Return Of The Pink Panther Sometimes a popular movie franchise can hit its peak at the most inopportune times for both an actor and director. The year was 1975. It had been over 10 years since A Shot In The Dark had come out and solidified Inspector Jacques Clouseau as a veritable legendary comedy character. […]
Revenge Of The Nerds Call it luck, call it what you will, but sometimes on the unlikeliest of projects everything comes together to produce a modern classic that never outlives its popularity. With it’s near seamless ensemble, crackerjack writing and gags (which grow mostly out of the characters and their development), and semi-cool soundtrack of […]
Revenge Of The Nerds 2: Nerds In Paradise In my humble opinion there is almost nothing more shameful than taking one of the Grand Masterpieces of Raunchy 80s Comedies and producing a sequel that winds up being rated PG-13. You’re basically neutering, cutting the balls off what made the original great, and coming up with […]
Revenge Of The Pink Panther By 1978, both Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers had declared themselves to be DONE with The Pink Panther Franchise, but when the studio practically backed a brink’s truck full of money up to the front door of both men’s homes, the inevitability of yet another sequel would indeed come to […]
Richard Pryor Here And Now For his final concert movie, it’s pretty clear that Pryor (who also directed) was openly acknowledged as a genius by this point, and perhaps that gave him the right to be a tad self-indulgent in his style here. Shot in 1983 on location in New Orleans, the film is nowhere […]
Richard Pryor Live On The Sunset Strip Considered to be his “comeback” performance in 1982 after nearly killing himself by setting himself on fire, any scholars of great stand-up comedy should study films like this for decades to come. It also harkens back to the old days of “concert films”, in which a performance would […]
Risky Business Right from the get-go, it’s pretty clear that writer-director Paul Brickman is nowhere in the ballpark of John Hughes when it comes to 80s teen angst (and probably why he has only directed one other film in the 25+ years since): The dialogue fails to be deep and insightful (“What the fuck?” seems […]
River Wild When the time came for oft-nominated actress Meryl Streep (considered the Grande Dame of American acting) to try her hand at a more “commercial” project, out she came with this action-suspense thriller from 1994, and while it seems that the script was a bit below her prodigious talents, one can quickly see how […]