Posts By Jonathan Durbin

Every week we round up selections from the funniest and most brutal film criticism out there so that you don’t waste your cash at the theaters and laugh a little at Hollywood’s expense. This week: Good Luck Chuck isn’t funny, entertaining, credible or witty. The film stars Dane Cook as a dentist whose love-life has been cursed. Jessica Alba is his crush. His best friend is Dan Fogler. And together the three of them are about as funny as a fart joke. A not-funny fart joke. The kind of fart joke that reads like a form from the IRS. A fart joke that could make you declare bankruptcy! Laughing yet?

“I’ve occasionally heard Dane Cook, one of the stars of Good Luck Chuck, described as a comedian. I find this confusing, since my understanding is that comedians are people who say and do things that are funny. Perhaps Mr. Cook is some new kind of conceptual satirist whose shtick is to behave in the manner of a person attempting to be funny without actually being, you know, funny. Or maybe he answered an ad in the back of a magazine and sent away for a mail-order license to practice comedy. Whether Jessica Alba, his co-star, acquired her acting credentials by similar means is an issue that will be addressed if she ever tries to act.” – The New York Times

“With any luck, you won’t upchuck.” – The New York Post
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Every week we round up selections from the funniest, most obscene and brutal film criticism out there so that you don’t waste your cash at the theaters and laugh a little at Hollywood’s expense. This week: The Brothers Solomon isn’t exactly the star-making vehicle we’d hoped Kristen Wiig would find for herself. Oh, well. Maybe Walk Hard will be different.

“A stillborn mashup of Dumb & Dumber and Knocked Up.” — The New York Post

“Nothing is harder to overcome as a performer than a comedy going south. Director Bob Odenkirk lets every other exchange dribble on, suffocating on its own dead air and diorama staging.” — The Chicago Tribune

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Every week we round up selections from the funniest, most obscene and brutal film criticism out there so that you don’t waste your cash at the theaters and laugh a little at Hollywood’s expense. This week: Balls of Fury makes critics mad enough to spit firecrackers. They were expecting Citizen Kane? We don’t know.

“Balls of Fury is a joke of a title in search of a movie with a single good joke.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Balls of Fury was written by:
a. Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant.
b. A racist monkey.” — LA Weekly [multiple choice test]

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Every week we round up selections from the funniest, most obscene and brutal film criticism out there so that you don’t waste your cash at the theaters and laugh a little at Hollywood’s expense. This week: The film adaptation of The Nanny Diaries, a roman-a-clef about a young woman (Scarlett Johansson) who tends to the children of an obscenely wealthy Manhattan family and falls in love with a Harvard hunk (Chris Evans), isn’t just execrable. Apparently it’s so far beyond insulting, it’s got liberal standard-bearer The Village Voice arguing for the rights of employers everywhere. Enjoy the irritating fantasy, audiences!

“A grim slog . . . a display of chick-flick clichés through the ages.” — New York

“Boss hate . . . has become something of a literary cottage industry in recent years, with the appearance of several surprise bestsellers about the disgruntled underlings of the rich and famous (or the merely rich), most of which are so fatally predictable in their imperious bile-spewing as to make you wonder when some CEO will counter the trend with the scandalous memoir The Assistant Shows Up Late, Makes Personal Calls on Company Time, and Is Delusional Enough to Think That I Should Actually Care About Her Feelings.” — The Village Voice

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