Tag: Tiffany Haddish

Like A Boss

Rated: MLike A Boss

Directed by: Miguel Arteta

Story by: Danielle Sanchez-Witzel

Screenplay by: Adam Cole-Kelly, Sam Pitman

Starring: Rose Byrne, Salma Hayek, Tiffany Haddish.

“I love my friends, but I don’t think I can handle the judgement today.”

I’m trying to think of a moment I didn’t like in this film.  Maybe because I’ve been watching nothing but serious movies, crime series or the school holiday kid flicks…  Do I like a chick movie now, that gets it?!  Maybe I do…

Best buddies Mel (Rose Byrne) and Mia (Tiffany Haddish) are living the dream, running their own makeup store.

Boutique and clever with ideas like the, One Night Stand pack, they work when they want, give cute nerdy-girl discounts to young prom beauties so they can shine from the inside out…  But living the dream comes at a cost that leaves the entrepreneurs in crushing debt.  Debt that will close their business without a huge investment from an external source.  Like Claire Luna (Salma Hayek).

A gift, a rescue, Mel thinks, because she knows the finances.  It’s Mia who’s the genius when it comes to product.  Mia doesn’t want to give up control, but without financial backing Mel knows the company will sink.

Savvy businesswoman Luna proposes a compromise, forty-nine percent if the girls can continue to work together, fifty-one percent if the partnership doesn’t last.

Confident in their friendship, the two besties agree to the terms not realising the lengths this ‘angry carrot – that’s not her hair,’ will go to in order to drive them apart.

There are some genuine chick moments that strikes a chord here, the setting of friend against friend unveiling some of that passive aggressive behaviour we’ve all been guilty of, when confronting a friend is just too hard.

I mean, I could go on about directors and actors and how the film was shot, but this movie’s all about the comedy and friendship of these two girls being themselves.  Exactly what I was in the mood for.

I loved seeing Jennifer Coolidge as shop assistant, Sydney – gorgeous woman!  And seeing chicks deal with the stress of it all without being dickheads about it is a lot of fun.

I know I’m being a bit lazy with this review, but right now?  Like everyone else these days, I feel busy.  So with this screening, I enjoyed taking a break and just having a laugh.

The Secret Life Of Pets 2

Rated: PGThe Secret Life Of Pets 2

Directed by: Chris Renaud

Co-Directed by: Jonathan Del Val

Written by: Brian Lynch

Produced by: Chris Meledadri, p.g.a., Janet Healy, p.g.a

Voices by: Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish, Patton Oswalt, Eric Stonestreet, Jenny Slate, Lake Bell with Harrison Ford.

‘If you pee on it, you own it’:  The wisdom of Terrier Max.

We all love our pets and their shenanigans.  My cat Cloud, AKA Cheeky brat, AKA Ching-Chong-Chunk is a constant source of entertainment and companionship.

The Secret Life Of Pets (2016)) managed to tap into that delight of humans and what we imagine our pets get up to when we’re not around.

Here, in The Secret Life Of Pets 2, we get Terrier Max (Patton Oswalt) returning with the loveable house-mate and mutt, Duke (Eric Stonestreet), along with pomeranian Gidget (Jenny Slate) taking a steam in the dishwasher and Chloe (Lake Bell) teaching Gidget the way of the cat.

The characteristics of animals we know and love are captured in detail making me smile in recognition, cat-meowing-in-sleeping-human-face included.

So starting out, all I could think was, Adorable.

In this next instalment, Max is coping with the introduction of another member of the family, baby Liam.

With Max stress-scratching we see the running theme of fear and rising to the challenge of life and facing fear, all cumulating when the family visit a farm.

Here we meet a wise farm dog and crazy stalker turkey.

All the birds are crazy-eyed and brainless, managing to always get me giggling.

Then there’s this side-story with an evil circus and lion and rescue mission from wolves I didn’t really get.

The humour was more slapstick as well, moving away from the cheeky pet behaviour that makes The Secret Life Of Pets so good.

Sure, this side-mission added adventure and was perhaps aimed at the youngsters in the audience; but I didn’t really sense a positive response from the kids either.

The super-hero bunny Snowball (Kevin Hart) with Daisy-the-brave (Tiffany Haddish) felt like another story from another movie.  And it didn’t really gel because the attachment to Max and Co. was already made.

I just wanted to keep watching Max at the farm and Gidget and the cat Chloe back at the city apartment block – that’s what I was interested in.  That’s what I found funny: the behaviour of the characters as pets, not as super-hero adventurers.

So, some of the film I adored; the rest, not so much.

Night School

Rated: MNight School

Directed by: Malcolm D. Lee

Written by: Kevin Hart, Harry Ratchford, Joey Wells, Matt Kellard, Nicholas Stoller, John Hamburg

Produced by: Will Packer, Kevin Hart

Starring: Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish, Taran Killam, Romany Malco.

I arrived at the preview of Night School with my tub of popcorn expecting a big, bold American-style comedy and it was that, but it was also something more.

The movie opens with Teddy (Kevin Hart) sparring with his sister over his decision to quit high school rather than face yet another test. Teddy argues that the test is not relevant to African American students; he can’t see the point of, ‘calculating the average number of Manatees in California’.

At the time, leaving school did not seem like such a bad idea. A few years later and Teddy is selling barbeques so successfully that his boss offers to hand over the business to him when he retires. Teddy seems to have it all: a drop-dead-gorgeous girlfriend, a luxury sports car and a secure, well-paid future. That is, until he accidentally blows up Barbeque City.

Despite an unparalleled talent for hustling, Teddy is looking at a long term future on the side of a highway wearing a chicken suit unless he returns to school. Unluckily for Teddy, the boy he publicly humiliated when they were students (Taran Killam) now runs the school, striding down the corridors with a baseball bat and a horrible case of ‘black-talking’, and the woman teaching the night class (Tiffany Haddish) turns out to be the complete stranger who dissed him out at the traffic lights earlier on. Even the text book is terrifyingly huge, and definitely not the mere ‘leaflet’ Teddy was hoping for.

If this isn’t enough, he discovers that he has a cocktail of learning difficulties including: dyslexia, dyscalculia and a processing disorder. Not that it wins Teddy any sympathy with his smart and fiercely dedicated teacher. She quips that he is ‘clinically dumb’ before launching a unique hands on special-ed program designed to unencumber his ‘neural pathways’.

All of this might turn others to a life of crime (has turned one class member), but Teddy still has his beautiful fiancé, Lisa, to live up to. Believing that she is out of his league, he has convinced her that he’s working for his best friend as an investment adviser, but he must first qualify for his GED if he is to make this true.

Usually, when I see a movie for the first time I experience the score in a direct, visceral way, and it takes deliberate effort to tune in to the sound more consciously. In this instance I did manage to wrench myself out of the action and I was impressed not only by the cleverness of the soundtrack, but the unpredictable ways it enhanced the comedy.

It wasn’t until final scenes that I realised that the Night School had been made with a genuine sense of conviction, and with much stealth, guile and cunning I had been drawn into a view of education as more important than any obstacle, however enormous. Yet the achievement of this movie is that there was not the slightest feeling of being lectured to. Well, maybe a tiny bit in the final joke littered speech. By then the entire cast has experienced their own brand of growth. Even the principal has shed his ‘black talking’ sneer.

Girls Trip

Rated: MA 15+Girls Trip

Directed by: Malcolm D. Lee

Produced by: Will Packer, Malcolm D. Lee

Screenplay by: Kenya Barris, Tracy Oliver

Story by: Erica Rivinoja, Kenya Barris, Tracy Oliver

Starring: Regina Hall, Tiffany Haddish, Larenz Tate, Mike Colter, Kate Walsh, Jada Pinkett Smith and Queen Latifah.

After 5-years apart, four lifelong female friends reunite for a wild weekend in New Orleans, unleashing their Class of 95 sisterhood, ‘the Flossy Posse’, older and wiser, little do they suspect just how wild and unwise unleashing their former selves will be.

Before the posse join the reveling hundreds of thousands, the throbbing mass of the Essence Festival crowd – where every temptation is overripe for the plucking – they are led into prayer – before their sins begin – by the provocative insanity that is Dina (Tiffany Haddish) a shameless, man crazy, hothead with anger management issues.

  ‘Dear God, my heart is so full of joy for these women right here. Lord please make sure that Lisa don’t get an STD and nobody has kidney failure because we plan to get messed up. And let me get pregnant by somebody rich. Amen’.Girls Trip

Sweet divorcee Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith) doesn’t get an STD, but does get a man endowed with an appendage the size of a third arm. How she overcomes the colossal feat of fellatio with grapefruit requires audience tissues, not for crying but for snort out loud laughter that is wet and uncontrollable in a cinema full of strangers.

At the movie’s heart is the tale of Ryan Pierce (Regina Hall) A svelte, successful, self-help author, selling her soul to uphold a marriage now stripped of love but needed to maintain celebrity image and fortune.

And Sasha (Queen Latifah) towers as the Judas character, a celebrity gossip blogger tempted by the fortune she could make by exposing her friend’s marriage to the world before the weekends over.

With an insanely relatable quartet of women, Packer dramatizes his characters alive not with the traditional single-woman qualities of cute man-pleasing sexiness but with women aware of their beauty, outrageous in their partying, their crowd surfing pantyless libidos and their criminal if convicted brawling. And he throws in just a few explosive public golden urine showers over innocent revelers to keep them dangerously unforgettable.Girls Trip

Dina is by far the most outrageous and controversial and in some scenes her motives teeter dangerously between pure funny wrong and pure wrong.

In one scene, she threatens to glass Ryan’s unfaithful husband with the broken neck of a wine bottle and in another she spikes the ‘posse’s’ cocktails with a heavy pour of 200-year-old absinthe – their night turns out hilarious and hallucinogenic but the concept of spiking one’s girlfriend’s kind of breaks that momentum of sisterhood.

In just over two hours, the movie edit could be tighter, but its outrageous moments will propel the word of mouth success of, Girls Trip.

In America, the film grossed over $85 million dollars making Packer 43 one of the world’s most prominent African American filmmakers with 26 movies grossing over $1 billion.

Packer has an innate sense of what his market audience wants and he delivers just that.

 

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