comedy

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (review)

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It’s probably very much funnier if you’re already a bit of an Anglophile, if you drink a lot of tea and long to attend a weekend house party in the 1930s at a manor in Sussex where you take the train down from London and someone meets you at a station that’s called a ‘halt’ and you don’t think murder is all that bad as long as the mystery of it is solved by a gentleman who has his manservant dress him for dinner. Cuz the Wallace & Gromit claymation toons have always been very much about both celebrating and sending up the peculiar British character, and you have to recognize it as a bit silly and a bit of an exaggeration that was never really real anyway but still completely love and embrace it nevertheless to really get the warmth and affection with which they — the Wallace & Gromit toons, that is — are offered for your entertainment.

The Dukes of Hazzard (review)

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‘I felt for a moment that the whole Duke family was a fraud, just a wall of lawlessness and motor-cars and moonshine, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness.’–E.M. Forster

Madagascar (review)

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‘Ahhhh! Nature! It’s all over me! Get it off!’ screams Melman the urban giraffe once he reaches the titular island in *Madagascar,* and New Yorkers will scream, too, with laughter, because we recognize ourselves in it, and everyone else will scream with laughter because they’ll think it’s making fun of our neuroses. But we like our neuroses just fine, thank you, and appreciate the tribute to them that *Madagascar* is.

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…

Sahara (review)

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Sometimes you want reality from The Movies, and sometimes you just want a big ol’ cartoony popcorny action adventure flick that’s exciting and makes you laugh and doesn’t require deep thinking but also isn’t so stupid that it makes you want to cry. And I got a huge kick out of this one. So there.

The Pacifier (review)

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So I’m sitting there in the dark with my little reporter notebook, diligently taking notes and formulating theses to support my contention that *The Pacifier* fails as a film, and I think it was during a burst of abject whimpering from the very famous critic sitting next to me, whom I guarantee you’ve seen on TV, that I suddenly and finally realized the futility of life, the ubiquitousness of pain, and the infinite emptiness of the universe that we puny humans on our puny planet in our puny corner of the cosmos cannot hope to ameliorate.

Diary of a Mad Black Woman (review)

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It’s kindness, at first, that leads you to suspect that someone is pulling our collective leg with *Diary of a Mad Black Woman,* because surely anything this jaw-droppingly awful must be a joke. Surely this is not being proffered with any genuine intention of it being seen as, well, an actual *movie,* with a plot and characters and scenes that connect in some reasonably logical sense. This *must* be a *MAD TV* sketch that went horribly wrong and escaped into the wild where it turned feral. Right?

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, The Year Without a Santa Claus, Rudolph’s Shiny New Year (review)

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Are they puppets? Are they some sort of clay-animated figures? Or are they some kind of beasts hitherto unknown and the likes of which the world has not seen again since? It doesn’t matter. The creatures Rankin & Bass brought to life in their animated holiday specials are so much a part of my psyche that I no more think about their nature than I pause to consider what constitutes the air I breathe.