I couldn't help but notice one pretty major plot detail left out of the newest trailer for writer-director Judd Apatow’s upcoming Funny People (out July 31st). The first trailer bases itself around the premise that a famous stand-up comedian and actor (played by Adam Sandler) learns he has terminal cancer, but the second one -- which played in front of Brüno this weekend -- leaves that little detail out completely. Why? Now it’s just a movie about…funny people. Does leaving out the movie’s more serious element (and lines like "I'm dying") make it more appealing to an audience looking for laughs?
Giving much more face time to the likes of cameos Jason Schwartzman and Jonah Hill, the newer trailer seems to rely on a cast. Plot? Who needs it! Hopefully the movie won't do the same. What do you think PopWatchers? Just because a movie’s called "Funny People" and stars some funny people, is it guaranteed to be funny? Check out the new, slightly NSFW, cancer-and-plot-free trailer below, and then first, cancer-centric trailer after the jump.
Much has been made of the frenzied casting of Hal Jordan, the former fighter pilot who gets enlisted into an interstellar peacekeeping corps and protects Earth from enemies at home and abroad as Green Lantern. For, like, half an hour, it was the hottest role in Hollywood -- names like Justin Timberlake, Bradley Cooper, Jared Leto were bandied around -- and Ryan Reynolds snagged it. Hot off both his role as Deadpool in Wolverine (which showed he could walk the superhero walk) and Sandra Bullock's love interest in The Proposal (proving his cache with female audiences), Reynolds made sense. Plus, I think he's a decent actor, one who's come a long way from Van Wilder.
But the apparent movement on Green Lantern has me asking another superhero movie question. It's not "How are they gonna explain to civilians the differences between Green Lantern and Seth Rogen's Green Hornet?" or "What's gonna happen to the Deadpool spin-off?" or "Why didn't they give the role to Nathan Fillion, who'd have crushed it?" No, I want to know where that Wonder Woman movie is.
Here's a character you don't have to educate the layperson about, one who has immediate name recognition, and one who still stands as a feminine icon. Plus, she's one of DC Comics' "trinity" -- along with Superman and Batman, she stands as a pillar of that universe; a heavy-hitter in every comic book she appears in. Joss Whedon was tapped to bring her to life a few years back, but that went...badly. Since he left the project, it's just been lying fallow.
Money on the table, if you ask me. If you cast that movie right, get a creative team passionate about the character, and put some promotional muscle behind it, the potential is there for a Wonder Woman film to make more money than four Green Lanterns put together. And, not to be chauvinistic, but from a body-part marketing perspective, abs will always be trumped by boobs.
Which would you rather see? Green Lantern or Wonder Woman? And was Reynolds a good choice?
Ah, Twitter memes; they come and go so quickly. This week's big hit was #1stdraftmovielines, in which the Twitterverse took iconic lines and wondered what they could have been if not for a trusty rewrite. Some were hilarious, some were confusing, and a lot tackled the same lines. Still, from the chaos emerged stars, and these are some of our favorites:
The pictured tweet is from @kentremendous (aka Office writer Michael Schur).
Flex those muscles, PopWatchers! Hit us with your best first-draft movie lines either here in the comments or at ye olde Twitter stream. You're following @EWPopWatch, right?
Don't get me wrong. I don't hate Brüno. I caught a screening of the movie last month and thought it was pretty funny, even if a lot of it felt staged to me. You'll never convince me that Paula Abdul wasn't in on the joke, loopy as she may be. And the central storytelling device -- foreigner comes to America with trusty sidekick, has a falling out with trusty sidekick, etc., etc. -- is a weak carbon copy of what drove the much funnier, fresher, and all-around more holy-crap-he-just-did-what?!Borat. (I'm not gonna get into the good-for-the-gays/bad-for-the-gays question here. Stay tuned for a post this weekend from Michael Slezak on that topic.) So yeah, I liked Brüno just fine.
But the Brüno marketing blitz that's been pummeling us for what seems like months now? Make it stop! The never-ending stream of "outrageous" Brünostunts around the globe is enough to make me want to declare war on the umlaut. Look! It's Brüno being flamboyant in London! Ah-ha, here's Brüno parading around as a bull in Madrid! Oh boy, now he's making Matt Lauer kiss his hand on the Today show! Sacha Baron Cohen, the man behind the titular character, even followed up a rare out-of-character appearance on Letterman this week with an in-character reading of Dave's Top Ten List last night. (The list? Ten reasons...to go see Brüno.)
I fully understand that promotion is as integral to the movie biz as suspenders are to Lederhosen. But Brüno, your shtick is starting to feel as stale as day-old Apfelstrudel. Ich bin so over you! What's your take on Brüno's übiquitoüsness? Is it über-annoying or über-hilarioüs?
Around these parts, we often lament the chronic sameness of entertainment, how every movie seems like a sequel or a rip-off or a watered-down version of something else. So imagine my delight and surprise to hear about The Beaver, the newest in-the-works project from Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson. Just...go with it.
The film, which topped last year's "black
list" of awesome-but-unproduced screenplays, is about a man who "wears a beaver puppet on his hand that he treats as a real person. Those familiar with the script have compared it to Lars and the Real Girl and the work of Charlie Kaufman," according to the Hollywood Reporter. Foster is set to direct and co-star as the beaver-handed Gibson's wife.
First, let's take a little break to make every possible lewd "beaver" joke in our heads. [Take as much time as you need.] Okay, now that our minds are out of the gutter, put me in the "hell yes" category. Does this sound weird and kind of stupid, and do I expect the beaver to resemble Uncle Joey's woodchuck puppet, and might this be just nine kinds of terrible? Certainly. However! I want stuff that's different; I want to be dazzled by imagination and creativity. I want to be surprised and impressed, and I want a wider variety of stories and storytellers. So if that means that sometimes I have to resist the urge to make a tasteless joke about locker room terminology for genitalia, so be it. You?
If Triumph the Insult Comic Dog was narrating a documentary about the San Diego Comic-Con, he'd greet the announcement of the con's programming -- which lists all the panel-related goodies -- with something like, "And with these directions entered into the navicomputer, the March of the Nerdguins can begin."
The Comic-Con masterminds don't just drop their programming infodump in one fell swoop like some eager teenager, they parcel it out over a few days. All the better to whet eager appetites. Yesterday, Wednesday and Thursday's schedules went public, and we're gonna whittle it down to the stuff that sounds the awesomeist. Okay, here we go:
After a five-month search that included multiple screentests, Warner Bros. is poised to select its Green Lantern. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the studio has narrowed its options down to three actors: Bradley Cooper, Ryan Reynolds, and Justin Timberlake. The heroic Hal Jordan, who was the comic book's most famous Green Lantern, was "utterly honest and born without fear," so with that in mind, let's size up the finalists:
Bradley Cooper (pictured, left) * He's currently starring in one of Warner Bros.'s biggest hits, The Hangover. * He has the rage to play an action-hero, as he sadistically expressed in a friendly game of touch-football during Wedding Crashers. * But has he ever played a character you'd consider "utterly honest"?
Ryan Reynolds (pictured, center) * He's already attached to the X-Men comic-book franchise as Deadpool. * Have you seen his abs? * But why waste a great funnyman on such an earnest, square-jawed hero?
Justin Timberlake * Can probably moonwalk from galaxy to galaxy, green ring or no green ring. * Not intimidated by the idea of wearing tights. * But extensive Green Lantern shoot could interfere with SNL hosting duties.
What say you, PopWatchers? Who would make the best Green Lantern? Take our poll, then sound off in the comments below.
Months before June's commencement address, when it was announced that James Franco would be UCLA's commencement speaker, the entire campus full of Bruins roared, demanding to replace the bleezy smoking dude with someone who was "as esteemed as a commencement speaker of UCLA’s caliber should be." Naturally, they chose that one curly haired guitarist from Linkin Park to replace him. Franco rebutted, stating that he was too busy with preproduction on a movie to speak anyway. Sure.
Finally, in the NSFW video below, we discover the true reason why Franco didn't speak -- UCLA is a school full of pretentious prudes his offer was rescinded. Take a peek below and find out the truth for yourself, and how college like, really does take "minds into space like a rocket!"
July 16 will be the 10-year anniversary of a little movie called The Blair Witch Project. Perhaps you've heard of it? The film's spectacular journey from Sundance indie to mainstream phenomenon has become Hollywood legend, so much so that Roger Ebert named Blair Witch one of the 10 most influential films of the 20th century. The movie gave hope to young, broke filmmakers everywhere -- all you needed was the cost of tuition for one year at college, some cheap cameras, and a very, very, very clever idea.
Since Blair Witch made $249 million worldwide on its initial $20,000-$25,000 budget, others have tried to duplicate its unprecedented success, including none other than the film's own two directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. Still close friends, Dan and Ed went their separate ways after Blair Witch, each taking some time off before making a series of horror or supernatural flicks. Myrick directed Believers, Solstice, and The Objective; Sánchez helmed Altered and Seventh Moon. Haven't heard of those movies? Don't worry -- most of them went straight to DVD. But it can't be easy when your debut picture shatters records and is so convincing that some people, to this day, believe it's an actual documentary. How do you possibly follow that kind of once-in-a-lifetime anomaly?
EW talked to both of the Blair Witch directors individually, as well as the movie's three stars. To find out what has happened to those three young actors post-Blair, check out the new issue of EW, on newsstands July 10. But for now, enjoy this exclusive Q&A with directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, who discuss how they shot the groundbreaking movie, what they make of the subsequent backlash against it, and whether they'd ever want to return to Blair Witch.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: I've heard so many different stories about how you guys went about filming Blair Witch. Could you clarify exactly what it was like shooting the movie?
EDUARDO SANCHEZ: When Dan and I wrote the script, it wasn't really a script. It was more like a glorified outline of all the scenes. We didn't have any dialogue because we knew we wanted to make it completely improv. And then we decided we were going to leave the actors out there and try to remote-control direct them. We developed this system where we would leave notes for them in these little 35mm film canisters, and the notes contained logistical information as far as where to hike, and what time to get to a certain spot that we had already entered into the actors' GPS units. We also provided character notes, like "Heather's driving me crazy" or "You've got to get away from Mike" or "Josh is slowly losing his mind." And then we let them do their own thing. We'd supply them with fresh tapes and batteries, and we would give them food. As they neared the end of the shoot, we started depriving them of food. By the last day, they were basically living off a banana and some juice.
Were the actors upset by the end of production?
SANCHEZ: No, they weren't. We took good care of them. Our producer, Gregg Hale, was in the Army and had Special Forces training, so he led the whole "keeping them safe" part and had escape routes from all of the locations. They had a walkie-talkie with them. If they needed anything, they could just call.
Once upon a time, Peter Jackson was hired by Universal and Fox to oversee Halo, the film version of Microsoft's killer military/sci-fi videogame. Exhausted from shooting the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong, Jackson opted to executive produce. The man he wanted to direct Halo was Neill Blomkamp, who had nary a feature credit to his name but had shot a stunning short called Alive in Joburg, about aliens living a segregated life in South Africa. Halo eventually fell apart: the stated reason was that the budget had spiraled out of control, but underneath that was the fact that no one wanted to spend ungodly sums of money on a Halo movie that Jackson himself didn't direct. No one wanted to be in the Neill Blomkamp business. Something tells me that District 9 might change some minds.
A feature-length faux-verite exploration of the themes Blomkamp touched on in Alive in Joburg -- segregation, alienation, supression -- District also looks like it kicks its fair share of ass. Flamethrowers, mech suits, snatching missiles right out of the air? Hot damn, I'm in.
What about you? And wouldn't you go see a Halo movie done with the same kind of grit? I know I would.
