This is a tricky thing to pull off, where you take a genre that's had spotty success and try to make it more palatable by adding comedy to it. But it has a good chance of working here, because fantasy movies usually take themselves so deadly seriously that giving one comedy -- and not comedy that makes fun of itself, but the kind that works contextually -- allows it to feel more accessible. That strategy worked for Pirates of the…
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The Yards 2000
It's about corruption within the railway car repair industry, a subject so specific that it had to have come from real life, and sure enough director James Gray drew inspiration from a real-life scandal that involved his father. Reading some of the reviews here makes this movie sound like it was some kind of hidden gem, but, alas, I found it underwhelming and overcooked. It felt like a crime drama with pretty low stakes, the stuff involving family ties has…
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Party Girl 1995
This movie went from "I'm not sure this is my thing" to "Holy cow I think I love this" pretty definitively. And I'd hate to think it's because I hold some deep conservative value of admiring stories about people who mature and learn to be responsible. That might be part of it, but I think it's also how it's delivered in this distinctly absurd vibe -- it's this low budget indie with authenticity in its setting and characters, it's comedic…
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Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022
This movie references a lot of other movies, but if I were to distill it I would describe it as a cross between Christopher Nolan and Stephen Chow. It uses the Nolan formula, where the insane sci-fi concept that requires pages of exposition in order to be explained is both the point and not the point. A lot of the fun is in figuring out what's going on and watching it happen, but really it's a wrapping for whatever the…
