Comedy Archives - Page 7 of 18 - Movie SmackdownÂ®

Bad Teacher (2011) -vs- Bad Santa (2003)

June 21, 2011 Rebecca Coffindaffer 6

Good role models are hard to come by â€” especially once Hollywood gets its hands on them. In the year that Bush gave us Iraq, Hollywood gave us Bad Santa. Now itâ€™s Bad Teacher. Whatâ€™s next, Naughty Nuns?

Of course, the film industry has been tweaking iconic targets since the Marx Brothers brought their particular brand of chaos to A Night at the Opera. In recent years, theyâ€™ve upped the ante. Now, filmmakers are encouraged to slap on an R rating, make sure the kids have to sneak in to watch, and let everyone else enjoy what Tony Coxâ€™s Marcus character in Bad Santa calls, â€œAn adult joke. For us, adults.â€

With Santa Claus already trashed by Billy Bob Thornton and company, it was inevitable that someone would find another cherished cultural ideal, the teacher â€” beacon of knowledge and caring, glamorized in Stand and Deliver, Dead Poets Society and so forth â€” and put a caustic, foul-mouthed spin on it.

An irreverent, bad Santa vs. an irreverent, bad teacher. Only one can be the worst. […]

Click (2006) -vs- Big Daddy (1999)

June 12, 2011 The FilmGuru 0

We all know that guy, maybe in high school or college, who was a complete idiot most of the time. This is the guy who ran naked through the football field at Homecoming or would eat anything at lunch for a quarter. You know the type. Years later, you may have seen him with his family and thought to yourself, “How the heck does he have kids?”

That’s the way I felt about Adam Sandler. After seeing his wacked-out characters in everything from Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore to The Waterboy, I wondered how anyone could cast him as a caring, down-to-earth father figure. After all, he’d spent most of his adult life playing a man-child.

Then, Sandler was cast as a father in two separate movies, Big Daddy (in 1999) and Click (2006). The first was an edgier Sandler, forced to play the role of a reluctant surrogate father. In the second, the broad comedy of Sandler is more apparent as he plays a man trying to make time for his family and his career.

The question is, which film best captures Sandler’s charm to make us look past his goofy tendencies and appreciate his dad appeal? […]

Midnight in Paris (2011) -vs- Adaptation (2002)

June 6, 2011 Mark Sanchez 7

If thereâ€™s anything that sounds less appealing than watching the mental anguish of a blocked writer, we canâ€™t imagine what it is. In fact, we canâ€™t even begin to visualizeâ€¦ hold on a secondâ€¦ getting my thoughts straightâ€¦ just have to play some Spider Solitaire while I, umâ€¦ trying to focusâ€¦ Huh — I didnâ€™t know we had Cheetosâ€¦.

Fifteen hours later:

Right, where were we? Oh yeah, writerâ€™s block — itâ€™s not pretty. Not cinematic either, until Charlie Kaufman came along and sweated blood for three years, cracking the code of how to translate to film his own innermost creative struggle in a deeply personal, throw-out-the-rulebook kind of way. His resulting screenplay for Adaptation became the Holy Grail of screenwriter movies, and under the brilliant direction of Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Where the Wild Things Are), earned a slew of Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Adapted Screenplay. […]

The Hangover Part II -vs- Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

The Hangover Part II (2011) -vs- Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004)

May 31, 2011 R.L. Naquin 2

Itâ€™s widely understood that men are little boys who constantly behave badly and get into trouble. Women stand by and judge, often bailing the men out of trouble. Women, of course, are the grownups of the world, while men are too immature to be left alone without female supervision.

Thatâ€™s crap. Women can get into just as much trouble as men, and in fact, can behave in an equally self-destructive fashion.

In this SmackDown! itâ€™s the boys against a girl in sequel comedies that whisk us away on ill-advised trips to Thailand. The Hangover Part II takes on Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason in an attempt to determine which sex is the stupidest.

Can the Wolf Pack take on a lone she-wolf and come out the victorious fools?

Thatâ€™s crap. Women can get into just as much trouble as men, and in fact, can behave in an equally self-destructive fashion. […]

Will Ferrell -vs- Bill Murray

May 21, 2011 Bryce Zabel 1

Will Ferrell got booed.

Yes, you got that right. Will Ferrell, a beloved SNL comic and feature funny man, was booed by a couple of guys in the crowd I was in to see Ferrell’s new Everything Must Go. I can only assume that they saw the trailers which had been cut to make it look like a comedy, and they figured, hey, we love our man Will, so they let’s check it out.

I wondered as they left the theater just how far into the film they got before they realized it was not meant to be funny but was a tough story about substance abuse and how it can take away everything you thought you had or thought you wanted. These guys felt duped they did not get the Will Ferrell that they had paid to see.

They probably also didn’t love Bill Murray in Lost in Translation.

Most comedic actors secretly want to play serious roles. Despite what a great gift it is to be able to make people laugh, and despite how much we all need to laugh in this day and age, often times the people most talented at this want desperately to show you their “other side.” Sometimes we are very, very glad they did. Sometimes, not so much.
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Bridesmaids (2011) -vs- The Hangover (2009)

May 14, 2011 The FilmGuru 5

The world is probably a better place knowing that women can be just as depraved, insecure, crass, pathetic, disgusting and insanely funny as men. After all, fair is fair.

Our Battle of the Sexes Grand-Slam Comedy Smack pits women against men in a dual of the demos. The Bridesmaids versus The Wolf Pack.

After spending over $32-million to make Bridesmaids, Universal Pictures followed up with an expensive nationwide spin-job selling their new movie as a bachelorette party version of The Hangover.

What made that original 2009 film a surprise R-rated hit was bringing the Wolf Pack to life in a story that shattered the formula of a raunchy guy’s film and took it to a new level where roofies were just another plot device. The question that Bridesmaids raises is pretty basic: can the same dynamic — bad decisions, outrageous behavior and same-sex bonding — work in a film about some girls who just wanna have fun, too? And, even if it can work, can that film actually be a better one that The Hangover? […]

Life As We Know It (2010) -vs- thirtysomething (1987-1991)

October 5, 2010 Sherry Coben 1

Death of a loved one, friend or family, is a life-altering event; the grief and loss color everything for a while. Even when it seems that the worst of the grief has subsided, it still comes in waves for a while as we struggle to maintain our equilibrium and return to life as we knew it before loss. We live our day to day in a sort of agreeable coma, at least slightly convinced, temporarily comforted by the cozy lie that we are immortal, that those we love will never leave us. We know we are lying to ourselves, but while we may try to live consciously, to know the end will come, I think we mostly pretend otherwise. This is part of the reason that sudden and accidental deaths rattle us to the very core. […]

The Social Network (2010) -vs- You Again (2010)

October 2, 2010 Sherry Coben 9

Some films arrive with a fanfare of critical acclaim and a flurry of publicity and positive buzz. Since studio PR machines work overtime, such spin hardly guarantees greatness. Pedigree helps considerably; Aaron Sorkin, in spite of all his personal demons and occasional misfires, remains a critical darling, the smartest and cleverest fellow in just about any room. Director David Fincher hasn’t failed big yet either; critics are disposed to like whatever he delivers them, and so The Social Network opens with a golden stamp of near-universal pre-approval. […]

Easy A (2010) -vs- Election (1999)

September 19, 2010 Sherry Coben 7

Smart women are as rare on film as they are in life. Rarer even. Smart high school girls might be the rarest cinematic species of all. You can count them on your two hands. Cooler and wittier than any real girl in any real high school, they’re who we wish we could have been. The girls who say what we wish we had said. Smart girls who use their smart mouths to get into (and out of) considerable trouble. The adults in these films are unspeakably cool too; perhaps this whole smart high school girl genre is for us grown-up girls (and guys) who revisit our high school hallways every night in our dreams and nightmares, still trying to dot those old i’s and cross those uncrossed t’s, to redress grievances and beat down those bullies that haunt us still.
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Going the Distance (2010) -vs- Swing Time (1936)

September 4, 2010 Sherry Coben 8

Money’s tight. Jobs are hard to find. Relationships disappoint. Such is the world as we know it. You say recession, I say depression. Let’s call the whole thing off. We go to the movies to forget our troubles, to drown our sorrows, to watch others make sense of this whole sorry mess. Romantic comedy provides a welcome refuge, a few hours in the welcoming darkness where we can rest pretty well assured that no one will die and nothing untoward will befall our hero and heroine, safe in the knowledge that they’ll wind up together at the end no matter how tangled the web of misunderstandings, regardless how high they stack the hurdles. We sit and wait for our happy ending and return again to our little lives at the end, sated and ready for the mundane and the stress life hands us. […]