Due Date Movie Review: Missing the Mark

The road movie as a sub-genre is one of my favorites. The possibilities are great, with endless opportunities to mine the situation for both great comedy and high drama by putting two (or sometimes more) different personalities together on a journey can feel contrived when done poorly or expertly precise in the hands of a skilled writer and director. Todd Phillips, whose first movie was Road Trip, has returned to the road with two of the hottest ticket actors of the moment – Robert Downey, Jr. and Zach Galifianakis – for Due Date, a road movie modeled on John Hughes’ Plane, Trains and Automobiles with a man (Downey) trying to get home to his family while continually being tied to and hamstrung by an oafish buffoon (Galifianakis).

Dinner for Schmucks Movie Review: Never Go Full Retard

Paul Rudd meets Steve Carell with his mouse Last Supper

Dinner for Schmucks is what happens when middlebrow Hollywood talent take a perfectly respectable French comedy of errors and simmer it down to a lumpy reduction. Screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman, along with director Jay Roach (the Austin Powers trilogy), have altered Francis Veber’s The Dinner Game, a sophisticated and light farce, to a lowbrow ramshackle disaster comedy.