The Way, Way Back Movie Review

It’s probably bad enough to be a teenager dealing with the breakup of your parents’ marriage and then getting used to your mom’s new boyfriend, especially when he’s a raging ass. But on top of that, if you happen to be the most introverted and socially awkward teenage boy ever dreamed up by a screenwriter, then you might be the main character in The Way, Way Back, a new family-centered comedy drama from Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, the team that collaborated with Alexander Payne on The Descendants, another recent film that finesses the line between family drama and human satire in many of the same ways. In their first outing as directors, they exhibit some signs of growing pains, but otherwise have put together a fairly harmless and sweet film that was close to the best fun I’ve had at the movies this year.

Identity Thief Movie Review

It seems like a road trip comedy with Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman in which he’s been the victim of identity theft by her hands should be comedy gold – or something close to it anyway. McCarthy was the Oscar-nominated breakout star in Bridesmaids and Bateman has had one of the longest and most successful career renaissances in modern Hollywood history. His sarcastic straight man to her wild and boisterous comedy – both uncomfortably physical and tyrannically verbal – should be a great match. However, something was glaringly absent if I sat through most of Identity Thief without cracking a smile more than a handful of times.

John Cusack focus concludes with Review of Identity

It can be a really effective premise to confine your characters to a single location fort eh duration of the drama. The ancient Greeks were certainly aware of this as a narrative device. It can work best in a thriller and there are many that throw a bunch of people together for a single night and then dispatch them one by one.

James Mangold’s Identity starts eerily and mysteriously with newspaper clippings of a motel murder and voiceover recordings of a psychiatrist (Alfred Molina) talking to the alleged perpetrator. Then suddenly we’re thrust into a motel office as a man bursts in holding his bleeding wife shouting at the clerk to call an ambulance. Then in overlapping flashbacks we see the sequence of events, involving a young call girl, a limousine driver and an aging movie star, and a young boy who never speaks, that led to the accident. Because of a terrible rain storm that has washed out the road in both directions, all these characters and more wind up at the motel together.

Saving Silverman Movie Review

This review was written in Feburary 2001 and is presented here for the first time.

Some boy-meets-girl movies that aren't good are at least charming, or cute, or have characters that you want to root for and see come to a happy ending. Not so with Saving Silverman, a new comedy from director Dennis Dugan.

In this useless movie, we're supposed to feel something for three life-long buddies: Wayne (Steve Zahn), J. D. (Jack Black) and Darren (Jason Biggs). They became best buds in the fifth grade and remained together for...well according to the movie it seems to be that a mutual love for Neil Diamond is the only thing that has kept these three imbeciles together. Wayne and J. D. are basically dogs with human qualities - they slobber, drool, yell, make ugly bodily noises and have no idea how to tastefully interact with the opposite sex (or the same sex for that matter). Darren is a little more cultured, a little smarter, but he hasn't made much of his life.