(Picnic Bear is Yogi Bear’s cousin. He doesn’t steal picnic baskets, he just waits patiently for someone to show up with one)
Anna Faris, Justin Timberlake, and Dan Aykroyd have joined the cast of WB’s CGI/live action Yogi Bear movie, to be directed by Journey to the Center of The Earth director Eric Brevig.
Faris will play a nature documentarian who follows the antics of a bear in fictional Jellystone Park. Aykroyd will voice Yogi, and Timberlake could end up lending his pipes for Yogi’s constant companion, Boo Boo. [THR]
I always sort of liked Yogi Bear. I always sort of liked Anna Faris and Justin Timberlake and Dan Aykroyd too. So why am I not excited for this? Probably because when they CGI old cartoons and mix it with live action, it tends to look like this:
Does that appeal to anyone over the age of 10? No. Which means I’ll probably end up taking a date to this, but I won’t be happy about it.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was a children’s book from the seventies about a town called Chewandswallow where it rained food, written by someone who was probably really high. Sony made a movie out of it, and as you can see from the trailer below, they turned it into an origin story about how it came to be that this town rains meatballs. Pixar seems to be the only animation studio that can do kids’ movies without babytalking, so to speak, and since I don’t have any kids that I know of, I have hard time giving a crap about a movie like this. I’ll let FirstShowing handle it:
In comparison to Planet 51 [I'll have that trailer up later today -ed.], I actually want to see this one just a bit more. Something about all that food and the comedy, it just gets me. Though I’m worried that like Sony Animation’s last movie, Surf’s Up, it won’t be as good as the trailers make it seem.
Yes, you see, the food and the comedy, it really gets him. Fascinating, right?
Observe and Report, opening today from director Jody Hill, has been billed as “the Taxi Driver of mall cop movies.” (Whereas Paul Blart Mall Cop was more like the Big Momma’s House of mall cop movies). The question remains: is it any good? Relax, stupid, that’s what I’m gonna tell ya!
It might be an oversimplification to say that if you like Hill’s HBO series Eastbound and Down that you’ll like Observe and Report. The protagonists are similarly messed up and the tone is similar, but Danny McBride is a lot better at playing this kind of outrageous, over-the-top character. He and Will Ferrell might be the only two guys in Hollywood who’ve ever pulled it off. And that’s not a knock on Seth Rogen. In some ways it’s actually to his credit - he’s almost too believable to play a character so inconsistent.
Rogen plays a schlubby Travis Bickle - unstable, self-serious, loves power over others, lives with his mom, and is in love with the slutty pill-head makeup girl played by Anna Faris - a dead ringer for your sister. It’d probably be a waste to give you any more of the plot than that, except to say that the first half hour of this movie is truly atrocious. I like the f-word a lot more than most people, but that doesn’t make Seth Rogen and Aziz Ansari screaming “F*CK YOU!” “NO, F*CK YOU!” at each other for five minutes funny. It’s not. I’d rather get punched in the dick. After the slow start, the humor finally gets its panties off in the scene in which Rogen goes on a date with Faris, who single-handedly rescues the entire first half of the movie.
After the jump, I’ve got the red-band trailer for Observe and Report, a mall-cop comedy from Foot Fist Way director Jody Hill starring Seth Rogen and Anna Faris. It’s a real shame that Paul Blart came out earlier and stole their thunder, but not surprising considering it looks like in this one they at least bothered to write a script instead of just filming Kevin James’s pants falling down for two hours.
As you can see, this month’s Playboy features House Bunny star Anna Faris on the cover. It hits newsstands this Friday. What could possibly be bad about that news, you ask?
While Faris doesn’t appear nude in Playboy, she actually told me recently she was definitely tempted to strip down for the mag.
"I felt really sexy," she told me of the shoot. "I found myself totally getting into it. I was like, ‘Let’s just take it all off.’ " (Her publicist convinced her otherwise.) [E!]
BOOOOOOO!!!!! Thanks for the advice there, Lieutenant Cockblocker. A hot chick who doesn’t get naked is like a child without laughter, or the petals of a flower without the morning dew. People like Anna Faris’ publicist should literally be shot in the face and dumped in the sewer.
