05th Jul2014

Chelsea Handler – Theatre

by timbaros
images-203You either love her or you don’t love her. America’s most biting talk show host – Chelsea Handler – is coming to London.
Promoting her new book “Uganda Be Kidding Me”, Handler is most well-known for her eponymous television show on the E Entertainment Channel Network, Chelsea Lately, which she’s hosted for seven years. It’s a fast and funny talk/comedy show where she and three other comedians (and her Mexican sidekick nugget Chuey Bravo) discuss, and make jokes of, the day’s news. The second part of the show is where Handler interviews celebrities – A-list celebrities – and most of them seem to be friends of hers (Jennifer Aniston, Charlize Theron, Eric Bana, the list goes on). And as Handler is Los Angeles- based, she rubs shoulders with these people at parties and other events in the Los Angeles area.
Chelsea Lately airs at midnight here in the U.K., a bit late for some, but it’s worth staying up for.
Handler has written five books, all bestsellers, including her funny titled second book “Are  You There God, It’s Me Chelsea.” Her new book, “Uganda Be Kidding Me”, immediately topped the best sellers list when it came out.
Handler has been all over America promoting the book, and now she’s coming to the UK. Handler will be in Dublin on Friday, July 11th, and on Saturday July 12th she will be appearing at London’s Palladium Theatre. There is still tickets available for both shows, so if you are a fan of hers, or not, now’s the time to experience Handler’s sarcastic and edgy humor in a no-holds-barred live setting. And you won’t be seeing much of Handler after September, she has decided to end her talk show. What’s she going to do next? She’s signed a contract with Netflix to have exclusive rights to her next television show. She’s said that Netflix is the cutting edge new kid on the block, so she’s going to them. Chelsea, we will miss Chelsea Lately!
For tickets to the Dublin and London shows, click here:
Category : Theatre
Tags :
0 Comm
05th Jul2014

Delivery Man – DVD

by timbaros
images-201David Wozniak is a meat delivery driver. He also owes money to the mob. He has a girlfriend that can’t trust him. And he’s the father of 533 children. All of this in the new film Delivery Man.

Wozniak, played by Vince Vaughn, works for the family meat business in New York City – Wozniak & Sons. He also happens to owe $80,000 to the mob. His girlfriend Emma (Cobie Smulders) is pregnant, and she doesn’t even want him to be in their kid’s life. David is also not very good at his job, according to his father Mikolaj (Andrzej Blumenfeld), his meat deliveries are always four hours late.
So when one day David finds a lawyer at his house who announces to him that he has fathered 533, how can his life get any worse?
David realizes that his college days are coming back to haunt him as he was a very frequent donor to the local sperm bank to help him pay his way through college. And unfortunately, according to the lawyer, the sperm bank ended up using all of his sperm (instead of the other donors) to impregnate women, and now 142 of these children have filed a class action lawsuit to find out who their real father is.
David definitely does not want to be known as the father. He also decides that it is time to step up and be a man and to try to prove to Emma that he will be a good father to their child. David enlists his best friend and lawyer Brett (Chris Pratt) to represent him in court to make sure his name does not get out, especially as he doesn’t want Emma to find out as well. Brett hands over to David a package which includes all of ‘his children’s’ profiles, so what does David do? He decides to start meeting them, one by one (anonymously of course). The first on the list is a basketball player for the New York Knicks. The second kid he visits happens to work at a barista who is an aspiring actor, so David works one of his shifts so that he can go to an acting audition. The third child he visits, Kristen (Britt Robertson) happens to take a drug overdose while he is visiting, so it is up to David to save her and make sure she goes to work and stays on the right path. Other children he visits include a lifeguard, a drunk, a nail salon worker, a busker, and a severely retarded son, who he visits quite often and who he wants to build a relationship with. He also tells the boy that he is his father.
As he gets to meet more and more of ‘his’ kids (who have formed one large support group and call themselves Starbuck – the alias name David used at the sperm bank), and with his girlfriend about to give birth, David is ready for more responsibility then what he can handle.
Delivery Man is a film that won’t change the world, but it is a cute and funny look at a man who has no cares and responsibilities in life who all of a sudden has more than what he can handle. Vaughn is very good and funny in this role. We are used to seeing him in similar roles but with worse scripts. In Delivery Man, directed by Ken Scott, we have sympathy for him and at the same time want to cheer him on to step up to the plate. It is a film worth checking out.
Delivery Man is a re-telling of the 2011 French-Canadian film Starbuck, also directed by Scott.

Delivery Man is now out on DVD.

Category : DVD
Tags : ,
0 Comm
05th Jul2014

Last Vegas – DVD

by timbaros
LV_03450aFirst we had The Hangover parts 1, 2 and 3, for the boys. Then we had Bridesmaids, for the girls. Now we have Last Vegas, for the baby boomers (a/k/a Old Age Pensioners).
Last Vegas brings together Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline (all Academy Award Winners), to Las Vegas (58 years after they have all last seen each other). They are there for a Bachelor party to celebrate the upcoming wedding nuptials of Michael Douglas’s character Billy, a very rich Malibu lawyer who never got married, and who is now marrying a woman less than half his age (32). Sam (Kline) is living in Florida with his loving wife, settling too quickly for old age. Archie (Freeman), who’s had a stroke, lives with his overprotective son in New Jersey. Paddy, meanwhile, has recently lost his wife, lives in a Brooklyn apartment and is all alone and very lonely. They were all best friends when they were younger, but their lives have taken them different ways and to different parts of the country. So with his first wedding Billy thinks it would go a good idea to get the gang back together again for a bachelor party to end all bachelor parties, and where else? In Las Vegas! So Billy calls everyone up (this time not to tell them that somebody’s dying, but to tell them that he is finally getting married), and he convinces them to meet in Las Vegas. Archie has to sneak out of the house to avoid his son stopping him, while Sam’s wife gives him permission to fool around while he is in Las Vegas (what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas). Paddy, meanwhile, is just so miserable that he doesn’t want to leave his apartment, but the boys succeed in getting him to go to Vegas.
So the men all arrive, not having seen each other for decades, and any animosities between them, especially between Billy and Paddy (especially after Billy did not attend Paddy’s wife’s funeral), still simmer but take a while to disappear. Of course, the hotel that Billy booked them in is full, so they wander around figuring out what to do. Immediately Archie has a winning streak at blackjack, and with all the money he has won, he feels that him and the boys can get Billy a very good wedding gift as Billy has financially helped each of them in previous years. And as a bonus, the hotel where he won the money gives them one of the hotel’s best suites. It is the Aria Hotel, which really exists, and at times it seems like this movie is one long ad for the hotel as its logo appears in almost every other scene. So at the Aria Hotel the men are set to have a fun and wild weekend. But then they happen to stumble into a cabaret lounge and find a lovely, a bit younger singer Diana (Mary Steenburgen). She takes a shine to Paddy, and spend lots of time with him and the boys during the weekend. This is when the film goes downhill quick.
As their weekend progresses, so does the silliness and embarrassment. The men are asked to judge a bikini contest competition at the hotel pool but the most memorable part of this scene is when a guy in a speedo shakes his package in Robert De Niro’s face. And De Niro get backs at Billy by pushing  him into the pool. Is this good fun or a case of ‘close my eyes two major movie stars are resorting to this’ moment?  The evening culminates in a huge party in their suite, with all the characters they had met during the day attend, including some women they met at the nightclub, another bloke who they beat up the night before but then who answers to their beck and call. Why? It is not fully explained.  And all four men hope to get lucky at the party. And then there are  the ageist jokes – Archie asks the guys “Do you have any drugs?” One of them replies “Does Lipitor count.?” Ba da bing! And then 50 Cent shows up to the party (is he playing the Mike Tyson character from The Hangover film? I would say most likely.)  So in this Bucket List of a movie, I’m not giving too much away by saying that the wedding doesn’t happen, and that all the men have a good time and, when the weekend is over, they can go back to their miserable lives. And luckily for us this movie is over.
Last Vegas is now out on DVD.

 

Category : DVD
Tags : , , , , ,
0 Comm