A new Zooey Deschanel movie came out last weekend. But is it the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Paul Dano or the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt? It’s the former, and it’s called Gigantic, which is also not to be confused with this coming week’s new DVD release, Yes Man, in which she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Jim Carrey.

Sure, Deschanel has range and talent (see this fan-made montage of some of her more varied performances), but she also has a certain repetitive nature to her characters. And this “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” nature became all the more confusing recently when trailers for Gigantic and (500) Days of Summer (the Gordon-Levitt one, which is actually her second romantic pairing with the actor) appeared online around the same time. Maybe instead of worrying about people confusing her for Katy Perry, the actress should worry more about people confusing her characters and films for each other.

Or, maybe not. Plenty of us can’t get enough of Deschanel’s quirky, free-spirited performances. In his Yes Man review, Roger Ebert noted that two critics proposed marriage to the character at the end of the film. We wouldn’t go that far, but we have crushed on the actress since All the Real Girls and haven’t yet gotten sick of her or her similar, typecast roles. In fact, to us, the problem is not that indie films too often employ the MPDG character; it’s that they don’t cast Deschanel for every such part. So, instead of wishing she’d broaden her career to include other types of characters (it didn’t work well for her with The Happening, after all), we’ve selected ten MPDG characters that she should have additionally played.
…Read more

There’s a new Muppet special premiering on NBC tonight called A Muppet Christmas: Letters to Santa. So, because I’m a Muppet-loving fool, I figured it appropriate to feature Jim Henson’s creations once again in the Clip of the Day. This isn’t some kind of marketing ploy, though, and anyway I couldn’t find any clips or ads specific to the new program. In order to make this post more film-related, I initially thought about sharing a scene, preferably a musical number, from The Muppet Christmas Carol, but I wrote enough about my love for that movie last year for another site.

So, I’ve used this as an opportunity to finally showcase a brilliantly edited music video for a song called “All Through the Night” by Brooklyn r&b group Escort (despite their retro disco sound, they’re a current band, interestingly featuring former members of the popular Boston ska band Skavoovie and the Epitones). It’s not a legitimate Henson production and it doesn’t have to do with the holidays — unless your holidays consist of making love to Muppets all through the night — but it’s one of the best videos I’ve ever seen on YouTube.

One of the things on my Christmas list this year, by the way, is to hear of a definite production start for Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller’s planned Muppet movie (and I’d also like Segel’s Muppets-related “Dracula’s Lament” song from Forgetting Sarah Marshall to receive an Oscar nomination). And if those guys can find a way to fit some Muppet disco into their film, I’ll be their biggest fan.

Check out the awesome music video after the jump.

…Read more

• Sure, The Dark Knight is conquering the world, but Mamma Mia! has just surpassed Titanic to become the highest grossing movie of all time in the UK. Compared to the Batman flick, which has only earned $88.8 million in the UK’s territory (shared with Ireland and Malta), Mamma Mia! has made $132.2 million.
• Following their 2007 share of Michael Cera’s breakthrough, directors Jason Reitman and Greg Mottola are sharing in the rise of another young talent: Jesse Eisenberg, who stars in Mottola’s upcoming Adventureland, will next star in Reitman’s The Wedding, which sounds like The Graduate in more ways than one.
• Gore Verbinski will helm a movie about a real-life, married, role-playing 53-year-old diabetic who spends 20 hours a day online as “a musclebound entrepeneur” with a virtual wife. To acquaint yourself with the whole story, particularly why his real spouse is pissed, check out the Wall Street Journal article upon which it will be based.
• 30 Rock genius Tracy Morgan will star as an African dictator in Freshman Roommates, which asks the question what if those Nigerian prince scams weren’t scams.
• Harrison Ford is making another comedy in which he (likely) ends up with a much, much younger woman, this time played by Rachel McAdams.
• Please, please, please, Academy, nominate “Dracula’s Lament” for Best Original Song Oscar.

The last clip I posted, before taking a week off, was Muppet-related. And now, rather than digging through all the viral marketing and other cine-centric videos I’ve missed during my vacation, here is yet another clip that is Muppet-related. The video presents a year-old performance of “Count’s First Day of School” by The Dead Hensons, a Muppet cover band from the Bay Area. Unfortunately the group doesn’t appear to play too often (according to their website, after this May 2007 set, they only played twice again, in August 2007 and May 2008).

So why share this clip? Well, besides the obvious, that it’s important to note that a Muppet cover band is no less necessary or serious than any other cover band (IMHO, Paul Williams is one of the greatest songwriters alive), this is also a chance for me to recommend that Jason Segal and Nicholas Stoller consider giving The Dead Hensons at least a cameo in their upcoming Muppet movie. If you’ve seen Segal and Stoller’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, you might agree with me that this song is like a bridge between that film and the new Muppet movie, because Dead Hensons frontman Ryan Beebe is very Segal-esque (at least he appears so in this poor-quality clip) and this performance is kind of like the Dracula musical song from Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

For more enjoyable Muppets covers, check out the Dead Hensons’ MySpace page.

You know how I know you’re gay? You saw the Sex and the City movie.

The above clip was made a few weeks prior to the opening of SATC, which has cemented itself into film history as perhaps the most chicky chick flick ever made. But I find it even more interesting (and more pointed than actually funny) after seeing the box office figures. I wish there had been some kind of tracking done over the weekend of how much of that money came, respectively, from women, from gay men and from - God forbid - straight men.

Whether or not a heterosexual man has seen SATC is now officially a gauge of his manhood. Up there with liking beer, fighting, trucks, guns, chopping wood, etc. OR, in my honest opinion, up there with being comfortable with wearing a dress, putting on eye makeup, crying, giving another man a hug, etc. I have no reason to see SATC because I never watched the TV show, but I almost feel I should sit through it to PROVE my manhood. No need for push ups and skeet shooting, as the dude in the video thinks. Those activities are actually tools of repression for men who aren’t comfortable enough with their sexuality.

…Read more

• Pamela McClintock at Variety notes that the fact that Universal is opening two comedies in two weeks––Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Baby Mama––is a sign that the release schedule is over-crowded with comic content. Related: Judd Apatow gets yet another job.
• James Schamus will adapt the memoir Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, Concert, and a Life, for Ang Lee to direct.
• MGM has acquired distribution rights to the Simon Pegg comedy How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, which co-stars Kirsten Dunst.

Peter Bart is worried about porn. “The drop in porn rentals and sales is worrisome on several fronts,” he writes in Variety.” Till now, porn has been a recession-proof business. Further, with the country already in a dispirited mood, the fact that porn has gone limp may indicate a true plunge in consumer confidence.”

Bart devotes about 400 words to the adult film industry’s woes, then awkwardly segues into a discussion of Judd Apatow’s “crusade to defy the code by making the full-frontal phallus an important co-star of all his films.” The basic thrust of the piece: fetishing erections is so five minutes ago. The limp penis––and, significantly, the mocking laughter it apparently induces in girls––is the symbol of our recession-depressed times.

…Read more

• With the Tribeca Film Festival beginning on Wednesday, Winter Miller analyises the festival’s “7 year itch” for Variety. “Logistics and that intangible thing known as the “festival experience” might well improve, but seven years after its founding as a call to bring the city together post 9/11, the fest is still seeking a clear identity,” hew writes. Perhaps the first step would be to do something about the fest’s institutional indifference to quality in its obsession with quantity, which Miller alludes to: “Unlike fests with mandates to screen what they perceive as the absolute cream of the crop, Tribeca wears its number of international and first-timer participants as a badge of honor.”
• Martial arts epic Forbidden Kingdom grossed almost $21 million over the weekend, enough to take the top box office slot ahead of Forgetting Sarah Marshall; the latest widget from the Apatow factory earned a not-great, not-terrible $17 million. Also: the tactic of opening Expelled wide in rural and suburban communities paid off, as the doc made $3.1 million (and almost double per screen what Morgan Spurlock’s docu-farce Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? managed in a smaller run), in spite of almost universally negative reviews.
• A former TV exec and a producer of Bend it Like Beckham have teamed up to launch Filmaka, a “a digital entertainment studio that sponsors worldwide contests for aspiring filmmakers.” According to The Hollywood Reporter, the first contest will be judged by a panel of filmmakers including Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Neil LaBute.

Here is a film from 1965 of a young Jim Henson and friends lampooning their process of making commercials for Wilson’s Meats. It only goes to show how far downhill the Muppets have come. And how much more mature they were in the beginning.

I present it to you now, because in anticipation of the next project from Jason Segal and Nicholas Stoller (respectively the writer and director of this week’s new release Forgetting Sarah Marshall), which happens to be a Muppets feature, I hope there is some pre-Muppet Movie stuff taken into consideration as possible inspiration.

This particular film is a sort of sequel to this other one, which features more actual Muppets on screen, but I kind of prefer the Monty Pythonesque feel of the one I’ve featured above. But definitely watch both.

[via Fark.com]

image via Stop Smiling.

“I’ve been struggling to try to do a memoir,” said Andrew Sarris at the beginning of the Moving Image Institute session with he and fellow critic/wife Molly Haskell. “I haven’t made much progress, so don’t hold your breath.” Not to brag, but anyone who was in that room won’t have to. The Haskell/Sarris Hour (actually, several hours––the discussion continued over dinner, including wine for many of us and a vodka tonic for Sarris) was, for me, both the most purely pleasurable session of the Institute, and the portion of the program that gave me the strongest dose of film cultural-historical education. It all came down through Andrew and Molly’s candid storytelling. MOMI’s David Schwartz more than once credited Sarris for having mastered the lecture-as-stand up comedy, but in our small group, with Haskell at his side snarkily finishing sentences, it felt more like lecture-as-autobiography. With jokes.

…Read more

Resolved: “viral” (I know, I hate the word too) movie marketing peaked with Cloverfield; we are now watching its record-fast decline towards rock bottom as regular marketing guys shove regular campaigns into unimaginative, unconvincingly “alternative” wrappings.

Exhibit A: At Movie Marketing Madness a couple of days ago, Chris Thilk detailed the many ways that Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s campaign rubs him the wrong way. From the no-comments-allowed fake character blog to the billboards and bus ads that wreck any chance of playing as organic interventions by incorporating URLS and MPAA ratings, Chris says, “If this is the best a studio can do in terms of social media then…marketers have no place in this space.”

Exhibit B: Defamer points to this “ad” (maybe a generous assessment for a piece of paper taped to a tree) which takes the Sarah Marshall campaign’s familiar, Sharpie-scripted petulant, turns it away from the title character and towards said tree. I missed the film when it premiered at SXSW, but I have to wonder if this is an effort to fix another problem cited by Thilk, in that the fake blog posts “seem to exist after the events of the movie”––is there a bit in Sarah Marshall about a tree that this could be slyly referring to? Either the studio is responding to such criticism by steering the campaign towards attention-grabbing non-sequitors,  or they’ve been detourned by actual, semi-inventive spontaneity on the part of their annoyed audience.

I’ll leave the discussion up to you, but I will say that it does strike me that worrying about Marshall’s marketing is just a manifestation of total indifference to the movie itself (as Defamer commenter ricker puts it, “I think I’m going to forget to see Sarah Marshall.”) With the Judd Apatow backlash gaining steam with each successive disappointing release, maybe Sarah never had the chance to dodge the increasing taint of lameness bestowed by its brand-name producer. After all, aren’t we about at the point where a new Apatow-associated product is, like, the Destiny Turns on the Radio to Knocked Up’s Pulp Fiction?

Last week, while I was still exhausted from my first real SXSW experience, news broke out that actor/writer Jason Segel (of TV’s Freaks and Geeks and How I Met Your Mother and the upcoming movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall) is planning a new Muppet movie. Though the announcement likely figured into my subsequent quick recovery, I wasn’t in good enough health to write about it at the time. Fortunately, now there’s more details, courtesy of MTV Movies Blog, and I’m even more giddy than before. As I figured, Segel is looking to the original Muppet flicks, specifically The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper and The Muppets Take Manhattan, which were more centered on the Muppets themselves (rather than having them dropped into pre-written classics like A Christmas Carol and Treasure Island) as they simply set out to put on a show. And as I hoped for, Segel, who is already writing the script with his Marshall co-writer/director Nick Stoller, says he’s planning for a great deal of cameos, particularly from those actors we’d all assume would be involved.

Segel revealed plans to similarly enlist big-name cameos for the flick; in fact, he’s already approached several members of the Judd Apatow stable that includes Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Kristen Wiig and Paul Rudd. “All of our friends that I’ve brought it up to are pretty excited by the prospect of it. Everyone loves the Muppets; they’ve got a warm place in most people’s hearts,” he explained. “We want a lot of cameos. You look back at Charles Grodin, Charles Durning, there were just such great performances in those movies.”

…Read more

How esteemed is Judd Apatow right now? Apparently enough that he can manage to get blow job jokes — visual and verbal ones — on national television. The new trailer for Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which Apatow produced, premiered this week on Access Hollywood, and has the most obvious fellatio gestures I’ve ever seen permitted on anytime NBC, let alone pre-primetime NBC. Did nobody at NBC/Universal (which is also distributing the movie) notice? Or did they think the old ladies who watch Access Hollywood wouldn’t notice? Well, the execs didn’t really have to worry, because if you actually look at the version of the trailer shown on the air, it ends before the blow job jokes. Regardless, people who watch the show may have decided to go to the Access Hollywood website and watch the trailer again. This time wondering what’s so funny about a newly acquired necklace.

So, did nobody at the MPAA notice or get the jokes? This trailer may not be put on television in its entirety, but it’s certainly going to be playing to theater audiences comprised of all ages. I guess in relation to the general content of Apatow’s movies, as well as his R-rated viral videos and red-band trailers, this ad is considered pretty tame.

…Read more