Colin Higgins
6 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
The premise on paper seems simple enough but like Collin Higgin’s Nine to Five , a better film that you’re sometimes reminded of, care has been taken to circumvent obvious advances in the story.
An exercise in the fashionable Hollywood in-your-face lewdness associated with the envelope-pushing Judd Apatow, this business world comedy is a switch on Nine to Five , the 1980 feminist movie in which Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton kidnap their exploitative chauvinist boss.
Think of 2011's "Horrible Bosses" as "Nine to Five" meets "The Hangover."
And Jill Clayburgh, her too-brief life on earth now over, provides some scene-stealing moments of her own in her final film, as Annie’s mom, a devotee of the stars (Dolly Parton, Burt Reynolds) of distributor Universal’s 1982 feature “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”
Somebody killed Harlan, and while Benoit Blanc is on the case, ("I suspect," Craig drawls in Benoit Blanc's wonderfully ridiculous Southern accent, " foul play "), Knives Out quickly spirals into unexpected territory.
Working the case brings Mullins and Ashburn into contact with a series of crackpots and weirdos, an albino D.E.A agent (played by Dan Bakkedahl; "You look evil as shit," comments Mullins, a conscious callback to the albino villain in "Foul Play", seen on a television earlier in the film), a nasty drug addict named Tatiana (the hilarious Kaitlin Olson , who only has one scene, and kills it), and an exhausted white-haired police sergeant who says, "This job is destroying me.
It was the first comedy with an all-female lead cast to become a crossover demographic success since perhaps Nine to Five, which came out more than thirty years ago.
While we’re on the subject of female-driven comedies, though, “Bad Moms” also has more than a hint of “ Nine to Five ” about it—a huge compliment from me, given that it was a childhood favorite of mine.
The mom is Goldie Hawn, 71, who made a career out of playing ditzes with hidden reserves of pluck (“Foul Play,” “Private Benjamin”), while the daughter is Amy Schumer, 35, whose chosen persona is the big-city girl with hidden depths of insecurity (“Trainwreck”).
She was so adorable when she was younger, especially in "Foul Play" (1978) and "Private Benjamin" (1980), her best.
The trouble is, “Snatched” really is a return to form — it goes right back to the knockabout synthetic spirit of such cheeseball Goldie Hawn comedies as “Foul Play,” “Overboard,” and “Bird on a Wire.”
I saw two scenes that were very close replicas of scenes in her previous films: her hyperventilating anxiety attack in 1980’s “Seems Like Old Times” and the part in 1978’s “Foul Play” where she is kidnapped and prostrate in a locked room.
Hawn has elevated similarly throwaway material throughout her career (“Foul Play,” “ Overboard ,” “Bird on a Wire”), and it’s certainly lovely to see her again, but why come out of retirement for this?