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Lincoln Spector’s guide to revival houses, independent theaters, film festivals, and everything cinema in the San Francisco Bay Area

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Entries Tagged as 'Comedy'

Get Smart

June 29th, 2008 · No Comments

Action Comedy

Written by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember
Directed by Peter Segal

I approach films based on old TV shows with suspicion, but the comic potential of Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart lowered my guard. But while Get Smart has its charms, it doesn’t fulfill that potential by a long shot.
Carell wisely doesn’t attempt to imitate [...]

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Tags: Comedy · Reviews

Postal

May 28th, 2008 · No Comments

Very broad satire

Written by Uwe Boll and Bryan C. Knight; based on the video game
Directed by Uwe Boll

Postal starts with a promising scene for an intentionally offensive comedy. Two terrorists in an airliner cockpit (presumably on 9/11) discuss how many virgins they’ll get in the afterlife. It turns out they’ve been given different numbers, and [...]

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Tags: Comedy · Reviews

Juno

December 23rd, 2007 · No Comments

Dramatic comedy

Written by Diablo Cody
Directed by Jason Reitman

The last thing I expected before the year ended was a comedy about unintentional pregnancy that was more truthful, more insightful, and just plain funnier than Knocked Up. I found one. You could go to movies for years and not find anything as good as Juno.
Ellen [...]

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Tags: Comedy · Reviews

Enchanted

November 22nd, 2007 · No Comments

Family-friendly fantasy comedy

Written by Bill Kelly
Directed by Kevin Lima

Howard Hawks’ famous criteria for a great film–three good scenes and no bad ones–almost applies to this family fantasy. It has more than three great scenes. But it also has a few that border on the edge of just plain bad, and some horrendously cast lead [...]

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Tags: Comedy · Reviews

Romance and Cigarettes

November 15th, 2007 · No Comments

Musical

Written and directed by John Turturro

To a radical non-smoker like myself–someone who finds the act of smoking about as sexy as Dick Cheney–the very term “Romance and Cigarettes” seems odd. That’s appropriate. John Turturro’s musical tragi-comedy about marriage and adultery is a very odd motion picture. The songs are familiar hits, and for the [...]

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Tags: Comedy · Music · Reviews

The Altered Charlie Chaplin Problem

November 5th, 2007 · No Comments

If people know anything about Charlie Chaplin, they know he made silent movies. And if they know anything about silent movies, they want said movies to be accompanied by live music. And yet the upcoming Chaplin series at the Pacific Film Archive, screening nearly all of his features and all of his later shorts, has [...]

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Tags: Comedy · Silent Films · Upcoming & Local

Dan in Real Life

November 3rd, 2007 · No Comments

Romantic comedy

Written by Pierce Gardner and Peter Hedges
Directed by Peter Hedges

Peter Hedges does something unusual here. He puts a major comedy star (Steve Carell) into a conventional comic plot (widower with adorable kids falls in love with his brother’s girlfriend), then plays it for real emotions without worrying much about laughs. Instead [...]

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Tags: Comedy · Reviews

Capra at the Stanford

October 16th, 2007 · No Comments

The Stanford’s new schedule is up, and the theme is Frank Capra. Of the 26 films they’ve announced, 18 are Capra’s.
Actually, they’re starting off Saturday night with a Billy Wilder double bill–Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot. Great movies, but obvious choices that any cinephile has seen countless times. Still, if it’s [...]

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Tags: Comedy · Silent Films · Upcoming & Local

Death From Laughter

October 7th, 2007 · No Comments

What makes British humor so damn funny? First we get Hot Fuzz, easily the funniest new comedy since, well, the equally British Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Now Death at a Funeral (directed by an American but still very stiff-upper-lip) passes them all on the laugh meter. To put it simply, [...]

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Tags: Comedy · Reviews