There is no way that Get Him to the Greek should work. Taking a supporting character whose main purpose as a plot point was to be incredibly annoying and turning him into the lead of his own spin-off feature sounds like a horrible, horrible idea. Characters like Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) in Forgetting Sarah Marshall work best in small doses. The prospect of taking an unlikable cad like Aldous and turning him into a lead is a double-edged sword in that we don’t want to spend two hours with an a-hole but we equally don’t want to watch an edgy character turned into a sentimental one. It’s a tightrope that should result in comedy disaster. Remarkably, it absolutely does not as Get Him to the Greek is one of the funniest and most consistent comedies of the year to date.

Aldous Snow used to be the biggest rock and roll star in the world. He led a crazy lifestyle with his hot-as-hell pop star girlfriend Jackie Q (Rose Byrne) and produced hit after hit. Then he made the mistake of releasing a crap album and trying to sober up. The misfire is a hilarious video called “African Child,” which the trades notoriously called “The worst thing to happen to Africa since apartheid.” Jackie and his fans basically left Snow behind and he spent the next several years drinking, drugging, sexing, and generally being nothing more than tabloid fodder.

A lackey to the borderline-insane music executive Sergio (Sean Combs) named Aaron Green (Jonah Hill) has stayed loyal to his childhood icon. At a staff meeting, Aaron suggests holding a ten-year anniversary concert for Snow’s wildly successful concert at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles as a way to boost interest in his back catalog. Sergio orders Aaron to fly to England and serve as chaperone for the troubled troubadour. Of course, before he leaves town, Aaron gets into a huge fight with his super-cute girlfriend (Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men), leaving him free to dive head first into the deep

I spent most of the time watching Marmaduke trying to figure out two things. One, who exactly is the target demographic for this supposed family comedy? Two, when did they start letting groups of eight-year-old boys write movies? It may not be complete torture, but Marmaduke continues the crapfest of Summer 2010 with another lazy, boring, forgettable slice of mass-market entertainment. Many entertainment journalists have pondered the

Can a film be too clever? Can it be too polished, refined, and downright beautiful to look at to be effective? Jean-Pierre Jeunet seems to be consciously pushing the boundaries of these questions with Micmacs, a comedy that redlines the whimsical meter to such an extreme that it could be considered disappointing to even Jeunet’s most hardcore fans. There are elements of Micmacs that simply don’t

There are very few people whom one would think less likely to be drug mules than Hasidic Jews. Yet that’s exactly what happened to a group of unassuming kids from Brooklyn in the late 1990s and is now chronicled in the dramatic Holy Rollers, an unusual film about a fish very, VERY far from water. The fish is a twenty-year-old Hasidic Jew named Sam Gold (Jesse Eisenberg)

It’s a sad truth that early filmmakers and film watchers underestimated the longevity of the medium. One hundred years ago, not only was the future of DVD and Blu-ray completely unforeseeable but the cultural importance of preserving film as a historical artifact wasn’t really in place. Consequently, films were often mistreated, forgotten, and abused, to the point that many historians estimate that a majority of films up until

With one of the worst big budget scripts in years, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is the kind of laughable turd that only works if you see it in an empty theater and are allowed to heckle the film Mystery Science Theater-style. Otherwise, make sure you’re caffeinated because there hasn’t been this boring a Memorial Day tentpole since…well, ever. It is a shockingly lazy affair with

It pains me to say that the latest zombie film by one of my personal icons, George A. Romero, simply doesn’t work. It’s his most half-baked, poorly constructed films in year, a step down after the semi-resurgence of his Dead franchise with Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead. Easily the worst of the now-six-film series that includes two of the best horror

With the reunion of the great director James Ivory with star Anthony Hopkins, who appeared in the director’s Howards End and The Remains of the Day, The City of Your Final Destination starts off with the promise of the kind of well-acted human drama that they don’t make that often any more, even on the arthouse scene. Add great actresses Laura Linney and Charlotte

The first film based on the HBO show Sex and the City was a deeply flawed affair that misguidedly reveled in the excess of fancy shoes and high fashion instead of finding anything remotely relatable about its iconic characters. Somehow, I held out hope that writer/director Michael Patrick King and the rest of his talented team would rekindle the magic of the show in Sex and

In the pantheon of Saturday Night Live sketches turned feature films, there is the preeminent The Blues Brothers, the admirable Wayne's World, and then the ever-increasing junk pile, a category to which the newest SNL offering MacGruber falls. Not since 2000's pitiful The Ladies Man has anyone attempted to sail the murky waters of turning short sketches into 90 minutes worth of comedy with