Here’s a question. What’s Barbra Streisand’s worst movie? Or Dustin Hoffman’s? Or Robert De Niro’s? How about Harvey Keitel? It’s a trick question. Here’s a hint: It’s just one movie. Another hint? It’s a sequel and it’s in theatres right now. Enough hints. It’s “Little Fockers,” the third in a series of movies about a male nurse named Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) and his overly suspicious father-in-law (De Niro).
In this outing Greg, now moonlighting as a pharmaceutical salesman, must prove to Jack (De Niro) that he isn’t fooling around on Pam (Teri Polo) and is worthy to be the patriarch or Godfokker of the whole family.
“Little Fockers” is an interesting study in what passes for a successful comedy franchise these days. Its producers must be hoping that familiar faces and situations will equal laughs and big box office. They’re probably half right. The Focker mix likely will garner big returns at the box office, but the laughs aren’t there. Three movies in the ideas seem to have run out. Instead of the freshness of the first movie, we’re treated warmed over jokes, innuendo, a series of misunderstandings and the only enema-flirtation scene to ever appear in a Streisand movie. There is the odd laugh and a few giggle worthy scenes but they are few and far between.
It’s ram packed with big stars—even if one of them, Harvey Keitel, seems to only be there to add some heft to the marquee—but to be fair no one is doing their best work. Jessica Alba seems to be having fun playing a wild-child pharmaceutical rep but most of the other performances have a been-there-done-that feel, as if the movie was strung together from outtakes from the past Focker films. We also seem to have reached the self parody stage of De Niro’s career. Please Robert, if there is a fourth movie, no more Godfokker jokes!
“Little Fockers” is proof positive of the sequel law of diminishing returns. It might be time for these Fockers to Fock Off.
As summer blockbusters go, there is more invention and fun in the first twenty minutes of “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted” than in all of “Battleship” and “Men in Black 3” combined.
As the movie opens Alex the lion (voiced by Ben Stiller), zebra Marty (Chris Rock), giraffe Melman (David Schwimmer) and hippo Gloria (Jada Pinkett Smith) are still stranded in the African savannah with dreams of returning to their New York home. Unfortunately their plane has been hijacked by some shady penguins, who are whooping it up on the French Rivera. The menagerie makes their way to Monte Carlo with an eye toward getting their plane back and heading home. There they attract the attention of Capt. Chantal Dubois (Frances McDormand) a psychotic animal-control officer determined to add Alex’s head to her trophy wall.
To escape from her grip they join an America-bound circus featuring jaguar Gia (Jessica Chastain) sea lion Stefano (Martin Short) and Siberian tiger Vitaly (Bryan Cranston). The animal performers have seen better days, and while they keep Alex and friends safe (for the time being) from the clutches of Dubois, some changes will have to be made if this circus will be able to cut it in America.
“Madagascar” series has ever been my favorite animated franchise. I found the first two films pleasant enough, but not memorable—with the exception of the wisecracking penguins. They are bright, colorful films with good messages but they didn’t have the oomph of Pixar, or even other Dreamworks animations like “How to Train Your Dragon.”
Until now.
The addition of writer Noah “Squid and the Whale” Baumbach has brought with it a sensibility and humor missing from the other films. It’s rare that a franchise improves as it hits its third installment, but “Madagascar” has.
The new film is funny—it’s worth the price of admission to hear Chris Rock’s Polka Dot Afro Circus song—surreal and literally bursts off the screen in an explosion of neon colored 3-D. It’s frenetic, but imaginative with gags hidden throughout and several show-stopping action and musical sequences.
The penguins still steal the show, but this time around the script and look of the film give them a run for their money.
You had to see this one coming. Any time a movie grosses 500 million dollars a sequel can’t be far behind. So from the same company that brought us Shrek 2 and 3 and the upcoming Shrek 4-D comes Madagascar Escape 2 Africa which sees all the original Central Park Zoo creatures—Alex the Lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the Giraffe (David Schwimmer), Gloria the Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) and, of course, the penguins take another road trip.
As we rejoin the New York-raised zoo animals they are still marooned in Madagascar. When the penguins find an old plane it looks like they might be able to travel back home to America. Unfortunately the plane crash lands far short of their target. This time they end up stranded in Africa, “our ancestral crib,” as Marty the Zebra calls it. They soon discover that despite long lost relatives and some unexpected romance that the African jungle is a much different place than the concrete jungle they’re used to.
Madagascar Escape 2 Africa isn’t a bad kid’s flick, but it suffers from the usual symptoms of sequelitis. It isn’t quite as funny as the first movie, the story feels padded, even at a compact 89 minutes and the situation seems a bit too familiar. Not that any of that will matter to the little ones once they’ve seen the fun supporting cast.
The leads, save for Chris Rock’s hyperactive zebra, are rather bland, so luckily they are supported by lively and colorful secondary characters. Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat fame plays King Julien, the dramatic lemur monarch. His slapstick antics should amuse kids but his sly double entendres are aimed directly at adults. He has a funny, and possibly slightly inappropriate, line about almonds and a silver platter that’ll fly high over the tot’s heads but wake up their parents. In fact, the movie is peppered with lines referring to Darwinism and union trade talks that are clearly calculated to widen the movie’s appeal to all members of the family.
Kids will like the lemur, but they will love the penguins. Penguins are the new dogs. Not since the heyday of dog movies like Benji and Lassie has one species won over the hearts of so many. March of the Penguins was a left field hit a few years ago and an R-rated parody of that movie, Farce of the Penguins, soon followed. The little furry birds have also appeared in Happy Feet, the 3-2-1 Penguins series and even something called Penguins Behind Bars. Everybody loves penguins, and in Madagascar Escape 2 Africa their gangster shenanigans are the highlight of the movie. Next—a third Madagascar movie is already in the works—hopefully Dreamworks will pull back on the bland Alex the Lion character and focus on the penguins.
Madagascar Escape 2 Africa is a family friendly movie with slapstick for the kids and slightly more sophisticated jokes for the adults.
Night at the Museum was a mammoth hit in theatres in December 2006, ruling the box office for three weeks, taking in almost $200,000,000 in the process. Starring Ben Stiller as an unemployed man who takes a job as a night watchman at a natural history museum only to discover that the displays come alive when the sun goes down, the movie mixed Jumanji with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the usual Stiller shtick. Remarkable it was not, but no chance to make wheel barrels of cash ever goes unanswered in Hollywood, so this weekend Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, a bigger, louder riff on the first film, opens at a theatre near you.
As the movie begins the Museum of Natural History has been closed for renovations with many of its older exhibits being sent to deep storage in the federal archives under the Smithsonian in Washington. When Larry Daley (Ben Stiller), the former heroic Natural History night watchman, now a workaholic inventor and infomercial star (he’s the Sham Wow guy without the hooker scandal), returns to find out that his beloved “shabby stuffed monkeys and ratty displays” are being discarded in favor of high-tech interactive exhibits he vows to do something about it. Breaking into the Smithsonian’s storage area he clashes with the evil Pharaoh Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria), and his band of despicable henchmen (Al Capone and Ivan the Terrible) who plan on using a golden tablet to awaken an ancient army and take over the world. Enlisting aviatrix Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams) to maintain order, Larry tries to unravel the mystery of the tablet before it is too late.
Night at the Museum redux is a carbon copy of its successful predecessor. The location has changed, but little else is different. The screenwriters couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a new style villain, so we have another Pharaoh, this time the comically evil brother of the first movies’ Ahkmenrah.
Luckily for us, though, the wicked sibling is played with verve and a great Boris Karloff accent, by Hank Azaria, who is one of the high points in these otherwise very familiar proceedings. He gives the weak script—it’s more a premise than a story—some life, hamming it up and earning most of the film’s laughs.
Other than that there’s plenty of kid friendly slapstick and computer generated thrills, but no amount of CGI could make up for the lack of spark between leads Ben Stiller and Amy Adams.
He’s in family friendly mode here—all the usual square-peg-in-a-round-hole edge that informs his best work is gone—and she is simply doing a sassy dame impression, à la Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey. Together they romp through the museum, jumping in and out of classic photographs and battling the great warriors of history, but it all feels a bit been there, done that.
Night at the Museum was a mammoth hit at the theatres this past December. It ruled the box office for three weeks and took in almost $200,000,000. Not bad for a movie that co-stars Andy Rooney and Dick Van Dyke, two actors more suited to the dinner theatre circuit than blockbuster movies.
Starring Ben Stiller as an unemployed man who takes a job as a night watchman at a natural history museum, the movie mixes Jumanji with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the usual Stiller shtick. Alone in the cavernous building at night, with only the handwritten instructions left by the old watchmen (Rooney and Van Dyke, along with Bill Cobbs), he discovers the true meaning of the old phrase, “They only come out at night.” He is flabbergasted to learn that once the sun goes down and the museum closes, the exhibits come to life. Giant dinosaur skeletons roam the foyer, wax statues walk and talk, and a reanimated stuffed monkey tears up his precious instruction sheet, leaving him to deal with the nightly chaos on his own. Like Bill and Ted he is assisted by some figures from the past, in particular a wax statue of Teddy Roosevelt (Jumanji star Robin Williams) who spouts sage advice.
Night at the Museum has some amazing computer generated imagery, a few good gags, but fails to really set the imagination loose. Instead of concentrating on the story—the source material, a book by the same name by Milan Trenc, is only 32 pages long—director Shawn Levy fills the screen with pandemonium hoping that flashy computer tricks will mask the holes in the story.
Stiller does what Stiller does—slapstick with an amiable edge, but like they say, “You should never act with animals or kids.” In this case Stiller might want to add “Giant reanimated dinosaur bones” to that list. There’s too much going on and Stiller, along with the story gets lost in the mix.
Night at the Museum is a fanciful story that, in execution, isn’t as interesting as the idea.
Eddie Murphy’s journey from edgy comedian to beloved family entertainer has been rough trip. Kiddie comedies and daddy roles sidelined him for much of the last twenty years, and for every highpoint, like the Donkey character in “Shrek” there is a “Norbit.” For every “Dreamgirls,” there’s a “Haunted Mansion” or “Imagine That.” It’s been tough to be an Eddie Murphy fan, watching his trademarked acerbic comedy dulled by fat suits. Anyway, his transformation was never entirely convincing because Murphy always had too much edge to be Bill Cosby or even Steve Martin.
“Tower Heist,” his new film with Ben Stiller and an all-star ensemble cast, sees him turning to the style that made him famous in movies like “48 Hours” and “Beverly Hills Cop.” Question is, will audiences still care?
Directed by “Rush Hour’s” Brett Ratner, the movie has a ripped-from-the-headlines story. Allan Alda is Arthur Shaw, a Bernie Madoff character whose Ponzi scheme defrauded his clients out of millions of dollars. Among those burned by his scam were the employees of his luxury high rise. Having lost their pension plan the building’s manager Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) concocts a plan to break into Shaw’s apartment and steal his personal $20 million stash. When his posse of employees—Matthew Broderick, Casey Affleck, Michael Pena and Gabourey Sidibe—prove to be less than criminally adept Kovacs brings in an old friend and ex-con, Slide (Murphy) to run the operation.
It’s nice to see Eddie Murphy in a movie that allows him to drop his beloved family entertainer guise and bring back some of the bravado that we loved in movies like 48 Hours. It’s just too bad the movie feels like it was made thirty years ago. Despite its Bernie Madoff storyline it feels old fashioned.
For the most part it’s rescued by the chemistry of the cast who bring some much needed fun to this preposterous story.
Of the ensemble Michael Pena and Gabourey Sidibe are the standouts. Pena has great comic timing and perpetual dazed look on his face and Sidibe shows that she can do something other than the ennui of “Precious.”
Also interesting is watching Ben Stiller as the straight man to Murphy’s wisecracks. The movie definitely picks up when Murphy is on screen. Loved hearing Murphyisms like, “I will blow your face clean off your face!”
Despite the cast, however, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the actual robbery, despite a few twists here and there was completely unbelievable. I don’t mind suspending part of my disbelief but the sheer lunacy of the crime took me out of the movie.
In 2001 Ben Stiller sent up the fashion industry in a movie called Zoolander about moronic models. In his new film, Tropic Thunder, which he co-wrote, directs and stars in, he goes for something a little closer to home—his fellow SAG members.
Tropic Thunder, with its cigar smoking children drug lords, liberal use of the word “retard” and Robert Downy Jr’s blackface performance may be the most politically incorrect—and funniest—movie of the summer.
It’s the story of “the most expensive war movie NEVER made” featuring three pampered Hollywood superstars. There’s action star Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) the kind of dim bulb who describes the movies he stars in as “effects-driven-event-films”; Oscar magnet Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), a method actor (possibly based on Russell Crowe) who spouts nonsense like “I don’t read the script! The script reads me!” and comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a drug addled star best known for flatulence jokes. Two newcomers round out the fictional movie’s cast: multi-platinum hip-hop-star-turned-actor Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) and Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel).
The five are stranded in a Southeast Asian jungle by a director (Steve Coogan) determined to get realistic performances from his spoiled cast. Things get a little too realistic when the actors are targeted by a drug cartel that holds one of them for ransom. To get out of the jungle alive they have to come together and become more like the soldiers they are portraying.
For once you’ll want to arrive at the theatre in time to check out the trailers. Director Stiller introduces each character with a mock trailer from their most recent movie. These fake promos establish the movie’s silly tone starting with Stiller’s over-the-top Stallone-esque Scorcher clip, followed by the Eddie Murphyish The Fatties, where Jack Black plays multiple characters and a surprise cameo in the Downey Jr trailer promises that Tropic Thunder will take no prisoners in its ridicule of Tinsel Town.
After the trailers Stiller jumps right into the action. He opens the main story with a set piece from the fictional film so violently crazy it makes Jerry Bruckheimer look subtle. Blending in every cliché from every Chuck Norris war movie ever made Stiller shows how his pampered cast has gotten the film “one month behind schedule after only five days of shooting.” As the fictional story begins to echo the real life trials and tribulations of the legendary Apocalypse Now shoot, the lampooning of Hollywood broadens to include a grocery list of show business excesses. The movie business is so ripe for parody it’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more often.
Stiller aims his jaundiced eye at everyone in front of and behind the camera. From actors, portrayed as needy, coddled masses of insecurity to managers more obsessed with a contract rider that promises their client TiVo than the safety of the actor, no one is safe.
Stiller and Black (who brings notes of John Belushi and Chris Farley to the role) hand in good, solidly entertaining comedic performances, but it is Robert Downey Jr who steals the show. As Kirk Lazarus, an extreme method actor who changed his skin color to play an African American soldier, he creates a portrait of an artiste who is just an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the people he plays. It’s as effective a comment on earnest actors who take themselves a bit too seriously as it is hilarious. Highlights of Downey’s performance include a completely offensive, but screamingly funny breakdown of Speedman’s role in a movie called Simple Jack.
Tropic Thunder is an effective parody of Hollywood made by insiders—including Tom Cruise in a cameo that proves he may have a sense of humor after all—who understand how truly silly and confounding celebrity culture has become.
This weekend a movie called The Watch is opening in theatres. The Ben Stiller comedy was originally called Neighborhood Watch but the February, 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch coordinator in Florida led to the change.
In a statement, 20th Century Fox said, “As the subject matter of this alien invasion comedy bears no relation whatsoever to the recent tragic events in Florida, the studio altered the title to avoid any accidental or unintended misimpression that it might.”
The sad incident that prompted the name change was unusual, but title tweaking is commonplace in Hollywood.
Sometimes moniker modification happens for practical reasons.
In the early stages of development, American Pie was known as Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made For Under $10 Million That Your Reader Will Love But The Executive Will Hate. That unwieldy name got the attention of Universal Studios who changed it to East Great Falls High and then Comfort Food before settling on American Pie.
The Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night was also considered too long a name and changed to Saturday Night Fever, lifted from the Bee Gees song Night Fever.
A Roy Orbison song triggered the title of one of Julia Roberts’s most famous movies.
Pretty Women went into production under the name 3,000, the amount Julia’s working girl was paid for the night, but research showed audiences thought it sounded like the title of a sci-fi flick. Director Garry Marshal settled on the Oribson classic after listening to dozens of hit songs for inspiration.
Occasionally titles are changed to avoid confusion with other projects. Goodfellas was called Wiseguy but changed so as not be mistaken for the Ken Wahl television series. The Real World was the working title for Reality Bites, but was altered when MTV began airing a reality show of the same name.
One of the most famous James Bond titles was improved by a typo.
The story of a villain who creates the next day’s headlines and then causes them to come true was called Tomorrow Never Lies, but when a marketing executive mistakenly typed Tomorrow Never Dies in a memo the mistake was deemed more catchy and commercial.
Finally, would you see a movie called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Marketers didn’t think so and called it Blade Runner instead.
How about The Last First Kiss? That one became the Will Smith movie Hitch.
When people talk about chemistry in movies most often they refer to the sexual sparks that fly — or not — between the leading man and woman, but it’s just as important between actors who aren’t necessarily going to fall into bed clinched in a mad embrace.
That connection — as elusive and indefinable as it may be — is just as important to comic actors as jokes or pratfalls. Laurel and Hardy had it. So did Abbot and Costello. And so do Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, who team up for a third time in this weekend’s Dinner for Schmucks. Here are some other droll duos:
Matthau and Lemmon
Jack Lemmon called Walter Matthau the “best actor I’ve ever worked with.” Playing off the differences in their personalities and appearances they made nine films together, some classic — The Odd Couple — some not — Grumpier Old Men — but whatever the movie, they had an ease about them that couldn’t be faked.
Stiller and Wilson
In the early aughts it seemed like you couldn’t have one without the other. Described as “the yin and yang of Hollywood A-listers” Ben Stiller — dark and edgy — and Owen Wilson — laconic and expressive — made four films together in four years — Meet the Parents, Zoolander, Starsky & Hutch and the Royal Tenenbaums — and say that even if the film work dried up they would still find a way to work together.
Pryor and Wilder
Roger Ebert said Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder “make a good team, Wilder with what he calls his ‘low-key high energy,’ Pryor with his apparent ability to con anybody out of anything.” The pair was magic on screen but apparently didn’t always see eye to eye off screen.
