Comedy

Psych – The Complete Third Season

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Psych – The Complete Third Season
  • tv.com: link

I’m a big fan of Psych. Equal parts silliness and mayhem (with more than its fair share of 80’s pop culture references), the tale of fake psychic Shawn Spencer (James Roday) and his best pal Burton Guster (Dule Hill) solving crimes, both large and small, is a darn good time.

The four-disc set includes all 16 episodes from Season Three. One of my favorites from this season, or, for that matter the entire series, is the high school reunion episode “Murder? … Anyone? … Anyone? … Bueller?” packed to the brim with John Hughes references. It, like the season’s final episode “An Evening with Mr. Yang” (another strong episode, which you can watch below), also guest-stars Rachael Leigh Cook as the girl from Shawn’s past who got away.

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I’ve got a “Proposal” for you

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Proposal
  • IMDB: link

The ProposalRomantic comedies can scare critics away quicker than a mob racing out of a burning building. It’s hard to warm up to a genre that’s let you down so often, and so consistently. So settling down to watch The Proposal all I really was hoping for was to make it out of the theater with my sanity intact.

Here’s the thing, aside from the contrived device used to get the film’s stars together (and a few best-forgotten groan-worthy scenes), the film actually works better than I expected. It’s not great by any stretch of the imagination, but for the genre it’s above average.

Sandra Bullock stars as Margaret Tate, a bitchy cutthroat book editor who is feared by all. Her assistant, Andrew (Ryan Reynolds), sums up her character best as someone who is allergic to “pinenuts and the full spectrum of human emotion.” When Margaret is faced with being deported and losing her job she decides to blackmail Andrew, whose career track is tied to her success, into marrying her. The newly engaged couple take a trip to Andrew’s hometown to learn about each other and prepare for a quicky wedding. And so the shenanigans begin.

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Land of the Lost

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Land of the Lost
  • IMDB: link

land-of-the-lost-posterWhy? That’s the question that kept reverberating through my mind as I watched this big-budget feature based off of, let’s be brutally honest here, a pretty cheap Saturday morning TV show that hasn’t exactly aged all that well.

Don’t get me wrong, I spent some time as a kid watching Land of the Lost on Saturday mornings, and I have a warm spot in my heart for the Sleestak and the theme song. But I sure wasn’t demanding a feature based on the show, and this trainwreck of a film is exactly why.

In the original series, a family finds itself sucked through a portal into the land of the lost, a weird alternate world featuring dinosaurs, furry cavemen called Pakuni, and the villainous reptile men known as the Sleestak. In the new version, Will Ferrell, in the Hollywood tradition of Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist or Tara Reid as an archeologist, plays brilliant paleontologist Dr. Rick Marshall. I’ll give you a second to digest that. Take all the time you need.

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My Life in Ruins (after watching this movie)

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: My Life in Ruins
  • IMDB: link

Aside from the beautiful scenery, and a few nice moments from Richard Drefus (who’s really slumming it here), there’s very little to separate My Life in Ruins from any number of braindead romatic comedies. Here’s one of those films where a character notices the love of her life under her nose, finds meaning in her demeaning job, and everything ends happily ever after for everyone (except the audience).

When the film isn’t throwing out contrived plot points like candy, and simply allows the actors to give some actual weight to their characters, there are slight glimmers at what this film could have been. Sadly, these moments are few and far between.

Nia Vardolas stars as Georgia, a disgruntled travel guide. She hates her job, she hates the people she works with, she hates her rundown tour bus, and she hates her tourists who are a collection of cliches you are much more likely to find in a movie like this than on an actual tour bus.

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Dance Flick

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Dance Flick
  • IMDB: link

dance-flick-posterWhat are you doing reading a review for this movie? Come to think of it, what was I doing going to a screening of it? You know exactly what this movie is, and you knew before you ever started reading this review whether it’s for you or not.

There are no surprises with Dance Flick. What you see is what you get, most of it bad. The new film from the Wayan Bros. is yet another entry into the sub-genre of cheap parody films which has produced one or two fun flicks, such as the first Scary Movie, but also filled up the DVD bargain bin at your local Best Buy and the late night B-movie channels on cable.

Dance Flick isn’t one of the better entries into the genre, but at least it’s not the worst. I guess that’s something, right? It is however perplexing. Don’t get me wrong, the entire dance film genre deserves to get poked with a stick, but the idea of centering most of the plot around an eight-year-old film isn’t exactly timely.

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