I can’t think of a film more rife with product placement than TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY. Yet, this backhanded homage NASCAR, not to mention every sports film cliché ever devised, requires nothing less to make one of its many satirical points. Hence the eponymous Ricky doesn’t just sport the name of a… 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 »
CYRUS
A man, a woman, her son. It’s a situation of jealous hostility explored many times, but never more honestly, more painfully, or with bigger laughs than in Jay and Mark Duplass CYRUS. Made with an improvisational style that perfectly evokes the awkward immediacy of three people working through a new relationship that changes all their… Read More »
WRECK-IT RALPH
WRECK-IT RALPH may be set in the world of video games, but its conceit is set firmly in the most classic of paradigms, the Hero’s Journey. The mythic realms are made of bits and bytes, but the landscapes are just as magical, just as forbidding, and the tasks nothing short of Herculean. Not that any… Read More »