Palm Springs, the Andy Samberg (NBC’s Brooklyn 99, Saturday Night Live) and Cristin Milioti (The Wolf of Wall Street, It Had to Be You) led comedy, was exactly the movie we needed during the summer of 2020. In a year with very few comedies (Borat Subsequent Movie will likely be the most memorable), this was a fun, unique movie that I’m sure would have broken up a dreadful summer. The problem was that theaters were mostly closed when this movie was released.
Category Archives: Comedy
American Psycho (2000)
My recent apparent 2020 trend of alternating between Christian Bale, Denzel Washington, and Russell Crowe movies continues with my review of Mary Harron 2000’s cult classic American Psycho. In his first lead role, this film introduced an experienced but still grossly undiscovered Bale (The Fighter, Ford v Ferrari) to the screen.
American Psycho seems like a movie that most people have seen. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve at least heard of it. I’ve seen it three or four times, and each time, I think I will end up liking it more than the time before. And that’s not saying a lot because I wouldn’t say I liked it the first time I saw it and got upset with myself for watching it every four or five years. I want it to be good. It’s just not. The main reason is that it is too obscure. I’m not too fond of zany or batty. I also sometimes like everything laid out before me, so I don’t have to think. American Psycho makes you think, but you have to think too hard, and then you wonder if what you thought was correct or wasn’t anywhere close to being what Harron intended.
Late Night (2019)
Nisha Ganatra (The High Note) tries a formula that’s been tried and true with a slightly different spin in Late Night. The Emma Thompson (Howard’s End, Sense and Sensibility) dramedy focuses on her career as an acclaimed late-night talk show host who might be on the tail end of her career after plummeting ratings in recent months/years. Flanked by an all-white male staff of writers, Katherine Newberry’s (Thompson) material has become predictably stale.
Parasite (2019)
It’s hard to classify or compare Bong Joon Ho’s (Snowpiercer, Okja) Parasite to any other movie I’ve ever seen. From the first frame until the last, it comes together as a unique film that reminded me of Get Out and A Quiet Place in the sense that you know you are seeing something extraordinary and something that you have no idea where it comes from or where it’s going. These three movies are entirely different but follow the same formula of capturing your audience in the first scene and never giving them a chance to spin out of the web you hope you are creating for them.
Fighting With My Family (2019)
Based on the true story of WWE wrestler Paige, Stephen Merchant’s Fighting With My Family follows a tried and true formula of rags to riches story. While it only offers a little in terms of something we haven’t seen hundreds of thousands of times in the theater, it does provide us with a new avenue: that of a World Wrestling Entertainment superstar. Starring Saraya (Florence Pugh – A Good Person, Don’t Worry Darling) as Paige, this movie tells her story and the story of her entire working-class English town, where they own an inviting wrestling gym and run an independent wrestling league.