Last week, Universal pulled their trailer for The Dilemma after Anderson Cooper complained about the scene in which Vince Vaughn says “electric cars are gay” (even though Cooper never mentioned the name of the movie and sort of misquoted the line in question).  At the time, Universal said they’d already screened the trailer for members of GLAAD and gays in their marketing department and that no one had had a problem with it.

When the trailer debuted three weeks ago, complaints immediately came in to the studio and its marketing department. But Universal claims that’s when it called GLAAD again  to “double check” there were no objections. The studio tells me that “only then did GLAAD say, ‘This is probably questionable. It’s not a major offense at all. But it’s best not to use it in the campaign so it avoids any questions.’” [Deadline]

GLAAD denies that, but whatever the case, they started to complain about it after the Anderson Cooper appearance. Universal altered the trailer to remove the line, but now GLAAD is taking it a step further with an online petition to have the “anti-gay language” removed from the final movie altogether.  The line in the trailer was “electric cars are gay. …I mean, not homosexual gay, but but my-parents-are-chaperoning-me-to-the-dance gay.”  Meanwhile, ThePlaylist reports that that line had been altered from Allan Loeb’s original script, which said:

“Not homosexual gay… but soft gay, unmanly gay, quiet and small gay” and that “if you’re a real man… you don’t want an electronic car.”

Now, I’m tempted to point out that it’s dangerous to set a precedent wherein what a movie character says has to be screened for PC language, and that if you squint, you might imagine that the point of the line was that the Vince Vaughn character is kind of an A-hole who talks too much and his mouth gets him in trouble, not that he’s a really good guy who never says anything vaguely homophobic, even by accident. 
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TMZ reports that Universal is pulling the trailer for the Vince Vaughn/Kevin James “comedy” The Dilemma after Anderson Cooper complained about it on the Ellen show this week.  The offending line was the opening of the trailer (which is still live on Yahoo, but will supposedly be replaced by the end of the day):

“Ladies and Gentlemen, electric cars… are gay.  I mean, not homosexual gay, but my-parents-are-chaperoning-me-to-the-dance gay.”

Deadline reports that Universal had shown the trailer to GLAAD and that some of the marketing people in charge were themselves gay (sounds crazy, I know…) and no one had had a problem with it.  Nonetheless, they’re pulling it after Anderson Cooper had this to say (video after the jump) on Ellen this week:

“I was sitting in a movie theater over the weekend and there was a preview of a movie, and in it, the actor said, ‘That’s so gay,’ and I was shocked that not only that they put it in the movie, but that they put that in the preview. They thought that it was okay to put that in a preview for the movie to get people to go and see it… We’ve got to do something to make those words unacceptable ’cause those words are hurting kids.”

Oh yeah, I’m sure this will totally keep adolescent boys from calling each other gay.  I love you, Anderson, but come on, pick your battles: “gay” had a meaning before it meant “homosexual”.  For someone to use “gay” and explicitly refer it back to the non-homosexual meaning IS NOT OFFENSIVE.  And no, “that’s so gay” is not the same as the N-word, so stop using that argument.  It’s stupid.  Their history and their connotations are completely different.  Maybe I’m overreacting, but I refuse to believe that the most offensive thing about a movie starring Kevin James dancing, written by Allan Loeb and starring Queen Latifah and C-Tates, is that someone said something was “gay.”  Offensive to gay people? No. Offensive to intelligent people?  Definitely.

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Oliver Stone has won a best picture Oscar and delivered era-defining films on more than one occasion, his work inspiring everyone from the Gekko wannabes on the real Wall Street to the N-words who he says all love Scarface (his words, allegedly).  He might be the perfect director to deliver a film about American capitalism in that in both, the big question is, are they defined by their successes or their failures?  I don’t know the answer to that, I’m not a scientist.  But I can tell you that when Stone fails, he fails spectacularly.  In Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Stone delivers a master class in how not to make a movie and creates a film which unintentionally mirrors the causes of the financial collapse it tries to dramatize — a pile of worthless elements cleverly configured to resemble something of value, but which is ultimately just a big stack of crap.

You can sense in it an attempt to define the financial excesses and failure of personal responsibility of the early 2000s era, but the scope is so broad and the critique so unfocused that it becomes little more than a pile of buzzwords.  MORTGAGE, LASER FUSION, CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS, BLOGGING!  Only in this movie do mortgage-backed securities and alternative energy have anything to with each other.  For a project with A-list stars, a critically-acclaimed director, and a blockbuster release, it has to be one of the clumsiest screenplays ever to make it to film.  I suspect that the problem, like a 2003-era mortgage prospectus, was that NO ONE BOTHERED TO READ THE FINE PRINT.

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Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps opens today, and all-around Hollywood awesome dude Josh Brolin plays the film’s villain, Evil Motorcycle Guy.  Brolin was also the subject of this month’s Playboy interview, in which he offered this possibly telling quote:

“The movie is more formulaic than anything Oliver’s ever attempted before [dramatic pause inserted here by the editor before Brolin tries to put a positive spin on what he just said] but in the most beautiful, Oliver-esque way.

Oliver Stone has made some great movies and some crappy ones — what makes this quote possibly telling is that Wall Street 2 was co-written by Allan Loeb, who previously wrote the puke-inducingly formulaic 21 and The Switch.  He also has like 10 projects in development, most of which sound like awesom-o pitches, including:

• Just Go With It: An Adam Sandler vehicle for Grown Ups director Dennis Dugan in which a guy rents a family to impress the girl of his dreams.

• Untitled project in which Kevin James saves the rec center with MMA.

• The Dilemma, in which Vince Vaughn catches his best friend Kevin James’ wife cheating on him with Channing Tatum, probably because he’s fat. He needs to get his groove back. You could totally combine this with Hitch.

• An untitled Ryan Reynolds project about “an injured baseball player on the mend with echoes of The Rookie.”

• A remake of the 2006 French film The Valet, “about a parking valet who is enlisted to impersonate the lover of a famous fashion model in order to deflect attention from her relationship with a married businessman.”  Aka Pretty Man.

• A Little Game Without Consequence, “based on a French play of the same title which concerns a seemingly perfect couple who realize that their friends never liked them as couple to begin with after they pretend to break up.”

I can’t tell if the guy actually thinks like a Hollywood script-generating software machine or if he’s  a genius who figured out how to turn studios into his personal ATM machine.  Meanwhile, Brolin’s quote reminds me of Adam Carolla’s interview shorthand for when celebrities get asked about people they don’t like.  If a celebrity doesn’t like someone but can’t say it, the exchange will go something like, “What’s Jeremy Piven like? …Oh, you know. Jeremy’s Jeremy.”

“Did I say Wall Street 2 was formulaic?  What I meant was that it’s Oliver-esque.  Just wonderfully, beautifully Olivery.”

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Considering there’s been a shot of Kevin James looking like a regular Tommy Tapout at just about every UFC event in recent memory, it’s not surprising that he’s doing an MMA-themed movie.  The film doesn’t yet have a title yet, but might I suggest “Round and Pound?”  Ouch.  It hurt me on the inside to type that.  (*sprawl and bawl*).  Wait, he also plays a teacher?  “The Dean of Mean”, maybe?  (*hangs self with Nick Ring’s loose knee ligamenttth*)

Catch me in a rear-naked sadness bar, Deadline:

The script will be written by Allan Loeb (21, The Switch, Just Go With It, the Al Qaeda tapes*) and Kevin is producing with Todd Garner.

James is attached to play a physics teacher whose school faces drastic cutbacks. In an attempt to save his best friend’s job and the music program his students love, he moonlights in the octagon as a mixed martial arts fighter, ultimately leading to brawling in the UFC. [Deadline]

MMA saves the rec center… AGAIN!  How long did it take to come up with this concept?  Five, six minutes?  Look, I don’t expect you to have seen an Allan Loeb movie or be a die-hard MMA fan like me, but having suffered through both 21 and The Switch and heard the pitches for Loeb’s next few movies, believe me when I say that Allan Loeb and Kevin James teaming up for an MMA movie is like being in the middle of a nice dinner when a hobo comes in and de-lices his ball hair with my fork.  If there isn’t a scene where Kevin James cries because the schoolkids hide his pie while he’s cutting weight, I will drink Lyoto Machida’s pee**.

"Word up, I'm sponsored by Kangol and ho-hos"

*I suspect

**I’m kidding. (Just in case Kevin James’ friend Rampage sees this and decides to take me up on the offer)