black comedy

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (review)

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It’s something close to a stroke of genius that once-wunderkind screenwriter Shane Black sought out Robert Downey Jr. to star in his directorial debut. Not because Downey is so achingly sublime an actor and so funkily charismatic a screen presence that it near to makes you want to weep with despair at what brilliance we’ve missed from him over the years during which he wasn’t able to keep his shit together — though he certainly does give us one of the most deliciously shivery-great performances so far this year in *Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.*

Lord of War movie review: sympathy for the devil?

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Funny? Sure, *Lord of War* is funny. Funny like how you’re not sure whether that headline is from Reuters or The Onion. Funny like how Jon Stewart has to insist that what he’s about to tell you really happened and is not the invention of his team of political wagsters. Satirical? Sure, *Lord of War* is satirical. Satirical like the front page of *The New York Times* is satirical. Satirical like how, at the end of Andrew Niccol’s black comedy about a relatively small-time freelance arms dealer, he tells us that the biggest arms dealers in the world are the nations that are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Thumbsucker (review)

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Yup, this is the movie about the 17-year-old kid who still sucks his thumb. But don’t get too excited: there isn’t a lot of hot thumbsucking action or anything like that. Instead there’s a lot of adolescent angst, and the fact that it’s so achingly poignant and pointedly hilarious even if you’re way beyond high school makes me suspect that none of us ever really outgrow that teenage insecurity.

Entourage: The Complete First Season (review)

It’s very easy to puncture the self-importance of Hollywood types, and this HBO original series never fails to take that easy route, though it cloaks itself in a veneer of intelligence and insight. Vince Chase is the hottest thing to hit the movies since Johnny Depp, but Adrian Grenier (Hart’s War) fails to make us … more…

Near Dark, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Once Bitten, Blacula, Love at First Bite, and Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter (review)

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Of course, most respected anthropologists and biologists recognize that the New World Vampire, or *vampirus americanus*, differs greatly from the European species, or *vampirus continentalus*, but few films have recognized that the wide-open spaces of the U.S. produce a vastly altered creature than Europe’s dense urban spaces or intimate, if remote, medieval villages. But years before John Carpenter and the team of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez documented the vampires that dwell in the lonely stretches of the Americas, the criminally underappreciated ethnographer Kathryn Bigelow did it — spookily, grimly, hilariously, gloriously — with 1987’s *Near Dark,* in which a coven of nasty bloodsuckers roam the deserted American Southwest.

Saw (review)

I tell ya, if ‘reality TV’ was like this, I’d actually watch it. Let’s put some real bite into *Survivor.* If some unknown, untalented schmuck wants to be an instant celebrity *and* take home a million bucks, he should have to gnaw his own foot off and put a bullet in some other fame-whore first.