Back on the Strip is a guilty pleasure in the sense that I feel like I need to apologize to somebody for laughing as much as I did. This unleashed movie isn’t very perceptive or thoughtful, but it knows how to deliver a payoff and a punchline. I suppose in these circumstances you have to be fair and give credit where credit is due, but it feels like I’m rewarding bad behaviour.
News of an upcoming feature from filmmaker Patrick Read Johnson (who had previously directed mid-90’s comedies Baby’s Day Out and Angus) lit up the Internet in the mid-2000s with a fantastic trailer set to music by ELO and Jon Brion. The trailer, centred around an awkward teenager in the 1970s anticipating a unique blockbuster called Star Wars, dropped when I was in high school and working at a video store. However, the film went silent…