Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021). Following the inspired The Big Short and the unwatchable Vice, director Adam McKay continues his run as a satiric auteur of lefty outrage with this onion skin–thin allegory of political indifference to the climate … Continue reading Then Playing — Don’t Look Up; Paper Moon; The Friends of Eddie Coyle
I was a fan of Adam McKay’s The Big Short. By any reasonable assessment, the film about the mortgage crisis the leveled the economy in the first decade of this century (based on a nonfiction rage-generator written by Michael Lewis) … Continue reading The Unwatchables — Vice
Approaching ten years since the heartless, virulently irresponsible greed of countless Wall Street hooligans decimated the United States housing market, the one part of the nation’s economy thought to be practically bulletproof, and nearly took the entire global financial network down with it, and the repercussions against the perpetrators have been practically nonexistent. Damning journalism and ferocious editorials haven’t shifted the national narrative. Maybe comedy can help. In adapting Michael Lewis’s the non-fiction book The Big Short, which itself is infused with an apoplectic wryness, filmmaker Adam McKay brings his long history as a boisterously committed comic voice (mostly working … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Nine
It’s not that the entire career of Adam McKay makes it appear that he’s have no interest in, much less facility for, an adaptation of The Big Short, Michael Lewis’s fury-stirring 2010 book about the fiscal malfeasance that precipitated the real estate collapse of 2007. Time as a head writer of Saturday Night Live is inked into his resume, meaning there’s got to be at least some amount of political awareness in his skill set, and the Funny or Die website, which he co-founded, has demonstrated a regular willingness to use broad, hooky gags as a delivery vessel for pointed, … Continue reading Inside this stillness is a wave, a force from which we won’t be saved
Best Foot Forward (Edward Buzzell, 1943). Less than a decade before a certain TV series elevated Lucille Ball to the stratosphere of stardom, she was merely the “Queen of the Bs,” which makes it a little odd to see her playing herself in this film about a cadet at a military academy who convinces the redhead to come be his date for a big dance. She’s also far removed from the ditzy whirligig persona that she’d soon be known for, playing scenes instead as the smartest person in the room with a disdainful, withering comment for everyone and everything she … Continue reading Brooks, Buzzell, Freudenthal, Matzdorff, McKay
Coffee for Two 