Buried has a new poster out.  I’m offended that “‘Faux-artsy torture porn,’ -Vince Mancini, FilmDrunk.com” didn’t make their precious little list. And also that Ryan Reynolds is wearing a shirt.  For shame. [Collider]

Jim Carrey to star in Mr. Popper’s Penguins.  Mean Girls/Spiderwick Chronicles director Mark Waters will direct Carrey in an adaptation of the 1938 children’s book.  The contemporized plot: “a high-powered businessman suddenly inherits six penguins. As he gets acquainted with his winged roommates, Popper’s life quickly unravels: his swanky New York apartment is turned into a snowy winter wonderland, the deal he’s long been working on is derailed, and he almost lands in jail.  But thanks to his new charges, Popper comes to understand the importance of family – human and otherwise.”  Well that sounds like every comedy ever. “Damn you, penguins! (*record scratch*) You’ve covered my blueprints with snow! (*Trombone fart*) Now I’ll never make that important business meeting with the Japanese!(*sproing*)”  In related news, Tom Cruise has agreed to star in Amyl Popper’s Penguins, “as long as there are no gays in there.” |Deadline|

Maggie Gyllenhaal to star in Victorian vibrator drama. She’ll appear opposite Rupert Everett and Hugh Dancy in Hysteria, a romantic comedy about the London doctors who began treating “hysteria” (“a woman’s irritability, anger or unexplained tears”) with their new electrical device (replacing the previous treatment, a hearty throttling).  Before they could market it, the two would have to withstand a public smear campaign from Thomas Edison, who tried to demonstrate that their product was dangerous by vibrating to death an elephant’s vagina.  Which, coincidentally, is also the medical term for your mother’s condition. |Variety|

Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Adrien Brody rumored for the lead in Fantastic Four reboot.  Screenrant says Fox is looking at Meyers and Brody for the role of Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) and that Amber Heard is in the running for Sue Storm.  According to my sources, the film is still slated to screen as a Who Gives a Sh*t Channel exclusive.  In related news, I think I threw out my back dismissively wanking. |Screenrant|

USA Today debuts first picture from Ron Howard’s The Dilemma.  That’s the one that stars Vince Vaughn as a guy who finds out his best friend Kevin James’ wife is cheating on him, written by Allan Loeb, the guy who wrote The Switch and 21.  Oof. I don’t know how you could possibly make that sound worse.  Says USA Today: “Plus, a sibling cameo tradition continues: ‘Clint Howard has a nice turn.’”  (*screams, dives through plate-glass window*)

Jim Carrey, whose recent Twitter rants about prescription drugs and “suppressive personalities” have fueled speculation that he’s become a Scientologist (wouldn’t that be a nice, easy explanation for why he stopped being funny), is set to play a French art thief in a film from Borat/Bruno director Larry Charles.  Suckre Bleu, they could call it.  Mercury taint my vaccines, Deadline:

Charles has signed on to direct Pierre Pierre, a comedy that has Carrey playing the role of a Frenchman who transports a stolen painting from Paris to London, behaving more obnoxiously than any waiter you’ve ever encountered at Cannes.
[Added the reporter, "La di da, the south of France is so passé these days, don't you think?" Then cut a robust fart and inhaled deeply. -Ed.]
This project is moving forward again after weathering some serious setbacks. Two years ago, the script by then-unknowns Edwin Cannistraci and Frederick Seton [make that "still-unknowns"] made the Black List and sold for $1 million, with Carrey to star and Juno‘s Jason Reitman attached to direct. Fox Atomic’s Debbie Liebling and Peter Rice won the bidding battle over three others. Then: Reitman dropped out; Fox Atomic imploded; Liebling moved to Universal; Rice moved up in the Fox hierarchy. Sans champion, Pierre Pierre fell into turnaround. With Charles aboard, the comedy will be shopped again by its producers, Escape Artists’ Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal and Steve Tisch, and Category 5′s Brian Sher. They plan to make the movie for just over $20 million.

I’ve said it before, but what happens to Black List scripts is one of the best examples of how Hollywood ruins good things.  Scripts make the Black List mainly for being funny and/or original.  Producers then buy these funny, original scripts, and usually attach big stars like Jim Carrey (who’ve already burned us three or four or six times in a row) to attract funding. Then the studios hire someone to “polish” that good, original script for the big star, and suddenly it looks a lot like his three previous movies that sucked.   Shampoo, Rinse, Record Scratch, Repeat. They should just combine this with the Knight and Day sequel and call it Knight and Day and Jim Carrey and Farts.

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.

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.”

Read the rest of this entry »