An ostensibly romantic comedy throwing together Mr. Uptight (Ben Stiller) and Ms. Free Spirit (Jennifer Aniston), written and directed by John Hamburg, whose mind is quite literally in the toilet. The fart at the men's-room urinals is just a warm-up for the illustrated definition of "shart," an intended fart that …
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, …
And the gray area of white bleeding into black, the particular area of interest of the filmmaker-within-the-film (Brooke Shields), who follows around, with a camcorder the size of a paperback, a group of hip-hop hangers-on from Manhattan's Upper East Side: "I have a vision," she proclaims. "I want it to …
Why all the whining? Put another way, why does Brad (Ben Stiller) spend more time counting other people’s successes than he does taking stock in his own good fortune? Beset by the feeling that his college chums (Michael Sheen, Jermaine Clement, Luke Wilson) are all passing him by, his anxieties …
Deprived of parenting as a lad, reared by television ("I learned the facts of life from watching The Facts of Life!"), he's now a lisping cable installer with a flypaper personality: he wants to be best friends with his new customer. Despite some side trips -- Court TV, "theme" restaurants, …
Tasteless, touchless, but strongly smelling sports comedy, wherein Average Joe's little mom-and-pop gymnasium and its corporate neighbor Globo Gym ("We're better than you and we know it") are on a collision course for the $50,000 prize money in a Vegas dodgeball tournament. The motto of the underdog is the motto …
By increasingly foul means, a yuppie couple attempt to root out their upstairs Neighbor-from-Hell, a wizened Irishwoman with a deceptive grandmotherly twinkle. Director Danny DeVito has been toiling too long in the same black-comic mine (Throw Momma from the Train, The War of the Roses, Matilda, Death to Smoochy), and …
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 …
This is perhaps, just barely, recognizable as the work of the Spanking the Monkey man, if not for its gerundial title, then for its morbid fascination with family dysfunction. David O. Russell's move into or toward the commercial mainstream, though, has meant an accelerated, assembly-line manufacture of jokes, and damn …
Noah Baumbach, writer and director of The Squid and the Whale, features Ben Stiller as a kind of middle-aged-crazy Jesse Eisenberg (nose up, shoulders forward), a self-absorbed self-conscious ineffectual intellectual, who, upon his release from a mental hospital, wants to concentrate on “really trying to do nothing for a while,” …
The Farrelly brothers' remake, thirty-five years after the original, serves as a handy gauge of the decline of Western civilization. Apart from their substitution of bodily-function gags for social observation and verbal wit, the well-cast and well-constructed comedy about the man who strays on his honeymoon (as directed by Elaine …
Edward Norton, making his directorial debut, shares screen time with Ben Stiller in the roles of boyhood pals who've gone separate but parallel ways -- priest and rabbi -- as hip, happening, new, now, popular, popularizing, palm-slapping types of clergymen. In short, "the God Squad." Then the Third Musketeer from …
Four escapees from the Central Park Zoo -- a lion, a zebra, a hippo, and a giraffe -- are packed up and, in fulfillment of the tenth-birthday wish of the zebra, shipped back to the wild: "the live-in-a-mudhut-wipe-yourself-with-a-leaf wild," in the less sanguine view of the lion. ("They are just …
The light-in-the-loafers cartoon lion, a self-professed “protégé of Fosse and Robbins,” accidentally finds his way, along with the zebra, the hippo, and the giraffe, back to his ancestral home, where he proves to be an embarrassment to his kingly father: “Lions don’t dance.” The not so subtle pleas for diversity …