Lynn Shelton Embraces Awkwardness and Vulnerability in the Exceptional Comedy Humpday

For much of the history of American comedies, gay panic jokes were as standard of a source of comedy as sleeping on a banana peel. Just because they were ubiquitous doesn't mean they weren't harmful or unfunny. The rampant presence of gay panic jokes no doubt contributed to pop culture broader issue of normalizing the dehumanization and mockery of queer individuals, particularly between men. Throughout the history of cinema, though, plenty of great classic comedies have managed to generate yuks without restoring to a cheap trick like gay panic gags. Among such comedies was Humpday, Lynn Shelton's second directorial effort that, on paper, seems like it could have gone down a much more mocking path.

Russell Crowe and Rachel McAdams Headline State of Play, a Solidly-Crafted Political Thriller

In my opinion, Russell Crowe is at his best playing morally complicated figures as prone to darkness as they are helping people. When he's playing a straightforward biopic protagonist in something like A Beautiful Mind, I just can't buy him. Even his lead performance as the action hero in Gladiator doesn't quite work for me. But put Crowe in Noah, The Nice Guys or the 2009 movie State of Play, suddenly we're cooking with gas. Crowe's genuinely gifted at portraying rough and tumble figures who seem to have leaped out of reality rather than a studio executive's cliche-ridden idea of what a "tough guy" is.  There's actual menace and unpredictability to his best performances and he's even able to imbue a distinctly different personality to, say, his version of Noah compared to his Nice Guys role.

13 Days of First-Time Frights: Jennifer's Body

13 Days of First-Time Frights is a series of reviews for October 2019 where Douglas Laman, in the spirit of Halloween, watches and writes about thirteen horror movies he's never seen before. These reviews will be posted each Tuesday and Thursday as well as the last three Wednesdays of October 2019.

Entry #5: Jennifer's Body

When it comes to acclaimed horror movies getting initially negative reviews, well, to quote tom Jones, "It's not unusual." Films like George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead or Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre had plenty of notable detractors upon their very first theatrical releases before getting properly reevaluated in the years afterwards. What's especially strange about Jennifer's Body is how the initial reviews didn't just critique the film, they saw it as a vehicle to attack the films writer (Diablo Cody) and to ogle the films star (Megan Fox). As has been noted in a number of excellent pieces by now, the majority of negative Jennifer's Body reviews back in 2009 were all kinds of gross and misogynistic. It's utterly repulsive to see all these reviews passing for actual film criticism, though, thankfully, a broader array of voices have made themselves heard on the internet and ensured that Jennifer's Body is getting the re-evaluation it deserves.

Law Abiding Citizen Is Another Gerard Butler-Headlined Disaster

In each era of American history, the then modern-day American political climate seems to always seep into our countries action movies. Sometimes they manifest in interesting ways but other times history has shown that action cinema chooses to reflect the real world in toxic ways that try to soothe the frayed nerves of privileged members of society in order to ensure that everything is just hunky-dory with the actually troublesome status quo. Much like Rambo and other testosterone-fueled action movies of the 1980s were very much made as responses to the post-Vietnam climate of the country, Law Abiding Citizen is a movie made for the era of the PATRIOT act as good guy detectives proudly deliver “heroic” lines like “Fuck his civil liberties” and a mayor played by Viola Davis makes a sweeping speech to urge law enforcement officers to bend the law to take down Gerard Butler’s baddie. The end justifies the means for Law Abiding Citizen, a thriller seemingly handmade for people who would dismiss Taxi to the Dark Side as “fake news”.

The Box Shows The Best And Worst Traits of Richard Kelly's Filmmaking

It's been a whole decade since Richard Kelly directed anything. Can you believe it? The director of Donnie Darko has been attached to a number of projects over the years, but he hasn't helmed anything new in a decade. Truth be told, I'd say it's only a matter of time before we see more from Kelly in the future considering his creative spirit and that he doesn't have any scandals tarnishing his reputation. Perhaps that's just the hopeful optimist in me talking though since I tend to find Kelly's trio of movies utterly fascinating. Yes, that even includes his weakest directorial effort, The Box, which offers plenty to dissect even if it doesn't either come together as a cohesive whole or deliver a Southland Tales-esque all-timer head trip of a mess. 

Julie & Julia Offers Up Two Pleasant True Stories For The Price of One

The saddest part of watching Julie & Julia in 2019 is that it feels as foreign from modern American cinema as 1953's The Big Heat (another movie I watched for the first time yesterday). Can one even imagine the current version of Sony/Columbia, whose present-day slate features Peter Rabbit, Men in Black International and a Morbius the Living Vampire movie, spending $40 million on a delightful mid-budget movie like this? Julie & Julia was mighty profitable in its initial theatrical release and scored a Best Actress Oscar nomination, but if they tried to make it today, well, they'd have to make it as an eight-episode Netflix miniseries, there's just no room in the modern American marketplace for movies that aren't made for under $10 million or over $250 million.

Medicine for Melancholy Saw Barry Jenkins Hit The Ground Running As An Exceptional Filmmaker

Barry Jenkins is best known today for directing two of the best movies of the 2010s, Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, but those weren't his first two forays into the world of feature film filmmaking. Prior to those two outstanding features, in 2009, he directed a small indie feature entitled Medicine for Melancholy that saw Jenkins channeling his inner Agnes Varda and Richard Linklater in telling a story about two people just spending a day together walking around a city and exchanging dialogue. Watching the film now, it's interesting to see how various parts of Medicine for Melancholy compare to his subsequent directorial efforts, with individual elements of the movie coming off as direct precursors to Jenkins' future directorial work.

Observe and Report Is an Imperfect But Ambitious Dark Deconstruction of Typical Man-Children Comedies

CW: DISCUSSIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT 
SPOILERS AHEAD

In his time as a comedic leading man, Seth Rogen has demonstrated an admirable ambitious streak. The films rarely turn out to be all-time classics (though at least none of Seth Rogen's vehicles have turned out as badly as modern Will Ferrell or Adam Sandler features) but movies like The Interview or This is the End tend to be centered on more high-concept unorthodox comedic premises that see Rogen and company demonstrating bolder creative aspirations. This quality could be found as early as less than two years after Knocked Up cemented Seth Rogen as a viable leading man with the black comedy Observe and Report, which hews closer to Taxi Driver than fellow 2009 mall cop movie Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

Sugar Is A Departure From Typical Sports Movies And Is All The Better For It

A whole decade before they directed box office juggernaut Captain Marvel, Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck helmed the sports drama Sugar, which takes a premise that could easily be fodder for a run-of-the-mill inspirational sports movie and takes it in a whole other direction. The Sugar of the title refers to a nickname given to Miguel Santos (Algenis Perez Soto), a baseball player residing in the Dominican Republic who, along with every other local baseball player, dreams of getting recruited for rookie training in the United States of America. That's not a turn of events that befall just anyone, but Miguel manages to score such a rare opportunity to train with the Kansas City Knights in Iowa.

Surviving The Undead Inhabiting Zombieland Proves To Be A Recipe For Great Comedy

The two writers behind Zombieland are Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, a pair of individuals who are most well-known today for writing both of the Deadpool movies. Watching Zombieland through the lens of it being a precursor to the pair's work on Deadpool, one begins to notice some similarities between the two projects. Most notably, both are extremely violent works containing a large amount of dark humor that inhabit well-trodden grounds of genre fiction (superhero movies and zombie movies) with lead characters who have varying degrees of self-awareness of the circumstances they're stuck in and provide narration to the audience on circumstances that are playing out on-screen. Like the two Deadpool movies, Zombieland is also funny, even moreso, in fact, than the pair of Deadpool movies Reese and Wernick would pen in the years to come.

The Political Farce In The Loop Doesn't Feel All Too Divorced From Reality

When you do topical comedy, there's always the chance that it may become dated years down the line and end up reading as incoherent to viewers years later. From 2009 specifically, I'm sure there are numerous sketches related to "balloon boy" and Jon And Kate Plus Eight that read like gibberish to 2018 viewers, hell, I'm still trying to figure out why we were all so obsessed with Jon And Kate Plus Eight! But then there's In The Loop, a political comedy from 2009 that was a critique of the war-driven politics of the 2000's but registers as plenty humorous in the modern age because it doesn't just rely on elements ripped from 2009 newspaper headlines. Peter Capaldi swearing profusely will always be funny, it's as timeless as anything in this universe!

The Informant! Show Matt Damon In Top Form But Steven Soderbergh Has Done Better

SPOILER ALERT 

Director Steven Soderbergh loves movies about criminals with some of his most famous works (namely, the trilogy of Ocean's Eleven movies or Out of Sight) exploring crooks in a light-hearted manner, while one of his most acclaimed dramas (Traffic) explores various avenues of criminal activity. His 2009 effort The Informant! falls in between these two groups of movies in terms of tone, there's a wry playfulness to this specific Soderbergh meditation on criminal activity, but it's also clearly supposed to be more contemplative about specific sociopolitical issues compared to his more jaunty explorations of law-breakers.

One of Sam Rockwell's Best Performances Emerges In Duncan Jones Debut Project Moon

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Tomorrow night, Sam Rockwell will almost certainly take home his very first Academy Award for his role in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a major victory for one of Hollywood's most entertaining yet oddly underappreciated character actor. For those who are looking at all the acclaim Rockwell has garnered in recent months and find themselves wanting to seek out other noteworthy performances from Mr. Rockwell, well, there's certainly plenty to choose from (he's a hoot in Galaxy Quest, for instance) but for my money, one of his very best dramatic turns came nearly a decade ago in the 2009 film Moon, which served as the directorial debut of Duncan Jones.

A Great Cast And Confident Directing Make The Brothers Bloom A Delight

The occasionally wacky humor of Star Wars: The Last Jedi was a surprise to many viewers of that space opera, but thinking on it, that sort of humor feels like trademark Rian Johnson, especially in regards to his 2009 feature The Brothers Bloom, which is chock full of stylized gags that feel heavily reminiscent of Monty Python or perhaps Wes Anderson. It takes a little while to get into the heavily ridiculous aesthetic of The Brothers Bloom, but taken as a whole, it's easy to see why Rian Johnson decided to go full-on silly since he's doing an extended homage to the caper subgenre with this project and that's a section of cinema that's well-known for its heightened tendencies.

Hop Aboard The Thrilling And Well-Crafted Tony Scott Feature The Taking Of Pelham 1 2 3

It starts out like any other normal day. The trains are whizzing by, they stop, people get on, other people get off. Walter Garber (Denzel Washington) shows up to his station as a Subway dispatcher as he helps all the various trains in the subway system of New York City run smoothly. Most days, they do just that. But today, something's gone wrong. The train Pelham 1 2 3 has stopped suddenly in the middle of the rails and nobody in charge of Pelham 1 2 3 with Garber over the established communication channels. Confusion ensues until a voice is heard speaking to Garber, with the voice belonging to a man who has taken control of the train with the help of some other gun-toting men.

Scares Are Minimal In The First Paranormal Activity, The One That Started It All

Though it may have been released in 2009, Paranormal Activity was actually filmed in 2006 (something reflected in on-screen text in the film itself), an entire decade ago and a year before the first iPhone was released. Imagine how much technology has changed in the years since then. Everyone's got a portable camera/computer/entertainment system residing in their pocket now and entire films (like Tangerine) are filmed on people's phones now. Analyzing how much technology has changed in the epoch since Paranormal Activity was filmed provides a lot more entertainment than the movie itself, which is just disposable horror fare at the end of the day.

A Profound Loss Guides The Remarkably Astonishing Film A Single Man

Loss is a universal emotion. There isn't a soul on this Earth who hasn't dealt with losing someone they cared for. Whether that someone was a parent, a lover, a pet, a friend, the sharp emotional pains stemming from their sudden absence in your life is something we all endure. And because so many go through the process of grief after losing someone near and dear to them, there are limitless ways to cope with a tragic loss. Some withdraw from the world, some mask their pain with an endless facade of smiles and chipperness. For George (Colin Firth), he's simply tried to go on with his life in as normal as fashion as possible after the sudden death of Jim (Matthew Goode) a man he's spent over a decade with.

There Are Four Avatar Sequels Coming, You Cannot Escape Them

Y'know what movie I like? Avatar. It's nowhere near a perfect movie (then again, what is?), but James Cameron certainly knows how to weave a visually pleasing world. There's also an earnest spirit to the film (it's less obsessed with being "dark" or "gritty" than it is embracing all the fun that comes with having your own space dragon to fly around) and Stephen Lang's General Quaritch is the perfect kind of over-the-top bad guy that this kind of movie needs. Yeah, all in all, a super enjoyable movie, totally easy to see why audiences got so enamored with it, especially since it was one of the first films to take full advantage of the positive aspects of Digital 3D and especially IMAX 3D.

Watchmen Review (Classic Write-Up)

Perhaps the greatest testament to how much of a pop culture phenomenon 300 was upon its initial 2007 release was that director Zack Snyder somehow got Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures to pony up $130 million for him to film an R-rated adaptation of one of the most beloved graphic novels of all time, Watchmen. This adaptation would have no A-list stars, tons of blue penis, graphic violence and would contain numerous monologues centered on weighty themes and concepts. Total crowd-pleaser right?

A Serious Man Review (Classic Write-Up)

In many of the films by The Coen Brothers, religion may play a role as one of many themes bouncing around in a certain plotline (such as in works like Hail, Caesar!, O Brother, Where Are Thou? or No Country For Old Men), but for their 2009 feature A Serious Man, religion comes forth as a primary player in the entire endeavor. Specifically, Judaism, the faith the directorial duo were raised in and the one in which our lead character, plays  a crucial role in the ballad of Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg), who confides in the religion for answers in his time of immense personal turmoil.