Balls of Fury is tremendously silly, but curiously amusing tale of a former ping-pong champion recruited to infiltrate a Far East crime lord's organization through his sudden death ping pong tournament. It has a healthy dose of very silly Christopher Walken and a lot of other silliness, and if you're into stupid movies, it's really not bad. It's not up to the level of Broken Lizard comedies and some of the other fine silly movies I've seen, but I had a lot of fun (although the company helped).
Fred Claus is the slightly less silly story of Santa Claus's unappreciated younger brother Fred, although it is still pretty silly. It has some problems, like way too many sappy subplots that contribute to an overly long running time, but it has a few things going for it, most notably Vince Vaughn's mile a minute Chicago con man. Flaws and all, I really did like Fred Claus, for its holiday message that even well-intentioned relatives can still be a major pain in the ass, and that even the cloying Claus family has a few issues surface around the dinner table.
I was really looking forward to Дневной дозор, completing the great Russian horror epic started in Ночной дозор, but I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed. Night Watch had something of a unique style that had Russians pouring into theaters in record numbers, but visually Day Watch never reaches the same level outside the opening sequence with the Chalk of Fate, and the plot didn't make a whole lot of sense either... I couldn't help feeling something was lost in translation. I was still interested in how the characters from Night Watch were getting on, and I'd still get suckered into any third entry in the trilogy, but there's really no rush.
I first caught Sean Ellis's short film "Cashback" because it was nominated for an Oscar in 2006, and I found it to be a fun meditation on art and the female form, full of bright humor and delightfully naked women, as an artist explains the art of surviving working at a
supermarket overnight. The feature film of the same name includes the entire short film and expands on it in both directions, adding a lot of humor and a bit of romance, but losing along the way some of the poignancy of the short film. The feature film takes what I took to be a metaphor, a painter's ability to freeze time capturing a moment on canvas, and makes it a literal ability to freeze time. It's still a cool movie and I'd highly recommend it to anyone with access to decent movies, but I would recommend watching Ellis' short film first (almost certainly on the same DVD).
The company definitely made the movie more fun.
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