It’s always a bit depressing to watch the inexorable march of time turn once-hip Saturday Night Live stars into paunchy movie dads. As the first host of Weekend Update, 1975-era Chevy Chase was the country’s preeminent young wiseass. But as his hairline and fame receded in the following years, he eventually found himself playing lame […]
If you watch all of the films that are based on Saturday Night Live sketches, you will notice some definite tiers that emerge. Many entries are abysmal (including It’s Pat and A Night at the Roxbury), some are underrated (Stuart Saves His Family and Coneheads) and a select few are beloved (Wayne’s World). There is […]
There are times when you want to watch serious, deep movies about the things in life that really matter. For us, we mostly like watching ridiculous movies with terrible-yet-hilarious jokes that have us tittering to ourselves for hours. Based on our love for all things goofy, we came up with this list of the 10 […]
Road trip movies are an important segment of cinema. They capture the freedom that the road can bring you, the laughs you can share among friends, and the failures and screw ups you sometimes can’t escape even when you leave home behind. Hollywood has given us an abundance of these flicks (heck, they’re a dime […]
Some road trip movies make you yearn to grab your friends and hit the road on a cross-country journey immediately, if not sooner. Then there are those road trip movies that make you want to claw your eyes out and have you questioning your decision to waste an hour and a half of your life […]
It’s likely that we’ve all had that experience where we’ve sat through the entirety of a film, left the theater, and hours later realized that the filmmaker managed to very discretely slide an important message into their movie. Perhaps it’s through some kind of subtle symbolism or by surreptitiously making an entire feature that is […]
Wait, isn’t this that critical bomb from 2002 starring Cameron Diaz? No, This was released solidly, and proudly, in the middle of the 1980s. It’s about a recent high school graduate who’s travelling across America to hook up with a guaranteed hot-and-easy time, only to find true love with a more conservative girl. Wait, isn’t that […]
It’s been a long time since I first saw Borat, but I still remember how inescapable the film was when it debuted in 2006. Its star, British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, had been playing the character (inspired by a Russian doctor he once met) for years on Da Ali G Show, which aired first in […]
We’ve watched a lot of bad flicks for our road trip movie series this summer. We’ve seen middle-aged A-list actors engage in homophobic humor. We’ve endured the worst of the Disney family road flicks. We’ve even witnessed Britney Spears’ failed venture into womanhood. But, none of that compares to the nails-on-chalkboard irritant that is 1997’s so-called “comedy” Excess Baggage. […]
We’ll be honest. We had every intent of categorizing this road trip family comedy as one of the worst based solely on its lukewarm reviews. Director Anne Fletcher is never one to produce anything formulaic–unless you count her previous three films: Step Up, 27 Dresses, and The Proposal. Now, she’s taking on the nagging Jewish mother cliche? […]
There was a golden era in cinema history when our screens weren’t saturated with duplication after duplication of the same old road trip film. Back in 1934, a hard-working, up-and-coming Frank Capra produced his first major hit starring Clark Gable, before he didn’t give a damn, and Claudette Colbert, a screen legend of her time […]
One of our favorite aspects of our summer road trip film series (apart from getting to discuss cars) is discovering and drawing attention to lesser-known independent films, such as this smart and quirky independent feature from 2001. Writer/director Joel Hopkins made his feature length debut with this understated romantic comedy based on his successful 1998 short […]
Within the road trip blueprint, there are multiple sub-divisions that have become a part of our cinematic cannon: the boy-meets-girl scenario where the two go from bickering to falling in love, the quintessential American family goes on a vacation that goes horribly awry, and the mismatched adults learning to overcome their pet peeves and form a philia […]
Dumb and Dumber is the first adult comedy movie I remember seeing as a little kid, and it is still one of my absolute favorites. In fact, I was incredibly excited when I heard they were making a sequel, but then I saw the trailer and let’s just not talk about that ever please. (We […]
In 1971, Universal TV purchased a short story called “Duel” that had originally appeared in Playboy magazine. They hired the author adapt his own work into a teleplay, shot the project in 13 days, and aired it as an episode of ABC’s Movie of the Week series. The reception was so positive that they decided […]
In the follow-up to his directorial debut last year (Hummingbird, starring Jason Statham), Steven Knight writes and directs Locke. This one-man tour-de-force stars iron-jawed Brit Tom Hardy, coming off his career-making success as Bane (The Dark Knight Rises) and Eames (Inception). It’s a one-actor, one-location performance, and it’s not the first example we’ve seen recently. You […]
For the last three years, I’ve had a friend who worked at a local drive-in, meaning that my buddies and I got to go see movies for free for three summers in a row. My summers of free movies have tragically come to a halt, however, as the friend moved to Florida just last week. […]
It’s finally time for this series to get our hands dirty reviewing what, according to Box Office Mojo, is the highest grossing road trip comedy of all time: Wild Hogs. I don’t think those figures have been adjusted for inflation, but it’s still sad that this movie made a whopping $168,273,550, roughly three times what […]
