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Showing posts with the label rom-com

GAME NIGHT - REVIEW

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Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams star in Game Night , a dark comedy about a couple and their friends who are invited to play a new game one night, only to find that the ensuing chaos is very real and not actually part of said game. Sort of like a cross between The Man Who Knew Too Little and Date Night with a little of  The 'Burbs thrown in, Game Night takes a gimmicky, slightly derivative premise and runs with it with enough gusto to make Baby Driver jealous. For all its goofier aspects, this is a sharply written comedy that strikes a good balance between dumb and clever without losing track of its characters and why we should care about them. Max (Bateman) and Annie (McAdams), through their playfulness and competitiveness, seem to be perfect for each other and, even though some problems are revealed along the way, this is a relationship we root for throughout. Their friends are mostly one-dimensional but they each have their moments and remain likeable despite their ob

MODERN PROBLEMS - REVIEW

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Released in 1981, Modern Problems is an off-beat comedy starring Chevy Chase as a loser air traffic controller who is dumped by his girlfriend then somehow gets covered in nuclear waste which leads to him acquiring telekinetic powers, for some reason. Chevy Chase is a comedian who could easily elevate silly or potentially bland roles to something special. While his movie career has stumbled since the late 90's, probably at least partly due to him having a bad rep with his peers and being apparently difficult to work with, he remains one of the most reliable comedy actors out there. It's a shame, then, that Modern Problems is not a better film. Made when Chase was near the peak of his career, it not only failed to capture the actor's comedic talents but failed to tell a funny, or at least entertaining, story. The concept, while random, could have translated into a really fun movie: Chevy Chase has superpowers, he uses them in silly ways, goes too far, has to redeem him

MODERN PROBLEMS - VIDEO REVIEW

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Review of the Chevy Chase comedy Modern Problems .

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

CAFÉ SOCIETY - REVIEW

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This year saw the release of Café Society , the latest film by Woody Allen. Set in the 1930's, it starred Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart and Steve Carell as three parts of an awkward love triangle. Jesse Eisenberg is Bobby Dorfman, a young neurotic who moves to Los Angeles to work for his uncle Phil (Carell), a wealthy talent agent. Though he is tasked with small errands, he gets to opportunity to attend a lot of fancy parties and he soon falls in love with Phil's secretary Veronica (Stewart). What Bobby doesn't realise, however, is that Veronica is having an affair with Phil, who is unsure whether to leave his wife for her or not. This sort of plot is very reminiscent of other Woody Allen films so this new outing definitely suffers from some overly-familiar scenes here and there. The love triangle is only the focal point early on in the film as Bobby eventually moves back to New York where he starts working in a club run by his brother Ben, who happens to be a gangs

FUNNY ABOUT LOVE - REVIEW

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Directed by Leonard Nimoy, Funny About Love was a romantic drama/comedy from 1990 starring Gene Wilder and Christine Lahti as a couple who struggle to have a baby and slowly drift away from each other as a result. Like Woody Allen's Husbands & Wives or Kramer vs Kramer , Funny About Love aims to tell a very real story about real people who have real marital problems as we see a genuinely sweet relationship come together then reach a dead-end and finally split apart. It's not too surprising that critics weren't too keen on this one (Roger Ebert hated it) upon its release since the first act of the film tells a harmless enough, pretty adorable love story then purposely takes a detour to uncomfortable places, something which probably lost a portion of the audience who was enjoying the light-hearted aspects of the film and expected another Mr Mom . Indeed, the main couple's attempts at conceiving a child and their eventual split are awkward to witness but if you&

HEARTBEEPS - VIDEO REVIEW

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Here's the video version of my review of Heartbeeps .

HEARTBEEPS - REVIEW

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There's something kinda perfect about the fact that Andy Kaufman's only proper movie remains Heartbeeps , an off-beat romantic comedy about two robots who fall in love and leave their factory to go on a life-changing adventure. Much like with most of Kaufman's comedy, critics and audiences back in the day just didn't get this movie and it was quickly dismissed as a bomb and a failure. Watching the film now, it's obvious why Heartbeeps didn't exactly wow the public: initially aimed at a young audience, the humour is at times much too weird or adult-themed and both Kaufman and Bernadette Peters look positively freakish. There's a cute baby robot thrown in there but, otherwise, this is one that only fans of the lead's unique sense of humour could possibly enjoy. Anyone else should find themselves scratching their heads, wondering why this movie even exists. Not that Heartbeeps isn't funny, quite the opposite, it's just that the jokes are so biz

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP - REVIEW

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After his sci-fi romantic comedy Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind looked at how memories can affect matters of the heart, Michel Gondry then directed The Science Of Sleep , another bittersweet rom-com, this time focusing on the world of dreams. This feels much more like a French film than Eternal Sunshine with Gael Garcia Bernal being the only non-European cast-member and the likes of Alain Chabat (who steals every scene he's in), Charlotte Gainsbourg, Miou-Miou and Emma de Caunes forming the rest of the cast. This is something which actually works to the film's advantage since Garcia Bernal's Stephane is a bit of a fish-out-water as he moves into his mother's old apartment in Paris despite not knowing anyone or speaking French very well. Hence why Stephane constantly seeks refuge inside his dreams and through his imagination. Unfortunately, that all backfires slowly but surely as he starts to confuse his dreams with reality, which is clearly too cruel for hi

SPLASH - REVIEW

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Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah star in this 80's comedy re-imagining of the Little Mermaid fairy-tale which did what Disney is currently trying to do with its live-action adaptations of every animated film they've ever done but without any big special effects. And all before Disney's The   Little Mermaid was even released. Really, on paper Splash should have been awful but in the safe hands of director Ron Howard and with a first class cast which also included John Candy and Eugene Levy, it was a big hit and was even nominated for an Academy Award back in 1984. By handling the movie like a grown-up (and literal) fish-out-of-water story with some romance and jokes thrown in, Howard manages to make Splash more of a modern fairy-tale adults can enjoy rather than corny, kids-only fare. The very good, very funny script keeps a perfect balance between comedy and fantasy and the cast is simply flawless from Hanks' lonely romantic to Daryl Hannah's wide-eyed, innocent

50 FIRST DATES - REVIEW

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Here's a movie which, on paper, sounds like the worst thing you'll ever see: an Adam Sandler rom-com starring Drew Barrymore as a girl with no short term memory, a girl Sandler has to woo every single day. The Hawaii-set romantic comedy, as expected, is a pretty cheesy affair with more than its share of infuriating moments. For one thing, Rob Schneider cameos as Sandler's slobby pal so expect loads of bad jokes and borderline racist stereotyping, plus awful child actors speaking loudly around him as a bonus. Then there's the plot which is about as believable as whatever happened in The Adventures Of Pluto Nash and the earnest way in which it's handled often clashes with the usual mostly low-brow Happy Madison brand of humour. Walrus vomit jokes, anyone? Then there's Drew Barrymore who really does her utmost to hammer in how adorable she is, often to irritating effect. Though one scene sees her hitting Schneider repeatedly with a baseball bat, something

WARM BODIES - REVIEW

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What if a zombie fell in love? Surely a question we've all asked ourselves at one point or another. It's also Warm Bodies ' unique concept, introducing to the world the odd notion of a rom-zom-com. A world that's way into zombie-themed things these days, what with the likes of The Walking Dead , World War Z and Zombieland doing so well and all. Despite the odd premise, Warm Bodies looked like a winner. After all, Fido had proven that zombie movies didn't always have to be depressing affairs and that familiar zombie lore could be toyed around with a little in order to make it fit into more off-beat settings and genres. This movie opens like a cross between Zombieland and Wall-E , following Nicholas Hoult's lumbering zombie who spends his days mindlessly walking around an airport grunting, eating the occasional brain and playing music in his abandoned private jet home. Several new zombie ideas are soon introduced to us: zombies can think and actually t

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

JERRY MAGUIRE - REVIEW

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Several years before messing up Tom Cruise's face and going all sci-fi in Vanilla Sky , Cameron Crowe made this romantic comedy about a sports agent turning his life upside down after one night of sobering honesty which sends his career seemingly spiralling down the tubes. It was a huge hit and, back in 1996, no moviegoer didn't yell out "Show me the money!" whenever possible. The film follows sports agent Jerry Maguire (Cruise) as he loses pretty much all his clients in one day after writing a much too honest memo/mission statement. One of his last remaining clients is Cuba Gooding Jr.'s football player whose attitude problem doesn't exactly make him the easiest guy to help get a $10M contract. When Jerry is inevitably fired, he takes some fish with him (they have manners) and is followed into the unknown by a single mother working in his office called Dorothy (played by Renee Zelwegger). Jerry tries everything to make his career work as an independent b