Sentences with phrase «like screwball»

Hollywood's first decade with sound gave rise to a number of staple genres like the screwball comedy, which featured rapid - fire dialogue laced with wit and whimsy, and lavish musicals.

The ensemble plays it like screwball comedy.

The latest trailer puts any fears to rest and sets a much better tone of the film, looking less like a screwball comedy and more like an epic action - filled drama.

As a result, the movie plays more like a screwball comedy than a violent action thriller, though it contains many pieces of the latter and hardly any of the former.

Apart from Cary Grant's collaboration with director Alfred Hitchcock, we like his screwball comedies and light romantic roles best.

It's like a screwball Hitchcock film reworked for the freewheeling eighties indie culture (including cameo appearances by John Waters, John Sayles and The Feelies as the high school reunion band), and as their baggage tumbles out along the way, her past catches up in the form a creepily charming bad - boy ex.

The movie acts like screwball comedy, but there are no laughs as Daisy and Jay's connection lurches toward implausible romance.

Named for a physics - defying baseball pitch, screwball comedies put likable characters in ridiculous situations, where they behave like screwballs: erratic and unpredictable.

Not exact matches

Like other Willis novels, this book uses a science fiction premise to season a screwball comedy.

how does fair, unbiased CNN, AKA ACNN (Anderson Cooper News Network) pick and choose stories as noteworthy... a comment is made by a very elderly priest, probably not quoted properly, and is «front page news» on CNN's website... this same man (priest) has written many great books, done a lot of great charity work in the poorer parts of New York and nothing is ever posted on the website... but something is said incorrectly and its published... is this fair, is it right, is it unbiased or is the motivation to make an entire Church lokk bad and let the anti-Catholic screwballs have their heyday in hateful posts... I didn't see this wonderful netwrok post anything about the disgusting, bigoted and hateful attacks, written by the liberal left wing media elites, like Maureen Dowd, against Rep. Paul Ryan and his Catholic faith... it's all acceptable to you liberal HYPOCRITES!

What you think is a 97 - mph heater leaving his fingertips may be an 83 - mph curveball that can turn the bravest hitter's knees into gelatin, or it may be a 77 - mph changeup that breaks like a hyperactive screwball.

And looking at his cocky expression, I found out that my dad as a young man was very much like me, only he had that screwball.

I think they taste like Cap’n Crunch cereal; Dave thinks I'm a screwball.

Downey and Favreau and screenwriter Theroux like the sarcastic screwball comedy cross-fire of talk and flirtation, the displays of attitude and absurdity of super-heroism, along with an occasionally sharp satire of corporate jargon.

However, plot isn't important, as a screwball comedy like this is all about the dialogue.

Reminiscent in tone to classic dark screwball comedies like Ruthless People, director Seth Gordon (Four Christmases, The King of Kong) succeeds by keeping the energy high, the actors flowing naturally with off - the - cuff reactions, and by keeping the tone light, the performances spot on, and the quips lightning - fast throughout, even during the pitch - black comedy moments.

Like many screwball comedies, this is critic - proof, as the non-stop barrage of jokes may be hilarious to some while nauseatingly bad to another viewer.

But then Martha has these odd moments where she acts like an actual person that don't jive with the heightened screwball tone of the rest of the movie.

Sometimes, it's just a simple overlap in theme, subject matter, or setting — the way, for example, that a screwball comedy like Mistress America can faintly resemble an earnest melodrama like Ten Thousand Saints, if only by virtue of both being about surrogate siblings.

But this definitely looks like it could be a screwball delight.

There are vestiges of the classic screwball formula in Phantom Thread, where a workaholic nerd (like Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby) is overrun by a free - spirited dame who will not take no for an answer.

The teaser trailer certainly makes the film look like an embarrassment of riches, with the entire cast seemingly having the time (and hairstyles) of their lives, and if anyone can walk the fine line between serious drama and screwball comedy, and deliver something that audiences and critics alike will love, it's Russell.

The philosopher Stanley Cavell has called the classic screwball movies like The Awful Truth (1937) and The Lady Eve (1941) «comedies of remarriage,» in which couples are rudely bounced from their Edenic connubial gardens and reunited (after a series of farcical / magical contrivances) in a spirit of wry realism: This time they know they'll live bumpily ever after.

Yet credit co - writer / director Will Gluck («Easy A») for obviously trying to evoke the kind of snappy, screwball, romantic comedy that was once embodied by droll pros like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

However, every now and again they like to dabble in farcical screwball comedies that always meet a mixed response.

To some degree, this is to be expected in screwball comedy, given that a majority of the films of the genre had to balance Production Code coyness (unless it was a pre-Code film like Lubitsch's Living) and Hollywood sentimentality.

There are many different subgenres of the comedy genus, including screwball, black comedy, parody, anarchic comedy, and gross - out, a subgenre that has become increasingly popular with films like «There's Something About Mary» and «American Pie.»

Westrate's delivery does not sound like a forced impression of the way actors talked in those films, but instead comes across rather naturally, while capturing all the elements which made the speed and style of speaking unique during the screwball comedy era.

I like 1930s comedy, but I wouldn't say screwball comedies specifically.

Wonder no longer: Aided by producers Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, «Squirrels to the Nuts» finds Bogdonavich returning to the screwball comedy genre that he explored so well with the likes of «Paper Moon» and «What's Up, Doc?»

Known mainly to audiences for his screwball work in films like Notting Hill, Ifans has never offered so accomplished and meaty a performance as he does in Anonymous.

Like Frances Ha on Adderall, Mistress America finds Baumbach working with a manic screwball energy that has more in common with Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks than it does any of his previous films.

It's a throwback to old screwball comedies where anything could happen without having to make sense, and it relies on that zaniness to drive laughs rather than pairing it with rapid - fire jokes like an Airplane!

I appreciate screwball comedy but the genre can also feel like I'm watching Looney Tunes for a feature length.

That philosophy came in handy once more when he decided to revive a long - dormant movie genre — the screwball romantic comedy — back when action flicks like «Lethal Weapon» and «Die Hard» were the rage, with 1990's «Pretty Woman,» an unlikely Disney fairy tale about a beautiful streetwalker who falls for her rich prince of a business - exec client that turned Julia Robert into a superstar.

Indeed, it's difficult to think of a post-code film that feels as much like a pre-code film as this screwball comedy, recently re-issued by the Warner Archive Collection.

A screwball - tinged heist flick that not so much feeds «eat the rich» feelings which might be surging in the zeitgeist at the moment as offer up a divergent, flight - of - fancy caper for the middle - aged, The Love Punch plays out like a reimagining of The Parent Trap by way of Ocean's Eleven, and minus the kids.

And yet, it works, not unlike The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook, because we meet it halfway with our own awareness of the forebears Russell lightly subverts (whether underdog sports movies, screwball comedies or, now, Scorsese's American crime epics), and we're willing to fill in the blanks to enjoy trappings like Bale finessing Irving's «rather elaborate» combover or Lawrence yammering Rosalyn's way into getting what she wants.

Lake Bell trounces the comic competition in this frisky screwball which feels a little too much like a TV sitcom.

The films beat out a number of other worthy contenders like Gregory La Cava's Stage Door, Frank Capra's dramatic fantasy Lost Horizon, the Darryl F. Zanuck - produced drama In Old Chicago, and the Cary Grant - Irene Dunne screwball comedy The Awful Truth.

Like that film and Wes Anderson's «The Royal Tenenbaums,» «The Meyerowitz Stories» is very much about the burden of having a difficult dad, although toward the end I could have sworn the movie also morphed into a screwball remake of «Summer Hours,» Olivier Assayas» wonderful 2009 film about three siblings trying to figure out how to deal with an artistic inheritance.

Baumbach: Initially, I wanted to do a comedy about marriage, something in a tradition of adult comedies about marriage, starting with the screwball comedies but also connected to movies when I was growing up, like Broadcast News, or Working Girl, or Tootsie.

It doesn't matter, though, because «Date Night» is a lot like one of those classically improbably screwball comedies that remind you what the genre should be — just plain funny.

Not that you'll be in a particular hurry to get there, given how entertaining it is to watch the talented cast perform Potter's rat - a-tat script (the speed and complexity of the dialogue are reminiscent of classic screwball comedies like «His Girl Friday»).

The subversive use of humor feels like a distinguishing touch on its own — who else would have put the obligatory interspecies hang - out scene in a high - stakes casino straight out of a 1930s screwball comedy?

This all sounds terribly unpromising by description, but Russell, working from Matthew Quick's novel, harnesses Cooper and Lawrence's mutual quirks into a screwball delirium that plays like a more mainstream Flirting With Disaster or I [Heart] Huckabees.

If ever one needed proof that the Coen brothers» twisted screwball alchemy isn't easily replicated, Suburbicon provides it: Though directed by one of the filmmakers» regular collaborators, George Clooney, from a script Joel and Ethan wrote themselves, this»50s - set crime caper often plays like a cut - rate Fargo.

Clooney is clearly a fan of screwball comedies (as witnessed in past films with the Coen brothers), and while a movie like this certainly doesn't need someone like him behind the camera, it's a project that he's passionate about.

It's like a classic Hollywood screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.

«The Front Page» (1974) Even for a comic titan like Wilder, it took some balls to remake arguably the greatest of the screwball comedies, 1940's «His Girl Friday.»