Screen
On agents and agency
Melissa McCarthy is immensely talented, armed with a stunning repertoire of acting skills. So, of course, Hollywood sees her and claps its collective hands together, yelling “Make the funny lady fall down again!” Spy is writer/director (and frequent McCarthy ...
Still crazy after all these years
If 40 years of Saturday Night Live has taught us anything it is this: comedy is the sharpest form of criticism. Biting wit levied by the absurd becomes the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, and SNL has been spoon feeding America since 1975...
The kid in the bird
There is one thing you never do on Sesame Street and that is put someone down...
Quake and stakes
Let’s get this clear up front: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s character, Ray, in San Andreas is stealthily one of the most morally bankrupt, narcissistic assholes to ever be called a “hero.” He’s introduced as having saved more than 600 lives during his many years with ...
All refrain
Fact: It’s harder to make people laugh than cry. Fact: It’s harder to make someone laugh a second time than the first. Conclusion: Comedy sequels are the hardest sequels to make satisfying...
Falling with style
At the turn of the 20th century, vast majorities of the planet remained undiscovered for those restless ones who couldn’t possibly imagine a life spent behind a desk or in a factory. If they had the notion, and sufficient funding, there were mountains, deserts, ...
Make way for yesterday
The movies started small. So small that only one person at a time could watch them. The year was 1892, and Thomas Edison and his colleague William Kennedy Laurie Dickson discovered that if you spun sequential photographs in a small box, you could create the illusion ...
Men ruin everything
I don’t want to review Mad Max: Fury Road. I want to write love letters to it or draw it like one of those French girls. If I could find the right keystroke combination, this review would just be one long onomatopoetic recreation of the feral roar of approval ...
One is the loneliest number
Antonio Pane (Antonio Albanese) is a 48-year-old blue-collar journeyman who has spent his life bouncing from odd job to odd job. Some days he is a cook at a five-star restaurant, on others he could be cleaning out coffins or ripping apart cars at a junk yard. It’s ...
