Not to excuse indifference to bloggerly responsibilities on my part, but Paul is the kind of movie that isn’t a lot of fun to review.  It’s not terrible, there aren’t any glaring inconsistencies, but it just doesn’t quite work.  It’s just not that funny.  It’s usually cute, but not quite laugh-worthy, and occasionally obnoxious, but not quite grating.  The word that most comes to mind is “thin.” It’s trivial.  It’s the acquaintance you always tell yourself you should call more but don’t, and deep down you know exactly why.

It’s a bit of a blue-ball dry rub considering the people involved.  I loved director Greg Mottola’s last two movies (Superbad and Adventureland), and getting the double-team from Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (who also wrote the script) is almost always a good thing.  The plot, two nerds find a wacky alien (voiced by Seth Rogen) and have to help it escape the US government that wants to study its brain and harvest its penises for fuel or whatever, is cribbed from the standard 80s-alien-movie formula (ET, Mac & Me, etc).  But rather than the clever genre homage seen in the Pegg co-written (with Edgar Wright, whose influence might have been needed here) Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, or the glowy, rich nostalgia of Mottola’s last two movies, what we get instead is just a series of throwaway references to every 80s alien movie, like they wrote it by going down a checklist.  Reese’s Pieces reference goes here… okay now what?  Not homage, not parody, just, as my co-viewer Brendan from the Frotcast put it, “one long wink.”

Winking at the audience can be fine, but… you should probably tell a joke first.

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FilmDrunk’s 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award winner Christopher Mintz-Plasse and some guy named Scott Porter are the latest actors to hop on board the upcoming indie comedy The Hand Job, which is starting to look like a “Who’s Who” of people you would expect to see attached to an indie comedy. Variety reports that in addition to Vince’s best friend Chris and that Scott dude who probably doesn’t even read FilmDrunk, the Maggie Carey-directed film also stars:

Aubrey Plaza
Alia Shawkat
Mae Whitman
Connie Britton
Dominic Dierkes
D.C. Pierson
Donald Glover
Andy Samberg
Bill Hader

Plaza stars as a nerdy (read: hipster; see also: Juno) high school student who vows to lose her virginity before she heads off to college. And as I wrote that sentence, a million pairs of skinny jeans just got a little bit tighter. Glover will play a lifeguard, which is ironic and therefore a part of the standard indie formula, and Hader will play a stoner. I wish he would play Stefon. Sad Burnsy in a skinny tie.

Variety also reports that the roles of a “gorgeous older sister” and Plaza’s “intimidating father, a conservative judge” have yet to be filled. And I will save them some time and go ahead and scribble Zooey Deschanel’s name in the sister role, and for the dad… Alec Baldwin. Maybe Tim Robbins. Either way, it will be someone who is a famous liberal mocking the conservative role. That will totally show the system. Or not. Whatever.

Every time I think James Franco’s getting a little too up his own ass with his gay art exhibits (and here I mean gay as in actually homosexual-themed, with penises and stuff), he comes back and does a funny video like this.  Well, played, Franco, well played.  Actually, the best part of this is Bill Hader’s Willem Dafoe impression.  And the fact that Sam Raimi’s birthday isn’t until October.

DAILY CIRCLE JERK LINKS

• 8 things Twilight has ruined besides vampires. |Uproxx|
• I don’t play Halo or know much about Halo, but f*ck me sideways, that is one hell of an awesome Halo sculpture. |GammaSquad|
• 5 ways NBC can save The Office. |SmokingSection|
• So, uh, I guess on True Blood, one of the vampires twisted a chick’s neck around so he could bang her hard without having to look at her face.  Seems perfectly natural. |WarmingGlow|
• The hierarchy of Twilight fandom. Twihardedness. Whatever. |ScreenJunkies|
• A flowchart for determining whether your girlfriend is a post-op tranny. |HolyTaco|
• District 11 is like District 9 for World Cup soccer players. |Atom|
• Vanity Fair just released a movie trivia app for your iPhone. Time to start f*cking people up at Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. |Apple|
• Man freaks out because mall is closed.  Because he’s Canadian, he enunciates and speaks in full sentences. |CollegeHumor|
• 31 enormous fish.  Hey, does it smell like YOUR MOM in here? (*holds hand up for high five*) |Urlesque|
• The 20 biggest financial failures of all time and their director’s post-failure careers. |Pajiba|
• Everyone hates Hitler. |AdultSwim|
• The 9 most secretly badass animals. |Guyism|
• 10 badass movie knives. |Gunaxin|

SNL was pretty much what we’ve come to expect this week: a couple funny bits involving Andy Samberg and Jason Sudeikis floating in a sea of unfunny crap like Kenan Thompson’s Grady Wilson sketch that makes you wonder why the person who thought this should be a recurring character hasn’t been taken out behind a barn and shot (and if no barns exist near 30 Rock, I could build one for the purpose).  Anyway, here’s the digital short, James Cameron’s Lasercats 5, with cameo by James Cameron.  I think it’s the attention to detail that makes it, with all the James Cameron references and Papyrus font.  If I had one criticism, it’s that I wish there were more real cats (but I say that about everything, even my grandma’s funeral).  Oh, and at the end, where Lorne Michaels throws them out of his office, someone could say, “You didn’t like it, Lorne?  Hey, aren’t you the guy who hired Kenan Thompson?”  And then kill him with the laser cat.

[Oh, and here's a Golden Globes drinking game for tonight, though if you're even considering watching the Golden Globes, you're probably drunk off your ass already]

NY Magazine caught up with Bill Hader outside a Paper Heart screening recently, where they asked him about the upcoming Macgruber movie.  He said he’s read the script (by Will Forte, Jorma Taccone, and John Solomon), which tells us there’s actually a script, and that it’s… *gasp* rated R.

It’s like a hard-R comedy, and it totally works. It’s hilarious. It’s kind of in the vein of, like, eighties action movies, like there’s a very definitive bad guy. I don’t know if I can talk about the plot too much, but it’s hilarious. The thing that kind of blew my mind about it is that it’s like a HARD-R movie. I was like, “What is this? This is f*cking ugly. You guys are really going to do this?” And they’re like, “Yup.” And I was like, “That is awesome. That is f*cking hilarious.” [Vulture]

Unfortunately scripts have a way of changing once the people paying the bills get ahold of them.  And putting out an R-rated SNL movie would take some serious balls, a rarity these days everywhere but your mom’s underwear.  As ThePlaylist points out, there hasn’t been an R-rated SNL movie since Blues Brothers, and the conventional wisdom is that they’d lose a big chunk of their network-TV friendly audience by making an R-rated film.  But I hope they do it.  Not because cussing is inherently funnier, but because that would at least give it some separation from the sketches, which kinda suck.  It could be really good if Macgruber was more like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, cutting peoples’ arms off and feeding deer and carrying tree trunks on his shoulder and swearing.  And then sometimes a naked girl would walk by for some reason.  I guess what I’m saying is that it could be good if it’s nothing like Macgruber.