With the success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and now Knocked Up, the Judd Apatow imprimatur is safely established, and now the further comedic branding is really began to pop and sizzle, with the writer-director putting his stamp of namesake approval on projects as a producer. First it was Seth Rogen who rode this Apatow-inspired wave from costar to leading man, and now Jonah Hill is charting the same trajectory, with this August’s Superbad and next year’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall among the titles on his busy schedule.
Now, per MTV’s Movie Blog site, Hill is having a fit of Pure Imagination, headlining the second of two scripts he’s also written. This one — still shopping for a director, but described as marrying the sort of improvisational guy’s guy comedy of Knocked Up with the flight-of-fancy of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry — will star Hill as a traumatized twentysomething oaf whose only pal is of his own creation. When he strikes up a relationship with a girl, but starts to in turn wonder if she’s real, he has only this imaginary friend to fall back on for advice. Presumably the friend won’t be named Tyler Durden… but it’d be a lot cooler if he was. Filming looks to start in early 2008, for a possible release the same year.
It’s been a while since we’ve had a crop of screen comedians with such an active hand in writing (rather than just “developing”) their own material. It would be interesting if Rogen, Hill and fellow Apatow disciple Jason Segel could all hone their own popular voices and score big, but the long odds are against it.
Daily Archives: July 9, 2007
Transformers Tops Weekend Box Office
In news surprising absolutely no one (even Punxsutawney Phil took last week off), Transformers topped the box office chart this past weekend, parlaying its July 2 evening sneak screenings, July 3 proper opening and big mid-week business to a $155 million total haul, around $70.5 million of that coming during the weekend frame. Disney/Pixar’s latest animated masterwork, writer-director Brad Bird’s Ratatouille, rang up $29 million Friday through Sunday, taking its total box office tally to $109 million. Placing third, meanwhile, Live Free or Die Hard pulled in another $17.7 million, raising its cumulative domestic numbers to just under $85 million.
The only other wide release new opener, Warner Bros.’ comedy License to Wed, opened to $10.4 million, while the deadly word-of-mouth on Universal’s Evan Almighty still hadn’t found everyone, resulting in another $8.7 million in theatrical receipts. People want to like Steve Carell, make no mistake about it, but Evan is a neutered film all the way through, and its $79 million-and-counting gross won’t be enough to offset its production costs, conservatively estimated at $175 million.
Rounding out the weekend’s top 10 were John Cusack’s 1408, with just over $7 million, for a $53 million total haul; Knocked Up, with $5.2 million, $132 million total; the Fantastic Four sequel, with another $4.2 million, $123 million total; Michael Moore‘s documentary Sicko, with $3.6 million, $11.5 million total; and Ocean’s Thirteen, which has now tallied just under $110 million domestically, but another $140 million abroad.
7-Eleven Gets Kwik-E Mart Treatment
A friend and (presumably occasional) site reader passed along these shots of a transformed 7-Eleven convenience store from Orlando. As part of its promotional efforts for The Simpsons Movie, 20th Century Fox is tricking out certain branches of the chain nationwide, converting them to the Kwik-E Marts, the show’s equivalent convenience store. (Why am I telling you this, honestly? If you don’t already know…)
On the outside, “Thank you for loitering, please come again” reads the sign above the store’s front, and if you look up and to the left (not a phrase that Mayor Quimby would like to hear, thank you very much), you can see Bart and Milhouse perched on the corner of the building. Marge’s blue hair, meanwhile looms at the bottom of the frame. Maybe she’s about to get egged.
The amusing re-branding doesn’t stop there, though. The Slushee machines have been rechristened Squishee machines (below), and series foodstuff staples like Buzz Cola and Krusty-Os cereal are also garnering shelf space. If you live in Los Angeles or its
Burbank suburb, New York City, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Seattle or the aforementioned Orlando, snap some photos for friends, and consider entering the Internet-peddled collectibles market — I’m sure it will be quite lucrative. Smaller markets also graced with transformed stores include Henderson, Nevada; Bladensburg, Maryland; and Mountain View, California. The Simpsons Movie opens nationwide July 27.
On Hot Rod’s Trashcans
I went for a jaunt around Santa Monica yesterday, traversing pretty much the entire beach from Temescal Canyon to far south of the pier, and was struck by the literally hundreds of trashcans bearing wrap-around advertisements for Paramount’s new comedy Hot Rod, starring Andy Samberg. I get that these types of things, along with item separators in grocery stores, are the new frontier of “public impressions,” a nice, low-cost supplement to conventional P&A. But does it strike anyone else as subversive commentary on the relatively disposable nature of the piece? Too-easy ammo, I suppose. Some reviewer will make hay of this… maybe me, since I should be seeing the movie this week, so as to also lay to rest any controversy over its running time.
SSI: Sex Squad Investigation
Sex farce and wriggling softcore T&A showcase meets foreign-shore political satire in SSI: Sex Squad Investigation, the latest spoof from the EI Cinema folks, who’ve made a nice cottage industry out of lampooning — in often sapphic fashion — recent film and TV hits as well as genre moviemaking in general.
Written by Andy Sawyer and directed by Thomas J. Moose (Zombie Toxin, The Girl Who Shagged Me), SSI is a wobbly-legged thing, done in by the fact that none of its makers seem to really be on the same page. Detective John Honeysuckle (John Fedele) is a troubled cop struggling in his duties as the top dog in the city’s toughest criminal investigation unit. Set up to enforce President George Shrub’s “Illicit Sex Bill,” which has made premarital sexual intercourse punishable by life behind bars, the SSI unit is a mess. With unsolved cases mounting, sexy rookie Katrina Lightbody (AJ Khan) arrives as Honeysuckle’s new partner.
When, as the DVD’s back cover text explains, a “highly profitable crime spree of illegal inhibitions and seductions” hits New York City, Honeysuckle must put aside his differences and work together with Lightbody. As the serial seducer continues her haughty onslaught, though, dirty secrets involving the president (Frank Bowdler) and his promiscuous daughter Jessica (porn star Natalie Heck) come out. Vice President Selina Moon (McKenzie Matthews) eventually reveals herself as someone not to be trusted… after, of course, blouses are doffed and skirts dropped.
I’m generally all for judging a movie on its own terms, within the genre parameters it uses to define itself, if it all. But simply putting whimsical goofball shenanigans and play-acted indulgences to film (or video, as the case may be) doesn’t a “satire” make. Such behavior has a shelf life and appreciatory audience that doesn’t much extend beyond high school English class group projects, and the friends involved in such rib-nudging, look-at-me nuttiness. That pretty much defines all the non-nude portions of SSI. Fedele is a world-class mugger, which serves some spoof work well, but here undercuts everything. This is a low-rent yawner, through and through. There are much easier ways to see naked women, really. Also, for reasons not entirely clear, the movie is shot in the United
Kingdom but set Stateside, which makes for all sort of cross-cultural
bunglings.
Housed in a regular Amray case, SSI is presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, enhanced for 16×9 televisions. Three minutes of bloopers are set to tune that very much owes a debt to Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone,” and there’s also included a 31-minute short from 1992, The FBI Guys, that costars Fedele and apparently played at the Meadowland Showcase, according to a rambling commentary of reminiscence tagged on as well. Crap stew with an extra side serving of feces cornbread, you say? You bet. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. For more general information, meanwhile, visit Pop Cinema’s web site by clicking here. F (Movie) C- (Disc)