Neil Morris

Pineapple Express opens Wednesday throughout the Triangle It seems strange to appraise the “history” of the stoner comedy, a subgenre whose alpha is also its archetype: the Cheech & Chong films of the 1970s and ’80s. Within the lineage that follows are amusing but not groundbreaking entries such as How High and Half-Baked. However, it […]

The essence of any good satire is its underpinning of truth. Last February, during a press junket in Chapel Hill, Will Ferrell took a few moments to forecast his then-upcoming film, Step Brothers, about two 40-year-old dolts still living at home with single parents who then get married, forcing the two man-children to become stepbrothers. […]

Nowadays, you can throw a dart at a newspaper movie listing and hit a film with some post-Sept. 11 import. But, while 2005’s Batman Begins was director Christopher Nolan’s indictment of society’s fear of terrorism, its sequel is a nuanced, occasionally convoluted examination of the consequences of the Bush Doctrine. The Batman (Christian Bale, again) […]

Like many film critics, one of the most frequent invectives hurled my way goes something like this: “Why can’t you just enjoy a movie without overanalyzing every little thing?” Notwithstanding the fact that analysis is the only reason I sit through 90 percent of the movies I watch, I often wonder whether an overexposure to […]

The young North Carolina-born director Ramin Bahrani, in Man Push Cart and now Chop Shop, steeps his audience squarely in society’s impoverished underbelly. One of the few visual cues that the setting for Chop Shop is a major American city, and not a random Third World slum, is the periodic glimpse of New York City’s […]

It is worth remembering that, long before the Judd Apatow comedic reign began, the Farrelly Brothers were once the toast of Tinseltown, working in scatology the way some artists work with watercolors. After defining (and influencing) film comedy for the decade of the 1990s with Dumb and Dumber, Me, Myself & Irene and There’s Something […]