The Watch
[youtube=http://youtu.be/vFXoKCwUZJY]
Tagline: Got protection?
To say that The Watch has had a troubled birth from page to screen is an understatement. Originally titled Neighborhood Watch, the title was changed in the aftermath of the events surrounding Trayvon Martin.
And so with real-life affairs tangentially making an impact on the studio, could it end up affecting box office takings? The story finds four regular suburban guys, who meet up once a week as an opportunity to do something different from their mundane lives. Who are they? Why, only Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill and Richard Ayoade, a group who surely knows as much about raising a laugh as anyone in this business we call show.
The plot is utterly ludicrous: An alien invasion of Earth is taking place from headquarters in a basement beneath a Costco. And if you’re curious as regards the location – let’s face it, the store can’t have cropped up in too many movies down the years – the reason is both funny and practical. Aliens, as well as humans, you see, can locate everything they could ever need under the store’s roof.
But will the critics find everything they need from The Watch? Roger Ebert isn’t convinced. “It’s so determined to be crude, vulgar and offensive that after a while I grew weary,” he concludes. “Abbott and Costello used to knock out funnier movies on this exact intellectual plane without using a single F, S, C, P or A word.” The San Jose Mercury-News takes a kinder view on the language employed: “it’s that vulgar, in-your-face humor that makes The Watch hysterical” but that it’s “also tiresome.” And our own Richard Corliss brings us all down to earth, when discussing the male leads, and how these are “the men who misplaced their usual intelligence for comedy when they made this unwatchable botch.”
MORE: Neighborhood Watch Movie Suffers from Seriously Bad Timing
Killer Joe
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Tagline: Murder Never Tasted So Good
There’s a clear case to be made that William Friedkin is never going to return to his high watermark of The Exorcist and The French Connection but, as with fellow veteran director Woody Allen, he’s going through an interesting period right now. His Bug from 2006 polarized many but if you were in the thumbs up camp, you were wowed by the performances he extracted out of Ashley Judd and a then (relatively unknown) Michael Shannon.
But Killer Joe surely ups the stakes by enticing Matthew McConaughey (experiencing a McConnaissance of his own, as he puts it) to take the lead as Detective “Killer” Joe Cooper, the hired hit man with rather sweet manners. He’s contacted by drug dealer Chris (Emile Hirsch), who needs to get his hands on some cash quick. A deal is struck, involving his sister (Juno Temple) and father (Thomas Haden Church), surrounding the mother’s life insurance policy.
The critics think the movie kills, which should be read as a compliment. “Gazing into the abyss has rarely felt so good,” said Time Out New York. “A gruesome, brutally violent and queasy trailer-park nightmare from deep in the heart of Texas,” sums up the Guardian. And Empire couldn’t be more impressed by the director and main actor: “Thanks to McConaughey’s oily power and Friedkin’s unflinching purpose it’s a compelling beast.”
MORE: TIME’s Top 10 Movies of 2011
NewsFeed’s Flicks Pick: There don’t appear to be a whole host of laughs in The Watch so we’ll plump for Killer Joe.