Peter Murmann

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry reminded me of an episode of the Love Boat in the 1980s.  After yet another romantic disappointment, a lady decides that she had it with men. She meets a notorious womanizer on the boat. To get the woman “into the sack”, the gigolo plays the role of a [Read More]

One of the big ironies of modern society is that we require people to obtain licenses for important and trivial tasks before we let them lose onto the world. I remember being told in my late teens. The of two most important decisions in life about choosing the right job and the right wife. For [Read More]

This newest effort by Will Farrell is not nearly as funny as Bodega Nights.  The basic idea behind the movie has some charms. Let’s use the gender wars to go for a real gender bender. Two guys compete in the Olympic pair ice-skating competition.  I have been told many times that the top female player [Read More]

One should not be a reviewer of a film in which a colleague has a gig. Richard Roeper (who together with Ebert forms the Chicago Sun-Times film critic team) said that he did not like the film based on the trailer, but came to like it quite a bit. This is chick’s film and not [Read More]

Remember the six months before American troops invaded Iraq. The French and German secret services were claiming that no credible evidence existed to show that Saddam was close to producing nuclear weapons. Colin Powel, in what became a reputation destroying speech at the UN, claimed that the U.S. had precisely this smoking-gun kind of evidence.  [Read More]

A Prairie Home Companion is a film about the live radio show presenting a mixture of folk music and comedy for the heartland of America every Saturday night. Periodically I would stumble upon show on my classical radio station, but never listened more than a few minutes because the humor was not my cup of [Read More]

The Devil Wears Prada does not offer any meaningful drama but it gives a wonderful peek into the world of high fashion magazines. If you read fashion magazines regularly, you will enjoy this behind the scenes look. If you never open such magazines, you will probably enjoy getting to know this world. I did. Based [Read More]

Drawing on the plot of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Mclintock shows you what the fourth of July was like in the Wild West. They did not have fireworks but plenty of fun. The Wild West in this film is a comedy land. The place is Arizona and it is dry. My historical knowledge [Read More]

Go for Zucker is a delightful German comedy written and directed by Dani Levy. With a Midas touch, he navigates around highly sensitive topics for the German national psyche and creates the first post World War II German comedy about a Jewish family. Jacky Zucker (nee Jakob Zuckermann) was born to a Jewish mother in [Read More]

Mike Binder, who wrote, directed, and played a small part in The Upside of Anger, successfully pushes the boundaries of the “romantic comedy” genre. The humor takes place on a thick background of anger, despair and sadness. Terry Wolfmeyer (Joan Allen), an elegant suburban woman with four daughters ranging between the ages of 13 to [Read More]