Daily Archives: June 16, 2008

Nicholas Stoller Talks New Muppets Flick

Interviews

Director Nicholas Stoller and his Forgetting Sarah Marshall star, Jason Segel, not only delivered a solid commercial base knock ($62 million, domestically) with their spring comedy, but they also laid track for a couple future collaborations as well — including Five-Year Engagement as well as a reboot of the Muppets franchise, which the pair are writing together. “Jason had a general meeting at Disney, and at the end of the meeting they asked, ‘Are there any properties you’re interested in?'” recounts Stoller in a recent interview. “And he said, ‘Well, I’m just curious — what you’re doing with the Muppets?’ And there’s an awkward pause, and they looked at each other and said, ‘Nothing.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you do something, I’d love to be considered.’ And then they said, ‘We’d love to have you involved,’ and then Jason pulled me into the project.”

“I love the Muppets, like any comedy geek,” Stoller continues. “I call the Muppets the gateway drug to comedy; that’s what kids get into when [they’re young], that was certainly the case with me. We’re in the middle of the script right now. It’s an old-school Muppets movie, like Muppets Take Manhattan or The Great Muppet Caper. [It should be] really cool.”

The Love Guru Honors Mariska Hargitay

Amusements, Interviews

I previously mentioned its top-shelf opening joke, but one of the weirdest tangential tidbits from Mike Myers’ The Love Guru involves the repeated evocation of Mariska Hargitay‘s name as a sort of blessed mantra.

As with Myers’ Austin Powers character, the preparation for the film involved a number of improvisational public performances of the character, to help workshop material, and that’s where the Hargitay joke came from. “A friend of mine and I played Mike’s main devotees,” explains co-writer Graham Gordy, “so we shaved our heads, and did intros about how the guru changed our lives. I was a junior high basketball coach from Joplin, Missouri that was selling meth out of the trunk of my Chrysler LeBaron, and the Guru Pitka found me face down in vomit behind an Outback Steakhouse, and pulled me up and helped me out. And this other guy, Eric Gilliland, is friends with Mariska Hargitay. So when he said that she was going to be there one night, at one of the shows, we just started saying [her name], and then we started saying ‘Paula Zahn.’ Mariska Hargitay was there and started laughing hysterically in the crowd. That may have been the first stage show we ever did, and it just caught on from there. And we were like, ‘Really? People know who Mariska Hargitay is, but will they get that as a joke?’ But eventually it became so ridiculous that it just stayed.”

Gwen Ifill on Tim Russert: “A Stand-up Brother”

Politics

Gwen Ifill, host of PBS’ Washington Week and frequent Meet the Press guest, has a nice piece of remembrance on Tim Russert on The Root, citing her experience covering the Million Man March in 1995 and disagreements with Russert regarding the Don Imus controversy as examples of his honest intellectual curiosity, and willingness to book and brook dissenting opinion, even when it made him personally look bad. Confirming the obvious, the world of journalism lost a good one.

Hulk Gives Headline Writers a Free Pass, Smashes Box Office Competition

Box Office

Will people turn out to revisit a character they revisited only five years previously? It seems so. Universal’s reboot of The Incredible Hulk owned the top spot at the box office this past weekend, grossing $54.5 million (down from the $62.1 grossed by Ang Lee’s 2003 version, starring Eric Bana). Powered by voice work from Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman and Angelina Jolie — and abetted by a lack of direct genre competition — the animated family flick
Kung Fu Panda made a strong second week showing, earning an additional $34.3 million to push its accumulated domestic receipts to just under $118 million. Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s R-rated The Happening, meanwhile, debuted in third place with $30.5 million.

Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan slotted fourth, with an estimated $16.4 million in its second week of release. Placing fifth was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which grossed another $13.5 million; the
fourth film in the iconic period adventure franchise has now grossed
$275 million domestically and another $327 million overseas. Rounding out the top 10 were Sex and the City, starring Sarah Jessica Parker and a bunch of shoes and handbags ($10.2 million for the weekend, just under $120 million in total); Paramount’s high-flying Iron Man ($5.1 million, $297.4 overall); horror
thriller The Strangers
($5.1 million, $45.3 million overall); The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian ($3 million, $131.7 overall); and Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz’s What Happens in Vegas ($1.7 million, $75.8 overall).

In limited release, meanwhile, writer-director Steve Conrad’s
quietly funny The Promotion, added 75 screens and grossed $137,000; John Cusack’s sprawling satire War, Inc.
added nine more theaters and pushed its slow roll-out, month-long total to around $236,000. Werner Herzog’s documentary Encounter at the End of the World opened in a single theater in New York City, to $17,500.