Comedy

Beverly Hills Cop

  • Title: Beverly Hills Cop
  • IMDb: link

Throwback Tuesday takes us back to 1984 and the birth of the action-comedy. Originally a far more straight action film that at one time was a vehicle for Sylvester Stallone, Beverly Hills Cop became a much more humorous break-out role for Eddie Murphy cementing him as a bankable movie star and arguably carving out a new niche for the action-comedy (with the script being rewritten on the fly while the film began shooting under director Martin Brest).

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Official Competition

  • Title: Competencia oficial
  • IMDb: link

From Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat comes this dark satire featuring a group of people who should never have gotten together to make a film when a businessman (José Luis Gómez) turned producer looks to enhance his reputation despite knowing nothing about film (or the Nobel Prize winning novel he’s bought). Then there’s the eccentric director (Penélope Cruz) who casts the book’s estranged brothers with a method theater actor (Oscar Martínez) and a worldwide movie star (Antonio Banderas) hoping to harness their mutual animosity to fuel the film.

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The Bob’s Burgers Movie

  • Title: The Bob’s Burgers Movie
  • IMDb: link

Adapted from the animated TV-show of the same name, The Bob’s Burgers Movie is your typical sitcom expanded to a full-length film taking full advantage of the quirky and constantly struggling Belcher family attempting to make their way through a latest disaster. For the film this includes attempts to drum up business to make a mortgage payment while at the same time dealing with a giant sinkhole that appears in front of the restaurant.

Fans of the show will recognize themes including Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) slowly spiraling, Linda‘s (John Roberts) relentless optimism, and various peculiarities of their children who getting themselves entangled in a mystery after Louise (Kristen Schaal) discovers a skeleton in the sinkhole. The mystery allows the trio to ignore their own separate issues (a boy, a band, and a bully) and attempt to find the murderer and help the family save the restaurant.

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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

  • Title: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
  • IMDb: link

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is insane, in mostly good ways. I’m not sure it’s the most Nicolas Cage movie ever, but it’s not from lack of trying. Nicolas Cage stars as himself in a ridiculous adventure comedy that finds the actor during a downturn in his career accepting $1 million to attend a fan’s (Pedro Pascal) birthday party only to become pulled into a kidnapping case by the CIA.

Cage, playing a larger-than-life version of himself selfishly driven to be a movie star at the cost of his marriage to his ex-wife (Sharon Horgan) and his strained relationship with his estranged daughter (Lily Mo Sheen), is terrific here. Pascal is an inspired choice for the super-fan who, despite the warnings from the CIA, quickly becomes Cage’s best-friend as his undercover mission becomes all the more complicated. A celebration of Cage’s career and eccentricities with nods to numerous films, one could argue it’s the most professional fan film ever produced.

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Turning Red

  • Title: Turning Red
  • IMDb: link

Disney’s Turning Red is basically an animated remake of 1985’s Teen Wolf recasting the main character as a 13 year-old girl who begins turning into a giant Red Panda whenever she gets too excited. Like Michael J. Fox‘s Scott Howard, the cause for the transformation is a mix of puberty and a family curse which Mei (Rosalie Chiang) only learns about after being freaked out by the horror of the unexplained change. And, as in Teen Wolf, Mei is told by her family to control and hide the Panda within but instead uses it to increase her popularity at school.

Turning Red is slow to get started, relying on cookie-cutter Asian stereotypes of the dutiful daughter breaking out of the mold. Thankfully, once the Red Panda shows up, things get a bit more interesting. However, if we are going to ding movies aimed at kids for dick and fart jokes, it’s hard not to do the same here for the numerous cheap jokes the film gets away with around mensuration. 

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