• Shia LaBeouf will take a pause from Transformer movies and unofficial Hitchcock remakes long enough to star in an adaptation of the new John Grisham legal thriller, The Associate. The film will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who oversaw past Grisham films The Client and A Time to Kill. Could this mean director Joel Schumacher will also be on board?
• Peter Farrelly (one of the brothers) and producer Charles Wessler are putting together a comedic portmanteau (or anthology) film with 24 shorts utilizing the writing and/or directing talents of such vets as Brett Ratner, Todd Phillips, Mike Judge and potentially Josh Gordon and Will Speck. The sole Farrelly will direct two installments, but for some reason his brother Bobby is not involved with the project.
• The media thrashing of Australia includes the film’s reception Down Under, where it isn’t being greeted as the national treasure Fox hoped it’d be. Sure, it didn’t open as big as Mamma Mia! there, but if you look at usual figures for Oz, a US$5.1 million opening is actually pretty good. Besides, did the studio really think Aussies would let it topple Crocodile Dundee for the title of national treasure?
• Is Kung Fu Panda now the animated feature to beat at the Oscars? The film racked up more than double the amount of Annie Award nominations Wall-E received.
• Blockbuster stores still exist? I guess the few still out there will now be making some side money through a deal to sell concert tickets via LiveNation. Wait, people still buy concert tickets in person?

The third part in Universal’s rebooted Mummy franchise takes the series in a new direction. Rather than set in Egypt and dealing again with the same old villain, Imhotep, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor brings us to China and gives us a different sort of preserved corpse baddie. And it looks like the change could actually add some freshness to the franchise.

Of course, history would hint that such a move for the Mummy movies is a bad idea. While it seems beneficial in theory to redirect the focus of a series with the third installment, especially if the first sequel was too much a repetition of the original (a la The Mummy Returns), in practice many threequels mistakenly alter things for the worse. These aren’t necessarily the worst threequels ever made (*cough* X-Men: The Last Stand); they’re just some movies that took their series in a completely wrong turn.

1. Halloween III: Season of the Witch - Now viewed as an unfortunate detour in a long series involving the slasher Michael Myers, this misstep can apparently be blamed on John Carpenter and co-writer/producer Debra Hill, who agreed to a second sequel to Halloween only if it didn’t involve Myers. But what was the point? Sure, a franchise can work with unrelated sequels, but after two movies dealing with the same villain, it seems odd to switch it up so late in the game. Still, if this wasn’t such a terrible movie in general, it’s possible Halloween III could have worked as an intended beginning to an anthology franchise.
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While I’m on the subject of writing about comedy today, and since there aren’t any new trailers to comment on, I figured I’d go back and take another look at You Don’t Mess with the Zohan trailer. When the preview first hit, I decided not to write about it, because I know how difficult it is to write about comedy and I just know that people are apt to disagree with me over Adam Sandler’s career.

As a youngster, I was a huge fan of Sandler and a constant defender of the merits of his comedy. But I think as I’ve grown older, I’ve lost the appreciation for that random and absurdist stuff — I think this somehow coincides with my waning enjoyment of Bunuel. For awhile, I thought it was Sandler who was growing up, doing movies for kids and families and making more efforts to do dramatic roles, but Zohan seems as immature as anything he’s ever done. The problem is, it also seems as simple and formulaic (in a 1980s comedy, there’s always a bad guy to make the third act less funny, Crocodile Dundee/Twins/etc., sort of way) as anything he’s ever done. Say what you will about Billy Madison or Happy Gilmore, but there is some well-crafted, anarchic comedy in there beneath the stupid surface storylines.

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