When Sebastian Maniscalco Calls His Movie ‘About My Father,’ You’d Better Believe Him

May 24, 2023

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Sebastian Maniscalco, next to his father (CREDIT: Dan Anderson/Lionsgate)

Starring: Sebastian Maniscalco, Robert De Niro, Leslie Bibb, Kim Cattrall, David Rasche, Anders Holm, Brett Dier

Director: Laura Terruso

Running Time: 89 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Some Mildly Off-Color Jokes and A Full Moon

Release Date: May 26, 2023

What’s It About?: Sebastian Maniscalco has now joined the time-honored tradition of comedians making movies about their very own lives. Ain’t that something? It certainly helps that he knows some memorable characters, including one in particular. That would be his Sicilian immigrant father Salvo, here played by none other than Bobby De Niro. Salvo values hard work and frugality above all else, except when it comes to cologne. You might not expect a guy like that to be a hairdresser, but he is in fact an undisputed master of the cosmotelogical arts. As for the plot, Sebastian is finally ready to propose to his girlfriend Ellie (Leslie Bibb) on a Fourth of July trip. He brings his dad along, but a little warily, because he’s not so sure about the impression he’ll make on Ellie’s upper crust family. If that sounds like a formula for gags involving peacock slaughter and accidental indecent exposure, then you know exactly what you’re in for!

What Made an Impression?: I’m fairly certain that the screening of About My Father I attended was mostly filled with Sebastian Maniscalco fans, and they were cracking up the whole way through. So if you count yourself a connoisseur of his comedy, then you should probably check it out as well. I wouldn’t say that he’s fully won me over, but I see the appeal, and it’s an enduring and pretty much universal hook. You don’t have to be Italian-American to understand his family’s immigrant story, and you don’t have to be a child of immigrants to have wacky relatives. About My Father doesn’t break the mold at all with its family dynamics. In fact, it’s as moldy as they come, but it knows exactly what it wants to do, and it pulls it off comfortably.

It certainly helps to have pros on hand who can sell the emotion and trust in the wilder flights of fancy. This isn’t vintage De Niro, but it’s not sleepwalking De Niro either. I imagine he caught some of Sebastian’s stand-up, cracked a smile, said “That’s funny,” and then knew exactly how he was going to play the part. Ellie’s generically conservative parents seem to exist totally divorced from any political reality, but David Rasche is comforting even when you hate what he’s doing, and Kim Cattrall of course cannot be denied. As Ellie’s brothers, Anders Holm is maybe a little too much of a hardcore country club douche (though that’s of course what you hire him for), while Brett Dier is a scene-stealer as a woo-woo positive energy seeker. In conclusion, everyone hits their marks on time, the laughs arrive efficiently, and we all get to go home after an hour and a half.

About My Father is Recommended If You Like: Mining new laughs out of old clichés

Grade: 3 out of 5 Colognes

This Is a Movie Review: ‘Game Over Man’ Posits: What If ‘Die Hard,’ But with a Scene of Analingus?

March 23, 2018

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CREDIT: Cate Cameron/Netflix

This review was originally posted on News Cult in March 2018.

Starring: Blake Anderson, Adam DeVine, Anders Holm, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Neal McDonough, Jamie Demetriou, Aya Cash, Rhona Mitra, Sam Richardson, Daniel Stern

Director: Kyle Newacheck

Running Time: 98 Minutes

Rating: Not Rated, But It Would Be a Hard R for Nudity Leading to Violence, Leading to More Violence (Basically Both Naked and Clothed Bodies Are Mutilated and Exploded)

Release Date: March 23, 2018 (Streaming on Netflix)

Suppose you want to shamelessly rip off Die Hard. It’s a reasonable enough desire. Plenty of folks have done it already. It was practically its own sub-genre for a while there. The knockouts have tapered, but the original is still there for new generations to discover and grow up loving. Thus the Workaholics trio of Blake Anderson, Adam DeVine, and Anders Holm have delivered to the bowels of the Netflix original realm Game Over, Man! in which the height of action thriller cinema is crossed with video game excess. What results is less a narrative movie and more a bizarre wish fulfillment fantasy.

Instead of off-duty cop John McClane, Game Over, Man! gives us The Dew Crew, three hotel workers thus named because of their affinity for a certain soft drink (even though we almost never see them drinking any Mountain Dew). Fashioning themselves entrepreneurs, they attempt to get financing for their “Skintendo Joysuit” (basically a full-body video game controller) from a vulgar celebrity (Utkarsh Ambudkar) partying at the hotel, but that is all derailed, of course, by a team of big-time thieves.

The Dew Crew get the McClane role by virtue of happenstance keeping them away while all the hostages are rounded up. So of course we know they will end up saving the day, but it is a wonder that they do not end up killing themselves instead. DeVine, for one, can never get beyond the mindset that they are in a real-life video game, as he remains singularly focused on getting the kill that the other two have already achieved. Anderson and Holm manage to have a little more awareness of the severity of the situation, but their survival is still mostly attributable to coincidence.

Anderson, DeVine, and Holm have clearly been given free rein to be as graphic as possible, and they take full advantage o. Body parts are variously mutilated and exploded, while there is plenty of male nudity, including one detached member that plays a pivotal climactic role. The shock routine is clearly meant to draw the laughs out, but the trouble is, there is no zest, no finesse to the deployment. Extremity for extremity’s sake can serve the purpose of disrupting snobbish tastes, but when you have an already receptive audience (which the Netflix algorithm will work to ensure), the effect is just numbing.

Game Over, Man! is Recommended If You Like: Excessive Violence and Excessive Comic Nudity

Grade: 2 out of 5 Vapes