Ben Stiller and Robert Deniro’s embarrassing paycheck movie, Little Fockers opens this weekend. I took one look at the trailer and saw that filmmakers thought the fact that “Focker” kind of sounds like “F*cker” was a strong enough joke that they re-used it five times in two minutes and figured it’d be okay for me to sit this one out.  Many of my film critic colleagues, however, aren’t content with simply assuming that hitting one’s penis with a framing hammer will be painful, and had to find out the boner way. I mean hard.  But thanks to those heroes, we can now play the Plot Recreated with Reviews game.

You know how this works: we recreate the plot using only expository quotes — NO ANALYSIS! — from the poor sad bastards who had to sit through it.

ACT I

Nothing much has changed in the household of Gaylord Focker except that everyone is a few years older. [StarTribune]

Jack, who now suffers from serious heart palpitations, is obsessed with finding a successor to his “throne.”  [WashingtonPost]

“Are you ready to be the GodFocker?” he demands. [StarTribune]

Jack decides Greg is having an affair with pharmaceutical rep Andi Garcia… [FilmSchoolRejects]

…[with whom] Greg is working closely peddle Sustengo, an erectile dysfunction pill… [WashingtonPost]

… and who we’re supposed to believe becomes instantly smitten with Stiller after helping him give an anal probe to an elderly patient. [JoBlo]

She shows up at male nurse Focker’s hospital, inexplicably signs him up to give speeches on her erectile-dysfunction drug, then strips down to her undies and jumps him. [NYPost]

Bernie Focker (Dustin Hoffman), struck with a bout of “manopause,” has fled to Spain to study flamenco dancing, while Dina Byrnes (Blythe Danner) is experimenting with kinky role play in hopes of spicing up her and Jack’s sex life. Greg has to impress the headmaster of a snooty private school (Laura Dern) where he wants his children to go. [WashingtonPost]

Owen Wilson hangs around again as the golden best friend to flirt with Greg’s wife again (accidentally, he got a giant back tattoo of her). [NYPost]

Not too long ago, Jessica Alba made headlines for reportedly telling an Elle writer: “Good actors… never use the script unless it’s amazing writing. [...] All the good actors I’ve worked with, they all say whatever they want to say.”  Considering she’d been in both The Love Guru and a Dane Cook vehicle, she might be forgiven for misdirecting bitterness at her agent towards screenwriters in general.  Nonetheless, she recently went on record to explain her comments, claiming it was actually the reporter who went off script.

While promoting Little Fockers, Alba seized the opportunity to clear the air about this issue. When asked about her comments, she began by firmly stating, “That wasn’t true.” She went on to say, “Just so it’s clear, films don’t even get made and nothing ever gets a green light unless there’s great material,” and added, “that’s always a #1 thing before you can get a director, actors or a studio even interested in anything.”

“‘Nothing gets made without great material,’ she said while promoting LITTLE FOCKERS.” Hell, I’d let her ad-lib.  That’s great stuff.

From there, Alba pointed a finger at Elle. “There was an article written recently where I was completely and totally paraphrased and things were taken out of context and mushed together,” Alba explained. “It was a four-hour interview that got condensed into a page and a half for a fashion magazine.” She went on to cite her own difficulty adlibbing to exemplify the importance of good writing. “When I was doing my first job where I was talking to dolphins in The New Adventures of Flipper when I was 13 – it was a fake dolphin, we had a great relationship [laughs] – when he would go off script, the dolphin, I didn’t know how to,” she joked. “He would squeak and I couldn’t squeak back. It took me like 15 years to learn to do that – and lots of therapy.” All joking aside, Alba wrapped things up by explaining, “Basically I was saying that I didn’t have the courage and didn’t really understand how to bring my own thing to the table and I would never veer away from the script, ever, no matter what. Even when actors would go off book, I didn’t know what to say.” [CinemaBlend]

Oh sure, blame the dolphin.  Anyway, I find this whole thing is a lot funnier if you imagine Jessica Alba crying in her therapist’s office while he holds up a dolphin hand puppet and says “Eee eee eee eee!  …Squeak back at me, Jessica.  Eee eee eeee!  …C’mon! Squeak back at me!”

"Whoa, is that the guy from American Gothic?"

In what I’m guessing will be the last time I post a strongly-worded open letter to Jessica Alba, screenwriter John August (Big Fish, Go, The Nines) has written a response to Jessica Alba’s hopefully misquoted assertion that “Good actors never use the script.”  Haha, I love you, Jessica, you’re so pretty when you’re dumb.

I have to believe she was misquoted, or excerpted in some unflattering way, because Jessica Alba couldn’t have actually said this:

“Good actors, never use the script unless it’s amazing writing. All the good actors I’ve worked with, they all say whatever they want to say.”

Oh, Jessica. Where to start?

Scripts aren’t just the dialogue. Screenplays reflect the entire movie in written form, including those moments when you don’t speak. Do you know the real reason we hold table readings in pre-production? So the actors will read the entire script at least once.

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Access Hollywood recently did a story about how Jessica Alba had once considered quitting acting. See, the trouble for beautiful people like Jessica and me is that no matter how incredible we are at what we do, some people just refuse to see beyond the Christ-like perfection of our physical features. Alba says the final straw for her came when Fantastic Four director Tim Story told her once, during a death scene, “It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry?”

I’ll leave Jessica Alba’s claim that a director once told her that her acting was TOO GOOD alone for now, because the piece gets even more ridiculous.

The actress said she had a series of experiences where she was told to read the words on the page, exactly, that ended up knocking her confidence.
“Good actors… never use the script unless it’s amazing writing,” she said. “All the good actors I’ve worked with, they all say whatever they want to say.” [AccessHollywood/Yahoo]

Ummm, really?  Is this chick serious?  What planet do pretty girls live on that an “actress” can take offense to being asked to remember her lines?  “Here I am working at McDonald’s, and this A-hole comes up to me and asks if I can make him some fries.  Can you believe the nerve?  All the good McDonald’s clerks I work with, they just make whatever they want.  Julie Reynolds gave a guy half a box of Tic Tacs once.  She’s incredible.”

MINI SITE NEWS UPDATE: Hey, kids, Daddy’s back.  I know Burnsy and Cho-Cho have probably been letting you eat candy for dinner and draw dog poop murals on the living room wall, but now it’s time for you to straighten the f*ck up and act right or else I’ll redden that ass in front of the neighbors again. Don’t think I won’t.  Anyway, expect some news posts followed by a couple more Comic-Con posts at the end of the day, because uploading all those pictures takes forever.  Now back to your regularly scheduled postings.

After the jump, Robert Rodriguez and his cute little Ché hat introduce a new trailer for Machete, which he says is pretty “loco.” (That’s how you know he’s Mexican). I’m not a Spaniard myself, so I don’t know what that means, but I can tell you that the new trailer is crazy.  How crazy?  Well, let’s just say, come for the bare boobs, stay for the Danny Trejo repelling out of a building using a guy’s guts for a rope.  Because seriously, that happens. I thought no mames, guey, but mira, eet’s true.  I’m curious as to what being on this set must’ve been like.  Because I imagine that when you put Danny Trejo and Michelle Rodriguez in the same room, everyone ends up bleeding, pregnant, or both.

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