The Headliner

The Campaign

Just in time for Election Day, here's your chance to watch the Will Ferrell–Zach Galifianakis satire The Campaign in the comfort of your home — the very place where you may have already planned to spend the weekend pondering your political options! To be honest, "satire" is a pretty strong word for The Campaign: Though there is some pretty savage stuff in there about the Koch brothers (extremely thinly veiled versions of whom are played here by Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow, using their money to influence the titular campaign), most of what happens is pure silliness.

Though I wouldn't put The Campaign in the top tier of Will Ferrell movies, it's a serviceable entry at the level of, let's say, Talladega Nights. What put it over for me was Galifianakis's performance as Marty Huggins, a local boob thrown into the political arena by the wealthy, connected father he's pitifully desperate to please. Marty is basically a sweet idiot who's woefully ill-equipped to handle the effects that a brutal campaign will have on his personal life; if we didn't have the naive Marty to root for, The Campaign might be unwatchable for being too depressingly real.

A Good Day to Die Hard (February 14)

Silver: Oh. OK. I get it now. A Good Day to Die Hard is a reboot of the franchise as a comedy. This makes much more sense. How else could you explain the film’s absurd synopsis, which, I assure you, I have not edited in any way for humor; this is exactly how it’s written on the film’s Apple Movie Trailers page:

Iconoclastic, take-no-prisoners cop John McClane, for the first time, finds himself on foreign soil after traveling to Moscow to help his wayward son Jack — unaware that Jack is really a highly-trained CIA operative out to stop a nuclear weapons heist. With the Russian underworld in pursuit, and battling a countdown to war, the two McClanes discover that their opposing methods make them unstoppable heroes.

The Die Hard series have clearly scraped the bottom of their “coincidence bucket” on this one. Producers are now asking audiences to accept that McClane just so happens to be in Russia, much less at the exact flashpoint in Russia where an underground terrorist group threatens the civilized world with nuclear destruction. And in the midst of the chaos, he just so happens to run into his super-spy son. Not even the best rendition of Ludwig Van’s Ninth Symphony can distract me from enough Bruce Willis wise cracks and smirks to fill the Nakatomi Plaza building. How is it possible that A Good Day to Die Hard is NOT a comedy?