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: Year of Release
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.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
In a summer movie season that has seen the unlikely pairing of Oppenheimer and Barbie dominate the box office, two surefire franchises have found it a bit more difficult than anticipated to generate sales. While Oppenheimer and Barbie have both faired well with critics and audiences, Christopher McQuarrie’s (The Way of the Gun, Jack Reacher) Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One has scored just as well, but whose box office revenue may have been slighted due to the Oppenheimer/Barbie dual release date two weeks after. It may have made the Mission Impossible franchise’s seventh movie out of sight, out of mind a little too quickly. Dead Reckoning Part One is a film that should be seen in the theater, which many will agree with. Saying that it is better than Oppenheimer and Barbie is an unpopular opinion but one that I believe to be true. The novelty of Oppenheimer and Barbie is undoubtedly an allure over the seventh installment of a franchise and is something I do understand and appreciate. However, as a whole, I found Dead Reckoning Part One to be far more entertaining and better executed.
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