These days, it is simply accepted that Adam Sandler movies are going to be difficult to watch and yet increasingly generic. He’s made a very comfortable living by continually playing to the lowest common denominator, whether it’s through paint-by-numbers romantic or over-the-top absurdist comedies. But there was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when it […]
Another new Christmas movie for me! Although I’ve seen the animated version more times than you can shake a stick at*, and have read the book pretty consistently since childhood, I was full of enough Jim Carrey-fatigue by the time the live action version of Dr. Seuss’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas showed up that up […]
Before this project, I had never seen National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, a fact that inevitably elicited gasps from whomever I told it. It’s a classic, sure, but like most of the pre-Community Chevy Chase oeuvre, I somehow missed it. So it was with great joy that I undertook the task of partaking for the first […]
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is probably the only thing less traditionally Christmas-y than Bad Santa. And yet the straight-to-DVD Always Sunny Christmas movie is about to become a new classic for my Christmas routine. Frank Reynolds (Danny DeVito) was a horrible father to Deandra (Kaitlin Olson) and Dennis (Glenn Howerton) throughout a childhood of […]
In honor of Home Alone, a movie I must have watched fifty four thousand times from age 3 to age 13, and not a single time since, I’m going to do this whole review in the form of random observations, and let my rampant, 24-year-old ID take the reins: • Holy Shit, Macauley is young. […]
From the first moment of Bad Santa, the film is fully defining its viewpoint. Billy Bob Thorton, looking alcoholic skinny with a cigarette in his hand and a Santa suit hanging angrily off his lanky frame, provides voice over narration to a scene that is set at a bar and which ends with Billy Bob […]
Half the battle with watching The Santa Clause is just ignoring the late 90s parade of former stars (Judge Reinhold!) and future stars (David Krumholtz) and stars that inexplicably have stuck around long after their usefulness (Tim Allen, although he actually gets a lifetime pass for Toy Story) that litter the pathways. Add to that […]
It is amazing to me that the release and theatrical run of 50/50 came and went with very minimal hoopla. The film is everything Hollywood commentators love- clever and unexpected but somehow in adherence with current tonal trends, well cast, smartly written, genre subversive, thematically daring, backed by big names and based on a true […]