Jonathan Poritsky

Drugs, guns, vul­gar­ity and rims are just the tip of the pigeon­holed ice­berg that is Benny Boom’s fea­ture debut, Next Day Air; but what this lit­tle caper has that so many other films of a sim­i­lar ilk lack is heart, and lots of it.

The improb­a­ble story fol­lows ten bricks of cocaine from a for­mi­da­ble drug dealer in Calexico, California to his dis­patcher in Philadelphia by way of an overnight deliv­ery ser­vice, Next Day Air. Donald Faison, of Scrubs fame, plays Leo Jackson, a chron­i­cally stoned deliv­ery man for the fic­ti­tious com­pany, whose mind is so clouded on the job that he deliv­ers the coke to apart­ment 302 instead of 303, set­ting events in motion. The drugs end up in the hands of fledg­ling crim­i­nals Guch, Brody and Hassie instead of the diminu­tive yet feisty Jesus, who prefers to be called “Gee-sus” rather than “Hay-zoos”. While Hassie is sleep­ing on the couch, as he is for the most of the film, Guch and Brody, played with an incred­i­ble bal­ance of humor and charisma by Wood Harris and Mike Epps, respec­tively, hatch a plan to sell the dope to Brody’s cousin, Shavoo, before the right­ful own­ers get wise to the mis­take. Think of it like True Romance but with­out white peo­ple and set in Philly. Continue read­ing at the can­dler blog.

It had to hap­pen some­time. As much as I had hoped to stave it off for as long as pos­si­ble, the day had to come when I would leave a Judd Apatow pro­duc­tion utterly dis­sat­is­fied. “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” nearly did me in, but fur­ther rumi­na­tion on the film showed a real mat­u­ra­tion hap­pen­ing in the cabal of dirty lit­tle boys that sur­round the Hollywood com­edy mag­nate. Too bad that the pro­gres­sion toward a bet­ter kind of toi­let humor didn’t make it’s way into the teams lat­est, and arguably most antic­i­pated, “Pineapple Express”.
Read on…

Of the few episodes I have seen of the suc­cess­ful HBO series, I can say with con­fi­dence that the tele­vised incar­na­tion of Sex and the City is smarter, fun­nier, classier and all around more sig­nif­i­cant than the recently released film ver­sion. This wouldn’t be such a prob­lem if that laun­dry list of pos­i­tives didn’t apply to pretty much every film I’ve seen in the past year when stacked up against Michael Patrick King’s first foray onto the sil­ver screen. In the end, as with every male-driven action film that comes out around this time, qual­ity isn’t such a con­cern for the core audi­ence, who have come out in droves to instantly push this rom-com into the black. We’ll get to the ladies who turned out their pock­ets and bedaz­zled purses at the box office in a moment, but let’s start with the movie.

The film starts almost like any episode of the show, with a mod­i­fied title sequence that should a har­bin­ger of shlock to come. Instead of Carrie’s tutu-ed prance about town which ends with her get­ting splashed with muck, we are put through an awful mon­tage updat­ing us on the shows ups and downs over some ter­ri­ble popi­fied ver­sion of the theme song. Message: this is a fash­ion show of fool­ish­ness you are about to see. Read on…