The Black List is a list of Hollywood’s best unproduced scripts as voted on by executives.  The projects are interesting not because most executives aren’t complete idiots, but because projects tend to be better when they start with an actual script, instead of some half-assed pitch like, “Hey, what about guinea-pig secret agents?”  Anyway, here’s an update on two:

Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer signed on to direct 30 Minutes or Less, a script by Matthew Sullivan and Michael Diliberti.  I wasn’t a huge fan of Zombieland, but I thought the visual style was very cool, and I was hoping his next project wouldn’t be stock characters in a stock premise again.  Now THR reports that Aziz Ansari in a story that… “revolves around a junior high history teacher (Ansari) and a pizza-delivery man who are forced to rob a bank when one of them is strapped to a bomb vest.”  ThePlaylist has more details on the plot, though they warn it’s “spoilery”.  Meanwhile, Danny McBride is in talks to co-star as Ansari’s straitlaced University classics professor.  Ha, just kidding, he’ll play a “white trash goon.”  In honor of that, here’s a Tweet from KF*ckingP: “Doing free pap smears today on Miami Beach to raise money for Haiti. Let’s get our troops home!”  There’s so much right with that.

Rob Corddry will sculpt your butter for Obama.  In Butter, a script by Jason Micalleff ,Rob Corddry will stir Jim Carrey’s vanilla, stepping into a role he turned down, of a former butter-sculpting champion whose wife (Jennifer Garner) is the heir apparent to win this year’s title, only to be thwarted by a young black girl.  The whole thing is said to be a satire of the 2008 Iowa democratic caucus (the black girl is Obama, Jennifer Garner is Hillary).  Box-office toilet poison Kate Hudson is also signed to star, presumably as a stand in for Sarah Palin, the chick that ruins everything for everyone.  [via LATimesblog]

Butter is a Jason Micallef script “that uses a butter-carving contest at the Iowa State Fair as a metaphor for 2008′s Hilary versus Obama Iowa caucus showdown,” which won a Nicholl Fellowship and made the 2009 Black List.  Ergo, it’s probably pretty good.  So what has The Weinstein Company done to it?  Why, they’re trying to hire Kate Hudson and Jim Carrey, according to Vulture:

Carrey playing a philandering, Bill Clinton–esque repeat sculpting champion who is forced to stop competing because he’s “termed out.” When his long-suffering wife (Jennifer Garner is already signed on) finally steps up for her chance to become America’s next top dairy queen, she’s pitted against a 12-year-old African-American girl in foster care. Hudson would co-star as the Carrey character’s illicit paramour.

That sounds like a promising concept.  And although Jim Carrey and Kate Hudson were both at one point in their careers actors I enjoyed (Eternal Sunshine, Almost Famous), after like 15 Bride Wars and Fun with Dicks and Jane in a row, their presence is now a net negative.

I hate how studios try to cast comedies the same way they would an action movie — get big-name actors, any big-name actors, just to raise the project’s profile, rather than just using comedians or unknowns (consider that the cast of The Hangover were once considered too under-the-radar to warrant funding).  Sony did the same thing with Bad Teacher and Cameron Diaz, another black-list comedy.  It doesn’t work that way for comedy.  Yes, Jim Carrey, Kate Hudson, and Cameron Diaz are all stars with high profiles.  The problem is, they’ve also become known for being in crappy comedies.  Giving them a good script to work with is like getting Louis CK to write jokes for Larry the Cable Guy.  They might be funny, but the audience that would actually enjoy them ain’t gonna hear them.