Tag: Alan Alda

Wanderlust

“Wanderlust” is a silly mess of a comedy in the way it tries to mock a hippie lifestyle while still grooving off their good vibrations.

David Wain’s film follows New York married couple George and Linda (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) to the Elysium commune in Georgia after they lose their jobs and apartment, a place where every hippie cliché ever imagined is piled on to a disturbing degree.

George and Linda are the only two characters not on an extreme end of the spectrum, be it the free loving, voodoo chanting, nature embracing and technologically challenged Seth (Justin Theroux) or George’s aggressive, douchebag brother Rick (Ken Marino).

Rudd is amusing in small-scale moments when the script allows one of the normals to be funny, namely because he will say yes to any bit, no matter how ridiculous.

But the movie’s screwball nature to top itself can be overwhelming and just plain gross. Not even an actor as likeable as Rudd can make carrying a newborn’s placenta around funny.

2 stars

Tower Heist

 

It’s probably not a mistake to feel somewhat robbed after “Tower Heist.”

Brett Ratner’s movie is too rigid and bland to be a good comedy and too goofy and tame to be truly thrilling.

We learn a lot of mundane details about the inner workings of a New York building that is essentially Trump Tower, including security policies, elevator codes and its many tenants.

Why we have to know so much about a building of all things is frustrating when “Tower Heist” refuses to develop its characters or even begin to get comically creative. Continue reading “Tower Heist”

Rapid Response: Crimes and Misdemeanors

Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” is one of his finest, yet darkest comedies he’s made. It brings up themes of human morality and meaning in life by dabbling in adultery and other sin, in this case a murder/assassination, which are familiar traits that can be found in one of his other masterpieces, “Hannah and Her Sisters.”

Martin Landau plays a respected ophthalmologist who has been seeing another woman for two years behind his wife’s back. She can’t live without him and wants to reveal herself to his wife, and he can’t deal with her neuroses and threats, so he has his brother, a sketchy con artist, arrange to have her killed.

These scenes are played strictly seriously, and Landau is excellent (he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1989) as he reflects on the religious ideas he sacrificed and forgot, only to have them now gnaw on his conscience as he questions how God judges sinners and what that has to do with his life on Earth in the present. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Crimes and Misdemeanors”