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 would probably never hear them.
I was the first to confirm the rumor that Sean Penn would be playing Larry in the Farrelly Brothers’ Three Stooges movie back in February. Benicio Del Toro and possibly Jim Carrey later signed on to play Curly and Moe, until Penn announced his “hiatus from acting” and threw the whole project into limbo. But now, Penn is back, and the Farrellys want to shoot Three Stooges after they finish an awful-sounding Owen Wilson comedy called Hall Pass.
Penn took a Tinseltown time-out back in June when he announced he was forgoing future film projects to focus on his family as his marriage to Robin Wright Penn went down the tubes. [Editor's Note: why does every gossip columnist think alliteration is so clever?]
“We got him back,” Bobby Farrelly told the Track. “He always said he wanted to do it after, you know, taking care of his family.”
Now that they have their Larry back and Benicio Del Toro is still interested in playing Moe, Curly still needs to be cast. There was word, way back when, that Jim Carrey was interested. But Bobby claims otherwise. [BostonHerald]
The Farrelly Brothers haven’t made a good movie in a really long time, but if they want this to work, I’d suggest working aspects of their actors’ lives into the plot. Larry’s cheats on his wife and is gettin divorced, Curly’s wife has some cockamamie theory about vaccines causing autism, Moe is turning into the Wolfman — it’d be like a Tyler Perry movie for white people, but awesome.
Does anyone actually like motion-capture besides Robert Zemeckis?
After the jump you can watch the first full trailer for his A Christmas Carol starring digital Jim Carrey. The 3-D, motion-capture-animated adaptation of the Dickens’ tale beautifully combines two technological innovations that I hate. I’ve said it before, but look, if you want to animate something, just draw the damned thing. (and if you want to put a fleshlight in someone’s hand, use Photoshop). Motion-capture still doesn’t look as good as photography, and none of the “nifty” effects are as cool as real-world special effects like costumes and pyrotechnics. And you know how in real life you can see people’s pupils expand and contract as they focus on stuff and adjust to light? They don’t seem to do that in motion-capture, and it makes people look… well, sorta weird. Which we might be able to accept if there were… you know, any actual benefit to motion capture. I don’t want to sit through this technology’s growing pains any more than I would’ve wanted to be the first guy to get a heart transplant. “Did it work?” “Nah, he’s dead. Maybe next time we should try filling him with baboon blood first, I just have a hunch.”
The Boston Globe is reporting that the role of Larry in the Farrelly Brothers’ Three Stooges movie, originally set to star Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, and Jim Carrey, until Sean Penn pulled the kind of selfish dick move that is his trademark, will be filled by Paul Giamatti.
In town this week to see Paul McCartney play at Fenway, Peter Farrelly told us that Paul Giamatti has signed on to replace Sean Penn as Larry. Playing Moe will be Benicio Del Toro, one Hollywood’s biggest “Three Stooges” fans. Still to be cast is Curly. There had been reports that Jim Carrey would utter Curly’s signature “n’yuk, n’yuk, n’yuk,” but it’s not so.
Jim Carrey dropping out makes sense, but it’s strange that Paul Giamatti would jump in as Larry. What basically happened was Penn dropped out, then a bunch of people said “Hey, what about Paul Giamatti? He’s weird looking and bald.” Then someone asked Giamatti about it and he said [via /Film]:
“They were always so dark and grim. And Moe was this ancient man with a little boy’s haircut. But Larry? I don’t get Larry. He’s strange. He’s sort of the blank guy in the middle.”
So maybe he had a change of heart. Or maybe Peter Farrelly was just drunk. Or maybe we’re all just figments of Tom Cruise’s coma fantasy, what am I, a wizard? Anyway, I don’t see this movie happening. I love the stooges, but the Farrellys haven’t made a good movie in a long time, and comedy doesn’t really age well (in fact, the latter may explain the former). If they want to get this made, they’re gonna have to change the source to a graphic novel and Larry and Curly to two warring factions of vampires.
(I’m not homophobic, the French subtitles are.)
After the jump, I’ve got the new trailer for I Love You Phillip Morris, in which Jim Carrey plays Steven Russell, a Texas family man who gets in a car accident, realizes he’s gay, becomes a con man to support his new habit of buying fancy clothes, goes to prison where he falls in love with Ewan McGregor, and keeps escaping and getting thrown back again. It’s almost as if gayness was his gateway vice. Here’s the description of the original book from Amazon:
Steven Russell, the subject of this true crime story, is a rare individual, a genius who has run afoul of the law, a prodigious intellect endowed with boundless energy, audacity and guile. Russell pulled off his first jailbreak while waving a stolen walkie-talkie at a guard as he sauntered out the front gate, and his last escape — a feat of staggering self-discipline — by faking a terminal case of AIDS over several months and forging his own death certificate. Russell also walked out of prison and into a six-figure job as a CFO of a major company-twice.
I’m intrigued by the story, but I don’t I like the direction they went with it. Call me crazy, but it’s a little hard for me to take a movie seriously when a guy jumps face first onto concrete from three stories, then shows up in the next scene with a bandage on his nose like Wile E. Coyote. But it’s about a gay love story, so you know the academy will be paying attention. The new coolest thing is watching two dudes make out for uncomfortably long periods of time to prove how open-minded you are. Or as I like to call it, Thursday.
