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: Steve Buscemi
The Messenger (2009)
Somewhere inside Oren Moverman’s (Time Out of Mind, Rampart), The Messenger is a pretty good movie. It has the right tone. It has the right cast. It has the right setting. It has the right director. It just has the wrong plot. Well, I shouldn’t say it has the wrong plot, but I should say that the plot is a bit flawed. And it’s not even faulty so much as it is incongruent. It follows a timeline that we are uncertain of. Does this movie take place over a few weeks, a few months, a little bit more, or somewhere in between. It’s an integral part of the story to know the movie’s time frame because it helps us justify or not justify some of the actions of its characters. The longer the period that this movie takes place, the more likely it is for me to believe the story. The shorter it is, the less likely I am. The reason for this is the characters change too much. And I am not saying people can’t change over a short period, but it seems a stretch for all characters to change how they did in that brief period. But the time frame is never stated. It is implied to be three months, but it isn’t conclusive. For me, it doesn’t help the movie. It leaves me with the burning question of when to go from start to finish.
Ghost World (2001)
Despite its title, 2001’s Ghost World is not a horror movie but rather is a movie about finding one’s place in the world or moving through the world as a ghost, unable to impact others despite one’s most honest intentions. Thora Birch (American Beauty, The Hole) plays the lead of Enid, an 18-year-old recent high school graduate trying to figure out what to do next in the months following her graduation. She has no plans for college or work. She barely knows what she will do for the day when she wakes up. A key member of her life is her best friend Becky (Scarlett Johansson – Match Point, Lost in Translation), who, at the beginning of the film, seems to share the same brain. Another is Seymour (Steve Buscemi – Reservoir Dogs, Armageddon), a self-proclaimed loser Enid befriends following a mean prank she pulled on him.