Category: Comedy

REVIEW: Life as We Know It [2010]

Jared Mobarak

“Don’t let any fat grown-ups in when the kids are inside” Long-time television producer Greg Berlanti’s first directorial wide release, Life as We Know It, had two strikes against it before I even popped in the DVD. To begin with, the film was a romantic comedy in the vein of countless others—two people who hate each other are brought together by circumstances out of their control and slowly fall in love. And while the premise here is equal parts horrible in the fact someone thought it would be a good…

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REVIEW: Rango [2011]

Jared Mobarak

“Ain’t no one gonna tango with the Rango” Director Gore Verbinski knows star Johnny Depp’s penchant for fast-talk rambling only too well. After helming the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, he decided to take an odd turn into animation with the PG-rated Rango, taking his lead with him for the journey. Using a quasi-motion capture technique, the actors actually performed their roles, the footage later animated in character to mimic the motion and expressions of each. So, even though we see an awkward chameleon in a Hawaiian shirt—it’s not…

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REVIEW: Zookeeper [2011]

Jared Mobarak

“I certainly wasn’t cleaning my basement” What is the point of giving Zookeeper a rating? There really is none. The people who want to see it will see it, the kids who its aimed for will eat up the fact animals are talking and singing and joking around, and the adults escorting them will at the very least chuckle when the raunchiness comes out to play. Its success is a foregone conclusion, just like that of its most kindred of spirits. Call it Night at the Franklin Park Zoo, call…

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REVIEW: Horrible Bosses [2011]

Jared Mobarak

“How you like ‘dem nipples?” I had such high hopes. Between Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day being the leads, Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell, and Jennifer Aniston the supporters, and Jamie Foxx as the comedy’s comic relief, how could it have gone wrong? It must have been the writing, right? The trio tasked to tackle this tale of men trapped in jobs with the worst bosses possible, who hatch a plan to murder them all, ended up falling prey to the easy desire of catering the characters to the…

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REVIEW: Cars 2 [2011]

Jared Mobarak

“I vant to siphon your gas” Being that I was not in what appeared to be a vast majority of people who thought Cars was ‘lesser’ Pixar, I can’t say I was too surprised to find I was on the outside of the even bigger group of critics who trashed Cars 2 as a sequel based solely on toy manufacturing profit. Yes, it is totally a cash-grab—I’m not questioning that fact—but alongside this is an attempt to create something the studio has yet to do, an entertaining comedy existing on…

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REVIEW: Hawaiian Vacation [2011]

Jared Mobarak

“I just zip and unzip. I don’t fly.” Upon seeing Buzz and Woody onscreen for the Pixar short playing before Cars 2, my first feeling was disappointment. These abbreviated tales are sometimes the highlight of going to a family friendly animated film, generally heartfelt and funny in a minimal span of time to get audiences in the mood for the feature following. Instead of some new carefully constructed character—Presto and Geri’s Game—or a well-conceived, dialogue-free vignette—Lifted and the brilliant Day & Night—all we were to be given was Toy Story…

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REVIEW: Larry Crowne [2011]

Jared Mobarak

“Beaver Fever. Catch It!” I really like the poster. The sky blue with the alternating thick/thin sans serif font and the jarringly bright yellow, drawing your eye to it and down towards the pair of movie stars at bottom right. Julia Roberts looks ecstatic and Tom Hanks suavely cool on his scooter—this could be a gem of a film with some sophisticated style. Alas, though, it is not. After starting with the charming joke of a middle-aged man living and breathing his retail sales job, picking up the trash in…

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REVIEW: Bad Teacher [2011]

Jared Mobarak

“Peanut Butter everywhere …” I wasn’t the biggest fan when it was called Bad Santa and took place in a department store, so, suffice it to say, Bad Teacher’s foul-mouthed comedy never quite hit home. Scribed by writers from “The Office” and, what is sadly much lower on my anticipation list now, Ghostbusters III, Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg have one thing going for them—laughs. If it weren’t for a healthy amount of laugh-out-loud instances, the void of any engaging conflict coupled with the broadest performances I’ve seen in quite…

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REVIEW: Barney’s Version [2010]

Jared Mobarak

“Montreal 2, Boston 1” It begins with an aged detective, a man unafraid of police brutality, and his newly released novel about the circumstantial evidence surrounding the disappearance of a young man at the summer home of a friend. Detective O’Hearne (Mark Addy) has never let go of the assumption that Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti) shot and killed his Best Man from two weddings, Boogie (Scott Speedman), in a drunken stupor after the discovery of an adulterous tryst. To that end, he has been a constant fixture in the television…

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REVIEW: Happythankyoumoreplease [2011]

Jared Mobarak

“Who says Santa’s pants have to be red?!” It only took about halfway through Happythankyoumoreplease before I began to think about the one thing I probably should have latched onto from the start. The comparisons between this and 2004’s Garden State are unmistakable. And it’s not just the obvious—or what should be obvious if my brain had been working—that each starred and was written and directed by the star of a hit television sitcom, it’s also the sense of heart behind every single moment, the off-kilter eccentricity of certain characters…

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REVIEW: Le Concert [The Concert] [2009]

Jared Mobarak

“This is the real communism” By no means as madcap as I had been under the impression it would be, Radu Mihaileanu’s Le concert [The Concert] is most definitely the uplifting comedy it’s American poster proclaims. The laughs it elicits are often earned by scenes hiding truths, their revelations the joke, and absurd nonsense during the chaotic whirlwind of three days in Paris to ready for a sold out concerto featuring ‘The [Russian] Maestro’, famously embarrassed in a public assassination on stage thirty years previous, and the incomparable Anne-Marie Jacquet,…

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