Not quite live from beautiful downtown Culver City, watch as the ubiquitous NPH — who’ll be hosting the Emmys on Sunday night — shows us the craft of being a highly trained voice thespian. In this extremely serious promotional clip for “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” he explores the various meanings, shades, contexts, and subtexts of “Steve” and “poop.”
H/t Whedonesque.
Well, you got it! What with the Oscars, Golden Globes, Emmys, Grammys, and VMAs, it constantly feels as if there’s some big reception right around the corner. Despite their constant presence, comedians have always felt that their craft is shunned at most Hollywood ceremonies, especially the Oscars and Golden Globes. Thus, George Schlatter founded the American Comedy Awards in 1987. The event inexplicably shut down in 2001, but now it’s coming back.
ABC carried the majority of ACA broadcasts in the 1980s and ’90s, while Comedy Central aired the final edition in 2001.
Having just signed the deal, cabler doesn’t have many specifics on what the show will look like in terms of length, format or location, but president Michele Ganeless told Daily Variety that it will “likely feel like a Comedy Central event and not very formal. It will be fun, irreverent and appropriate for the brand.”
What is known is that the categories to be honored will include film, television, performance and digital shorts.
Ganeless said the cabler is restarting the ACA because it feels the genre is underserved by other kudos.
TV Land and Spike TV will both air the American Comedy Awards sometime in late 2010.
It’s going to be a messy weekend at multiplexes this weekend. Raining food items in 3-D are likely to rule the weekend against a sex-heavy horror comedy with a literally man-eating lead, a food-industry investigation gone badly awry, and the semi-obligatory poorly reviewed rom-com and/or rom-drom.
Redefining the term “splatter” for an all-ages audience is “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.” The Sony-made entry looks to combine the proven appeal of family-friendly animated comedies, 3-D (and 3-D Imax), and adaptations of popular books to make what THR‘s Carl DiOrio guesses will be roughly $25-30 million. Add to that the film’s fairly stellar critical appeal, with most critics echoing the sunny assessment of our own David Medsker with an 89% Rotten Tomatoes “Fresh” rating, and you get a feature with extremely wide appeal. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one go well over the $30 million mark. (I should add, however, that the “Top Critics” rating is a considerably more modest, but still good, 71% as of this writing. However, with only seven reviews included, that seems like a less a fair sampling.)
Likely to come in a distant second is the R-rated, youth oriented sexy horror comedy from Fox, “Jennifer’s Body.” Variety doesn’t hazard a guess this week, but THR/DiOrio is saying to expect a gross in the “low-teen millions” and that seems reasonable. Though for whatever sick reason audiences have been turning up their noses even at very strong horror films inflected with humor like “Drag Me to Hell,” this film benefits from the current”Transformers”-based star power of flavor of the month Megan Fox. Directed by Karyn Kusama and written by the ballyhoed Diablo Cody, this mixture of blood, sex, and quips is generating little “Juno“-based critical afterglow and some anti-Cody backlash with a mere 33% “fresh” rating. That’s not so surprising given that a lot of critics already had mixed feelings about former exotic dancer’s sometimes cutesy dialogue in last year’s sleeper hit. Given the cussedness of young audiences lately, I wouldn’t be surprised if this would be the film to overcome the horror-comedy jinx and over-perform by a few million this weekend. I think the youngsters enjoy driving critics mad.
And then we have this week’s token major release for discerning grown-ups, “The Informant!“. A fact-based comedy about a borderline delusional executive who threw a huge monkey wrench into an FBI price-fixing investigation of food giant Archer Daniels Midland, it’s the latest from the very prolific Steven Soderbergh. In the past, the onetime “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” wunderkind has had success with fact based material with the unassuming 2000 box office hit, “Erin Brockovich.” This film is similarly star-driven, though it remains to be seen if a pudged-up Matt Damon wearing a doofy mustache will have the same appeal as Julia Roberts in a push-up bra.
With an okay 67% RT rating, the critical chorus here is marked by notes of disharmony. Sometimes that’s actually the sign of a truly interesting movie, but rarely is it the mark of an instant hit, though the hope is still for a double-digit millions opening weekend and some “legs.” Damon is getting very good reviews for his lead performance, so a Best Actor Oscar nomination is definitely not out of the question, which could help this movie get some kind of second life if it does disappoint this weekend.
Bringing up the rear is “Love Happens,” which has one of those titles that pretty much dares critics to come up with clever and, in this case, potentially scatological, insults. I didn’t see anyone actually take the bait this time, though the film did receive a not unfecal 20% RT rating. Also, there seems to be some genuine disagreement about whether or not this film is really a comedy or more of a soapy drama, which is usually not a good sign. The appeal of Aaron Eckhardt — still an underrated actor — and Jennifer Aniston, not my choice for the actress of her generation, can only do so much. Fortunately for the producers, the film had a low enough budget that even a single digit opening weekend can mean they’ll eventually recoup their money and perhaps make a profit. Maybe.
Finally, as Oscar season approaches, we’re starting to see more limited releases of interest. This one to watch this week is the new film from writer-director Jane Campion of “The Piano.” Featuring Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw, “Bright Star” is a well-reviewed romantic period drama/biopic about poet John Keats and the literal girl next door. Not that it’s a huge category, but I’m betting this will be the big date movie for English majors of 2009. All that, and no naked Harvey Keitel. Yay.
You’re pre-weekend box-offfice preview will be up bright and early tomorrow morning, but first I have a couple of what Rachel Maddow calls “Holy Mackeral stories.” Both of them involve old movie reliables trying new stuff, and somehow Matt Damon is involved in both movies.
* Back in 1955, Clint Eastwood had uncredited bit parts in two sci-fi monster/horror flicks from director Jack Arnold, “Revenge of the Creature” (the sequel to the 3-D hit, “Creature from the Black Lagoon”) and “Tarantula.” Since then, he’s somehow managed to steer clear of anything remotely fantastical either as an actor or a director — until now. “Hereafter” is being kept under wraps but the story is said to be in the same general ballpark as “The Sixth Sense.” It’s being written by Peter Morgan, also a first-timer in tales of the supernatural, though the playwright/screenwriter of “Frost/Nixon” and “The Queen” is also branching out genre wise with the 23rd James Bond movie. As suggested above, the star will be Matt Damon, who has been around the supernatural before. However, I suspect this film won’t have a whole lot in common either with Terry Gilliam’s ill-fated “The Brothers Grimm” or Kevin Smith’s “Dogma.”
All of this is not to say that director Eastwood can’t do scary. His 1971 directorial debut, the witty and suspenseful “Play Misty for Me,” was pretty thoroughly grounded in our reality but had some definite terror elements.
* Now, Michael Douglas found himself in a pretty similar predicament to Eastwood’s “Misty,” character in the 1987 hit, “Fatal Attraction,” but there’s pretty much no similarities in anything he’s done before with his next project. I don’t know how I’ve missed it, but the actor commonly associated with such super-macho characters as Gordan Gekko (soon to be reprised in the upcoming “Wall Street” sequel) and ultra-horny cop Nick Curran of “Basic Instinct” will be playing Liberace, the glitzy pop-classical concert pianist for whom the word “flamboyant” might have been coined. Directing the film will be Steven Soderbergh, returning to his nonfiction well that earned him one of his biggest commercial successes with “Erin Brokovich” and, he hopes again, with this week’s wide release of the fact-based comedy, “The Informant.”
Just to tie things up in a nice ribbon, as reported by People — who somehow found a picture of Michael Douglas looking oddly like Liberace might have looked later in life — “Informant” star Matt Damon will play Liberace’s longtime partner who ultimately sued the Las Vegas star in a palimony suit. I’m not sure it’s fair to say he “outed” Liberace. This will not, of course, be the first time that Matt Damon has played a gay character. That would be “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”
And, now, a moment of vintage Liberace. Definitely not with Matt Damon.
This time the criticism is coming all the way from the White House. After President Obama reportedly called Kanye West a “jackass” off the record, former President Jimmy Carter has offered his biting opinion as well.
But now Kanye is in trouble with another Oval Office occupant, former President Jimmy Carter, who, speaking at a town hall meeting at Emory University, called West’s behavior “completely uncalled-for” and, showing off a surprisingly dry sense of humor, added that “his punishment was to appear on the new Jay Leno show.”
Obviously, Kanye West isn’t going to care about what Jimmy Carter has to say. The fact that Jimmy Carter even knows anything about pop culture is commendable; he’s probably informing his followers on who Kanye West is. As for President Obama, I’m positive Kanye feels embarrassed through and through as the rapper publicly supported Obama’s candidacy.
The real story here, though, is that we’re even hearing Obama’s comments on an event having nothing to do with American politics. When Bill Clinton and George Bush were in office, you never heard them weighing in on any scandal involving Michael Jackson. Perhaps they did, but apparently that’s when “off the record” meant something. When ABC’s Terry Moran posted Obama’s remarks on his Twitter, the public must have known something was fishy. I don’t give a damn what Obama has to say about Kanye West, and I doubt our president wants the public to know either. Could you imagine John McCain in the oval office during this advent of technology? Obama is the perfect fit during an era where information is ubiquitous. Still, he knows which of his comments belong in the media spotlight. If he’s in the news for something other than politics, odds are the story is pointless. So, Terry Moran, it looks like you’re the real jackass in this situation.
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