TheRetroCritic

Here's a movie the trailers and posters really didn't help. Quite the opposite, in fact. The trailer passing the film off as some kind of Farrelly Brothers-style farce mostly involving Sam Rockwell laughing his ass off and the posters misrepresenting the psychopaths in question and giving us one of the worst taglines you'll ever hear: "They Won't Take Any Shih Tzu" Urgh... The film itself is actually closer to something like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang : a clever, sharply written, funny little dark comedy with an almost poetic look at its seemingly cartoonish characters. Colin Farrell is a depressed alcoholic writer trying to write a script for a film incidentally called "Seven Psychopaths", but he's stuck and needs to find several more psychos before he can finish it. His dog-kidnapping friend, played by a scene-stealing Sam Rockwell, is very keen to help, though, by ANY means necessary. By stealing a nutty Woody Harrelson's dog, this begin

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

What kind of a world do we live in where people are remaking Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and making them worse?! I mean, it's not like they're remaking the shitty ones either, Conan The Barbarian and Total Recall get remade when the likes of Red Sonja , Hercules In New York and Junior  still roam the Earth? I don't get it. But ok, fine. It's a Philip K. Dick short story so there's room for interpretation and I guess with all the new CG technology available to us, a slicker version of Paul Verhoeven's film could serve at least as decent popcorn entertainment. Or, if it's smart enough, as a kind-of-good companion piece to Minority Report . The trailers promised striking visuals, loads of action and a solid cast so chances were we'd get something half-decent if not quite as retrogasmic as the original film. Alas, what we got was a mixed bag to say the least. Technically, Total Recall is not a bad film. It follows the basic formula of the orig

Some films sound so good they shouldn't even exist. Shame it's a comedy, for a second there I thought this was gonna be dead serious. And therefore hilarious. Sadly, being built as a joke it might end up feeling a little too self-aware. Fuck it, I'm seeing it.

In most cases, comedies work depending on how good or clever their original premises are. And if that's true then Horrible Bosses should be amazing. Its not. And that it's not is something of a miracle. I mean, you've got Colin Farrell doing the mother of all Michael Keaton impressions with a combover, you've got a perfectly psychotic Kevin Spacey, a masturbating Jennifer Aniston...do you NEED more? Well good jokes would have been a plus. Sadly, Horrible Bosses is one of those movies where a bunch of funny dudes are left rambling in loud improv mode for hours as a golden set-up and potential hilarity go to waste. Sure there are some good lines here an there, amidst Charlie Day's relentless high-pitched screaming but a film like this, where the villains and the concept are the real stars, there really is no need to milk our main characters for on-the-spot lols. Try writing jokes next time, perhaps? I'm just sayin'... Admittedly, our bosses are stil

Colin Firth excels once more with this new, highly lauded effort and provides us with yet another pitch-perfect, smart performance. The film itself is confident, entertaining, well made and amusing if not quite as Earth-shattering as the critics claim. Then again it's Oscar season so why wouldn't they exaggerate a tad? Truthfully, there's not much to this film. Here we have the usual template for a character study: man has problem, gets someone to solve it, problem solved. The journey is very pleasant though and there are good performances all around, especially from Firth and Rush. The film only slightly falters when it attempts to be too cute, which happens a few times and isn't completely necessary as the situation highlighted here is whimsical enough without piling on the "lols". Not much more to say about that one really: it's good, a tad forgettable and of course overrated but good. It's never quite clear what the film is trying to conve