| Nov. 15th, 2009 @ 04:01 pm Quick reviews (again) |
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Clearly I'm doing a bad job of keeping up with this again. So last weekend was BVH's birthday, and at her request we went to see The Men Who Stare At Goats. Now, I'm a huge fan of Jeff Bridges, and I like Ewan MacGregor and George Clooney as much as the next guy (though perhaps not as much as BVH) and Kevin Spacey once seemed like a promising actor, though I find his recent work to be lacking. The film seemed to be a wacky comedy based off of the various 1980s U.S. Military psychic research programs, which should be a fertile ground for a wacky comedy. Unfortunately, this was all peripheral to a road trip through the Iraq War story with MacGregor as a reporter and Clooney as a man on a journey to find his former commander and spiritual mentor, Bridges. The film tries to be Iraq's M.A.S.H. or Catch-22 but utterly fails to strike the right balance between wacky and fucked up, which is crucial for a serious farce of that kind. Spacey is very blah here, but the other actors do what they do best, which saves the project somewhat. Ultimately I think that the film would have been better if it stuck to the 1970s/1980s days or if it had been more serious, since it is based on real events to a certain extent that are quite serious. I may have to read the book it's based on. Still, BVH enjoyed it, so your mileage will probably vary.
Yellowbeard: This film was a favorite of mine growing up, a comedy that was perennially on cable and whose jokes, such as "Stagger, stagger, stagger, crawl, crawl, crawl" became a basic part of my vocabulary at the time. Unfortunately, the film just didn't hold up when I re-watched it last weekend. It's possibly that was somewhat due to the Baroness, who sometimes acts as the "comedy killer" when she just can't get into a film-see Sean of the Dead for an example-but I have a feeling it's more that the bad taste jokes such as the constant pauses for Yellowbeard to rape women are less funny and just more bad taste. There's also wasted potential here-no movie with this many comedians-Peter Cook, Graham Chapman, Marty Feldman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Peter Boyle, Cheech and Chong, Madeline Kahn, and Kenneth Mars should be this light on laughs.
I Love You Man: We had more luck with yucks with this one which has Jason Segel and Paul Rudd doing the Judd Apatow-style bromance thing. BVH found it a bit too awkward for comfort, but I found it to be a reasonably funny comedy, though I did notice that the female characters are fairly personality free and are basically there to cheerlead, show off their desperation to get married or for sex appeal. Segel and Rudd are perfect, however, and there's some funny jokes using Lou Ferigno and some ludicrous billboards that really work. Not my favorite recent Rudd comedy (that would be Role Models) but a fairly solid one. |
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