Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster is one weird movie. I don’t often do well with movies that I find to be strange. Some movies that have gotten high ratings with the critics are so utterly dreadful that they are virtually unwatchable. The tone is simple, the dialect is weird, and the actions are peculiar, but the overall strangeness of these movies makes the experience a chore. I know some love Wes Anderson, and to each his own. The Lobster feels similar to one of these Anderson movies, but oddly enough, it interested me. While I didn’t understand why a strange movie needed to be made, I found it engaging, and it didn’t feel like I was watching it to say that I watched it. While I wouldn’t say I liked it and would never watch it again, there were parts of it.
Category Archives: Comedy
Daddy’s Home (2015)
With apologies to the extremely funny The Campaign, first-time co-director John Morris and Sean Anders’s (Horrible Bosses 2, Sex Drive) Daddy’s Home is, ironically, Will Ferrell’s (Old School, Step Brothers) best-starring comedy role since 2010’s The Other Guys. It’s not a movie I thought I would particularly like and one that I had serious doubts about as much as 20 minutes in (I hadn’t laughed, but maybe one time), but as the movie progressed, it got funnier and funnier. By its conclusion, it became a somewhat memorable movie I wouldn’t put on the “A-shelf” comedy list but might find itself just a notch below. What made the movie work was the dynamics between Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg (Lone Survivor, The Fighter), who didn’t have the same chemistry they had when they teamed partners in the buddy cop, The Other Guys, but were still pretty close. While Daddy’s Home was 100% entirely predictable, it didn’t make it any less fun, and while Ferrell and Wahlberg weren’t exceptionally fantastic in the scenes where they weren’t together, it more than made up for the scenes where they shared screen time.
The Nice Guys (2016)
“Nice Guys Finish Last.” That’s a saying we’ve all heard before. The grunge band Green Day wrote an iconic song about it in the mid-1990s. I’ll alter the quote slightly by saying that The Nice Guys finishes last. This was not my favorite movie. I knew I would probably feel this way going into the film, but I was willing to sacrifice the two hours because it starred two of my favorite actors, Ryan Gosling (Blue Valentine, Drive) and Russell Crowe (Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind). Despite its 90% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I had no faith in this movie. Its style wasn’t my favorite. Shane Black (Iron Man 3, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang) style for directing this movie was similar to that of Joel and Ethan Coen in that it blended comedy, drama, action, dark comedy, crime (both organized and unorganized), and even small bits of horror to try to come up with a unique idea. Was The Nice Guys a unique idea? No, not really.
A Walk in the Woods (2015)
A Walk in the Woods, the 2015 comedy-drama that I thought would be a throwaway movie I originally only watched so that I could add it to my list, turned out to be one of the year’s biggest surprises. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’d be a fool to think that a year from now, I’d remember anything from this movie or that I’ll ever watch this movie again. But for two hours on a Tuesday night in the middle of April, it was a refreshing escape from reality, and the movie had me grinning from ear to ear from the first scene until the last. Also, if Robert Redford (The Horse Whisperer, All is Lost) or Nick Nolte (The Prince of Tides, Warrior) called it a career today, and this was either of their last movies, that would be okay.
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Miss You Already (2015)
Beaches 2 or something more? Maybe somewhere in between. Miss You Already tells the story of two lifelong best friends who have been there for each other at every instance of their lives. Jess (Drew Barrymore – Charlie’s Angels, The Wedding Singer) and Milly (Toni Collette – The Sixth Sense, Little Miss Sunshine) have been nearly inseparable since Jess transferred into Milly’s first-grade class in London after moving from the United States. As the pair approaches her 40th birthday, they are infused with a situation that no one can ever prepare for. Yes, this is both a friendship movie and a cancer movie. Yes, it will try to try to guilt you into tears. But, while the acting is not great and the story predictable, something about the movie keeps you interested when a lesser movie would have lost you completely 45 minutes in.