Bridesmaids Fits Easily Into Best Comedy Movies of All-Time

Bridesmaids fits easily into my list of "top 60 funniest movies" of all time, all of which are five-star classics.

The thing that stands out about it is that a buddy-girl film like this has never been attempted, or at least has never worked. Kristen Wiig shines with all the promise she has displayed in recent years on Saturday Night Live, but never fully captured at the box office.

Wiig plays the maid of honor who just isn't very good at wedding planning. The best scenes happen when the girls disgustingly pick out their wedding dresses, take a messy flight to their Vegas bachelorette party, and are entertained at Maya Rudolph's wedding by a certain female trio from the 90s.

Melissa McCarthy as Megan is a highlight as the chunky and spunky sister of the groom. She's full of bad ideas, like when she flirts in flight with an air marshall (played by her real-life husband). Jon Hamm, Mad Men's Don Draper, is also delectable in a different kind of sleazy way from his TV character.

***** out of ***** stars

Fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm Can Do No Wrong with Clear History

In HBO's Clear History, Larry David behaves exactly as he does in his brilliant Curb Your Enthusiasm show.

He plays an advertising guru of sorts named Nathan Flomm who opens his opinionated big mouth one too many times and gets fired by his boss, played by Jon Hamm.

Hamm’s company creates the Howard, a car that Flomm thinks will be a grand failure. He’s wrong, and Flomm becomes a national laughingstock for missing out on what would have been a huge payday.

Hamm plays it straight, but Clear History is dotted with hilarious performances, led by David.  The always-lovably-ridiculous Danny McBride plays Flomm’s best friend in his new life in Martha’s Vineyard. Bill Hader and Michael Keaton play a couple of local yokels, Kate Hudson is steady as Flomm’s love interest, and J.B. Smoove is wack as usual.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the movie is how 70s yacht rockers Chicago fill the soundtrack throughout, and also play a role in pulling the entire plot together.

For fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm, there is no going wrong with Clear History.

***1/2 out of ***** stars

Friends With Kids: Bad Idea in Many Ways

For a movie with so many of my favorite actors, Friends With Kids could easily be considered a stinker.

Granted, Jon Hamm of Mad Men plays an unlikable and unhappy father stuck in a relationship with Kristen Wiig, but they are both given little to work with and don't particularly shine in their key scene, when Hamm's character is drunk and tells the film's main characters that having a baby while remaining friends instead of a couple will never work.

Adam Scott, as the male lead, plays a jerk who we never quite care enough about to cheer for, and Jennifer Westfeldt is squirrelly, kind of plastic looking, and not very interesting as the female lead who goes from being "happy every morning" to conflicted about the decisions she's made to become a single parent.

Chris O'Dowd, Edward Burns, and Megan Fox are all cool enough, but they each seem detached from their performances. Really, only O'Dowd and Maya Rudolph seem at all convincing as harried Brooklyn former-hipster parents.

The star power captured my attention throughout the film, but other than that, Friends With Kids is a bad idea in concept as well as in execution.

**1/2 out of ***** stars (being generous)

Celebrity Edition: Hangin' With Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss

An excellent first day at the Vocus PR conference at National Harbor in Washington D.C. culminated in a meet-and-greet with keynote speaker Elisabeth Moss. It was pretty fun for colleague Mike Smith and I to meet the famed "Peggy Olson" of Mad Men.

Moss, incidentally a Scientologist, has appeared in Girl, Interrupted with Winona Ryder and 25 episodes of The West Wing. But nothing prepared her for what may be the best drama in TV history (and, if not, Jon Hamm as Don Draper is at least the greatest dramatic character, with Moss's Peggy not too far behind in the mix).

Other highlights of the impressive conference were Arianna Huffington and Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute. Legendary journalism professor Jay Rosen also gave a solid presentation on the shifting nature of the expertise.

Best Magazine Reads: 8 Reasons Why I Love Jon Hamm/Don Draper

I was reading a recent edition of Rolling Stone, and the cover story was on Jon Hamm, who, as Don Draper on Mad Men, is probably my favorite actor in a TV drama ever.

It was a pretty good article that probably could have been more revealing of its famously mysterious subject, but the article did at least capture much of what I consider the "8 reasons why I love Jon Hamm/Don Draper:"

1. Like me, he's a huge St. Louis Cardinals fan. Like me, he wears their team hat quite a bit. And unlike me, he was a power-hitting catcher growing up in St. Louis. I was a hitting-for-average first baseman growing up in St. Louis.

2. He plays fantasy football. Major props there. Not to mention that he's a former all-state linebacker.

3. He loves Budweiser (meh, I can only tolerate it BECAUSE I'm from St. Louis, but I'd much prefer a craft) and Wilco (now we're talking ... one of my favorite bands).

4. All the actors want to please Hamm on the Mad Men set because he's "like the dad" and "they really don't want to let him down."

5. He worked for 10 years in L.A. before getting his big break, at one point even earning a living as a set dresser on soft-core porn movies.

6. People see Don Draper and they see glamour and authority, apparently a lot of people see their fathers. But I agree with Elizabeth Moss, who plays Peggy Olsen, in that Draper is almost impossible to not stare at and be in awe of.

7. He likes Jeff Bridges as an actor. You have to like that. I mean, Bridges is the Big Lebowski.

8. Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield calls Mad Men the "greatest TV drama of all time, and it's not even close. Mad Men is to TV what The Godfather was to the movies."

I would have to second Sheffield's opinion.