Reviews Worth Reading
Films which are comedic or have comedic elements to them
Baby Driver wouldn’t have to be good to soar: watching Baby at work would have been reward enough. It gets so rewarding it starts to feel like we cheated our way into another theater, in a place where the movies are still fun despite being exciting. It’s a place we haven’t visited in a while.
This 2011 double-Sandler performance accentuates his impenetrable laziness, even more so that he performs twice and acts half as much. Those familiar with how much work his work has become for him, should know the drill: the crotch-shots, the desperate laughter, the screaming, the falling down, the farting, the falling down and farting, the marginalization humor and innocent sex ploys.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? isn’t an enduring testament to the road picture. It doesn’t enhance your memory of them. Quite oppositely, it’s the best of them, and no better than them.
This moral naysaying is shockingly against type for a film bursting with Copacabana headliners. Remember that these are the guys hired explicitly to hold a mic in one hand, a drink in the other, and to generate a fantasy of wealth and well-meaningness that makes thousands of less charming people mistake clubbing for having fun. Robin and the 7 Hoods is drastically less endearing than any of its hoods.
Corpse Bride has 77 minutes to dazzle with its artistry, yet it wastes its time with misinformation stories, a plot twist telegraphed so obviously it physically hurts, and generally inessential and confusing background noise.
This early studio work for Mutual Films, of which One A.M. stands apart if not in medium then in conviction, is less decipherable now, as though it comes from an era when music was rhythm without tone. Mutual is Chaplin’s most uninhibited work however, the work with the least distance to travel from his brain to the screen.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day stays in your memory like soda bubbles on your lip because it’s just as fizzy, confectionary, and neutral to your health. It’s the most “nothing movie,” as Billy Wilder said of The Seven Year Itch, but today that reminds me so achingly of the frivolous oldies that I can’t help but swoon.
This below-average comedy becomes a disreputable slog by whoring out its cast for a studio’s marketing angle. It becomes socially harmful in the guise of good, a defiler in prophet’s clothing, when it promotes the fair representation of young girls in a film whose feministic prowess never exceeds petty and ill-conceived passes at men, whom Sony counter-marginalizes as comeuppance, as though the playground is the most intellectual arena to which feminism has ever gained access.
At the core of the Sandler character is an unwillingness to be stepped on, a rebellious energy merely playacting as perverted. His films have never taken notice of him, but it seems like we’ve been doing it all along. And Anderson, a Sandler fan first, saw an old-timey romance at the center of a geek’s just rage at a society in which he doesn’t fit.
Art isn’t just a product: it’s a testament to the beliefs that made it. What beliefs does Peter Rabbit celebrate? A belief in art or analytics, in magic or in marketing? I remember thinking the same of Kangaroo Jack, of which Peter Rabbit is more a successor than to Potter. At least it’s so disparate from itself that it says nothing about her and everything about us.