Tag: comedy

The Onion Movie: A Review by Nate Hill

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

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That’s right, the Onion News Network made a movie, back in 2008, and it’s every bit as irreverent, satirical and wantonly bizarre as you would imagine. They have been comically killing it for years with their online platform, and the film is a nice extension of that. It’s episodic, meandering and devoid of plot, made up of many little sketches and vignettes, some gut bustingly funny, others just plain odd. I have three favourites which pretty much sum up their inane, Monty Python type shtick: An out of work actor named Bryce Brand (Nick Chinlund is priceless I  just a few minutes of screen time) arrives back home from drug rehab and is hounded by his agent to nab new scripts. He promptly falls into a weird new addiction that gets slapped sillily onto the headlines, thus ending his arc with deranged efficiancy. Steven Seagal shows up as a fat slob of an action hero aptly named ‘The Cock Puncher’, a lumbering buffoon who punches people in the cock, naturally. The third, and funniest sequence features a riff on the celebrity roasts of the 60’s, with some kind of amazing group of crusty old crooners hurling stinging and incredibly raunchy insults at each other with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It’s tough explain just how funny that bit is in a review, but suffice to say it had me roaring as loud as the obscene bunch of wrinkled baboons in the in the skit. There’s a plethora of other sequences which I’ve since gotten hazy about, but I remember many other instances of pure hilarity to be had. Watch for further celebrity appearances including Eric Stolhanske, Michael Bolton, Richard Fancy, Daniel Dae Kim, Brendan Fletcher, Rodney Dangerfield, Joel McHale and more. Side splitting stuff, if you’re into this type of humour.

Undertaking Betty: A Review by Nate Hill

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

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Undertaking Betty (or Plots With A View, as it’s called in the UK) is British black humour at its most brilliant, hilarious and surprisingly touching, in the tradition of stuff like Waking Ned Devine and Monty Python. It’s carefree and harmless but not without a raunchy sting that can’t help but be met with loving reception due to its charm and top drawer silliness. Brenda Blethyn plays a woman who has spent thirty years of her life in a small Welsh town, married to an absolute pig of a man (Robert Pugh). He’s a sleazeball who is shagging his slut of a secretary (Naomi Watts in full gumball sickening skank mode). Blethyn is secretly in love with the local undertaker and mortuary owner (Alfred Molina), the romance sparking up as the two try to find a way to get her away from Mr. Awful husband. Molina has the brilliant idea to fake her own death, letting her off the hook and allowing them to elope. She’s willing but reluctant, and so they proceed. Only one problem: Molina isn’t the only funeral outfit in town. Garish eccentric Frank Featherbed (Christopher Walken) and his peevy associate (Lee Evans) owns his own business and plans to steal Blethyn’s funeral for his own. Walken dials up the kook factor to the maximum and is pure genius, an entertainer at heart who believes that every funeral should have the showmanship and dazzle of a broadway show, leading to some amusingly awkward scenes. Just the fact that an american Chris Walken is working as a funeral home director way out in rural Wales is enough to bust a gut, let alone his off the wall performance. The resolution reaches comic heights that made me truly query why this film’s praises weren’t sung to high heaven upon release, but such is life, and death. The romance between Blethyn and Molina is sweet, endearing and balances out the larger than life sense of humour that the film keeps tossing around like confetti. Walken fans, dark comedy fans, film fans alike…please check this out. 

Easy A: A Review by Nate Hill

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

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The best way to describe Easy A is calling it a wiseass high school retelling of The Scarlet Letter. That can also be a temperature gauge for someone to tell ahead of time if it’ll be there thing, or not. I enjoyed it a lot, thanks to a funny as hell Emma Stone who doesn’t leave out the vulnerability peeking through her guise as strong young woman. It’s a little more relaxed in the content department than some of the bawdier stuff that she got her start in, but still contains sufficient amounts of raunch to please the comedy hounds. Stone also has a veritable army of seasoned pros backing her up, an element which helps her, however she’s quite capable of carrying a film and does so as well. She plays Olive, a spitfire high school girl who finds herself in a funny yet unfortunate situation after her dunce of a friend starts a wildfire sexual rumor about her. Soon the whole school is talking about it, and she takes action in a bizarre move to fight fire with fire…of a certain kind. She boldly takes up the mantle of the school harlot, forever changing things in her quiet serengetti of suburban youth. It all spins wildly out of control, a common characteristic of adolescence, with poor Olive stuck right in the middle of the debacle, which sucks for her but is too funny not to enjoy. Stanley Tucci (“The Bucket List”) and Patricia Clarkson are darlings as her parents, Thomas Haden Church scores points as a deliberately hip and sympathetic literature teacher, and Lisa Kudrow that old flamingo, has fun as a dour guidance counselor. There’s also work from Amanda Bynes as an unhinged religious nut, the perpetually wooden Cam Gigandet, Penn Badgley and a brief cameo from Malcolm  McDowell as the world’s most cynical high school principal. As a riff on The Scarlett letter it keeps theme alive, and as a teen comedy with a gaggle of adults trying to keep up with the youngsters, it’s a charmer. Stone holds the proceedings together very well.

Burn After Reading: A Review by Nate Hill

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

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The Coen Brother’s Burn After Reading is the duo at their height of trolling the audience, a mood they seem to make some of the most devilishly funny films of their career. This one reminds me of long days full of running around, confusion and missed appointments, days where I get home and reach the end only to realize that for all the frenzy, nothing I did all day was really of any consequence. This film is sort of like that; a whole lot of clandestine nonsense and tomfoolery that adds up to.. well, not much of anything in the end. If that sounds like I’m being negative, I’m not. That’s part of the Coen’s charm and a core aspect of what makes this one so hilarious. It’s also full of complete dimwitted morons, which only adds to the chorus of lunacy. John Malkovich teeters on the borders of mania, scary and funny as ex CIA half wit Osborne Cox, in a performance so utterly Malkovich that he almost seems like some other actor parodying him. He’s got a cold hearted bitch of a wife (Tilda Swinton) who is fooling around with even bigger idiot Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney  is a riot) who is also fooling around with anything that has a pulse, being the squirrelly sex addict that he is. Cox has started a memoir (or, ‘mem-wah’, as Malkovich ludicrously intones it), the contents of which are on a disc that end up in the hands of yet even bigger idiots. Linda Litzke (Frances Mcdormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) run a gym called Hardbodies (only the Coens, folks) and see the disc as ‘secret spy shit’ they could use to make a buck. That’s where the plot hollers off the rails into pure madness, as each and every character makes the dumbest possible decision  along the way. J.K. Simmons are gold as two CIA honchos who are more puzzled than the audience, Richard Jenkins trolls perhaps the subtlest of all, and the cast also includes Jeffrey Demunn, Olek Krupa and a meta cameo from Dermot Mulroney. Among the cloak and dagger chaos, the Coen take every chance they get to spoof and lovingly ridiculue society’s cringe inducing stereotypes, until you start to realize they’re levels of exaggeration aren’t all that over the top. Pitt is gold as the air headed gym rat, Clooney pure screwball, and Malkovich is a force of demented nature, his exentuated word pronunciations reaching a boiling point of absurdity here. This is up there with the Coen’s best, and certainly one of their funniest hours.

B Movie Glory with Nate: Blood Shot

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

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Folks, this is one for the books. Ever wish there was a film made about a badass, gun slinging vampire who is secretly contracted by the President of the United States  (Highlander himself, Christopher Lambert) to carry out dangerous missions and thwart evil Islamic terrorists? Well your very specific and demented wish just came true. Imagine for a moment that John Carpenter, Joe Dante and Michael Bay got hammered one night and wrote the most ridiculous script for a horror action comedy this century has seen. The resulting treatise would be Blood Shot, an absolute hoot of a flick that combines elements that wouldn’t be caught dead (or undead) together in any other setting but that of the gloriously unrestricted world of the B movie. The President uses a craggy operative named Sam (ever brilliant Lance Henriksen) to brief the Vampire in question (Michael Bailey Smith) on his missions. He is to hunt down violent Islamic rebels, led by a dude called Bob. Bob is Arabic. Bob is played by Brad Dourif, who is white as a sheet, but here shows up caked in brown makeup and hollering away in the most idiotic accent I’ve ever heard. His casting alone is just hysterical, and should drive the social activists up the wall screaming, while the rest of us howl in with laughter. His character is called Bob because of everyone’s inability to pronounce his real arabic name which is a mile long and completely nonsensical. His crew are terrorists straight from a Mel Brooks film, complete with a midget amongst them. There’s also a lone hero cop (Brennan Eliott channels the hotshot, reckless law enforcers of 80’s movies) hunting both the terrorists and the Vampire, getting in everyone’s way and capping anything that moves. The fact that Highlander plays the President in a film about a Vampire who hunts down terrorists named Bob should be more than enough for any self respecting film fan to drop whatever they’re doing and go bask in this baby’s glow. Despite being a direct to video flick, it contains not a trace of the trademark ineptitude and shoddiness that you’re always likely to find when exploring the genre. Campiness and lunacy, oh yes. But never mediocrity or laziness. But that’s what your friendly neighborhood Nate is here for, to wade through the unwatchable sludge and mine out the priceless gems for you all to see. This one’s funny, imaginitive, off the wall and a pint of B positive fun. 

Ted Demme’s The Ref: A Review By Nate Hill

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Ted Demme’s The Ref is one of my favourite holiday comedies of all time, one I re watch every and never tire of. It’s the most cheerful black comedy I can think of, while at the same time being one of the most cynical, acid tongued Christmas movies on record. In spite of this pissy tone, however, it still manages to elicit warm fuzzy feelings and make you care for its loveable, curmudgeonly characters. It’s also got a spitfire of a script, given wildly funny life by its star, the one and only Denis Leary. Leary, every the motor mouthed, nicotine fuelled teddy bear, is an actor who’s work is very dear to me. Many times when I was younger and wasn’t in the best place in my head, I’d watch various films of his, and his standup and he always put me in a better place. Here he plays short tempered cat burglar Gus, who is forced to lay low in a small town on Christmas Eve after being busted and nearly caught by a state of the art alarm system. He takes a middle aged couple hostage to hide out at their house, and goes from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis play the couple, who bicker endlessly and drive Gus up the wall by constantly being at each other’s throats and never shutting up. Spacey never comes up short in intense performances, whether dramatic or funny, and he owns the role, meeting Leary and Davis’s manic energy with his own verve. Davis, an underrated actress, pulls out all the stops an delivers like she always does as well. The three of them are left in the house to hash out their issues, criticize each other, fight, make constant jabs at character and all that other lovely Christmas-y stuff. The hilarity peaks when Spacey’s insufferable brother and his family show up for the most awkward Christmas dinner in history, as the trio tries to disguise the fact that they’re harbouring a criminal from the dimwitted clan, and Spacey’s tyrannical bitch of a mother (Glynis Johns). There’s balance to the stressful vibe, though, as Leary’s presence elevates every emotion from the couple and eventually turns things around, all expertly played by the actors for laughs both obvious and subtle. The excellent Raymond J. Barry is crusty delight as the mean spirited Sheriff, and there’s great work from J.K. Simmons, Christine Baranski, Arthur Nascarella, Vincent Pastore, Richard Bright, Adam LeFevre and B.D. Wong. A Christmas classic for me, for a number of reasons, and one of the funniest, overlooked holiday flicks out there.