Promising comic premise -- a swinging single San Diego newsman in the Seventies, and his personal attraction but professional resistance to a female colleague -- subjected to a strategy of anything-for-a-laugh: wild exaggeration, improbability, impossibility, fantasy, absurdity, ribaldry, animal abuse, cartoon interlude, musical numbers, celebrity cameos (Vince Vaughn, Jack Black, …
Twisted, tangled, snarled zaniness around a behind-the-times video store, facing foreclosure, in Passaic, N.J. An habitué of the place (Jack Black, at his most demonically possessed) unwittingly erases the entire stock after he becomes “magnetized” while attempting to sabotage the next-door power plant: “I didn’t sabotage the power plant; the …
Jack Black is the life-based but rather cartoonish Bernie, a sweet, dapper, fussy (read: gay) undertaker in Carthage, Texas. He is an angel disguised as an oddball, loved by all, even (for a time) the mean widow Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine). Director Richard Linklater provides a cozy jacket of style, is …
Nature tourism lamely disguised as comedy. Steve Martin, Owen Wilson, and Jack Black play fanatical birders competing to see as many feathery critters as possible in one year. They run around the country, making cute faces between bird views, and classy old actors (Anjelica Huston, Brian Dennehy, Dianne Wiest) are …
The definitive documentary on Ronnie James Dio transcends the standard rock documentary. Dio rises from ’50s doo-wop crooner to his early rock days in Elf and Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, to replacing Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath, and finally cementing his rockstar status with his own band, DIO. The first documentary …
Yes, it means what you think it means — but also more! Jack Black commits, wholeheartedly and straightfacedly, to the part of Dan Landsman, a Midwestern guy with an admiring boss, a great wife, and a good kid who is nevertheless obsessed with having some bros. Guy friends, like the …
Sizes up the strain on a friendship after the "dreamer" of the two invents an aerosol spray to make dogshit disappear. The invention itself -- Vapoorize -- gives a fair indication of the level of inventiveness in the movie (license plates: "CACA KING" and "POO CZAR"), and further proof that …
Call it the Alien/Aliens effect. One alien on a single spaceship is a horror story, but a thousand aliens in a colony is almost necessarily an action pic. So while any single monster from R. L. Stine's series of young adult horror novels may have been enough to make kids …
You can, with CGI effects and scale models, make Jack Black far bigger than everyone else and even have him pee on Blenheim Palace. But he remains a bloated teddy bear, a hip doof from School of Rock doing silly stuff at the expense of Jonathan Swift’s classic social satire. …
Cool-cat comedy centered around the owner of a used-records store called Championship Vinyl, his love life past and present, and his two nerdy clerks. The arcane shoptalk will perhaps be of interest to those who can decipher it, but it makes no noticeable effort to engage the outsider. The musical …
Writer and director Nancy Meyers arranges an Internet home exchange, for two weeks at Christmastime, between two wounded women desperate to get away: a London newspaper columnist (Kate Winslet) with a cozy cottage in Surrey, and a Hollywood trailer-cutter (Cameron Diaz) with a modernist mansion in Beverly Hills. The agreed-upon …
An orphaned boy named Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro) is placed in the custody of a Warlock uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) who quickly proceeds to groom the lad in the art of sorcery. With the premise precariously set in place, director Eli Roth relinquishes control to the production designer and special …
An orphaned boy named Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro) is placed in the custody of a Warlock uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) who quickly proceeds to groom the lad in the art of sorcery. With the premise precariously set in place, director Eli Roth relinquishes control to the production designer and special …
An orphaned boy named Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro) is placed in the custody of a Warlock uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) who quickly proceeds to groom the lad in the art of sorcery. With the premise precariously set in place, director Eli Roth relinquishes control to the production designer and special …
Spiritual and geographical journey of a junkie nicknamed Fuckhead, in the early 1970s (more progress geographically, perhaps, than spiritually). The incidents, lifted from a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories by Denis Johnson, have something of the talkative drug addict's boring desire to astonish and proneness to embellish. But the one …