If there is one point THE BIG SHORT makes, it’s that just because something has never happened before, don’t make the mistake of thinking that it can’t. And that it takes someone with the comic sensibility of co-writer Adam McKay, a director known for THE OTHER GUYS and TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE LEGEND OF RICKY BOBBY, to… Read More »
STEP BROTHERS
Will Ferrell makes two kinds of silly comedies. There are the silly ones that are very funny, BLADES OF GLORY comes to mind, and then there are the silly ones that are wretched. KICKING AND SCREAMING comes to mind. STEP BROTHERS falls, alas, into the latter category. It is a one-joke film dreamed up by… Read More »
ANCHORMAN
ANCHORMAN is a film without a reason to exist. Sure, there are one or two moments that are genuinely funny, but when co-star Steve Carell steals the film out from under the higher-billed Christina Applegate, Paul Rudd, and star Will Ferrell, you know that theres a problem. Its a badly paced, unevenly written and ill-advised… Read More »
BEWITCHED
The funniest thing in BEWITCHED is an oddly touching attachment Will Ferrell’s character, Jack Wyatt, develops for a bottle of ketchup he picked up during an off-screen interlude in New Mexico. It’s barely mentioned, but there it is in a couple of scenes, clutched tenaciously the way a kid clutches his blankie in times of… Read More »
TALLADEGA NIGHTS — THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY
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 »
THE OTHER GUYS
A rambling script that never quite takes the aim it meant to at the rarified world of high finance proves little impediment to THE OTHER GUYS, an uneven comedy redeemed by the inspired casting of Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg as cops with nothing in common paired up on a career-making case. Forget the brief,… Read More »