Bad Santa (2003)
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
You'd better watch out - Willie T. Soke is coming to town, and he doesn't care if you've been naughty or nice. Willie's favorite holiday tradition is to fill his sacks with loot lifted from shopping malls across the country. But this year his plot gets derailed by a wisecracking store detective, a sexy bartender, and a kid who's convinced Willie is the real Santa Claus.
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What critics compared Bad Santa to
Inevitable comparisons can be drawn with Terry Zwigoff's 2003 movie "Bad Santa."
Taking the "Bad Santa" skew to the classroom, Cameron Diaz is the "Bad Teacher" of the title, a rotten apple of an educator if ever there was one.
The bulk of Bad Teacher isn't so subversive – Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg's script is basically Bad Santa's public-school analog – but it is consistently funny.
The game plan of “ Bad Teacher ” is quite simple – create a middle school variant on “ Bad Santa .”
Both Bad Santa and the Bad Lieutenants (Keitel and Cage) were really bad, but they were entertaining.
"Bad Teacher" immediately brings " Bad Santa " to mind and suffers by the comparison.
Of all the movies to follow the Bad formula — a collection that includes Bad Grandpa, Bad Teacher, Bad Santa, and that has somehow retroactively enveloped Abel Ferrara’s not-like-the-others 1992 Bad Lieutenant — Bad Moms clearly features the lowest standards for what constitutes misbehavior.
From (two of) “the dudes who brought you The Hangover” comes another entry in the proliferating Bad/Dirty-verse still ruled by 2003’s Bad Santa (Dirty Grandpa was a late overachiever).
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- In the tradition of similarly named movies -- "Bad Teacher," "Bad Bosses" and even "Bad Santa" -- comes the Mila Kunis comedy project "Bad Moms."
Bad Santa, Bad Teacher, Bad Grandpa (Dirty Grandpa), Bad Lieutenant, Bad Boys, Bad Girls, Badlands, Superbad, Very Bad Things — etc.
Of course, it’s been shown that when a movie has “bad” in the title and features a true celebration of bad behavior (“Bad Santa,” “Bad Teacher”), it may just have a commercial edge.
Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, and Kathryn Hahn are the mothers of the depressingly boilerplate title (I’m thankful for a lot of what Bad Santa gave us, but not that rubber-stamp titling rubric), and as you’ve probably gathered from the trailers and said title, they play a trio of (hot, of course) suburban mothers who’ve finally had enough of the exhausting rituals of perfect-momming, and lash back with drinking, screwing, and general hell-raising.
Like 2003’s Bad Santa and this year’s The Night Before , it rejects Capraesque sentimentality in favor of a more misanthropic (and, really, a more relatable) worldview.
When Sarah's redneck sister Linda (Alison Tolman) visits with her Uncle Eddie family--husband Howie (David Koechner), horrible tween girls (Lolo Owen, Queenie Samuel), Bad Santa mutant (Maverick Flack), and baby, plus ugly-talking, trashy Aunt Dorothy (Conchata Ferrell)--familial tensions erupt along with an ominous, electricity-killing blizzard.
Dougherty the screenwriter uneasily mixes the creatures’ PG-13-level scares with the most misanthropic humans to grace a Christmas film since “Bad Santa,” making for a movie that is unvaryingly better when no one is speaking.
Segel and Diaz have reunited here with director Jake Kasdan, who all worked together on Bad Teacher, which was itself a Bad Santa ripoff set in middle school.
Segel, Diaz, and director Jake Kasdan teamed up a few years ago on Bad Teacher, a Bad Santa derivative with an appealing raunchiness, and Segel and his frequent writing/directing partner, Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Neighbors ), co-wrote the script with Kate Angelo.
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Eschewing Apatovian sentiment and a refreshingly absent insidious moral center, Horrible Bosses has a lot in common with the abrasive Glenn Ficarra-John Requa projects Bad Santa and Bad News Bears.
The result is the funniest comedy of degeneracy since Bad Santa, and a career-changer for Aniston and Farrell if they'll only keep following their perverted muses.
Whatever promise Dirty Grandpa held of being a profane yet intelligent and insightful comedy (like Bad Santa or There’s Something About Mary) is quickly lost after an unrelenting and meaningless barrage of rape jokes, drug jokes, child-molestation jokes, masturbation jokes, Jew jokes, racial jokes, gay jokes, lesbian jokes, disability jokes, and one joke that somehow finds a reason to reference Mother Teresa’s genitals.
In the vein of movies like Snakes on a Plane and Bad Santa, Burr Steers' Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a film that very much tells you what it’s all about with its title: it’s Jane Austen’s classic romantic tale retold with a bit of Walking Dead action.
The screenplay by writing partners Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (“Bad Santa”) and Josh Goldstein tries to recreate Steven Spielberg’s homages of the action scenes of silent film comedy masters Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.
Screenwriting duo Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, whose eclectic CVs include such family-friendly fare as Cats & Dogs and, ahem, Bad Santa , and associated others’ solution?
The film's script has passed through a myriad of hands, with "Blade Runner: 2049" scribe Michael Green and "Bad Santa" writing duo Glenn Ficarra & John Requa getting final credit, so there's the typical amount of tonal and plotting inconsistency at play here.
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"Eagle Eye's" small pleasures are to be found in a couple of early chase scenes and a droll supporting turn from Billy Bob Thornton ("Bad Santa," "Mr.
You can’t fault Smith for returning to the “Hitch” realm of romance, sleek interiors and beautiful clothes, or for wanting to be in an R-rated film with adult themes and occasionally raunchy banter (Requa and Ficarra also wrote “Bad Santa”).
“Focus” is written and directed by the team of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, known for creating smart comedies (“Bad Santa,” “I Love You Philip Morris,” “Crazy, Stupid, Love”).
The reliably solid team of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa—who previously scripted Bad Santa and moved into directing with I Love You, Phillip Morris and Crazy Stupid Love—have a fine ear for dialogue and specialize in stories of elaborate deception.
How did the filmmaking team of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa — responsible for the brilliant nastiness of Bad Santa (as writers) and charming sweetness of I Love You Phillip Morris (as writers and directors) — come to this? Focus is unpleasant, humor free, and contrary to accepted codes of movie (and nonmovie) morality.
The director-writer team of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa ( Bad Santa ; I Love You, Phillip Morris ; and Crazy, Stupid Love ) know how to keep things lively, luscious and lovely.
Written and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, the team behind Bad Santa and I Love You Philip Morris, this is one of those sexy international intrigues in which every con turns out to be part of an even bigger con, until none of the characters could possibly trust each other but the two leads live happily ever after anyway.