Comedy

The Nice Guys

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Nice Guys
  • IMDb: link

The Nice GuysIn his latest film writer/director Shane Black returns to a formula he knows well. Set in the 1970s, The Nice Guys delivers on the buddy-cop genre by pairing hired thug Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) with drunk private detective Holland March (Ryan Gosling) on a case involving a missing girl (Margaret Qualley), a murdered porn star (Murielle Telio), political activism, and the United States Justice Department.

The Nice Guys is an attempt to recapture the brilliance of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang by similarly throwing together an unlikely pair to solve a case involving a missing woman. The Nice Guys lacks the snappy dialogue of Black’s best film and the pulp detective and noir elements add an entire layer to Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang which is missing here. Given their similarities, it’s impossible not to compare them, but even if his latest doesn’t quite measure it still delivers in its own ways.

Gosling and Crowe work well together, but it’s the addition of Angourie Rice (as March’s daughter Holly) that ultimately makes the pairing work. Even if the murder plot is a bit convoluted, it’s a joy to watch them slowly uncover the truth.

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The Big Bang Theory – The Viewing Party Combustion

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: The Big Bang Theory – The Viewing Party Combustion
  • wiki: link

The Big Bang Theory - The Viewing Party Combustion

For an episode centering around the group gathering together to watch Game of Thrones “The Viewing Party Combustion” has little to do with the HBO series. The viewing party is basically just an excuse to gather the group together as small fights, beginning with Leonard‘s (Johnny Galecki) railing at Sheldon (Jim Parsons) for another stipulation in the roommate agreement, break them into two separate factions.

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The Intern

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Intern
  • IMDb: link

The InternNancy Meyers‘ The Intern is a fun, if lightweight, affair casting Robert De Niro as the unlikely new intern at an online fashion company who, of course, turns out to be the perfect man for the job. Immediately loved by everyone else in the company, it takes longer for the company’s CEO (Anne Hathaway) to take to the firm’s newest employee.

The Intern succeeds mainly on the likability of its stars, although the script gets into trouble with an ill-conceived heist sequence and a rather awful girl’s night out hotel bonding sequence between the pair late in the film.

Also troubling is that for the smart, successful businesswoman Hathaway portrays she’s incapable of making the easiest (and most obvious) decision in the entire movie which she needs the help of not one but two men (both her intern/new best friend and her less-than-trustworthy cheating husband portrayed by Anders Holm) to make for her.

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The Ice Pirates

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Ice Pirates
  • IMDb: link

The Ice PiratesWhile I admit for a 9 year-old boy the tongue-in-cheek space adventure about a motley crew of smugglers stealing the universe’s most valuable resource (water) was a hell of a lot of fun, it’s equally hard to ignore as an adult that The Ice Pirates is a mess of a movie. The PG-rated movie offered funny castration jokes, space herpes, odd robots and aliens, and a time-displaced climactic battle. It also offered bad writing, cheesy special effects, and nearly as many groans as laughs.

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Hail, Caesar!

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Hail, Caesar!
  • IMDb: link

Hail, Caesar!With Hail, Caesar! the Coen Brothers take a few good-natured stabs at the golden age of movies while celebrating, and lampooning, the studio system of Hollywood during the early days of the Cold War. Providing a film where Channing Tatum gets to play Fred Astaire and Tilda Swinton does double-duty as twin gossip columnists, I wouldn’t go so far to call it a screwball comedy, but Hail, Caesar! certainly does have a few screws loose (in mostly the right places).

Josh Brolin stars as studio exec Eddie Mannix dodging offers to leave the studio for a more stable job while overseeing a big-budget spectacular about a Roman general’s encounter with Jesus Christ when his star (George Clooney) is kidnapped by a group of Hollywood writers who are all Communists (Fisher Stevens, Patrick Fischler, Tom Musgrave, David Krumholtz, Greg Baldwin, and Patrick Carroll).

Not all the film works. Far too much time is wasted on Mannix being wooed by an airline, and, while opening up intriguing ideas about outside-the-box solutions to problems, the subplot involving Scarlett Johansson as a single pregnant starlet fizzles. More successful is Alden Ehrenreich as a Western star struggling with his role in straightforward drama.

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