This week on the Frotcast, we bring back listener and Frotcast favorite Lindy West to talk Due Date and Unstoppable. We didn’t get to see Unstoppable, but Lindy basically tells us the entire plot and how dumb it was, and ironically, this only makes us want to see it more. (Lindy interview begins at 33 mins)

Meanwhile, Brendan talks about meeting a famous former baseball player this week, who told him a story about how Cal Ripken’s wife once banged Kevin Costner during Ripken’s historic streak. Ripken found out before a game, and the stadium had to fake a power outage and cancel the game to keep the Ripken streak unbroken. (Juicy blind item, omg!) That starts at 26 minutes.  Oh, and I talk about filming my television debut yesterday near the beginning.  I have a hard time talking with my hands, which is rather strange for someone with such a dago name.

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Same as last week, this week’s intro song is “Totally Snake” courtesy of the band Totally Snake.

Megamind opened big, Due Date had the highest-grossing opening ever for an R-rated comedy*, and all was well in Hollywood, as overall business was up 30% from last year.  But in my mind, the big story is that Tyler Perry’s adaptation of For Colored Girls grossed $20.1 million, which is comparable to the opening of freakin’ Knight and Day.  For reference, here is an abbreviated list of movies that opened smaller than For Colored Girls this year:

Wall Street 2
Legend of the Guardians
Easy A
Machete
Piranha 3D
The Switch
Scott Pilgrim
Step Up 3D
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Get Him to the Greek
Marmaduke
Kick-Ass
Hot Tub Time Machine
Green Zone
She’s Out of My League…

I know some of you are probably thinking I’m naive for being surprised at the success of a Tyler Perry movie, when he’s clearly become the closest thing we have to a male Oprah, but keep in mind, For Colored Girls was A TWO-HOUR SLAM POEM ABOUT RAPE AND ABORTION.  I’m not sure I’d see that even if every part was being played by Diora Baird’s boobs.

(full top 10 chart below)

*Which you’d never have guessed by the six-year-old sitting next to me in the theater.  No joke.  He really enjoyed the masturbating dog joke.

[via BoxOfficeMojo]

Not to give too much press to the competition (or are they colleagues? Eh…), but Todd Phillips recently did an interview with Movieline, and things got a little… awkward.  And by that, I mean he told them he hated their website before the interview even began.

Thanks for taking the time to do this.
This is for Movieline?

Yes.
This website’s the worst, but, all right, let’s do it.

Oh, no. Why do you say that?
No, honestly, I’m teasing, but you guys just hate every movie. So it’s like, “Ugh, really, I have to do this and open myself up to some snarky, clever title?” You know what I mean? There are movie sites that love movies and there are movie sites that are just bitter people that just hate movies. I find Movieline to be in the latter. The tone is bizarrely hateful.

I hesitate to interrupt a conversation this entertaining, but I will say this: not that I’m disagreeing with Phillips on this particular site, but I don’t like the way the whole “some people love movies, some people don’t” argument usually gets worded. I love movies. I also recognize that 85% of them suck. That’s just the nature of movies. Actually, it might just be the nature of things. That most things kind of suck is what makes things that don’t so awesome. A guy like Pete Hammond, who spouts hacky, asinine words of “praise” in exchange for frozen herring, does not “love movies.” I’m not sure he actually even watches them beyond seeing the trailers and composing a couple d*ck-fisted soundbites.  And to me, that seems much more disrespectful. < / Earnest Bear >

Really? I wouldn’t call it hateful at all.
In print. You’re right, in person I’ve only had great experiences with [the writers]. And I’m not even talking about my own personal things, I’m saying that when I go on that site and read about other movies, it just seems like one of those sites.

[...]

Is it tough coming back for a sequel to The Hangover? I mean, these guys wind up in this impossible situation in the first one. Is it hard to find a way for something else crazy to happen to these four guys or does it just flow like it did the first time?
Well, it’s been flowing for us and it’s not necessarily going to follow the same idea. We’re in the middle of making that movie, but I think people are going to be surprised with how much of a… How do I put this without getting some f*cking snarky feedback in the headline?

I swear I wasn’t going to ask anything more about Mel Gibson situation…
Oh boy, here we go.

Do you think it’s true that any press is good press?
No, I don’t! I don’t subscribe to that at all. Particularly in comedy filmmaking where so much of what we do relies on surprise. So, no, I don’t believe any press is good press. And I don’t mean that I’m talking about from a PR stand, like this is bad for the image of The Hangover. I’m talking more about comedy just works better when you’re taking people by surprise, not talking about it on a blog six months before we even shoot a scene. You know what I mean?

[...]

I just feel, tonally speaking, how movies have a certain tone or comedies have a certain tone, I feel like websites do have a tone. And the tone of the Movieline website seems very high school to me. Does that make sense? I’m not telling you to agree or not, I’m just saying that’s where that is coming from. [Movieline]

As far as blog tones go, high school would be a great complement for Perez Hilton, who spends his days drawing “doody head” on celebrities’ pictures while typing extraneous exclamation points with his flippers. And anyway, I think what Todd Phillips is describing is less “high school” than it is “freshman gender studies major at Sarah Lawrence.” That may sound like the pot shouting the N-word on the kettle’s answering machine, but here at FilmDrunk, if we have a tone, it’s clearly the Brown Note.

Zach Galifianakis isn’t your usual yuk-yuk comedian, which is part of what makes him so funny.  Like a lot of great comedians, he seems to have a depressive, perfectionist streak.  You’d think that could cause some conflicts when you become a big star in Hollywood, which is largely run by d-bags who don’t know whether something’s funny until the test audience laughs.  According to a recent Galifianakis appearance on the comedy death-ray podcast, he may be in the midst of a conflict on the Hangover 2 set.  Here’s what he said, as transcribed by Vulture:

“But a movie you’re acting in, you don’t have a lot of control — you just show up and vomit your lines out. I’m not the boss. I’m in a deep protest right now with a movie I’m working on, up in arms about something. But I can’t get the guys to [listen] … I’m not making any leeway.” Galifianakis cut host Scott Aukerman off with an abrupt warning sound as the host began to mention the film’s title, but after Aukerman pressed, “I know you’re filming The Hhhhhhhh … ” Galifianakis admitted, “It has something to do with a movie I’m working on, yeah. I’ll tell you about it later. It’s very frustrating.”

Just to add smoke to the non-fire here, Galifianakis also had this to say about working on Due Date, another Todd Phillips movie:

PLAYBOY: Due Date features a soon-to-be infamous scene in which you and a pet dog named Sonny masturbate together.  Does this count as your first cinematic sex scene?
GALIFIANAKIS: I would think so. To be honest, I am too much of a snob to think I would like to see that in a movie. I dislike any sex scene in movies.  But this is a first for me, so I’m eager to see how people react.  Is it high cinema?  No. Would Lassie have done it?  No.  But the director, Todd Phillips, likes to push the envelope.

Basically, it sounds like Phillips and Galifianakis have done two movies in a row together now and they’re starting to have some creative differences. Seems only natural.  Until Galifianakis rides off on an elephant to go meditate in the jungle like Tony Jaa, I wouldn’t worry.  My only question, where were your deep protests on Dinner for Schmucks?  Oh yeah sure, make me look like a jackass when I have to go demand my money back from the poor pimply kid behind the window.  Nice work there, Neville Chamberlain.

Hot off the tubes, it’s the new international trailer for Due Date.  It’s almost sad how easily Due Date boils down to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles meets The Hangover, but I just can’t resist Zach Galifianakis holding something cute (*quietly exposes penis*).  And if you would’ve asked me a couple years ago whether I’d rather see another Planes, Trains and Automobiles or a sequel to Tron, Tron would’ve been the clear loser.  But no matter how you feel about Tron, at the very least, we should all be thanking God the directing job went to Todd Phillips and not the Dinner for Schmucks guy, and that the John Candy role went to Zach Galifianakis and not Kevin James.  They would’ve had to rewrite so that all the jokes rely on him being fat. Haha, oh, Kevin James, you can’t eat pie on a segway!

Opens November 5th.

[hat tip: ScreenJunkies]

Courtesy of Yahoo Movies, here’s the new poster for Todd Phillips’ Due Date.  Yes, it’s basically a transparent attempt to recreate the success of The Hangover – disheveled dudes in the desert, physical injuries, sunglasses, bloody shirts, Zach Galifianakis holding something cute — but it also has Zach Galifianakis, Robert Downey Jr, and a puppy, so complaining about it is kind of like being upset that you have to have butter cakes and sugar for breakfast again.  Besides, Todd Phillips is usually a good director. I have faith that he can give these guys the freedom to be funny and not rape them with a horrible farce script like Dinner for Schmucks.  Farce rape took my uncle.

Opens November 5th.

After the jump, you can watch Michael Cera and Jason Schwartzman read the weather in El Paso.  Which is unrelated but similarly cute.

[via Awl]

So how does plan Todd Phillips to top The Hangover?  From the looks of this new trailer for Due Date, you take The Hangover baby, give his sunglasses to Zach Galifianakis, switch the baby with a French bulldog with a plastic collar around its neck, and add Robert Downey Jr.  If this was Kevin James or someone sh*tty and lame, it might seem like a cheap attempt to recreate a past success.  Luckily it’s Zach Galifianakis, so it’s awesome.  Plus, I’ll take a French bulldog over a stupid baby any day.  Maybe for his next road movie, he can take care of an otter.  An otter wearing one of those foam cowboy hats, maybe. (*sigh*)  That would be awesome.

Courtesy of /Film, this is the first picture from Due Date,Todd Phillips’ follow-up to The Hangover starring Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis.

…buddy-comedy story has been described as kinda Hangover meets Planes, Trains and Automobiles. The screenplay by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland [story editors on King of the Hill] (with rewrites by Adam Sztykiel [Made of Honor]) has Galifianakis as a wannabe actor who becomes the companion to an expectant father / businessman (Downey) as they dash cross-country to (hopefully) arrive in time for the childbirth.

I’d watch Zach Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr. paint a house (preferably mine), and everyone’s impressed at what Todd Phillips did with The Hangover — which started as a script by the guys who wrote Ghost of Girlfriends Past that one studio wanted to call What Happens in Vegas — but a script by two guys from King of the Hill and the writer of Made of Honor does not inspire confidence.  Look, Todd, we know you’re tough, but we’d feel better if you’d quit showing up to sword fights with a broken bottle.  Here, take this stun gun and chloroform I had in my van next to the lube.

Due Date already reteams director Todd Phillips (Old School, The Hangover) with Zach Galifianakis (who recently revealed that his real name is Chad Farthouse), which was more than enough to chub my anticipation boner, but now that Robert Downey Jr. has been announced as his co-star, they’re practically stroking it through my sweatpants.

Downey will play an expectant father on a road trip with a mismatched partner, racing to get to the birth of his first child.  Galifianakis, who delivered a breakout performance this summer in the Phillips-directed comedy “The Hangover,” will play Downey’s road trip mate in a comedy that Phillips calls “a buddy comedy without the buddies.” [Variety]

No one in The Hangover did a bad job, and Todd Phillips is one of the best comedy directors around, but Zach Galifianakis carried the entire movie.  Much like Downey did in Iron Man (seriously, imagine that movie without him: the richest, coolest guy in the world sort of falls for Gwyneth Paltrow?  WOOF.).  So will them together be the best thing ever, or will their respective awesomeness clash somehow?  It sounds like a good idea to me, but then I think you can never have too much of a good thing, which is why I always order my bacon ice cream with a side of explosions and porn.

Ever since The Hangover became the second highest-grossing R-rated comedy ever, speculation on what Todd Phillips and Zach Galifiniakis’ next project would be has run wild like an aborigine with a spear in the jungle.  Now Variety reports that the pair will do Due Date, to be followed by The Hangover 2 a year later.

Galifianakis will play one of the two leads in “Due Date,” an Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland [King of the Hill - eek] script that was revised by Adam Sztykiel [Made of Honor. Oof]. In the comedy about fatherhood, an expectant dad and his unlikely travel companion (Galifianakis) race cross-country in hopes of making it home for the birth of his first child.

Phillips is on track to earn $35 million or more on “The Hangover” after he gave back his salary and gross position to become an equity investment partner in the pic. Move allowed him to make the film with Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms, who were not proven at the box office. Phillips never wagered as smartly as he did on “The Hangover.” Because he insisted on his cast, WB Pictures Group prexy Jeff Robinov gave him a budget ceiling of $34 million, and the only way Phillips could make that number was to work for scale and use salary and gross to buy his way into being an equity investor. [Variety]

F-ck yeah, Todd Phillips.  Uh, he’s here for the gangbang?  But seriously, it’s pretty awesome when someone in Hollywood lays his nuts on the table and ends up proving everyone wrong.  Usually the only time you see nuts laid on the table is when squirrels gamble.