Movie Review: Neighbors (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

I've long been a fan of actor Seth Rogen, director Nicholas Stoller and just about anyone else that comes from the Judd Apatow school of comedy. Writer-produced Apatow himself does not appear to be directly involved with Rogen and Stoller's new film Neighbors. But it does evince the kind of hallmarks one would expect from an Apatow film: a wistfulness about attaining a certain stage of maturity; a focus on a mismatched couple that is more wish-fulfillment than reality, usually a schlubby guy with a nearly unattainable wife (not unlike Apatow and his beautiful wife Leslie Mann); and an ability to sneak in raunchy, gross-out humor in a fairly natural, often semi-improvisational manner.

Movie Reviews: The Internship and The Kings of Summer

by Tony Dayoub

Considering how easy it has been for moviegoers to score an advance ticket to The Internship (opening tomorrow), the lengths to which studio marketers have gone to prevent critics from publishing reviews are rather surprising. This week many major cities screened the film gratis for anyone, that's regardless of whether you actually had a pass or not, who was interested in attending. Yet critics were told to hold off on posting reviews until this afternoon. You'd think they were afraid of bad word of mouth or something, right? Unnecessary I say. Despite a rocky beginning, the new comedy re-teaming Wedding Crashers stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson rights itself halfway through, overcoming dull fish-out-of-water hijinks to become something sweeter revolving around starting over in mid-life.

The X-Factor

How X-Men: First Class Made Michael Fassbender a Star

by Tony Dayoub

Just out on Blu-ray and DVD, X-Men: First Class is Matthew Vaughn’s clever 1960s-era spinoff from Fox’s popular mutant superhero franchise. Based on the Marvel comics created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, X-Men posits a world where the infinite variety of super-powered homo superiors, the next step in human evolution, are being persecuted by the increasingly suspicious homo sapiens — us. Though the initial two films helmed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) tied the mutants’ quest for acceptance to the same battle being fought by today’s LGBT community, X-Men: First Class backtracks to its most primal disagreement, the one between its two lead characters. Appropriately enough, the movie this time finds its thematic touchstone in the civil rights struggle: telepath Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), like Martin Luther King Jr., believes humanity will only accept mutants through peaceful coexistence, at least as peaceful as it can be when fighting dastardly super-villains like Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon); Xavier’s friendly rival and master of magnetism, Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), is closer in spirit to the more militant Malcolm X, who believed coexistence must be fought for “by any means necessary.” Lehnsherr, the man who would be Magneto, is automatically then a far juicier role, and for Fassbender, a star-making turn.

CONTINUE READING AT NOMAD EDITIONS: WIDE SCREEN

Movie Review: X-Men: First Class (2011)

by Tony Dayoub

Given the decline of the X-Men movie franchise—which peaked fairly early with Bryan Singer's X2: X-Men United (not just one of the best in this series, but one of the best superhero films, period) before ending up in the execrable X-Men: The Last Stand and the disappointing X-Men Origins: Wolverine—one would be justified in choosing to avoid the latest entry sight unseen. But the anomalous X-Men: First Class turns out to be one of the most surprising summer blockbuster hopefuls in quite a long time. The cheesy comic-book costumes glimpsed in the preview hinted that this may have initially been planned as a slapdash film hastened to the box office for fear that studio distributor 20th Century Fox's rights to the series would revert back to Marvel. However, director Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass) turns the inherent camp quotient into a virtue, giving us a stylized, period look at the secret history of the mutant group and its origins, at times channeling the espionage-laden eccentricities of the early 007 films.