I wasn’t sure renting “Brad’s Status” was a good idea. Throughout 2017, I’d seen the trailer probably a dozen times prior to watching other films (films I chose to watch instead of “Brad’s Status”). And the trailer kinda overshares: Somewhat estranged dad takes son on college visits, possibly heartwarming hijinks ensure, yada, yada, yada. Another forgettable Ben Stiller vehicle. Anyway, it turns out it’s even worse than I thought. In fact, there’s a scene in the middle of the film where a character basically tells Stiller to get over himself, thus bringing into question why the film exists at all.
Archives for posts with tag: Ben Stiller
So I’m sitting here, trying to gather my thoughts about “Don’t Think Twice” (2016), a look at the neurotic underbelly of comedy, and I’m a little intimidated, because it wasn’t a great movie, and my blog is sometimes an exercise in comedy writing, so I feel like my review needs to be better than the movie, and then I remember the scene where the improv comics are watching a TV skit and one of them says it’s “skillful, but not funny. It’s like when something sounds funny, but it isn’t funny,” and so I just decided to steal that bit.
Finally, toward the end of “Zoolander 2” (2016), I laughed out loud. I don’t know whether it was that particular gag or just the absurdity of the whole thing that finally got to me. This movie is stupid. It knows it’s stupid. It knows that you know it’s stupid. It wasn’t trying not to be stupid. In fact, because it knows that you know it’s stupid, it doubled down on stupid until stupid became absurd and I laughed out loud. Just like the original, there’s dopey male models and world-saving hijinks. Thank god Penelope Cruz has a sense of humor.
100wordreviews 