Judd Apatow’s humor is my kind of humor. Actually, I should preface that some. The movies that Apatow directs (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, This Is 40, Funny People, Trainwreck) are my kind of humor. The films that he is merely a producer for are hit or miss. While I love Kicking and Screaming, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Step Brothers, Bridesmaids, Get Him to the Greek, and The Big Sick, there are just as many of his produced films that I am not a fan of, most notably Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. If anything, I wish I would stop producing altogether and spend more time writing and stepping behind the camera.
Category Archives: Drama
The Butterfly Effect (2004)
Name a movie that you like much more than you should. I could rattle off dozens, and right at the top of that list might be the incredibly flawed yet thoroughly engrossing The Butterfly Effect, the supernatural thriller co-directed by J Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress. This movie could be better with each subsequent viewing, but it still gets the job done. I watch it every four or five years. It captivates me each time, though I pick it apart more. It’s not a criticism but rather an observation. This is a movie that I admire. I enjoy its dark themes.
BlackBerry (2023)
2023 is proving to be the year of the biopic. While each year produces at least a couple of well-produced and well-marketed movies about the dramatization of a particular person’s life (or people), 2023 has more than usual. It is a trend I see continuing into future years. With films about Michael Jordan (Air), George Foreman (Big George Foreman), J. Robert Oppenheimer (Oppenheimer), Emily Brontë (Emily), Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (Chevalier), Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon), Henk Rogers (Tetris), Richard Montañez (Flamin Hot), Leonard Bernstein (Maestro), Ronald Reagan (Reagan), there is no shortage as to what’s on the table for someone in Hollywood to take a stab at. The much-anticipated Tetris felt like it would be the most significant “technology” biopic of the bench. However, I felt the film to be underwhelming and wildly ambitious (the KGB?) for a movie marketed to be about a universally cherished video game, but it often felt like it was anything except.
Rush (1991)
I wish Jason Patric (Downloading Nancy, Sleepers) would have landed a leading role on a gritty premium cable detective show (think of a darker True Detective that spanned multiple seasons with the same cast). His two best roles are that of an undercover narcotics officer willing to bend the law for the greater good. The first is the underrated Narc, a 2002 film that paired him opposite Ray Liotta. Eleven years earlier, Lili Fini Zanuck’s Rush further defined him as one of the most talented up-and-coming actors, following leading roles in movies like The Lost Boys, The Beast, and After Dark, My Sweet.
Oppenheimer (2023)
Barbieheimer, the crafty, endearing portmanteau of Barbie and Oppenheimer, the two biggest blockbusters of the summer, became mainstream weeks months before the dual-day release of each movie. Moviegoers flocked to the theaters in greater fashion than even 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick. This ultra-successful and undeniably popular film has become universally accepted as bringing people back to theaters following the COVID-19 pandemic. Some would say that it saved movie theaters entirely. As someone who sees two, three, or sometimes even more movies in the theater in any given month, and often being one of a small handful of patrons, I am in that camp.