With Casa de mi Padre set to hit theaters on March 16, Will Ferrell is currently in New Orleans working on his latest movie, Dog Fight. The first image was released last week (via NOLA Films) so now we can all start getting really excited about it, because LOOK! HE HAS FUNNY HAIR! And there’s Jason Sudeikis! Warm up the message boards, folks, because we have speculating to do.

Ferrell plays a South Carolina politician with presidential ambitions, but he’s locked in a heated rivalry with a fellow statesman played by Zach Galifianakis. I assume there will be hijinks when the two try to derail each other’s campaigns, and I’m guessing a lot of yelling of the shirtless variety. Dog Fight also stars Jason Sudeikis, who is currently playing the role of “The Luckiest Bastard Alive” in Olivia Wilde’s bedroom, as well as Dylan McDermott, Brian Cox, John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd, who was apparently able to pry himself away from his current Happy Madison obligations.

The film is scheduled for the convenient election season release date of August 10.

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20th Century Fox showed new Rise of the Planet of the Apes footage at San Diego Comic-Con and wisely put it online immediately so we wouldn’t have to post a buttcam bootleg.  The audience in Hall H saw the clip below and the ones from yesterday.  The new clip shows an army of primates attacking San Francisco, which is what I imagine a normal day on the west coast looks like.  The director explained to the Hall H crowd why they rebooted the franchise so quickly (besides “for piles and piles of money”).

“It’s never been possible to tell this story, technologically,” Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt told the audience, explaining why Fox is revisiting the franchise just a decade after Tim Burton interpreted the story about chimps that achieve humanlike levels of intelligence. “We wanted to tell our story without using live apes for any number of reasons. It would be a cruel irony to tell the story of the exploited and repressed and use live apes to do so.” [HeroComplex]

Okay, so that’s their reason for the mo-cap, and I’ll admit it’s growing on me a little.  A couple of the scenes in the clip below, particularly the end, were a bit intimidating.  You could even say these apes aren’t monkeying around. . . .  Play me off, Johnny!

What was that director guy saying about exploited animals again?  I’ve already forgotten.  Ha, funny kitty.

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“Let’s see. We got soda, purple stuff. Sunny D! All right!” *

Did you love the amazing realism of the clip Vince posted earlier this week, where Alzheimer’s disease means you forget how forks work, apes who attack a person in a nice neighborhood somehow aren’t shot by police or euthanized by order of the court, and the motion capture effect looks like “a character from Madden superimposed onscreen”?  Yeah, that was great.  Oh, but there’s more.  Andy Serkis (AKA Gollum), who plays Caesar the ape, is back to introduce two more clips from James Franco: Sexy Scientist, also known as Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

The clips below really show off the motion capture we can expect from the film, which opens August 5th.  We get to see how Ceasar escapes and makes the other apes intelligent (still no explanation why firearms and the military don’t exist to fight the apes).  I’m still not sold on this mo-cap, especially when Brian Cox just standing still looks fascinatingly real by comparison.  But the most important question raised by these clips isn’t one of our humanity but rather a more practical concern:  they spent all this money on mo-cap but they didn’t use any of it to fix Draco Malfoy’s creepy forehead?

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Ever since HBO’s Rome ended, I’ve had a pretty stiff nerd boner for seeing James Purefoy (who played homicidal ladies man Marc Antony) kill people with a sword.  In addition to Purefoy as one of the Knights Templar (my God, A Da Vinci Code parallel! Quick, call Tom Hanks’ hair!), Ironclad has Paul Giamatti (can I call you Pauly G?  let’s assume I can call you Pauly G) playing the evil King John, as well as Brian Cox, Bob Hoskins, and the late Peter Postlewaite. Holy hell, that is a cast made of dreams. With Pauly G and Brian C chewin’ scenery and swingin’ swords, how could you go wrong, right? The only thing that concerns me is the bro-rawk soundtrack playing over the top. You shouldn’t have to make a trailer about knights sword fighting seem MORE TOUGH. And that butt metal only makes a trailer seem more tough in the same way an Affliction shirt makes you better at fighting. Which is to say… IT TOTALLY WORKS! SUCK IT, BRO, I JUST ICED YOU.
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The Good Heart from Magnolia Pictures stars Brian Cox as a curmudgeonly old fart who meets pussy emo twerp Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood) in the hospital and decides to turn him into a bartender, and not the Tom Cruise kind.  In some ways, it looks a little like indie movie by numbers — the gruff old mentor, the suicidal brat and his wounded dove love interest (“I got fired from my job as a stewardess.  I’m afraid to fly.”).   But maybe it’s worth forgiving, seeing as how it also stars a duck, a german shepherd, and most cuddly of all, Brian Cox.  I love Brian Cox so much.  He’s so awesome and gruff.  He’s like a walking PSA for how to treat a hooker.

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