seth rogen

Good Fortune

by
Keanu Reeves with wings

A strangely old-fashioned supernatural comedy from Aziz Ansari, still probably best known for Parks and Recreation, who wrote, directed and stars in Good Fortune, a so-nearly-great feature debut falling over itself in its desire to pack everything in. The opening shot of Keanu Reeves stood on top of a monumental building kitted out in angel’s wings suggests Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, but Ansari is really channelling Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch. It’s a Wonderful Life and Heaven Can Wait most obviously, though the social-democratic impulses of Mr Smith Goes to Washington are sloshing around in the drum too. Reeves plays a low-status angel, Gabriel (not the billing Gabriel gets in the Bible, … Read more

An American Pickle

by
Seth Rogen as Ben and Herschel

American Pickle is unsure whether it’s fighting the culture war or fighting it off – a proper pickle It’s amusing, likeable, good-natured and I really wanted to like it, but American Pickle really is all over the place. Basics first: Seth Rogen is the East European from some Yiddish-speaking stetl who, after the Cossacks kill everyone in his village in a pogrom, heads to the US with his wife and love of his life (Sarah Snook, soon dead, before you get too excited). There, Herschel gets a job, falls into a vat in a pickle factory, wakes up a century later, the brine having somehow magically preserved him, and heads out into modern New … Read more

The Interview

by
James Franco and Seth Rogen in The Interview

Like an Inspector Clouseau party that’s forgotten to invite Peter Sellers, The Interview has a gigantic gaping hole where the comedy should be. Unsure if it’s a satire on modern entertainment or a Get Smart-style caper comedy set in the People’s Republic of North Korea, it squats uneasily between the two, leaving its game bromantic stars, James Franco and Seth Rogen, mouthing like beached fish in one unfunny set-up after another. The film arrives after the most brilliantly organised bit of internet brouhaha since The Blair Witch Project. First, Sony’s servers were hacked by the North Koreans, angry at the prospect of a film about an assassination attempt on the Dear Leader. The film … Read more