THE PROMOTION bills itself as a comedy, and elements of it do fall into that category, but at its core, this is an incisive and often merciless deconstruction of the American Dream. What writer/director Steve Conrad is getting at here, amid the absurdity rife in the general human condition, is the dark side of that… Read More »
HALL PASS
There is in the epilogue of HALL PASS a reminder of how gloriously demented a Farrelly Brothers movie used to be. Stephen Merchants hopelessly repressed character is offered the eponymous break from married life and imagines a series of interludes that grow more ridiculous and more dire with a geometric progression that ends in a… Read More »
BLADES OF GLORY
Having taken on Christmas and NASCAR, Will Ferrell takes the next logical step with a typically loopy take on the seamy underbelly of competitive figure skating. The only obstacle he had in his way was making a farce that would be the equal of the doings in the real world of competitive skating. Tonya Harding,… Read More »
WALK HARD — THE DEWEY COX STORY
What SPINAL TAP did to and for the heavy metal documentary, WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY does to and for the musical bio-pic. With a fearless sense of silliness and a savage swipe at the conventions of the genre, it forges a brilliant parody that is relentlessly funny and musically acute. There is not… Read More »