There is a moment late in The Hangover 3 in which the franchise’s sort-of villain and sort-of sidekick Chow (Ken Jeong) jumps off a Caesars Palace balcony and paraglides across the city, yelling “I love cocaine!”
It’s indicative of director Todd Phillips’ approach that we don’t actually see anything go up Chow’s nostrils. The emphasis is on punchlines irrespective of setups, pay-offs for jokes that haven’t even been invoiced. You can see it in the aberrant, flaky face expressions of star Zach Galifianakis, as if he were a grown-up Haley Joel Osment from The Sixth Sense (1999), stoned instead of spooked.
The jokes that work — such as a freeway accident caused by a giraffe beheading and a heart attack after a tense emotional exchange — required investment in characters and situations.
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There is a great shot in The Place Beyond the Pines that comes and goes in a heartbeat. Ray Liotta leans on the side of a car, peering through the driver’s window. He plays a cop — and given this is Liotta, not one of the by the book variety — who is intimidating the man behind the wheel in that distinctively Liottian way: a calm, seething glare that puts the frighteners on without so much as flexing a face muscle.











One would be tempted to slap the “style over substance” label on Danny Boyle’s frenetic new thriller Trance — a whirl of flashing colours, whiplash edits and throbbing electronica — were it not for a restless screenplay hellbent on inventing and reinventing itself, as if the writers kept turfing pages as soon as they flew out of the printer.





