Fred Willard

Nick Twisp (Cera) is a 16-year-old who feels out of sync with the world. He has a summer job in a caravan park, where he instantly falls in love with Sheeni (Doubleday), the fiercely protected daughter of religious nutcases (Walsh and Place). Sheeni is like a female version of him, only sexy and smarter, and he creates an imaginary alter ego named Francois Dillinger to give him the confidence to seduce her. But of course things go wrong from the start.

Continue reading: Youth In Revolt Review

Right around the time Pixar Animation Studios released its fifth feature, Finding Nemo, conversation shifted from "Is it any good?" to "Just how amazing is it?" Quality was assumed, and rightfully so. The studio's creative directors helped redefine the animation genre with the Toy Story franchise, A Bug's Life and Monsters, Inc. Subsequent Pixar stories were measured against their predecessors and ranked accordingly.

Continue reading: WALL-E Review

Every perfect and picturesque neighborhood - at least in the movies - has one: that creepy old house that fuels the nightmares and serves as the centerpiece of the double-dog dares for the local kids.

DJ (Mitchel Musso) has made the house his mission. He's set his bedroom up as home base to watch old Mr. Nebbercracker across the street, an irate curmudgeon (voiced by Steve Buscemi) who steals any balls or bikes that find their way into his yard, chases after kids to keep off his lawn, and, presumably, thinks the music kids listen to today is nothing but noise. Within an hour of DJ's parents leaving for the weekend, Nebbercracker is dead (from a heart attack during an apoplectic moment at finding DJ on his lawn) and DJ is finding out that the old coot might not have been the most dangerous part of the creepy old house, because the house itself is starting to... eat people.

Continue reading: Monster House Review

Anchorman launches us into the world of '70s broadcast journalism with local San Diego anchor Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) as the poster boy for men behaving badly. His supporting anchors introduce themselves by breaking the fourth wall with all the casual gusto of their on-air personas. There's good-ol'-boy Champ Kind (David Koechner) with sports, ladies' man Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) in the field, and dumb-as-a-Brick Tamland (Steven Carell) on weather. They revel in their boys' club with gleeful ignorance of terms like "sexual harassment" until new reporter Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) enters the fray. Improbably, Ron and Veronica hit it off until a series of events puts her in the co-anchor seat and professional jealousy rips them apart, sending Ron on a downward spiral.

Continue reading: Anchorman Review

Mockumentary maestro Christopher Guest -- the driving force behind "This Is Spinal Tap" and "Waiting For Guffman" -- aims his satirical squirt gun at obsessive dog owners in his latest tongue-in-cheek, interview vérité offering, "Best In Show."

Casting a wide net across kitchy Americana, Guest's cameras capture a handful of mildly lunatic canine caretakers as they travel to and prepare for a prestigious dog show.

There's Harlan Pepper (played by Guest), a North Carolina fishing shop owner and the proud papa of a sad-eyed bloodhound he's convinced is psychic. There's cross-eyed, buck-toothed Gerry and trampy Cookie Fleck (Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara), a middle-aged suburban couple with no kids but a pampered Norwich Terrier that is their pride and joy.

Continue reading: Best In Show Review

There is a key to good'n'stupid lowbrow comedy that few lowbrow moviemakers understand, and it is this: If you have a thin but serviceable premise upon which to build cheap, vulgar, tasteless, but side-splitting dumb gags, don't slap together some insipid story clogged with clichés to prop it up -- just run with what you've got.

Don't turn your movie into Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider fodder, full of insulting attempts to make audiences genuinely feel for your imbecile heroes and wishy-washy life lessons for your stock characters to learn in the last act. Don't be an "American Pie" and backpedal on your vulgarity at the last minute with a hypocritical-apology "happy" ending.

Instead, be proudly, shamelessly, flippantly stupid, like "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," in which two recent-grad, odd-couple roommates don't discover anything about themselves, they never see any "bigger picture," and they don't grow up at all. They just get stoned out of their gourds on a Friday night, develop the munchies for those famous square hamburgers from the titular eastern-U.S. fast food joint, and spend the rest of the picture having preposterous misadventures while driving all over New Jersey hunting for the nearest franchise location.

Continue reading: Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle Review