Swinging with the Finkels (review)
I love Martin Freeman, I really do, but what the hell is this shit?
romantic comedy
Bad Teacher (review)
A refreshing breath of just-so-wrongness in today’s movie milieu.
Something Borrowed (review)
The genre always assumes we’ll sympathize with ugly, soulless, personality-free women doing terrible things to the people they supposedly care about in the pursuit of a wedding, because what is more important than landing Mr. Right, right? But even grading on that rom-com curve, this is a disgusting movie.
Arthur (review)
It must have been a fine time, back in the early 80s, when Ronald Reagan was only just embarking on his diabolical plan to kill the American middle class: we could still find carefree, spoiled-rotten billionaires kooky and captivating…
Chalet Girl (review)
Behold! It’s a romantic comedy about a young woman who’s not looking for a boyfriend! A rom-com about a human female whose life is not consumed by the terror that she will be Alone Forever! A rom-com about a person of the not-male persuasion who has ambitions beyond the romantic!
Just Go with It (review)
Is it any wonder that is always seems to be Jennifer Aniston, America’s It Girl, who gets screwed by spectacularly selfish men who embody this new American ideal of “Do whatever you want, to whomever you want, no matter how evil, no matter how wrong, and you will not only escape punishment, you will be richly rewarded for your antisocial behavior”? Poor Aniston: She is the foreclosure crisis of the modern Hollywood romantic comedy.
A Little Bit of Heaven (review)
I had no idea colon cancer was so much fun! You get to lose weight… without even trying! You get to giggle your way through your first exam with your doctor: mostly cuz you’re ticklish, but also, he’s just really really cute, with a foreign accent and everything! It is so fantastic to be dying! Call it the Ass Cancer Life Plan. Every modern girl needs it.
I Love You Phillip Morris (review)
Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa graduate to writer-directors here, and give us a warmly human and hugely funny story that’s almost a sendup of both prison melodramas and hetero romantic comedies… yet is also a truly amorous and very satisfying tale about the extremes to which a man will go for love.
The Dilemma (review)
The real dilemma here is not: Should Vince Vaughn tell Kevin James that his — James’s — wife is cheating on him? It’s: How did Ron Howard get attached to this train wreck of a movie?
How Do You Know (review)
I’d really like to give writer-director James L. Brooks the benefit of the doubt here, because I think — as I usually don’t about asinine romantic comedies — that he means well. He simply doesn’t seem to realize that pathologically messed up characters are neither cute nor charming.
