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:
…Read more
The Webby Award nominations are out, and several Spout favorites have gotten the nod across the various Online Film & Video categories. David Wain’s Wainy Days was nominated for Best Comedy Series. VBS.TV, VICE Magazine’s video portal and the original home of a serialized version of Heavy Metal in Baghdad, is a finalist in the Travel video category (and wouldn’t it be fun to see the NY Times‘ service journalism trounced by Garbage Island, above). Finally, The West Side, the deconstructed Western web series which I wrote about in November, was nominated as Best Drama Series. Congrats to all, and don’t forget to cast your vote at the Webby Awards homepage.