While it’s nice to learn that so many other people love The Cannonball Run as much as I do, it’s very unfortunate that such a discovery comes only with the death of Dom DeLuise. The actor passed away peacefully last night at the age of 75, and today the Internet is heavy in mourning, as well as in discussion and celebration of underrated DeLuise classics.

For me, after the apparently “classic” Cannonball Run movies and my obvious rememberance of the actor’s appearances in The Muppet Movie and on The Muppet Show, I thought of Don Bluth’s animated features, many of which feature the voice of DeLuise. I recall being so excited upon the release of Bluth’s All Dogs Go to Heaven as a kid, mainly because it reunited DeLuise with his Cannonball costar Burt Reynolds. Plus, as much as it was always a delight seeing DeLuise’s jolly face onscreen, his voice alone always gave me a warm feeling. Even his “Pizza the Hut” from Spaceballs comes off as someone you’d like to hug, as messy as that might be.

Speaking of Spaceballs, many around the web are obviously writing fondly of DeLuise’s work in Mel Brooks‘ movies, and at least one person has acknowledged the late actor’s work in Fatso, directed by Mrs. Brooks, aka Anne Bancroft. That and other remembrances can be found after the jump.

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When it was announced that David Wain would be directing Role Models — taking over from The Girl Next Door’s Luke Greenfield — there was room for disappointment. After all, for Wain to follow up his anarchic cult favorites Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten with a seemingly mainstream man-child comedy — one more suited to the talents of Todd Phillips or, well, Greenfield — was to crush his fans’ hopes for something more along the lines of his wacky web series, such as Wainy Days and Stella, or the old MTV sketch comedy show, The State.

But Role Models does look funny, probably because Wain ended up rewriting (with Paul Rudd and Ken Marino) Timothy Dowling’s original script. And it’s not as if Wain has suddenly gone and sold out with a bunch of really broad family films, as did his former State mates Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, the screenwriting duo behind The Pacifier, Night at the Museum and Taxi. Still, many of us are holding out for that rumored State movie, or even better, a big screen adaptation of any of the following State sketches:

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• Brad Pitt will produce and may star in an outer space version of The Odyssey for Warner Bros., and the studio is looking to sign George Miller as director. It is indeed an interesting project for Pitt since he also starred in Troy, which was kind of an adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad. But even more interesting is the fact that this isn’t the first Odyssey in space movie announced this week. On Monday, Ridley Scott described his next project as “The Odyssey by way of Blade Runner.”
• Pitt may also play Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (labeled one of the “New Einsteins” in the latest Mental_Floss) in an adaptation of the nonfiction book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game from screenwriter Steve Zaillian (American Gangster) and director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada).
• Star Wars geek Kevin Smith is at last making his own sci-fi movie, a father-son comedy set in outer space that “will reference other sci-fi movies.” Hopefully it will be as good as Spaceballs and Galaxy Quest, but looking at both the history of sci-fi comedies and the Bluntman and Chronic stuff at the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back leaves me thinking it will be more 2001: A Space Travesty.
• It’s that time of the year when studios decide if their Oscar hopefuls are ready or not. Dimension is currently weighing the possibility of The Road being pushed to 2009, and now Paramount has announced that expected contender The Soloist won’t be released until March while Defiance will barely make the calendar cut with a limited drop on December 31.
• On this crowded news day, here are some other notable bits: David Bergstein is consolodating several companies, including THINKfilm and Capitol Films, for a new venture headed by former New Line exec David Tuckerman;  F. Gary Gray replaces Frank Darabont as director of Law-Abiding Citizen; Bourne 4 moves ahead with a screenwriter; Max Payne is expected to be #1 at the box office this weekend, unless of course some figures from Florida are miscounted permitting Oliver Stone’s W. to win the top spot.

Lists of movies within movies are fairly common on the internet, enough that I now realize I need to finally see Bowfinger simply because I’ve counted about a million list makers in love with something titled “Chubby Rain.” And the lists are likely to keep on coming thanks to this week’s hot release, Tropic Thunder, which actually features two movies within (the Vietnam War film “Tropic Thunder” and the festival-winning making-of documentary “Rain of Madness”), as well as the upcoming How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which has spawned a popular fake movie trailer for an NC-17 film titled “Mother Theresa: The Making of a Saint” (previewed above). Yet until someone makes a Wikipedia page for “List of Fictional Films,” these blogged and forumed lists are necessary to keep us movie fans remembering those non-existent movies we wish existed.

Narrowing down to ten seemed to be difficult — fictional films have been at least nominally been created for tons of films about filmmaking, otherwise reflexive films, sketch comedies, spoofs, etc. — until I realized that a lot of these films within films are appropriately nominal or trailer- or clip-sized gags and would in reality be terrible (imagine actually watching the entirety of “Asses of Fire” from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut). Even “Je Vous Présente Paméla” (”Meet Pamela”) from Day for Night and the sci-fi film being made in 8½ would probably be major disappointments in actuality if you expected from them the work of Truffaut and Fellini, respectively.

So, I went mostly with fictional films that would probably be bad, but would at least be amusingly bad — though I purposefully avoided fictional porns, including those from Boogie Nights and The Big Lebowski, of which there are literally thousands:

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It’s a sad day for Mel Brooks fans. With us still mourning yesterday’s passing of Harvey Korman, who appears in a number of Brooks’ films, today Page Six reports that the Spaceballs director is “quietly shuttering” his film production company, Brooksfilms. In addition to Brooks’ directorial works from A History of the World: Part 1 through Dracula: Dead and Loving It, the company also made such films as The Elephant Man, 84 Charing Cross Road, My Favorite Year and one of my childhood favorites, the underrated guilty pleasure Solarbabies.

I first caught wind of the news from Stu over at Defamer, and seeing as how his post features a montage of Brooksfilm clips that excludes Solarbabies (for which he apologizes), I present you with a clip from the film here. Isn’t it great to know that breakdance and beatboxing is still cool in the waterless post-apocalyptic future? Another thing that would be cool in the future: a Broadway adaptation of Solarbabies. Hopefully Brooks will forget about that Blazing Saddles musical that’s rumored to be in the works and concentrate on bringing one of his non-classics to the stage. It’d be kinda like Starlight Express meets Urinetown. If Xanadu can be a hit and Young Frankenstein can’t, I say this idea should at least be explored.

UPDATE (6/2/08): Mel Brooks says he is not shutting down Brooksfilms.

Two of the biggest stories populating the movie blogs this week have to do with George Lucas. Well, the Fanboys controversy has less to do with the Star Wars director, but obviously he’s connected in some way. The other story has to do with Lucas’ statement that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is (gasp) just a movie. Here is the quote, from USA Today, that’s putting fear into the minds of movie geeks throughout the galaxy:

“When you do a movie like this, a sequel that’s very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it’s going to be the Second Coming,” Lucas says. “And it’s not. It’s just a movie. Just like the other movies. You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up.”

Yes, he goes on to reference the reception of The Phantom Menace, which is obviously fair, but also a bit unbalanced. Certainly our disappointment with the Star Wars prequels had enough to do with their stand-alone quality (or lack thereof), in addition to but separate from them coming with such high expectations.

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