comedy starring Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd in which a man finally gets married only to find that his new wife is not quite the dream woman he initially thought she was. Eddie (Stiller) is a single guy who runs a sports shop in San Francisco, one day he meets Lila (Malin Akerman) and they start dating. Soon enough, after Lila tells him that she might have to move to the Netherlands because of work, they get married and are promptly off to Cabo for their honeymoon. On the way there, Lila starts to act strangely and reveals all sorts of off-putting details about herself. Unfortunately for Eddie, this keeps getting worse and worse so when he falls in love with another woman he meets while on vacation, asking Lila for a divorce becomes a priority even if it proves harder to do than he thought. Setting a comedy after the usual "Happily Ever After" ro

ZOOLANDER NO. 2 - REVIEW

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When the sequel to Ben Stiller's 2001 comedy Zoolander was announced, everyone was pretty much unanimously game: not too much time has gone by so the original cast looks basically the same and there is plenty about current day pop culture to send up. Speaking of which, Zoolander No. 2 opens with a chase through the streets of Rome straight out of a spy movie as some bikers hunt down and kill Justin Bieber who sends out his last Instagram selfie as he dies. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the film which is not only more action oriented but also packed to the brim with cameo appearances. Penelope Cruz is a new addition to the cast, she plays a member the Fashion Police who is investigating the recent run of celebrity assassinations. Zoolander's (Ben Stiller) "Center For Kids Who Can't Read Good And Who Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too", it turns out, barely made it a day before crumbling to the ground, killing his wife and disfiguring (that'

DUPLEX - REVIEW

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Danny DeVito directs this 2003 dark comedy which stars Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore as a newly married couple who move into a duplex in New York only to find that they have a tenant who might just drive them insane. The tenant in question is Mrs. Connelly (a brilliant Eileen Essell), an ageing Irish lady who seems harmless enough early on but who, little by little, successfully gets on Alex and Nancy's (Stiller and Barrymore) nerves. The former is a writer who is trying to focus on completing his book but he soon struggles when Mrs. Connelly starts getting him to do various mindless chores every day. Eventually, the couple even start considering murdering the old lady who may or may not be deliberately trying to ruin their lives. The film is a bit like a cross between Home Alone , The Money Pit and Throw Momma From The Train as two people who are clearly not cut out to be criminals find themselves reluctantly thinking dark thoughts while suffering through slapstick misha

VLOG TRILOGY - DECEMBER 2013

I talk about December releases The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty , Frozen and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues .

THE CABLE GUY - REVIEW

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Directed by Ben Stiller, The Cable Guy is a dark comedy starring Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick that proved maybe too weird for audiences back in 1996. It went from being treated as a joke to gaining a cult following over time but how does it fare today? The film sees Broderick's loser Steven move into a new apartment after awkwardly separating from his girlfriend (played by Leslie Mann) and meeting his "cable guy", a strange dude calling himself Chip Douglas (Jim Carrey) who speaks with a lisp, has a rather unpleasant sense of humour and who molests Steven's wall the very first time he meets him. Chip desperately wants to be friends with Steven and basically pushes this friendship onto him but when Chip finally crosses the line and Steven wants out, he soon becomes the latter's worst enemy. I could certainly see how going from The Mask or Dumb & Dumber to this would be a bit of a jump but seeing as, by this point, Jim Carrey had already played a dem

ALONG CAME POLLY - REVIEW

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Long before Ben Stiller travelled the world looking for Sean Penn, or a piano, or whatever that Walter Mitty movie was about, he starred in light-hearted comedy Along Came Polly alongside Jennifer Aniston and introduced the notion of blind ferrets and naked Hank Azaria to the world of cinema. As a romantic comedy, Along Came Polly is exactly what you'd expect: typical by-numbers boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-new-girl, boy-loses-new-girl, boy-gets-new-girl-in-the-end fare with the obligatory corny moment here and there and the obvious third act epiphany. Nothing original there, alas. That said, as just a goofy comedy, it works surprisingly better than you expect. Remember The Heartbreak Kid ? That movie wishes it was Along Came Polly. The Stiller/Aniston pair-up works and admittedly makes for a solid central relationship to focus on but this is the supporting cast's movie. I mean, it's like these side characters were written and cast first, long before the

THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY - REVIEW

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With The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty , it was looking like Ben Stiller finally wanted to get recognised as the talented director he genuinely is, giving a more serious, restrained performance in the process. The trailers for the film promised a deadpan sense of humour, thrilling visuals and a positive message. The plot of the film sees Walter (Stiller) working as the negative assets manager of Life Magazine, which is shockingly still around, apparently. The magazine is taken over by a bunch of patronising dorks who are planning to lay off everybody and redirect everything online but Walter has misplaced the cover photograph provided by Sean Penn's photographer so it's up to him to go out and find the adventurous fellow in order to somehow recover the lost picture. Oh, and there's also a subplot in which Walter likes his co-worker Cheryl (played by Kristen Wiig) and sends her a "wink" on an internet dating site before a guy working at eHarmony keeps calling hi

ZOOLANDER - REVIEW

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I forgot how goofy this movie was lol Ben Stiller doesn't direct a film often but when he does, love it or hate it, at least it's something very much unique. The Cable Guy was dark and twisted, Tropic Thunder was big, loud and action-packed and Zoolander was... really really, ridiculously good looking. And pretty damn funny. Ben Stiller plays Derek Zoolander, a dimwitted male model known for his trademark "looks" ( Blue Steel and  Le Tigre , among others) who, after losing out to new male modelling sensation Hansel (a perfect Owen Wilson) at a fashion awards show, decides to retire from modelling and try to find himself. Little does he know that the combined efforts of Will Ferrell's eccentric fashion designer Mugatu, Jerry Stiller's sleazy manager and a bunch of shady fashionistas are plotting to program him to murder the Malaysian prime minister who is planning to up the pays of textile factory workers. It's dumb, ludicrous and about as plausi

TROPIC THUNDER - REVIEW

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Tropic Thunder sure made noise when it came out. You had an all-star comedy cast, with Robert Downey Jr. famously and controversially playing an African American character... or, rather, a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude, and ultimately winning an Oscar for his performance. The film also included a nearly unrecognisable Tom Cruise in a rare goofy comedy role at a time where his popularity really needed a boost. The movie's plot revolves around a group of egomaniacal Hollywood actors working on a super-expensive Apocalypse Now -style war movie. When the film goes massively over budget and looks like it'll flop harder than John Carter , the film's director (played by Steve Coogan) decides to follow Nick Nolte's advice (he plays the writer of the novel the film is an adaptation of) and land all the actors in the real Vietnamese jungle so they can somehow shoot a gritty and more realistic version of the movie. Which is odd since that doesn't really