With Betty White at last hosting SNL tonight in just a few hours, it seemed like a good time to reach back a bit in time and present this humorous little Funny or Die viral video in which the astonishing Ms. White exercised her trademark gift for combining sweetness and brutality. I actually hadn’t seen this until just now, and also didn’t see “The Proposal,” so I could be wrong, but something tells me this is funnier than most of the movie.
Author: Bob Westal (Page 113 of 265)
Writer guy Bob Westal was literally born in Hollywood and has commented on the worlds of movies, popular culture, politics, and food ever since. His interest in cocktails is more recent, but he made up for lost time with hundreds of “Drink of the Week” blog posts for Bullz-Eye. In addition to writing and editing, Bob also talks a lot.
Unlike the last film in this brief series of posts, you won’t see Americans remaking, I hope, the “OSS 117” series. Based on a series of previously filmed books that are, I understand, the French equivalent of James Bond, this new series sends up the genre with terrific period detail and an extremely funny lead performance from Jean Dujardin who goes way past Mike Meyers as Austin Powers and winds up closer to Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. His Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath is a masterpiece of clue-free over-confidence.
It’s only playing in three theaters right now and I haven’t seen it yet myself, but if either spy spoofs or slapstick are your thing, you’ll probably want to check out “OSS 117: Lost in Rio,” which picks up the adventures of Monsieur Bonnisseur 12 years after the events of “OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies.” I’m certainly looking forward to it.
It’s late, so I’ll keep it brief tonight/this morning.
* Given the wave of movie science fiction we’ve had since the release of “Star Wars” back in 1977, it’s always been a disappointment to me how few of the most respected SF novels (“sci-fi” isn’t a term literary science fiction geeks approved of back in my day) have been made into movies. So, even though the book kind of baffled me when I read it not too long after it’s original release in 1984, it’s nice to see that a film version of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the novel which is the original source of the word “cyberspace” — whatever that means. Vincenzo Natali (“Cube”) appears to be the helmer.
* It’s looking like “Iron Man 2” will not be a huge record breaker after all and may make (horrors!) significantly less than the $140 million “floor” we were originally given.
* The RZA (pronounced “The Ri-zuh”) is joining the select club of successful pop musicians turned movie directors that includes Prince, David Byrne, Rob Zombie, Paul McCartney (on the ill-fated telefilm, “Magical Mystery Tour”) and I’m sure some others I’m forgetting. Not surprisingly for the Kung-fu loving Wu-Tang Clan founder who worked on part of the “Kill Bill, Volume 1” score, it’s a stylized martial arts epic co-written with fellow Tarantino associate Eli Roth.
* Speaking of Paul McCartney, the one time Beatle, an outspoken vegetarian in real life, may be going in a very different entirely unauthorized and fictional direction as a brain-eating mop-topped zombie in a possible film version of yet another comic zombies-in-history novel, “Paul is Undead” which envisions a zombified fab four. Sure, why not.
In something like the way America caught the “Survivor”-borne reality show virus from other nations in the realm of TV, our American predilection for coming up with multiple movies based on a single character or concept seems to be happening more in other lands these days. Of course, culture is a feedback loop and we start with the first film in a franchise which looks to become a possible American franchise as well. It’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” based on the first of three posthumously published mystery novels written by Danish writer and activist, Stieg Larsson, that have been dubbed The Millennium Trilogy.
Since this solid, actually quite conventional, though rather sordid and, for some, disturbing mystery thriller did extremely well all over the world, and it hasn’t done badly here, it’s naturally being remade. It’s being given a rather royal treatment, with director David Fincher returning to familiar murderous territory and Steve Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”) writing and producing. Currently young actresses including Ellen Page, Carrie Mulligan, and Natalie Portman‘s name are being bandied about for the title role, though an unknown is also perhaps a possibility. They do need someone very good, I can tell you that.
The male lead — a schlumpish middle-aged dude in the Danish film — has apparently been offered to Brad Pitt, who is middle-aged but very Brad Pitt-like. For it to work, he might have to put on some weight or something as it’s an oddball romance of sorts and it’s no longer so oddball if a handsome movie-star guy shows up.
So, a couple of weeks back, a volcano went off in Iceland. That meant that planes in Europe couldn’t fly for several days, which meant that suddenly a London press junket was canceled and rescheduled in Los Angeles, which meant that, one recent Thursday night, I wound up seeing “Iron Man 2” at the AMC Theater in Century City instead of “A Star is Born” at Grauman’s Chinese for the TCM Classic Film Festival. (The world is getting much smaller…)
Moreover, thanks to the volcano, the next morning, instead of my Crunchy Raisin Bran and 1% milk, I was instead being buttered up by with French toast and applewood-smoked bacon buffet at the Four Seasons, a free Iron Man action figure, and a theoretical chance to ask a question of the all-star cast of “Iron Man 2” — i.e., Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johansson, Don Cheadle,and soon to be super-villain of the year Mickey Rourke — not to mention director/co-star Jon Favreau, writer Justin Thoreaux, and producer Kevin Feige.
Of course, considering the 150 or so people in the room, I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t get to ask any questions, but it was a pretty entertaining event. Robert Downey may have famously given up a number of vices, but being a perpetual class clown does not seem to be one of them, and it wasn’t like he was the only interesting person in the room.
The first question, about whether Favreau or he felt any pressure in terms of living up to the success of the first “Iron Man,” set the tone. Favreau admitted he had never been involved with a sequel before, unless you count his “under five” bit part as “Assistant” in Joel Schumacher’s notorious “Batman Forever.” It certainly is a change from small independent films like Favreau’s career-making acting and writing debut, “Swingers,” which he compared to throwing a party and hoping people would come.
“…[On ‘Iron Man 2’] we knew that people were going to show up,” Favreau said. “We just wanted to make sure that everyone who showed up had a good time and that this was going to be as fun or more fun than the last party. So it’s a different kind of pressure.”
Downey then felt the need to start listing sequels others on the panel had been involved in, real and fictional. “Scarlet Johansson was in ‘Home Alone 3.’ Don Cheadle, 11, 12 and 13.”
That led to a question that was geeky in a way that anyone whose ever been a superhero comics fan will recognize, and which wound up being answered by producer Kevin Feige. It was about the “time-line” of the film. It turns out that, if viewers pay close attention, they can figure out that “Iron Man 2” actually takes place before 2008’s “The Incredible Hulk.” (Having seen both movies, I have no freakin’ clue how you’d deduce that.)
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