Movie Reviews: Category Archives
“Comedy” Archives
Speed Racer
by The Wachowski Brothers
I was as dazzled by the visuals in Speed Racer‘s initial promotional materials, teasers, and trailers as anyone. But as is always the case with such things, there’s the nagging suspicion that the film will be nothing more than such, and that the film won’t live up to the razzle-dazzle. And the fact that the Wachowski Brothers were behind Speed Racer‘s camera only made that suspicion worse. I don’t think the Matrix films were shallow by any means, but arguably, the brothers had definitely placed everything but sheer visual spectacle on the backburner by the trilogy’s end.
And when you’ve got the folks behind such films working on a children’s movie that is a remake of a Japanese anime series that, classic status notwithstanding, is more often the butt of jokes than anything else, well, let’s just say that I totally understand folks’ hesitation.
But the thing is, they’d be absolutely wrong.
Stardust
by Matthew Vaughn
I often find that I need to give a movie a “break” before I see it, if I’ve heard too much about it beforehand. Perhaps I’ve heard so many good things about the movie, and I worry that my expectations are too high. Or maybe I’ve heard so many troubling things that I worry that my opinion may be predisposed to be negative. Whatever the case, it often means that I miss out on seeing it in the theatre and have to settle for DVD, but I feel it’s the only way that I can give the movie a fair shake, that I can judge it on its own merits.
I suppose it’s an odd little quirk of mine, but it’s served me well in the past. And so I did it for Stardust, an adaptation of what is most certainly my favorite of Neil Gaiman’s works. I had read some troubling things—e.g., negative reviews that pointed towards disturbing changes to the storyline—but I resolved to watch the film as fairly as possible, keeping in mind all of the usual caveats concerning literary adaptations. It was an endeavor that proved pointless about thirty minutes into the film: Stardust was much worse than anything I had steeled myself for.
Hot Fuzz
by Edgar Wright
It would be way too simple and too easy to label Hot Fuzz—the latest work of cinematic brilliance from the folks behind Shaun Of The Dead and Spaced—as a parody of the stereotypical, big budget Hollywood action movie. Sure, Hot Fuzz contains countless references to such films as Lethal Weapon, Bad Boys (1 and 2), Point Break, and Die Hard (not to mention The Wicker Man, Terminator, Chinatown, He-Man, and Harry Potter).
However, parodies often seem to have an element of mean-spiritedness and cheekiness about them, which is not at all the case with Hot Fuzz. Rather, just as Shaun Of The Dead was obviously the work of folks who knew and loved zombie horror films, Hot Fuzz is the work of folks who obviously know and love action movies.
The Amazing Screw-On Head
by Chris Prynoski
There are two sides to American history. There’s the boring side that’s been taught to you by history textbooks and schoolteachers. And then there’s the other side where, as it turns out, America is actually littered with ruins of ancient and alien civilizations (at least west of the Mississippi), where mad zombie scientists seek to overthrow the world, and where horrific demigods lay imprisoned within vegetables, patiently waiting to be freed from their parallel universe prisons to lay waste to Mankind.
The only bastion of defense against these horrors is Screw-On Head, a secret government operative at the beck and call of Abraham Lincoln (yes, that Abraham Lincoln), and who is, well, a screw-on head with an army of steampunk bodies at his disposal. And he’ll need them all, because the nefarious Emperor Zombie—once Screw-On Head’s closest friend and manservant before he began dabbling in ancient black magic—is seeking the power of an ancient kingdom to bring the world to its knees.
Swing Girls
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School’s out for the summer—except, that is, for a group of schoolgirls attending a remedial math class that none of them care about. While their teacher drones on in the morning heat, one of students—a girl named Tomoko—stares out the window, daydreaming. She casually observes the school’s beloved brass band as they leave to help cheer on the school’s equally beloved baseball team as well as the deliveryman who arrives too late with the band’s lunches.
Seeing a chance for her and her classmates to escape their teacher’s lecturing, Tomoko volunteers to bring the lunches to the band as a show of school spirit. Naturally, the girls are much more interested in having the day off than in actually helping out the band, and so take their time with the delivery. By the time they finally deliver the lunches, it’s too late. The food has become spoiled, and the band quickly succumbs to a severe case of food poisoning.
The only survivor is a reluctant young man named Yuta who is charged with putting together an interim band until the “real” band can recover. Despite blackmailing the Tomoko and all of the other girls into helping him, Yuta still doesn’t have enough students to make a brass band proper, and so he improvises, deciding to start a swing jazz band instead.
Up until now, Swing Girls has been moving at a fairly leisurely pace, with a few little humorous asides thrown in here and there to establish the various outrageous characters. However, as the swing band takes shape, the film slowly begins kicking things into high gear; the girls learn to love the music they’re being forced to play, work their butts off to earn enough money to buy instruments, and struggle to be taken seriously as musicians even after the real band returns from the hospital.
At it’s core, Swing Girls is essentially a stereotypical sports movie, and as such, you can basically guess every single story element and plot twist that will pop up throughout the film’s 105 minutes. There’s the group of unruly misfits thrown together by outrageous circumstances and forced to train under a reluctant/unrelenting coach figure, who bond together during grueling circumstances, and who go on to triumph over various setbacks, learning a valuable life lesson or two in the process.
Little Miss Sunshine
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Movies that revel in the glory of quirky families are certainly nothing new. Indeed, some of the finest movies in recent years have, somewhere near their core, a family of “unique” individuals whose neuroses and foibles are at once the source of their downfalls and struggles and their only possibility for salvation.
Blame it on Wes Anderson, and the broken, messed up characters that people such acclaimed films as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic, but in recent years, tragi-comic “quirky family” movies seem to be all the rage, especially among America’s current crop of indie filmmakers. Witness Garden State, Junebug, Me And You And Everyone We Know, The Squid And The Whale, and now, Little Miss Sunshine.
However, it’s a trend that’s coming dangerously close to wearing out its welcome.
Just One Look
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It’s fairly safe to say that when it comes to Hong Kong cinema, the country’s action films get all of the glory, and for obvious reasons. While HK cinema in general has been lagging over the past decade or so, there’s absolutely nothing like HK cinema in its prime, especially the action titles, be they classic Jackie Chan and Jet Li martial arts, or John Woo and Ringo Lam actioners. However, that unfairly ignores a lot of great HK films that have fallen through the cracks, films that are usually overlooked due to the simple fact that they don’t feature a heavy dose of flying fists and blazing .45s.
Such is the case of Riley Yip’s Just One Look. On its surface your typical pop star-studded teen romantic comedy, Just One Look is, at its core, a gently nostalgic and bittersweet look at the Asian films of yore, and the way that they shape the memories and actions of their viewers. In this regard, Just One Look bears a passing resemblance to Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, a film which also dealt with the ways that films shape and mold its characters’ lives. But it’s safe to say that Yip’s film is considerably more wacky and lighthearted.
Singin’ In The Rain
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I’m sure that when many folks saw the Volkswagen commercial that featured Gene Kelly popping and locking his way through “Singin’ In The Rain”, they probably cried “foul”, seeing it as one more legend gobbled up by the world of advertising and crass consumerism. And normally, I’d be right there with them. Normally, but not this time, and for two reasons.
First of all, the ad is just really, really cool, seamlessly blending the grace of Kelly with the skills of David Elsewhere (among others). So cool, in fact, that I get a chill everytime the camera zooms in on Kelly’s beaming mug as he sings “I’ve a smile on my face” while his arms move in all manner of liquid, serpentine patterns. And the second reason I’m pooh-poohing the nay-sayers is because that ad, despite all of its commercial intents and purposes, actually inspired me to see the real deal, to see Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds sing, slide, and tap dance their way across the screen.
Singin’ In The Rain seems like a movie that is practically impossible to review. Not because it doesn’t merit serious consideration, or because it’s not a very satisfying and enjoyable viewing. Rather, it’s because the movie has become so tightly woven into the fabric of our pop culture subconsciousness. Everyone is familiar with the titular song, or “Make ‘Em Laugh”, or “Gotta Dance”. Even if we haven’t seen the movie, we know where those lines and melodies came from, and we can probably recite whole scenes because they’ve been parodied, referenced, and copied so many times already.
But that’s precisely why finally watching the movie was such a refreshing, eye-opening experience. To actually see where all of these cliched lines of dialogue and catchy melodies came from felt rather revelatory. It also told me that people back in the 50’s were a little wierd when it came to moviemaking. Or at least, they didn’t consider narrative as a strong necessity when it came to a Gene Kelly musical.
The American Astronaut
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The American Astronaut has all of your typical sci-fi earmarks—spaceships, outposts on the rim of known space, bizarre creatures, totalitarian societies, rayguns, and, um, space barns. Come to think of it, it’s not your typical sci-fi movie. The spaceships look like railroad locomotives on the outside and prospector cabins on the inside. The distant outposts are more like honky-tonk saloons. And the barns are, well, floating through space.
But the raygun still vaporizes people, so there’s that.
And then there’s the whopper of a plot. Samuel Curtis, the titular American astronaut (he’s from Nevada, to be specific), has just completed his latest job—retrieving a cat for a third party that he’s meeting at the Ceres Crossroads, a gin joint located on a asteroid near Jupiter. After delivering the feline, he receives a new job from his friend, The Blueberry Pirate (so named because he’s made a career of hitting fruit shipments—quite the lucrative trade in this vision of the future).
The planet Venus has been colonized by beautiful women, and only one man lives there—Johnny R., whose one function in life is to be the sexual consort for every Venusian woman. Unfortunately, Johnny R. recently died, and his family on Earth wants his remains, and they’re willing to pay plenty. Unfortunately, the women of Venus are unwilling to part with the remains unless a new consort can be found for them.
So before he can get Johnny R.‘s remains, Curtis must go to Jupiter and retrieve “The Boy Who Actually Saw A Woman’s Breast”, a strapping young lad whose one claim to fame is that he did, indeed, see a boob. But Jupiter is a mining colony populated only by men, and Lee Vilensky, the controller of Jupiter, uses the The Boy and the tale of his legendary encounter to keep the workers under control. And so Curtis leaves on his madcap journey, with nothing but a suitcase containing a real, live girl in trade.
Cutie Honey
by Hideaki Anno
Seeing as how I would spend as much of childhood Saturdays as possible watching cartoons, I figured it was only appropriate to kick off my marathon with a live-action remake of a cartoon. Granted, Cutie Honey wasn’t exactly the sort of cartoon I watched as a kid—created by the infamous Gô Nagai, the anime’s titular character was a shapely android who could transform into any number of costumes, each with their own power, but in the process of doing so, she’d lose all of her clothing.
Although the live action Cutie Honey doesn’t go that far during the transformation sequences, it does offer up quite a bit of eye candy, as Honey appropriates a number of slinky, revealing outfits. Thing is, the movie is played so lightheartedly and fluffily, with the action sequences so over the top and the tone of the film going to the silliest of extremes—from Eriko Sato’s ultra-chipper acting to the musical numbers to the hammy acting that would make Power Rangers look like Oscar material—that the thing never comes off the slightest bit offensive or leering.