Comedy, Reviews, Eddie Harrison

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz star in Knight and Day

‘I’m the guy!’ smirks madcap assassin Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) to mousey June Havens (Cameron Diaz) as he kidnaps her at gunpoint from a Boston cafe. Sadly, on the evidence of James Mangold’s pumped-up spy thriller, Cruise has little to be so cocky about…

Get Him To The Greek

(15) 108min Russell Brand proved a big hit Stateside with his role as debauched pop-star Aldous Snow in Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall. For this spin-off, writer Segel and director Stoller use the tried-and-tested format…

MacGruber

(15) 98min After the deluge of unfocused Scary Movie/Date Movie parodies, green shoots of comedic recovery arrived in the form of last year’s witty blaxploitation spoof Black Dynamite and this revival of Saturday Night Live character MacGruber, an…

Extract

(15) 94min After his considerable small screen success with Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, it was clear that Mike Judge’s brand of caustic humour would, one day, enable him to make a great big-screen comedy. Judge’s fans believe he’s…

Old Dogs

(PG) 88min Having earned his rubbish comedy spurs on Walt Becker’s biker comedy Wild Hogs, John Travolta returns on a fool’s errand to partner Robin Williams in the same director’s follow-up Old Dogs. Via a series of arch plot contrivances that…

The Spy Next Door

(PG) 94min Some years after Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop and Vin Diesel in The Pacifier, Jackie Chan is the latest action star seeking to reinvent himself for a younger generation by portraying himself as a put-upon babysitter to bratty…

Perrier's Bounty

(15) 88min After an accidental shooting, charismatic Dublin gangster Michael McCrea (Cillian Murphy) goes on the run with his fey neighbour Brenda (Jodie Whittaker) and his coke-snorting, hypochondriac father Jim (Jim Broadbent). Together they have…

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

The jokes are out of gas

‘We’re not going to break the rules, we’re just going to bend them a little bit,’ announces ruthless car-salesman Don Ready (Jeremy Piven) as he and his crack team of ‘car mercenaries’ descend on the small Californian backwater of Temecula. Their…

Jennifer's Body

Winning horror comedy from Juno writer

When it was released in the US, the heterosexual males who ogled Megan Fox’s superstructure amid the heavy-metal chaos of two Transformers movies stayed away in droves from Jennifer’s Body, and it’s not hard to see why. Karyn Kusama’s visceral horror…

Julie and Julia

(12A) 123min Nora Ephron’s love affair with cookery initially surfaced in Mike Nichols’ 1986 comedy Heartburn, with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson starring in Ephron’s adaptation of her recipe book of the same name. Now Ephron and Streep have…

Funny People

More bittersweet comedy drama from Judd Apatow

In his third film as director, Judd Apatow (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up) spreads his wings with a bittersweet drama about the moral vacuity of celebrity. Adam Sandler plays George Simmons, a stand-up actor gone Hollywood, whose success in films…

Dance Flick

Few genres are as ripe for parody as the ‘I’m gonna dance my way out of the ghetto’ teen flick. Unfortunately, few comic talents have such a lamentably poor track record as the Wayans clan, creators of the vile Scary Movie series as well as White Chicks…

I Love You, Beth Cooper

John Hughes protégée Chris Columbus desecrates his mentor’s memory with the ill-timed release of this so-called ‘comedy’. Columbus once rode high with comedies Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire but his return to the teen genre in which he made his debut with…

Bandslam

Todd Graff's take on the teenage rock star dream

‘This is sick!’ says budding impresario Will Burton (Gaelan Connell) as he constructs a rock’n’roll band from his fellow high school students to take part in a battle-of-the-bands competition. The description ‘sick’, obviously meaning, that his band are…

The Ugly Truth

This by-the-numbers romantic comedy from director Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde, Monster in Law) pairs Katherine Heigl (Knocked Up, 27 Dresses) with alpha male Gerard Butler (300, PS I Love You) for a mindless run through of familiar genre…

The Proposal

A summer-smash in the US, Anne Fletcher’s follow-up to 27 Dresses is an old-fashioned odd-couple comedy which might appeal to admirers of the bland charisma of Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. In a plot that blatantly reworks the central idea of…

Fired Up!

Two sex-hungry high school jocks, who don’t fancy summer in a baking hot football training camp, decide to infiltrate the girls’ cheerleader training instead. It’s a blatantly misogynist notion for comedy, yet director Will Gluck pulls off a far better…

Sunshine Cleaning

Suicide may be painless, but in the world of black comedies, it’s the cleaning up afterwards that really hurts. After her hesitant Sylvia Plath biopic, director Christine Jeffs has latched on to a solid if unexceptional script by first-time writer Megan…

Miss March

COMEDY 20th Century Fox’s recent decision to abandon their Fox Atomic subsidiary stemmed from the failure of such ghastly teenage fare as The Rocker and Miss March. This leaden buddy comedy features Eugene (Zach Cregger) and Tucker (Trevor Moore…

Monsters VS Aliens

ANIMATION/SCI-FI As with the cheerfully vacuous Bolt, Monsters vs Aliens exemplifies the virtues of today’s 3D cinema – eye-popping to watch, leavened with self-referential humour that makes it easy to digest, but also playing things so painstakingly…

I Love You, Man

COMEDY The brotherly-love or ‘bro-mance’ genre that Judd Apatow developed and mainstreamed with Knocked Up and Superbad shows no signs of running low on testosterone, with I Love You, Man picking up where last year’s equally acerbic Role Models left…

Bottle Shock

COMEDY/DRAMA After the pleasing sideswipes featured in Alexander Payne’s Sideways, the comic possibilities of wine-snobbery are placed firmly at the centre of Randall Miller’s Bottle Shock, which purports to tell the true story behind the sudden rise…

Diminished Capacity

COMEDY With his feature debut, actor-turned-director Terry Kinney has gathered several generations of comic talent (without any good reason) to make a well meaning but painfully obvious life-lessons comedy. Matthew Broderick and Alan Alda star as a…

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

COMEDY The latest delivery from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production line, Paul Blart: Mall Cop features Sandler’s regular cohort Kevin James as a big-hearted, small-time lawman. Blart takes on a gang of acrobatic skateboarding thieves after a…

Confessions of a Shopaholic

Meet Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher), an aspiring journalist who runs up a hefty seven-figure credit card bill while pursuing her dream in New York. With the pesky IRS on her trail, she tries to kick her plastic habit without losing the respect of her…