REVIEW: Late Night [2019]

You’re a little old and a little white. You can imagine how this film would have gone had a white male wrote it. The affirmative action jokes would play strictly for laughs rather than poignant introspection. The strong woman television host would use masculine tropes to service her goals rather than understand that a double standard can’t be weaponized in ways that end up affirming said double standard. And the idea that the fish-out-of-water newcomer entering the fray to shake the status quo could potentially date the “hot” co-worker would…

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REVIEW: Central Intelligence [2016]

“You can’t look a guy in the eye and say something like that” Writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber is finally back to the zany, off-the-wall, and over-the-top antics that made him a hot commodity back in 2004 after the release of Dodgeball. He took a genre (the underdog sports tale), brought it down from its lofty pedestal of true life historical pedigree and had fun lambasting the tropes in as juvenile a way possible while still retaining the smarts to remain satire. His last film, We’re the Millers, lacked that flair…

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REVIEW: Neighbors [2014]

“We should go Mom tipping later” After respectively writing and directing a short film that dealt with a manchild living in a storage unit who befriends one of the employees in hopes to stay, Brendan O’Brien and Andrew Jay Cohen have decided to go a bit less high concept with their feature screenwriting debut. But while the quirky setting may be gone, the theme of surviving the suburban boredom of adulthood is not. One could say Neighbors is an evolutionary reworking of American Storage‘s concepts as the duo polishes things…

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