REVIEW: Me Him Her [2016]

“Are you about to be super interesting up in this bar right now?” You have to give Max Landis credit for trying to breathe fresh air into Hollywood tropes through his genre merging scripts whether you believe they’re effective or not. Everyone loved Chronicle‘s sci-fi, found footage, horror thriller combo and reviled American Ultra‘s stoner Bourne Identity meets Mr. & Mrs. Smith (although the latter’s reaction may have hinged upon people’s inability to remove his Twitter-celebrity-the-world-loves-to-hate-on from the work). His latest foray in the millennial screenwriting annals is a play…

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REVIEW: American Ultra [2015]

“We fired the ugly one” When there are only seven basic plots—as the saying goes—to implicitly choose from as a screenwriter, genre-bending homage becomes the sole path towards creativity. So while Max Landis‘ script for American Ultra is The Bourne Identity meets Mr. and Mrs. Smith through a Pineapple Express filter, it’s a damn good ride regardless. He’s throwing common tropes on their head by making a government-trained agent into a paranoid stoner filled to the brim with anxiety. He’s creating laughs out of dramatic convention while director Nima Nourizadeh…

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