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‘Game Night’ Review: A.K.A. David Fincher’s Airplane!

Philip Brown — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 18:00:35 +0000

You know, it really didn’t occur to me until about halfway through ‘Game Night’ that David Fincher’s cinematic style had become iconic and imitated enough that it could be parodied. Yet here we are with a big Hollywood comedy that not only toys with a premise from a Fincher flick, but co-opts his style for...

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‘Office Christmas Party’ Review: Skip It for Santa

Philip Brown — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 13:00:33 +0000

Hollywood holiday movies don’t come much more generic than ‘Office Christmas Party’. If the painfully impersonal title didn’t give the game away, this is cookie-cutter comedy filmmaking at its most frustrating. Every joke is forced and every attempt at squeezing in emotion falls flat. This thing is a big corporate product that’s been overthought for...

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‘The Family Fang’ Review: Freaky Family Dysfunction

Philip Brown — Fri, 06 May 2016 14:00:30 +0000

After proving that he could direct a gentle R-rated comedy (‘Bad Words‘) as well as anyone who ever hired him to headline a similar project, Jason Bateman gets a bit more ambitious in his sophomore effort. ‘The Family Fang’ is a delightfully cracked dysfunctional family comedy that should please anyone who enjoys a little misery...

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‘Zootopia’ Review: A Disney Delight

Philip Brown — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 20:00:22 +0000

With the notable exception of last year’s downright masterful ‘Inside Out’, Disney’s namesake animation label has been cranking out movies with more consistent quality and ambition than Pixar in recent years. That’s undoubtedly because Pixar founder John Lasseter took over the Disney ship right around the same time that his own studio started cranking out...

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TIFF Journal: ‘The Family Fang’

Philip Brown — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 19:00:45 +0000

A few years ago, Jason Bateman tried his hand at directing and did such a good job mounting the bad behavior comedy ‘Bad Words‘ that no one made fun of him for it. Now Bateman has returned with a far more ambitious dark comedy about the pain and value of having a dysfunctional family. It’s...

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‘The Gift’ Review: A Clear and Present Danger

Philip Brown — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 15:00:57 +0000

Generally speaking, directorial debuts from actors should be approached with absolute dread. Just because an actor reaches a level of fame that makes it possible to get a movie made doesn’t mean he or she really has the chops to pull it off. Thankfully, there’s no need for such concerns with ‘The Gift’, the first...

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‘A Lego Brickumentary’ Review: Fan Service as Advertisement

Philip Brown — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 19:00:57 +0000

Filmmakers Kief Davidson and Daniel Junge certainly deserve points for excellent timing, if nothing else. Their feature length documentary love letter to Lego likely never would have gotten a theatrical release were it not for the fact that it came out shortly after ‘The Lego Movie‘ wormed its way into the world’s heart. It’s not...

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‘Horrible Bosses 2’ Review: Horrible, Indeed

Philip Brown — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 16:00:13 +0000

Sequels are hard to pull off in general, but comedy sequels seem to be the most difficult beast to master. Few things are less funny than a joke you’ve heard too many times. By necessity, most comedy sequels tend to run a good joke into the ground. The first ‘Horrible Bosses’ was hardly a classic...

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‘This Is Where I Leave You’ Review: Sappy Sobs and Gentle Laughs

Philip Brown — Tue, 23 Sep 2014 16:00:10 +0000

‘This Is Where I Leave You’ is a kindler, gentler version of ‘August: Osage County’ to watch with your mom. The movie plays mild family dysfunction for mild laughs and milder drama. It’s like a cup of instant chicken noodle soup – superficially as warm and pleasing as the real thing without any real nourishment....

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Weekend Movies: This Is Where We Look for Something to See

Luke Hickman — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 16:00:50 +0000

The post-summer slump may actually rebound this weekend as counter-programming delivers three potentially interesting offerings. Fox takes another crack at the YA market with ‘The Maze Runner‘. I’d never heard of the book until the studio began advertising the movie version, but it’s apparently very popular and widely known. Following suit with ‘The Hunger Games‘,...

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‘Bad Words’ Review: Bad Bateman, Good Director?

Philip Brown — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:00:51 +0000

If ‘Bad Words’ had been released in the early 1990s starring Bill Murray, it probably would have been a big mainstream hit. Twenty years later starring and directed by Jason Bateman, it’s now a small indie that should be a modest success. That’s not the same as saying that it’s bad, just a sign of...

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Emmy Grows a Pair

Josh Zyber — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 17:00:42 +0000

The nominations for the 2013 Emmy Awards were announced last Thursday. I had intended to write up a post on the subject for that day or Friday, but life intervened and I got busy with other things. And frankly, the Emmys always nominate the same small handful of shows year after year anyway. Would anyone...

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