Meewella | Critic

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Tag: Zach Galifianakis

QuickView: The Lego Batman Movie (2017)

The Lego Batman Movie poster

“DC… the house that Batman built. Yeah, what, Superman? Come at me, bro.”

Batman

Arguing The Lego Batman Movie‘s ranking amongst DC movies is amusing, but more interesting is that applying The Lego Movie‘s tongue-in-cheek humour to Batman’s storied past has created DC’s closest big screen competitor to Deadpool. It takes swings equally at DC’s successes (Joker describing his plan as “better than the two boats”) and its failures (“What am I gonna do? Get a bunch of criminals together to fight the criminals? That’s a stupid idea.”), as well as highlighting the sociological flaws in supporting a billionaire vigilante. Will Arnett returns to voice Batman largely as a gruff and self-involved caricature. Though we see some loneliness and self-doubt beneath the cowl, it’s not written to be as nuanced as Arnett’s voice acting in the sublime Bojack Horseman. The Joker unsurprisingly takes a central role but the film takes full advantage of Batman’s extensive list of villains, as well as co-opting a few from other franchises with Lego deals. Director Chris McKay was the animation supervisor on The Lego Movie allowing for a seamless transition in visual identity with bright colours and showers of bricks as well as some impressively atmospheric lighting. The (constr)action, however, is far less creative which leads to a disappointingly forgettable third act that will cause fatigue as most adult viewers zone out.

7/10

QuickView: Between Two Ferns: The Movie (2019)

Between Two Ferns: The Movie

“You once said you’re your own worst critic. So you haven’t read any of your reviews?”

Zack Galifianakis

The nicest thing I can say about extending the absurdist, zero production value web-series of awkward celebrity interviews into a feature-length film is that it’s pointless. This should simply have been another series. For those unfamiliar, Zach Galifianakis (of The Hangover fame) would interview often A-list celebrities with barbed or inappropriate questions in a send-up of the pandering late-night television circuit. It’s hilarious, won an Emmy, and peaked insurmountably with Barack Obama. The movie strings together a series of new interviews under the loose guise of Will Ferrell (co-founder of the show’s original home on Funny or Die) offering Galifianakis a talk show if he films another clutch of episodes. There are numerous laugh out loud moments, but they all exist within the interview segments rather than the perfunctory scripted story in between, which takes up the bulk of the running time. This is no slight on the actors involved and it doesn’t ruin the experience, but it’s simply not what the audience wants. Even the interview outtakes at the end (with celebrities struggling to retain their composure) are funnier than the unnecessary padding, as is the deleted material in the extended Paul Rudd interview. Just give us those and be done with it.

6/10

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

(CC) BY-NC 2003-2023 Priyan Meewella

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