The Hangover, Todd Phillips’ return to fratastic form after the disappointing School for Scoundrels, marks itself as an aesthetic step up for the Old School director right from the get go. With moody, pensive music playing on the soundtrack, the opening credits play out over a montage of Las Vegas By Day — giant cranes breaking the skyline of dull towers, Godzilla-size advertisements for “talent” like Marie Osmond baking in the sun — fading into the more palatable, glittery, and familiar images of Vegas By Night. This tells us right away that The Hangover means to say something about the contradictions of the city in which its set, and particularly the contrast between the Vegas myth of endless nights of full-on debauchery, and days spent nursing head-splitting regret at all-you-can-eat buffets. But Sin City presents Donnie and Marie is only the half of it: more importantly for The Hangover’s purposes, Vegas is a city constantly in construction, creating and erasing its own totally manufactured history, a vacation spot paradoxically designed to provide inspiration for amateur photographers, which simultaneously boasts of its ability to send the same tourists home without memories that they could relate in mixed company.
In other words: the whole goal of the contemporary trip to Vegas is to come home with a digital camera full of evidence that you had a bunch of fun that you can’t recollect and certainly are not going to talk about. So when Phil (Bradley Cooper) Stu (Ed Helms) and Alan (Zack Galifinakis) wake up in their suite at Caesar’s the morning after Doug’s (Justin Bartha) bachelor party to find that their room is trashed and they’ve been left to care for a wandering chicken, a live tiger and a mysterious baby, the initial assumption is that this detritus is Vegas business as usual. Why can’t they remember anything that happened the night before? As Phil puts it, “Because we obviously had a great fucking time.” So great that the groom has gone missing.
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 Australiaincludes 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?
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 Summerand The Tenwith 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 Museumand 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:
***Proving that anyone who’s ever had a beer with Judd Apatow is going to have no trouble finding work this summer, Freaks and Geeks star John Francis Daley (seen above) has sold a script to New Line called The $40,000 Man. Per Variety, it’s about a “legendary astronaut and true American hero who finds himself horribly injured in a car accident and rebuilt by the government to be a bionic man, on a budget of $40,000 — which makes him not that bionic.”
***In other dude-com news, Jack Black and Todd Phillips are teaming up to develop something called Man-Witch for Warner Brothers. The pitch sounds something like School of Rock meets The Craft, but with Jack Black in the Neve Campbell part. Sexy!
***Steve Carell, Daniel Craig, and J.J. Abrams are among the notables who have been invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for 2007.
***Oh good! A Wild Hogs sequel is on the way! Your dad’s half-wit friend will be so pleased.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
