Comedy

dir: Akiva Schaffer

2025

I was a fool to think that just because some people said this was funny, that I would find it funny. ‘Funny’ is more subjective than beauty, sleaze or profundity. Cuteness, hotness, cringe – now they’re universal.

There’s also the factor that seeing something on your own is never the same experience as watching something funny with other people. The collective energy makes a big difference. The involuntary, unconscious group dynamics can take you out of yourself and deliver you a very different experience. Duh, I know you’re thinking, no shit, Sherlock.

I didn’t have the luxury of watching this flick in a cinema. And no-one else at my place was awake to watch this with. So alone I trudged through this relatively brisk 85 minute movie, not laughing at what I am told is a steady stream of gags in the style of the classic Zucker – Abrams – Zucker movies like Kentucky Fried Movie, Flying High, Top Secret, Hot Shots and all those other pieces of shit, including the original Naked Gun movies with Leslie Nielsen.

Nah, that’s not fair, I take that back. I laughed at plenty of those when I was a child. I’ll laugh at anything. Finding stuff funny isn’t some elitist, rarefied pursuit like fox hunting or snorting caviar. Everyone laughs at fart jokes. Not all fart jokes, but the right ones, the most unexpected?

I laughed at some stuff here. Just not that often.

This was less like watching a modern version of those specific films from the past, and more like watching a couple of episodes of Family Guy back to back. I’ve seen plenty of episodes of that animated show, and I probably chuckled a few times, but it’s pretty mediocre in the scheme of things. The New Naked Gun does benefit from having Liam Neeson in the lead role, because you don’t expect him to be funny, and when he is, it’s surprising! I’ve seen him be funny in things (intentionally), including guest roles in The Simpsons and in Derry Girls, and in some other cameos here or there. But putting the whole flick on his massive shoulders, well, now that’s risky.

dir: Jesse Armstrong

2025

Ye gods I fucking hated this movie.

But I have to be fair – I have no doubt the intention was to get us to hate these people with every fibre of our beings. After all, the writer and director of this horrible satire is Jesse Armstrong, probably best known for creating Succession: a series about a terrible media mogul and his defective children. Any resemblances to Rupert Murdoch and his cursed progeny are purely intentional.

The luxury that the series had was having the time to show these despicable characters from a number of different angles, such that the sheer enormity of their vileness could be appreciated from different perspectives, in numerous contexts, in countless ways, for years.

This here movie Mountainhead is just a movie, so we’re hopefully only ever going to have this exposure to these deeply shitty billionaires this one time for this collection of toxic minutes, 109 of them, to be exact. Amidst all of those minutes were scant moments where I didn’t want to kick my screen in.

There are some things too strange to satirise. The rise of the tech billionaires has given us these strange people to mock or, for many even stranger people, symbols to idolise, envy or bootlick. They have acquired political power through their control of social media or through the sheer magnitude of their wealth; they wield outsized influence with complete impunity, and we just shrug our shoulders, and go back to whatever it was we were doing before. Probably doomscrolling.

This stuff is well known if you’ve read any news at all over the last however many years, but the solution, unless you’re Luigi Mangioni, isn’t immediately clear. It’s one thing to joke about whipping the guillotines out, but the reality is that they are the new aristocracy, so high above us, and who’s going to lug a guillotine up into the mountains of Utah, anyway?

dir: Tyler Spindel

2025

It could be seen as something of a strange coincidence that I watched two movies this week about women faking pregnancies. The other film, a Jordanian film called Inshallah A Boy, focusses on a woman who pretends she is pregnant (with a boy) in order to not lose everything after her husband dies. Its point is to emphasise and underline the inherent unfairness and chauvinism of Jordan’s legal system in terms of how it is structured against women, which is the very definition of misogynistic, patriarchal systems in action.

This movie, Kinda Pregnant? It’s purpose is just to remind Netflix audiences that Amy Schumer is still around, and that faking a pregnancy is just a bit of fun.

This seems like maybe an idea Schumer had long before she became a parent herself, that she’s pulled out of a bottom drawer, and handed to Adam Sandler’s nephew, no shit, and said “eh, we’ll just improvise a heap of stuff when the cameras start rolling.”

Why does her character pretend to be pregnant here… for shits and giggles, I guess.

Because she feels left out when her best friend Kate (Jillian Bell) tells her she’s pregnant? Because she sees how well pregnant women are treated on the train, and at Brooklyn cafes? Because she ‘accidentally’ befriends another pregnant woman, and her brother while wearing the fake baby bump, and she can’t afford to be caught out in the lie?

Those don’t seem like solid reasons, or even shaky reasons, but really, would we care if we were laughing at her antics and her comical stylings?

I don’t think, collectively, people would have judged the premise as harshly had they found the film funny enough. That it’s not as strong as Trainwreck, whose main character is an alcoholic and drug abusing fuck up, and is about as entertaining as I Feel Pretty, in which a brain injury leaves Schumer’s delusional character relating to the world the way she imagines a supermodel would, shows that in translating Schumer’s comedic sensibilities into romcom formats, the movies seem to overly rely on complicated conceits in order to give her something to do other than crack jokes. Another way of putting it is there is this strange weaponised self-deprecation aspect that requires the characters she plays to abase themselves horribly for our amusement before making us sympathise with their sometimes horrible actions.

dir: Shawn Levy

2024

Shame…shame…shame. I feel like I’ve been paraded through the streets of King’s Landing, much to my eternal regret for my shameful crimes, after watching this amalgam of references loosely aspiring to be a ‘movie’.

Watching and laughing as much as I did while watching this flick only filled me with deep shame, after the laughs wore off. I would almost argue that it was involuntary, as in, against my will and my supposedly rational mind, but that’s pretty much the same every time we laugh. It bypasses rationality and hits us in the centre of our lizard brain, that same part that laughs and then immediately recoils when you giggle at someone walking into something or getting hit in the groin.

I did not expect to ‘enjoy’ this flick, but then I discovered that either they programmed me years ago to enjoy things like this like the Pavlovian dog that I am, or, based on some kind of horrifying download directly from my brain, they figured out how to make something entirely for the very nerdiest parts of my entire being.

I mean, the only way they could have made it more for me is if they actually had references to me, like Deadpool himself saying “yeah, drew, you’re really going to like this next reference, who’s a clever boy?”

The thing is, part of me knows how wrong it is to find Ryan Reynolds and his smarmy antics so funny. It makes me feel soiled, contaminated in so many ways. I tell myself I am old enough not to fall for his bullshit, not to be amused by such lowbrow Freudian anally and orally fixated idiocy, and yet there I am, laughing until tears course down my haggard features.