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Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011) -vs- I Love You, Man (2009)

March 12, 2012 Arthur Tiersky 1

You found him oddly endearing and admirably willing to completely embarrass himself on Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. You didn’t even recognize him as the sleazy lothario Jason in Knocked Up. You thought he was just fine in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, though the movie was kind of flabby. You haven’t seen The Muppets yet, and you just plain don’t watch How I Met Your Mother. […]

Our Idiot Brother (2011) -vs- Step Brothers (2008)

August 27, 2011 Doug Molitor 2

If you have never had a loved one clout you with your own hand while telling you to “stop hitting yourself,” you are undoubtedly the eldest or the only child in your family. Who but a sibling empowered by a few years’ advantage in size and smarts and unencumbered by adult conscience or legal liability can do so much psychic damage?

Most adults must wait for Thanksgiving to revisit (then with any luck, repress) the memories of childhood battles, but every year or two, the movies allow us catharsis. In 2008, Step Brothers, the Judd Apatow-produced comedy starring the eponymous Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, was the film that made us all realize that maybe our own families weren’t really so bad. Now, in 2011, comes Our Idiot Brother, whose comic exaggeration allows us to laugh at the kind of intimate atrocities we assuredly did not find funny the first time we experienced them. Unless we were the ones committing them. […]