TheRetroCritic

At this point The Coen Brothers could pretty much do anything and I'd zombie my way to the cinema without thinking twice about it. With Gambit , a remake of sorts, it looked like they might have written another farce in the vein of The Ladykillers , a film which I've always felt was wrongly underrated. Alas, they aren't on directing duty this time... We follow Colin Firth's art curator as he hires Cameron Diaz's rodeo queen to help him pull off an elaborate heist involving a rare Monet painting. The goal being to piss off Alan Rickman's odious art collector and make quite a few bucks in the process. The film is going for a 60's-style screwball comedy vibe and with a strong cast like this one and a script by the Coens, you'd expect nothing less than a sharp, fun, clever little flick. Sadly, whatever wit we found in the likes of Fargo and whatever cartoonish shenanigans we found in The Ladykillers are nowhere to be seen in Gambit. Sure the film o

It's crazy to think that True Blood came out the same year as Twilight . It's just nuts. I mean, Twilight is the bad Disney movie take on vampire lore! True Blood is just... Good. The show sees that modernized Twilightness and gives it a very welcome, and very clever, tongue-in-cheek anything-goes rock-n-roll attitude combined with an effortless Near Dark cool you certainly haven't seen in a while when it comes to vamp flicks/series. The first season takes a familiar route with random murders being committed by a mysterious killer, typical TV plot ( Twin Peaks , anyone?), the whole thing being a whodunit that just happens to also be about vampires and a whole hidden world humans have no idea about. The show is set in a time where humans and vampires have learned to live side by side with vampires settling on a blood substitute, a drink conveniently called "Tru Blood", but obviously unspoken tensions between both still exist. As the season goes on, wh

Back in the mid 90's, Jim Carrey redefined slapstick comedy with his own brand of cartoonish goofiness. Then in the mid 00's, we were given Carrey-free outings such as Dumb and Dumberer , Ace Ventura Jr (shudder) and Son of the Mask, mainly rubbish sequels aimed at the poor nostalgic fools suffering withdrawal symptoms from the old JC days. Jamie Kennedy (star of Dr Dolittle 2 and Malibu's Most Wanted ) takes on the Jim Carrey everyman role and Alan Cumming is thrown in because...one annoying dude making faces at the camera is never really enough. Hence why the Ernest movies were always so underwhelming (sarcasm). Oh and there's Bob Hoskins voicing Odin in an extended, pointless cameo, a CGI baby, a CGI dog and a CGI everything else. Comparing Son of the Mask with the original The Mask would probably take all day and the conclusion would be pretty anti-climactic. Lets just look at what this sequel does wrong, for starters. After a promising opening s