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I laughed at 2009’s big comedy hit, The Hangover — that tense and raunchy tale of three longtime buddies at a wedding who wake up after a night of incredible but totally forgotten debauchery and have to try to figure out what happened and why the groom is now missing, have to try to reconstruct all the awful things they all did last night while they were too blotto to remember.

I wasn‘t alone. Inflation is inflation, but The Hangover made a ton of money by any standard. At The Hangover, Part II though , I barely cracked a smile. It’s another of those big, over-expensive sequels that tries to get by on simply repeating the first movie, maybe with a new background, but with the same ideas, the same actors, the same old stuff. That’s not necessarily bad. (I’ll explain later.) But  it’s not encouraging.

  The Hangover was the kind of movie that usually becomes ridiculous and offensive (like director Todd Phillips‘ follow-up movie Due Date ), but here worked like an addled charm. It was a “wild and crazy guys” movie with an ingenious structure (the first time aroumd) — a mystery story, without a murder (just barely) and lots of funny, sometimes fairly intense male bonding between the three main characters: Phil the affable stud English teacher ( Bradley Cooper ), Stu the nervous, hooker-obsessed dentist ( Ed Helms ), and Alan, the freaky man-child (Zach Galifianakis), the wild card guy who keeps tipping the party and the morning after into madness. (He does in this movie too). There was a fourth guy too: Doug the absent groom ( Justin Bartha ). But he missed almost everything — and, though now a non-groom, he misses it all here too.

The first scene of the first movie was classic, hilarious — with Phil, Stu and Alan waking up in in a strange Vegas penthouse littered with the residue of their blowout the night before: a baby and a tiger, no Doug, Stu missing a tooth, and all of them, from then on, trying desperately to figure out how to figure out what happened, to find Doug and save the wedding. As I watched all this,  I chuckled. And I kept smiling all the way to the end — the end-titles candid photos of the orgy we never saw.

Parts For Phantom Thailand - News


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And that's the 1935 Gene Autry serial The Phantom Empire, and the 1966 Z-movie, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, starring John Lupton. Both those pictures rank high among the most foolish movies ever made — even though Phantom Empire is at



New DVDs due for release on Dec. 13

(PG; some mild rude humor) ** THE HANGOVER PART II. On the way to a wedding in Thailand, a "bachelor's brunch" turns into another lost weekend - with danger, disaster and a pretty suspicious monkey. The ante is higher - and the antics more manic - this




Parts For Phantom Thailand - Bookshelf

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