Tag Archives: Ben Stiller

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At The Theater 2011 #13: Tower Heist

I liked Tower Heist much more than I expected to. I thought it would be okay, but after seeing it, I found myself recommending it to different friends. And each time, their reaction was along the lines of “Really? Are you sure?” To be fair, I would have had the same reaction before I saw it.

The marketing for Tower Heist didn’t do it any favors. Neither the trailer or poster left me really wanting to see it. But it was getting good reviews, I had just run the NYC Marathon the day before and wanted to laugh for a couple of hours without having to walk around. That and I tend to like movies with Ben Stiller.

Tower Heist made me laugh a lot. Eddie Murphy is back to being funny Eddie Murphy, who I think last made an appearance in the highly underrated Bowfinger. Gabourey Sidibe showed off her funny side playing a sassy Jamaican maid. I’m glad I got to see her in this, because I still have no intention of seeing her in Precious.

Rent it.


And if you’re really into the Ocean’s 11 set of heist movies, you’ve got Casey Affleck here to make you feel right at home.

Major spoilers about the ending follow after this photo of the highly addictive iPhone game Tiny Tower, which I admit has nothing to do with Tower Heist, but if you haven’t seen the movie yet and want to go in fresh, read no further!

Someone should make a Tower Heist mod to Tiny Tower.

The only problem I had with Tower Heist was at the very end. How did they get that damn car out of the pool and out the building?! This is the scene I wanted and needed to see! Even if it’s just a quick montage through the process, I needed to see this. Maybe Ocean’s 11 spoiled me, but my favorite part of heist movies is seeing how it all comes to together for the thieves and how they pull it off in the end.

I also wish that one of the crew members opening up their mysterious package with a solid gold car part in it looked confused instead of excited. Think about it. There’s no note, just a box with a gold transmission in it. Would they even know it’s gold? “What the hell is this?” I just think that would have been funny.

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At The Theater 2011 #9: Submarine

There’s a lot to be said for a great movie theater. When I’m in Los Angeles, I feel the need to see a movie at the Arclight. And when I travel to Bar Harbor, ME, I need to see a movie at Reel Pizza. I have never made a trip to Bar Harbor without seeing at least one movie at Reel Pizza.

I was looking forward to seeing Horrible Bosses or Midnight in Paris at Reel Pizza when we arrived in Bar Harbor. Unfortunately, I read the schedule wrong and those two movies weren’t showing up until later in the week, so we had our choice of Tree of Life and Submarine.

I didn’t know anything about Submarine before heading into the theater. I’d only seen the poster, which is pretty much just the face and torso of a Welsh teenager. But I did hear things about Tree of Life, mainly that it was long, boring and hard to understand. So Submarine it is!

Submarine is great. I definitely recommend watching it. If you like the humor that comes from awkward situations, like the kind found in Louis C.K.’s show Louis, I think you will enjoy Submarine a lot. Submarine captures the awkwardness of being a teenager, especially an unpopular one, very well.

Ah, young love. Young, awkward love.

If you have quick eyes, you might be able to catch Ben Stiller’s cameo in the movie. It’s faster than Rebecca Romajin’s cameo in X-Men: First Class.

I thought this was Ben Stiller. But it’s not.

My favorite pizza at Reel Pizza is the Hawaii 5-0. We had a larger group with us in Maine this time around, so we ventured out of our usual and added a large Godfather to our order. The Godfather pie is good, but I think the Hawaii 5-0 is still king there.

For more on why you need to see a movie at Reel Pizza, please check out my reviews of Inception and Oceans.

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At The Theater #41: Little Fockers

IT’S FINALLY HERE! THE EPIC CONCLUSION TO THE FOCKERS SAGA! EEEEE! AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Okay, maybe I’m overreacting a little bit. No one is going to line up for a midnight screening of the latest sequel to Meet the Parents.

I loved Meet the Parents, but I have yet to make it all the way through Meet the Fockers. I’ve tried. More than twice. The closest I’ve come so far was making it to just around the halfway mark when it was on TBS recently. Amazingly, never finishing Meet the Fockers had no impact on my ability to understand Little Fockers.

Meet the Fockers had a similar drop in quality from Meet the Parents as Father of the Bride 2 had from Father of the Bride. Thankfully there wasn’t a equal drop in quality with Little Fockers. Little Fockers was about as good as Meet the Fockers. This bodes well for Father of the Bride fans who never gave up faith for a third movie.

The major upsides of Little Fockers are definitely Robert DeNiro and Owen Wilson reprising their roles from Meet the Parents. If they decide to make another Fockers movie and Robert DeNiro doesn’t want to do it, they need to call it a day. Without DeNiro’s ex-CIA Type A father-in-law Jack Byrnes, Little Fockers would fall completely flat on its face.

I really like Owen Wilson in roles like this one, where he plays the super-nice guy who still manages to dick people over. He always means well, and his heart is in the right place, but he never quite seems to get the negative impact he has on people around him. I’m pretty sure he plays the same character in the soon to open How Do You Know. Wait, I’m pretty sure he plays that character all the time. I’m cool with that.

According to a recent unscientific poll, I am the only one of my friends who wants to see How Do You Know.

Is anyone else always surprised by how buff Ben Stiller is? My friend and I were talking about this after Little Fockers. Maybe it’s because he’s usually not in tight fitting clothes, but then WHAM, there’s a scene where he’s wearing a snug t-shirt and you’re sitting in the theater thinking, “Damn! Gaylord Focker is ripped!”

I’m not sure who decided December 2010 would be the month of boner pill movies, but here we are. First there was the Anne Hathaway’s breasts/Viagra vehicle Love and Other Drugs and now there’s Little Fockers, where Greg Focker earns extra money by promoting an off-brand Viagra. Both movies deal with the side effect of the pill working too well, and to their credit, both have different, but still very funny takes on what happens next.

Better title than Pequeño Fockers?

I can’t honestly recommend spending money on seeing Little Fockers. Wait until TBS does a marathon and catch it right after you finally finish watching Meet the Fockers.

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At The Theater #13: Greenberg

Dear Noah Baumbach,

In your attempt to create a movie that could be described as Garden State for old people, you succeeded in some respects. Unfortunately, you decided to mimic possibly the worst parts of Garden State in Greenberg.

You got a lot of the surface elements right. Ben Stiller plays Roger Greenberg, a single guy on a bunch of psych meds who isn’t certain of his place in the world, similar to Zach Braff’s character Andrew Largeman in Garden State. Also like Garden State, he meets a girl who changes the way he looks at and interacts with the world. You included an indie-music heavy soundtrack. You even had Roger stand in front of garish wallpaper in one of the early scenes, but without the matching shirt.
Garden State: like Greenberg for young people…and much better too.

What you failed to capture was any of the charm that made fans of Garden State fall in love with that movie. Before, I could never understand why some of my friends hated Garden State so much. But watching your movie, I now have more of an understanding of their opinion. If the charm of Garden State was lost on a viewer, I think his experience would resemble mine while watching Greenberg.

I find it hard to believe that you could be responsible for one of the best movies I have seen this year, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and one of the worst, Greenberg. The Fantastic Mr. Fox is full of humor and has a great plot, two things lacking in this movie. Some might point out that The Fantastic Mr. Fox was an adaptation, but to I would point out to them that I have enjoyed your original work as well. I thought The Squid and the Whale was a good movie, even though some of my peers labeled it as pretentious crap. I’d point out the great comedic bits, like anything involving Ivan the tennis instructor or eldest son Walt’s lifting of a Pink Floyd song as his own in a school talent contest. But where’s the humor in Greenberg?
If the point of Greenberg was to show just how unglamorous Los Angeles could be, then congratulations, mission accomplished. Also Greenberg succeeded in making me more afraid of being 40 and single and Couples Retreat did of making me afraid of 40 and married. And if it was any way your goal to make a movie that I would like less than Remember Me this year, good try. You weren’t successful on that last one, but I can appreciate attempt.

The blame for me watching and not enjoying your movie does not only fall on your shoulders. I would like to take to task both the Cobble Hill Cinema and the Angelika Film Center for subjecting me to so many multiple viewings of the Greenberg trailer that it seemed almost preordained that I see this movie. Why were they cramming this movie down their audience’s throats?

Sincerely,

Tuesday Night Movies

PS: Garden State had a better soundtrack