Category Archive: Comedy Film
Eternity (dir. David Freyne – 2025)
This TVC reviewer avoids weepies because they are for weak girls and, if she does accidentally watch one, will sit with defiantly non-running mascara whilst yawning at the tear-jerky bits. Unfortunately, one or two weepies have snuck their way through her defences (when Beth dies in Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 Little Women) and when Eddie Scissorhands goes up his mountain to make snow. What is it about Winona Ryder?). Films about the afterlife and memory can be strangely compelling (Heaven Can Wait, The Lovely Bones, Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) or ghastly like the schmaltz we haven’t watched, so…
Continue Reading →Bodies
Nobody (directed by Ilya Naishuller, 2021); Nobody 2 (directed by Timothy Tjahjanto, 2025) Bodies. Many, many bodies, and virtually none of them in a ‘good way’. This brace of actioners is great fun, and whilst made with obvious care and love, take themselves not at all seriously. Much of the entertainment comes, of course from Bob Odenkirk (as Hutch, aka ‘Nobody’), a humble bookkeeper stuck in a rut, whose inner demons (previously he was an “auditor”, i.e., the very last person you wish to ever see) are unleashed by a semi-violent home invasion, which leads to numerous fights (where the…
Continue Reading →This Is Spinal Tap
(Directed by Rob Reiner, 1984) (Special Screening at the Mercury Theatre featuring a Q & A with Harry Shearer, Adelaide Guitar Festival, 22 July 2022). Spinal Tap are the blond rock god David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean, who you already know well from Better Call Saul and other offerings), the bass player Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), who longs for St. Hubbins with big wet spaniel eyes. When Nigel learns that David’s girlfriend Jeanine Pettibone (June Chadwick aping Yoko Ono) is flying over from England to join the tour, his heart sinks. His crush on David…
Continue Reading →Don’t Look Up
(Directed by Adam McKay) (2021, Netflix) It’s a mongoloid meld of Melancholia with some David Attenborough tableaux and the arrayed stupidity of Burn After Reading. Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a comet. Her enthusiasm, and that of her colleague, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo Di Caprio), wane when they figure out it will collide with the Earth in about six months. These boffins are babes in the wood, and when a NASA man (Rob Morgan) arranges for them to brief the White House, their deep concerns are brushed off by a distracted and chaotic administration. So the scientists do the next…
Continue Reading →Two For the Road
(Directed by Stanley Donen) (1967) Boy meets girl; boy detests girl (“If there’s one thing I really despise, it’s an indispensable woman”); boy changes his mind; they fall in love and then spoil it all by getting married. Then they compound the error by having a kid (breaking Philip Larkin’s dictum in This Be the Verse). Two For the Road, for all its self-conscious charm, relentless male chauvinism and fey hipness, is something of a breakthrough – a love story that deconstructs what happens when the love fades, or more accurately, transforms from its first flushes into a more mature…
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