I've occasionally heard Dane Cook, one of the stars of Good Luck Chuck, described as a comedian. I find this confusing, since my understanding is that comedians are people who say and do things that are funny. Perhaps Cook is some new kind of conceptual satirist whose shtick is to behave in the manner of a person attempting to be funny without actually being, you know, funny. Or maybe he answered an ad in the back of a magazine and sent away for a mail-order license to practice comedy.
Whether Jessica Alba, his co-star, acquired her acting credentials by similar means is an issue that will be addressed if she ever tries to act. She does expend a little effort in Good Luck Chuck, pretending to be goofy and clumsy. But the main audience for this dim little sex comedy has no particular interest in seeing Alba act. They want to see her in her underwear and also to confront one of the central cultural questions of our time: Will she take her top off?
No spoilers here! In the meantime plenty of less famous women do take their tops off, which will make Good Luck Chuck a must-see for young men with a subscription to Maxim but no access to the Internet. The intended viewership seems to consist of guys who fantasize about sleeping with Alba, which may represent a reasonably large share of the population. The actual paying audience, however, will more likely be those poor, deluded souls - they've highlighted all the relevant passages of that notorious pickup manual The Game - who think they might really have a shot.
PHOTO:COURTESY OF WARNER BROS
The makers of Good Luck Chuck (it was directed by Mark Helfrich from a script by Josh Stolberg) try for the blend of filth and sentimentality that has made movies like The Wedding Crashers and the recent productions of the Judd Apatow atelier such big hits. What they end up proving (by negative example) is that even lowbrow comedy requires skill and intelligence. Instead they offer breasts, penis jokes and a cavalcade of wildly unoriginal ideas.
Cook's character has a doofus friend (Dan Fogler, in case Balls of Fury didn't satisfy your need to be reminded of his existence). Alba's character is crazy about penguins. Her brother (Lonny Ross) smokes a lot of pot. Apparently the very notion of fat women having sex is screamingly hilarious, though not as funny as the image of a three-breasted woman or a chubby man having sex with a grapefruit. (Typing that phrase turns out to be kind of amusing, but trust me, you don't need to see it.)
What passes for cleverness is the movie's central conceit: Chuck (that would be Cook) suffers under a curse that causes every woman he goes to bed with to fall in love with the next guy who asks her out. When the local ladies find out about this, Chuck gets a lot of action, but then - after a long, split-screen montage of his priapic exertions - he starts to feel empty and used. Me too. But if the logic of Good Luck Chuck holds, the next movie I see should be a masterpiece.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
Desperate dads meet in car parks to exchange packets; exhausted parents slip it into their kids’ drinks; families wait months for prescriptions buy it “off label.” But is it worth the risk? “The first time I gave him a gummy, I thought, ‘Oh my God, have I killed him?’ He just passed out in front of the TV. That never happens.” Jen remembers giving her son, David, six, melatonin to help him sleep. She got them from a friend, a pediatrician who gave them to her own child. “It was sort of hilarious. She had half a tub of gummies,
The wide-screen spectacle of Formula One gets a gleaming, rip-roaring workout in Joseph Kosinski’s F1, a fine-tuned machine of a movie that, in its most riveting racing scenes, approaches a kind of high-speed splendor. Kosinski, who last endeavored to put moviegoers in the seat of a fighter jet in Top Gun: Maverick, has moved to the open cockpits of Formula One with much the same affection, if not outright need, for speed. A lot of the same team is back. Jerry Bruckheimer produces. Ehren Kruger, a co-writer on Maverick, takes sole credit here. Hans Zimmer, a co-composer previously, supplies the thumping
There is an old British curse, “may you live in interesting times,” passed off as ancient Chinese wisdom to make it sound more exotic and profound. We are living in interesting times. From US President Donald Trump’s decision on American tariffs, to how the recalls will play out, to uncertainty about how events are evolving in China, we can do nothing more than wait with bated breath. At the cusp of potentially momentous change, it is a good time to take stock of the current state of Taiwan’s political parties. As things stand, all three major parties are struggling. For our examination of the