Random Movie Stuff - 12/16/13

- Three film icons (for different reasons) died over the weekend:

Peter O'Toole (Lawrence of Arabia)
Joan Fontaine (Rebecca)
Tom Laughlin (Billy Jack)

- Sony is looking at expanding its corner of the Marvel universe, i.e., the Spider-Man piece.  In addition to Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) and 3 (2016), they're developing spinoff films for Venom and The Sinister Six. The original Six consisted of Doctor Octopus, Electro, Sandman, Mysterio, Vulture and Kraven the Hunter.  Later incarnations would include Hobgoblin, Gog, Chameleon, Rhino, Shocker and Scorpion.

- With the Vacation sequel/reboot mothballed, Ed Helms has set his sights on starring in a Naked Gun reboot. Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant (Night at the Museum, Reno 911) will write it.

- Gerard Butler (Set), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Horus) and Geoffrey Rush (Ra) will star in Gods of Egypt, literally playing Egyptian Gods. Newcomers Brenton Thwaites (upcoming Maleficent) and Courtney Eaton (upcoming Mad Max: Fury Road) will also star.

- Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cate Blanchett, Casey Affleck, Michael B. Jordan and Christoph Waltz will star in Triple Nine for director John Hillcoat (The Road).  It's about a group of criminals who conspire to kill an LAPD officer as a distraction for a heist they plan to pull in a different part of town.

- Filming has begun on Men Women & Children, an ensemble film from Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air) about how the internet has changed lives, relationships and how we communicate, particularly between parents and children. Emma Thompson will narrate it, and it stars Adam Sandler, Jennifer Garner, Rosemary DeWitt, Judy Greer, Dean Norris and Travis Tope.

We're the Millers - Movie Review

Starring Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts, Will Poulter, Nick Offerman, Kathryn Hahn, Ed Helms, Molly Quinn and Luis Guzman.
Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber.

★★

This send-up of the heartland image of the American family can't decide on a tone. Is it just slapstick?  Farce?  Realistic?  You can't have a character go for heart-string tugs ten minutes after he winked right at the camera.

Jason Sudeikis, who announced he won't be back on Saturday Night Live this fall, plays a pot-dealer named David.  David just loves his life of living alone, dealing drugs, and being free.  Other than that, we don't get a lot of depth to him. We know he's cynical and a smart-aleck, the type of role Chevy Chase would've played 30 years ago.  After he gets robbed, he has to come up with $43,000 for his boss, who offers to forgive his debt and pay another $100,000 if he'll go down to Mexico and pick up a "smidge" of marijuana.

In one of those movie strokes of genius, he decides to hire a fake family and pretend to be dorks on vacation, another type of role Chase would've played 30 years ago.  David recruits Rose (Jennifer Aniston), a stripper who lives in his building; Kenny (Will Poulter), a nerdy 18-year-old who also lives in his building with a mom who's gone for weeks at a time; and Casey (Emma Roberts), a homeless runaway.

It has some funny moments, but it's more miss than hit. For instance, we don't need 12 different shots of ths spider to get that it's crawled up Kenny's leg.  Why does Rose even have a strip number in the middle of the movie, if only to gratify Aniston's ego that she's still got it? And at the end, when it goes for mushiness, it just reeks of falsehood.  The movie did nothing to earn it, and yet it tries to grab it.

Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn, both from Parks & Recreation, are energetic in their roles as the nerdy couple who try to befriend the Millers.

It passed $100 million this week, so if they want to make a sequel, it's set up for one.

Random Movie Stuff - 4/5/13

- Zoe Saldana (Star Trek) is up for the role of Gamora (on the right) in the big-screen version of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. It's scheduled to open August 1, 2014.  James Gunn (Slither, Super) will direct.  Chris Pratt (Zero Dark Thirty) will play Star-Lord (guy in the middle) and Dave Bautista (The Man with the Iron Fist) will play Drax the Destroyer (the bald guy on the left).  That leaves Groot and Rocket Raccoon yet to be cast.

- Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Lost) has joined the cast of Pompeii. It's directed by Paul WS Anderson (Alien v Predator) and focusses on an enslaved gladiator (Game of Thrones' Kit Harington) fighting back against a tyrant (Kiefer Sutherland) in the final days before the eruption of Mt.Vesuvius.

- We're getting another Godzilla movie coming May 16, 2014. It'll star Aaron Johnson (Kick-Ass), Elizabeth Olsen (Silent House), Juliette Binoche (Chocolat), Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai), Bryan Cranston (Argo), Sally Hawkins (Happy Go Lucky) and David Strathairn (Lincoln).

- Bradley Cooper will play the villain in the western Jane Got a Gun, starring Natalie Portman as a woman who turns to her ex-lover (Joel Edgerton) for help when a gang shoots her husband and they're coming to her farm to finish the job while he heals.  Cooper is replacing the recently departed Jude Law.

- Melissa McCarthy and Susan Sarandon will play granddaughter/grandmother on a road trip in Tammy.  Dan Aykroyd, Allison Janney and Mark Duplass co-star.

- Ed Helms will play Rusty Griswold in a Vacation sequel that follows grown-up Rusty having his own rough vacation misadventures. Christina Applegate will play his wife, and Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo are in talks to cameo as Clark & Ellen, grandparents. (Personally I'd like to see past Rusty actors cameo too, including Anthony Michael Hall, Johnny Galecki, and Ethan Embry.)

Jeff Who Lives at Home - DVD Review

Starring Jason Segel, Ed Helms, Judy Greer, Susan Sarandon and Rae Dawn Chong.  Directed by Jay & Mark Duplass.

★★★

The Duplass brothers have made a nice living dominating the Mumblecore genre, and now they've finally made a movie I could recommend.  It centers on Jeff (Jason Segel), a 30-year-old slacker who lives at home, but he's seeking meaning in life through random signs.  The movie isn't as profound as Jeff thinks his life is, but I liked the chain of events spawned from Jeff following whatever he thinks Fate wants him to do.

It also focuses on his older brother (Ed Helms) trying to save his marriage, and his mother (Susan Sarandon) who discovers she has a secret admirer at work.  It makes for a pleasant 85 minutes.

Random Movie Stuff - 5/14/12

- Warner Bros. has scheduled The Gangster Squad to open September 7. The film stars Ryan Gosling and Josh Brolin as agents leading a team to take down gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn). It also reunites Gosling with his Crazy Stupid Love co-star Emma Stone. The trailer's below. Meanwhile they've moved back the space thriller Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, to some time in 2013.

Personally I don't understand why they'd open Gangster Squad the week after Lawless, another ensemble period law-and-order movie.


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- Kurt Russell has dropped out of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained during filming. He'd replaced Kevin Costner, who'd cited scheduling conflicts. It'll be interesting to see who QT finds now.


- Jared Harris (Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows) and Sam Claflin (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) will star in The Quiet Ones, about a college professor who leads his best students to try to create a poltergeist using negative energy.


- Michael Scott may be gone, and Dwight, Toby, Kelly and Robert will be gone soon, but at least Jim, Pam and Andy will still be there. John Krasinski, Jenna Fischer and Ed Helms have signed new contracts to return to NBC's The Office.  Good thing too, since the anti-climactic season finale made it clear that Andy is here to stay.

NBC's The Office - TV Review

"Angry Andy" - Catherine Tate's Nelly has moved in, but we finally got the episode where Andy (Ed Helms) has returned and had to confront Nelly taking over his job and office. It had all the signature awkwardness of the series but it didn't get there in believable ways.

I get Angela taking Nelly's side, but all season long, Andy has been the underdog boss that the rest of the office rallies around. The group didn't rally around Andy this time. Even Robert California (James Spader) was baffled by Nelly and wound up taking her side. This did not feel right, especially since most of the office hates Nelly.

Now last week, Jim and Dwight got the dirt on Nelly, and so Jim decided to be nice about it, but this week, no, Andy was back, and the office should have stood up for him.

I did like Erin, seeing her man emasculated, deciding to stand up for him and show some anger. Andy - anger management graduate he - joined in, but in typical Erin/Andy fashion, they took it too far and Andy wound up punching the same wall he did a couple years ago.

And so Andy got fired.

Now we know that Robert California (Spader) will be gone by season's end, and we know that Dwight (Rainn Wilson), Kelly (Mindy Kaling) and Toby (Paul Lieberstein) are probably gone due to other projects the actors have. I also read somewhere that the contracts are up for John Krasinski (Jim), Jenna Fischer (Pam) and BJ Novak (Ryan) and they haven't signed new ones. If this was the last season for The Office, they're set up for it. Trouble is, NBC doesn't have anything on the schedule to replace it. Community and Parks & Recreation may be critical hits, but they can never muster the ratings.

So I would think they'll get Andy back as a Dundler-Mifflin employee by the season finale. In fact, my guess is Jo (Kathy Bates) will be back somehow to realign the universe. Nelly currently is one of those characters who's supposed to be an antagonist, but if she's still boss next season, it makes the already weakened Office that less appealing to keep on the DVR.

The Hangover Part II - DVD Review

★½

Starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zack Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, Paul Giamatti, Justin Bartha, Jeffrey Tambor, Mason Lee, Jamie Chung and Nick Cassavetes.  Directed by Todd Phillips.

When I think of the best sequels, they contain elements of the first movie, but they stand up solidly as their own story. Aliens, Godfather II, Empire Strikes Back, The Dark Knight. Some of the worst try to be carbon copies, hitting all the same beats but with tiny tiny differences. This unfortunately falls into that latter camp.

The movie begins the same way the first one did. Phil on the phone letting a bride-to-be know they've really messed up this time. Flashback to one week earlier.

Phil, Stu, Alan and Doug are together again, going to Thailand for Stu's wedding. They take Stu's future brother-in-law Teddy with them for "just one drink" on the beach. Cut to the next morning. Phil, Stu and Alan wake up in a trashed apartment with no idea what happened. But it's Bangkok instead of Vegas. And the surprise animal in the bathroom is a monkey instead of a tiger.

And it keeps going and going just like that, right down to the slide show of their wild night during the closing credits. It is basically the same movie as the first one, but far less funny.

Has The Office jumped the shark?

I thought the ensemble was strong that it might be able to survive without Michael Scott (Steve Carell), but it occurs to me that it's lost so much more than that. Gone is the byzantine upper management that gave us leaders like Jan and David, gone is the soul-crushing feel of the daily cubicle drudgery. Andy Bernard (Ed Helms) doesn't have the fragile ego that made Michael do impulsive, selfish things. Andy started off as a jerk who had to go to anger management. Now he's a puppy-dog who just wants to please everyone, and all of his co-workers want him to succeed. Where's the comedy in that?
Now with Sabre CEO Robert California (James Spader) I thought we'd get some darkness to rock the boat, but Robert's been hit and miss. This week's episode, where we meet his wife (Maura Tierney) may have been the best use thus far of the potential of this mind-gaming genius. I enjoyed Andy twisting himself into a pretzel trying to do what he thought Robert wanted him to do.

These characters are still fun and funny. Dwight, Jim, Pam, Ryan, Kelly, Toby, Angela, Meredith, Stanley, Creed, Erin, Oscar, Daryl, Phyllis... I just hope the show can find some consistent Michael-free magic. Or maybe they should quit while they're ahead.