ChrisThilk Blog

Let me start off by saying this: The Foot Fist Way is a lot funnier than its marketing campaign made it out to be.

The primary source of the comedy in the movie comes from the fact that no one is acting like they’re in a comedy. Everyone plays it completely straight and the performances actually have more in common with a drama than anything else. In fact it would only take a small tweak to everyone’s take on their characters to turn this into that potential drama. That means no one is over-playing how ridiculous their characters are but instead let the humor naturally flow from the ridiculous situations they find themselves in.

Danny McBride stars as the head of a Tae Kwon Do studio who fancies himself as some sort of noble master. His ego is completely outsized to what he actually does. All the insane goings on inside the studio, whether its his interactions with his students or something happening in his personal life, are completely deflated by the occasional shots of the exterior, which positions the studio in the middle of a bland, generic strip-mall.

The movie follows McBride’s character through some tumultuous times in his life. He’s having problems with his way-too-hot-for-him wife and finds himself pursuing a chance to meet his professional idol, a meeting that winds up not turning out how he expected it to on a number of levels. It’s never out and out funny in an obvious way, but the humor comes unexpectedly and, in most case, awkwardly as you watch a collection of relative idiots bumble their way through their lives trying to be bigger than they really are.

In honor of Burn After Reading hitting theaters last week I decided my latest mini festival was going to be some of the Coen Brothers movies I have in the library. There are some notable omissions from that collection that I don’t have a good excuse for but I did want to rewatch some of the ones I’ve picked up.

First up was Barton Fink, my first introduction to the Coens way back when it was first released. I’d seen bits of Raising Arizona but never really gotten into it. Fink, though, sucked me in and turned me into a fan of the brothers. The darkly comic tale of a writer who migrates from New York to Los Angeles in the mid-40s is always a treat on a number of levels. Not only are all the performances pitch-perfect, but the scene where Barton finally figures out what he wants the wresting picture he’s commissioned to write to be about and he winds up essentially re-writing the play we see in the movie’s opening always kills me. It completely undermines everything that we’ve seen about the character up until that point, that he’s some genius just overflowing with talent. Instead he winds up doing the only thing he knows how to do - repeat himself.

Next was Fargo, which is so good on so many levels it defies most descriptions. Trust me - As good as this movie’s reputation is, those reviews don’t come close to describing how well made it actually it. It’s a bit scary.

Finally I snuck in Intolerable Cruelty, which might seem like an odd choice but I like it. Catherine Zeta-Jones gives what might be called her usual performance and is more than a little funny, but she just doesn’t know what to do with the Coen’s style and so comes off a bit stilted. Compare that to George Clooney in his second Coen outing, who knows exactly what to do and how to sell his character. He’s the only one who seems to know what to do and what the Coens were doing in the movie, which is admittedly not one of their top-tier films. Still, it’s breezy and enjoyable and worth checking out or re-watching with a fresh perspective if you’ve previously dismissed it.

There’s no question that the original Ghostbusters is the superior of this pair, though it’s certainly arguable that the Ghostbusters 2 at least manages to hold its own and certainly doesn’t, as some sequels do, degrade from the enjoyment of the original.

The original is one of those films that I’ve literally grown up with. Released in 1984 when I was all of nine years old, I’ve watched it several times a year more or less regularly since then. So it’s aged with me, never far from my mind and still acting as a source of quotes when I need a response to someone saying “Chris, I need to let you know about something…” (The proper response, of course, is, “What did you do, Ray?”)

While GBII  contains a lot of the usual sequel contrivances (it’s once again Dana Barrett being harassed by the spooks) it does so in a very believable (so far as these things go) way and manages to bring something new to the characters beyond the usual rehashing of the first movie’s plot.