Not to excuse indifference to bloggerly responsibilities on my part, but Paul is the kind of movie that isn’t a lot of fun to review.  It’s not terrible, there aren’t any glaring inconsistencies, but it just doesn’t quite work.  It’s just not that funny.  It’s usually cute, but not quite laugh-worthy, and occasionally obnoxious, but not quite grating.  The word that most comes to mind is “thin.” It’s trivial.  It’s the acquaintance you always tell yourself you should call more but don’t, and deep down you know exactly why.

It’s a bit of a blue-ball dry rub considering the people involved.  I loved director Greg Mottola’s last two movies (Superbad and Adventureland), and getting the double-team from Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (who also wrote the script) is almost always a good thing.  The plot, two nerds find a wacky alien (voiced by Seth Rogen) and have to help it escape the US government that wants to study its brain and harvest its penises for fuel or whatever, is cribbed from the standard 80s-alien-movie formula (ET, Mac & Me, etc).  But rather than the clever genre homage seen in the Pegg co-written (with Edgar Wright, whose influence might have been needed here) Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, or the glowy, rich nostalgia of Mottola’s last two movies, what we get instead is just a series of throwaway references to every 80s alien movie, like they wrote it by going down a checklist.  Reese’s Pieces reference goes here… okay now what?  Not homage, not parody, just, as my co-viewer Brendan from the Frotcast put it, “one long wink.”

Winking at the audience can be fine, but… you should probably tell a joke first.

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Okay, I know I’ve been chugging coffee and snorting lines of negativism all morning, so I’ll give you a well-earned rant respite with this new trailer for Bridesmaids, aka The Hangover for Chicks.  Ever since Drillbit Taylor, I’m a little wary of movies Judd Apatow produced but didn’t direct, but this one’s from Paul Feig, the creator of Freaks and Geeks.  Which, uh… other people seem to like a lot.  (I still respect it for all the actors it gave us…)

I also normally wouldn’t be excited about a film with such a, shall we say, transparently opportunistic premise (It’s The Hangover… FOR CHICKS!), but hey, whatever it takes to get Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig together in the same movie.  I could do without the fat chick from Mike and Molly though.  Nothing against fatties (heck, some of my best friends are fatties), but can we stop it with the easy fat jokes already?  Okay fine, so she also seems to be lesbian.  I’ll overlook it if there’s no scene of her dancing sassily, deal?

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Hey, remember The Hangover?  Well imagine The Hangover with a big ol’ vagina that bleeds once a month and you’ve got Bridesmaids. What? Don’t look at me like that. I happen to think it’s a beautiful thing, the sloughing of uterine lining.

This spring, producer Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, Superbad) and director Paul Feig (creator of Freaks and Geeks) invite you to experience Bridesmaids. Kristen Wiig leads the cast as Annie, a maid of honor whose life unravels as she leads her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), and a group of colorful bridesmaids (Rose Byrne, Melissa McCarthy, Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper) on a wild ride down the road to matrimony.[Apple]

I give it three stifled wank motions and the mouthfart of cautious optimism.  I’m not thrilled about the couldn’t-be-more-reductive, it’s-a-female-version-of-The Hangover! premise, but I’ve always liked Kristen Wiig.  She seems like a positive force towards gender equality, and besides, she’s totally do-able. (PS, where’d they find white Queen Latifah over here?)  But I think the bigger question is, what happens to the dapper lab puppies who show up at the 1:54 mark?

Hey, fellas, lookin’ sharp.  You savin’ that seat for someone? Don’t start yawning yet, we’ve got a big night ahead of us.

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I wouldn't mind it if Kristen Wiig touched me like that. Just sayin. 'Specially if she was doin her Bjork impression.

It was only yesterday that I was explaining why Paul, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, from director Greg Mottola, was one of my most anticipated films of the year.  “It looks like an homage to weird 80s movies, Greg Mottola always does an amazing job capturing the spirit of 80s movies, and blah blah blah,” I said.

Now the full-length trailer is out, and I look like an idiot!  The thing’s chock-full of nutshots!  I’m already on record as saying that nutshots in the trailer are the kiss of death!  (For a comedy, anyway. In a Holocaust drama, each shot to the nuts in the trailer increases my desire to see the film by 30%).  Boy, is there egg on my face.  I still want to see this, it looks weird as hell.  But what of the nutshots?   This theory is very important to me.  Perhaps we could label  this old “exception that proves the rule.”  That phrase never made much sense to me before.  I think what happened was, the guy who invented it had come up with a theory, like nutshots in the trailer always making for a bad movie, and then someone publicly disproved it.  So he was all like, “No, see, the exception to the rule makes the rule EVEN MORE true!”  Then I bet he tossed a smoke grenade and dove out the window.  That’s what I would do.

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"Yo, girl. How 'bout you come back to C-Tate's place and we pretend that gum is my dick or whatever."

Kristen Wiig occasionally gets a bad rap, because two of her main recurring SNL characters, the Target Lady and Gilly, are f*cking terrible.  But between her Bjork impression and her character in Knocked Up, I think she’s pretty damn funny. And besides, she has long, slender legs that I like to imagine she’d wrap around me if we, you know, did it.  Today’s news is that she bought the option on the 2007 dark-comic novel, Clown Girl, about a girl named Sniffles the Clown who tries to resist the lucrative clown-fetishist prostitution trade.  Deadline reports that she plans to write and star, and yes this sounds awesome.  Here’s the book description, via /Film:

Nita, otherwise known as Sniffles the Clown, is tying balloon animals for a horde of greedy, sticky children at a fair. Suffering what may be a cardiac event, she’s rushed to the hospital—after trying to get help from a clown fetishist, who simply drops his phone number on top of her prone form. Welcome to wacky, stressful Baloneytown, where clown prostitution, stoned dogs and fire juggling–cum–arson are the norm. Nita struggles to make enough money clowning to keep herself in oversized shoes and squirting daisies, while also saving for Clown College tuition for her boyfriend, handsome clown Rex Galore. But Rex is mostly MIA, and Nita’s longing for him settles on local cop Jerrod. While not much happens, the pace of the narrative is methamphetamine-frantic, as author Monica Drake drills down past the face paint and into Nita’s core, often using Nita’s relations with men as the bit.

…the Aristocrats!  Honestly, I had to read “fire-juggling cum arson” about five times before I realized it meant arson by way of fire juggling, and not a malicious, semen-induced inferno.  I mean, I’ve experienced a burning sensation when I pee before, but this is ridiculous!  (*bike horn*)

(*pie to the groin*)

I regret nothing.