‘When no one laughs, your soul leaves your body’: have you heard the one about the Bradley Cooper film inspired by John Bishop … ?

Is This Thing On? is Cooper’s third film as writer/director – and his third to wonder whether performing saves or destroys your love life. He and stars Will Arnett, Laura Dern and Andra Day talk gags, growth and relationship goals Last Christmas, the audience at an open-mic night in New York welcomed to the stage a new standup. Alex Novak, he said his name was. Mildly funny, bit depressed. Mostly told jokes about getting divorced. Weirdest thing though: he looked exactly like that guy from Arrested Development . “I was so naively unaware of what to expect,” says Will Arnett, almost a year later. “I’ve been comedy-adjacent for a lot of my life, but not a comedian. I had no idea what I was in for.” Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/hBIcyrg via IFTTT

Saw X review – torture porn horror returns with more blood, less value

Stomachs will churn once again in an attempt to rewind the clock for the fatigued franchise but there’s ultimately little of worth here

It’s a strange existential feeling to be seated in front of a Saw film once again, a return not just to a franchise but an entire torture porn subgenre. As a screaming woman is forced to cut off her leg and suck out a litre of blood from her fresh wound in order to save her head from being sliced off by serrated wire, one might start wondering the hows and whys of what got us here.

While financial greed is the obvious studio motivator (cheaply made horror still the most reliably profitable genre in Hollywood), it’s curious to ponder why we might want to endure another two hours of stomach-churning gore especially when served on such a musty old platter. The decision to kill the series big bad Jigsaw in Saw III was fitting given the franchise obsession with cattle-prod shock value but it also left the makers in a trap they then struggled to get out of. Ensuing sequels were flashback-heavy, filling in an increasingly convoluted backstory, making each new Saw film feel more like daytime soap opera. In an attempt to swerve away from a timeline that even the most devoted Saw fan would struggle to explain, 2021’s Chris Rock-led Spiral tried to spin the story off into a detective thriller with a different villain but it was an embarrassingly junky disaster, a new low for a series that was already in the gutter.

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