Sherry Coben, Author at Movie SmackdownÂ®

About Sherry Coben

A comedy writer who created the 1980s hit show Kate & Allie, Sherry Coben â€” tired of malingering in development hell â€” has enjoyed coaching a high school ComedySportz team in SoCal, making a no-budget, high-ambition webisode series, and biting the hand that feeds her.

Toy Story 3 (2010) -vs- Toy Story 2 (1999)

June 18, 2010 Sherry Coben 10

Daring escapes and rescues are the linchpin of the series; the boundless imagination of children inspires the animators and screenwriters to expand the possibilities of play. The organic extension of pretend and our willingness to suspend any disbelief provide endless delights. As a child, I believed my toys shared a completely full and separate life that occurred in my absence or during my sleep. Perhaps the film’s true magic lies not in suspending disbelief but rather in the extending that simple and universal childhood belief that our toys are alive, that the toys we call our own love us back.
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Get Him To The Greek (2010) -vs- Almost Famous (2000)

June 6, 2010 Sherry Coben 6

The world is getting worse. I realize that my perception is colored by my advancing age and my own inevitable glorification of the halcyon days past, but I think it’s also true. The world is less civilized, less kind, less gentle, and the vulgarization of popular taste is either an unhappy result or partial cause of the precipitous downslide. Judd Apatow’s films capture something in the culture that grates on me; they have heart, but they also try to deliver on a boyish crudeness, an acceptance of careless behavior with little to no consequence. It’s the having it both ways that rankles so much; I would pay no attention to these films at all if they didn’t try so hard to be sweet. But the sweetness is buried in so much profanity and offensiveness; not liking these films makes me feel like a prude, and that’s not a feeling I enjoy. I don’t think I’m being a prude when I object to portraying heroin use and trafficking as a comic convention; there’s nothing funny about forcing an employee to shove a baggie of heroin up his ass while in line at an airport. I’m sorry. That’s not okay with me. The fact that the movie makes that incident not just okay but just another story beat in its salacious, bawdy, saucy naughtiness concerns me. Forcing that same someone to use a cocktail of drugs including meth and heroin strikes me as even more appalling. Making light of such drug abuse is just plain wrong.
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Sex and the City 2 -vs- Sex and the City

Sex And The City 2 (2010) -vs- Sex And The City (2008)

May 28, 2010 Sherry Coben 12

I don’t like stupid, offensive, unfunny pieces of jerry-rigged, half-assed claptrap disguised as popular entertainment and I never will. You can’t fool me with shiny clothing and costume changes, stale jokes and bad puns a mildly clever third grader can see coming at thirty paces, unconvincing plot contrivances, jacked-up complications, inane complaints, blissful unawareness of social mores and dignity, flagrant political incorrectness, shameless insensitivity, brazen condescension and hypocrisy all in the name of enlightenment and modernity. Add shoes and that’s the SATC franchise in a nutshell. Brace yourselves.
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Please Give (2010) -vs- Babies (2010)

May 14, 2010 Sherry Coben 6

Women’s breasts appear in a lot of movies. A lot. Usually, they’re gratuitous. Gratuitous, pneumatically enhanced and phony, fetishized dangling orbs meant to entice, designed for ogling. There. I’ve got your attention and I didn’t even have to unbutton my blouse. The breasts featured prominently in these two Smackdown contenders are all real and as far from exploitation as one could imagine. In the startling opening frames of “Please Give,” a series of disembodied, wordless and vulnerable milk glands get gently slapped, manipulated, and arranged under the harshest fluorescents. Readied for their respective mammograms, these random fleshy bundles of ducts and veins and possible disease are hardly ready for their decisively, definitively, defiantly unglamorous close-ups, and the tone is set. The bar is raised. In the remarkable French documentary “Babies,” mothers’ breasts appear frequently and utterly without the usual fanfare and sexual context. We’re on sacred ground, people. These movies weren’t made for teenage boys and the arrested men they’re destined to become. These films celebrate the human condition with honesty, integrity and very rare courage indeed.
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Kick-Ass (2010) -vs- Mystery Men (1999)

April 21, 2010 Sherry Coben 8

â€œKick-Assâ€ features winning and well-drawn characters engrossed in a complicated narrative full of revenge schemes, garden-variety venality, and grandiose dreams. The suspense gets punctuated with bursts of shocking violence and world-class movie-action, and somehow the high school domestic story somehow remains center stage. Kick-Ass keeps his high-school-nobody day job, and his friends, colleagues, and even his burgeoning romance all ring blissfully true. Itâ€™s a subtle mix set in a not-altogether convincing metropolis.
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Date Night (2010) -vs- The Joneses (2010)

April 14, 2010 Sherry Coben 8

“The Joneses” is about something important. I hesitate to explain much more than that, not wanting to spoil your fun. The film hasn’t been hyped, and if you hurry, you just might manage to see it without hearing much about the twists. Suffice it to say it’s super smart, ambitious, and it looks pretty darned good too. The cast is solid, and the ideas are sound. Moore looks absolutely amazing, and Duchovny delivers one of his surest performances ever. Simultaneously confident and vulnerable, they both play middle aged panic beautifully. The younger Joneses are played by fresher faces – the impossibly beautiful and occasionally naked (There. I’ve got your attention.) Amber Heard and heartthrob-in-training Ben Hollingsworth. Picture perfect as can be at first and even second glance, the reality behind the ideal reveals itself slowly and powerfully.
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Greenberg (2010) -vs- The Squid and the Whale (2005)

April 3, 2010 Sherry Coben 8

In Baumbach’s modern day Los Angeles, the disconnect continues and the rift grows wider between people. Love seems somehow outside the realm of possibility. Shambling through the wreckage of these wasted emotional lives, all these lonely people don’t even remember intimacy, don’t even attempt it. Everything is casual here; cruelty and thoughtlessness, abandonment, miscommunication and missed messages the currency of exchange. These characters are unsentimental, unceasingly critical, derisive, detached and deadset on avoiding attachment; sex is so casual and unfulfilling that it loses all meaning and pleasure. These zombie people slide in and out of beds, marriages, town, abortions, without registering anything much but a dull ache where real pain ought to be. Always on the lookout for something better, these narcissists seek pleasure and find only numbing activity; they fill their days somehow, connecting fully only with their dogs. Never far from an answering machine or a computer screen or a cellphone, these lost souls are drowning in their loneliness.
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The Ghost Writer (2010) -vs- Shutter Island (2010)

March 31, 2010 Sherry Coben 6

In the eyes of many Brits and other Europeans, Tony Blair played W’s lapdog for years, and this film presents a plausible (if a little harebrained and oversimplified) conspiracy theory in explanation. Pierce Brosnan plays the retired Prime Minister with his intellect on dimmer switch and gorgeosity and charisma on overload; it’s an effective and devastating performance and indictment. Echoes of a few other American actor/gladhanding puppethead-turned-politician types were surely no accident either. Olivia Williams plays his compelling Lady MacBeth, and Ewan MacGregor the ghost writer hired to finish the PM’s memoirs; he’s instantly and unwittingly entangled in political intrigue way over his level head. Eli Wallach delivers another terrific cameo; this guy just keeps on working and getting better with advancing age. Every time that now-ancient face appears onscreen, we’re sure it’s the last time we’ll see it, and yet he keeps coming back for more.
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Alice in Wonderland (2010) -vs- Avatar (2009)

March 16, 2010 Sherry Coben 26

I confess I’d happily watch Johnny Depp read a phone book, but even accounting for my extreme prejudice, his performance as the Mad Hatter is the linchpin of the piece. He is its heart, its Scarecrow, its Tin Man. Acting through crazily tinted contacts and a crowning frizz of unfortunate and unearthly ginger, Depp somehow manages to play a compelling leading man, a romantic lead, and an action hero. (His promised triumphant Futterwacken is a dire misfire and huge disappointment, a limp noodle of a magical victory dance.)
The rest of the cast performs admirably enough. Anne Hathaway Glindas it up as the White Queen, Crispin Glover plays the Knave of Hearts as elongated creepy courtier, and Helena Bonham Carter goes ghostly pale once again, this time a vain and giant-noggined Red Queen. She’s delicious and mordantly funny, and her decapitated head-filled moat provides enough nightmare food to keep kiddie nightlights burning for a good long time.
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Remember Me (2010) -vs- Sheâ€™s Out Of My League (2010)

March 15, 2010 Sherry Coben 4

Twilighters aside, there’s precious little to recommend the largely forgettable “Remember Me,” a pretentious romantic exploitation film that uses recent real life history to hype its otherwise tepid dramatic stakes. Director Allen Coulter (of “The Sopranos” renown) knows his New York tough guy patois better than this venture might indicate; poor Pierce Brosnan gets hung out to dry with the least convincing New York accent in movies since the arrival of talkies. Pattinson plays at-sea and moody, indicating the depths of his grief and misery by smoking cigarettes (unconvincingly) and guzzling beer (equally unconvincingly). His roommate is probably the most annoying little shitheel ever to make it to the silver screen, the unnatural spawn of Hal Sparks and Satan.
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