50/50 comes from writer Will Reiser, director Jonathan Levine (The Wackness) and producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.  Once called “I’m With Cancer,” the title refers to the protagonist’s odds of surviving his battle with cancer, based on Reiser’s real-life cancer scare.  So yes, it’s a film about a guy dying of cancer, but it’s also funny because JGL shaves his head with Seth Rogen’s pube clippers. Aw, I bet Seth Rogen’s pube hair is even more pubey than his hair hair.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Your mom's ready for her pelvic exam

I already want to see Paul, Greg Mottola’s homage to Mac & Me starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and the voice of Seth Rogen as a wacky alien, so I’m not going to watch this new red-band trailer.  But I will give you the opportunity, for I am but a humble public servant with a God-like talent for pelvic thrusts.  Paul opens March 18th in the US, but it’s already out in the UK, where it’s playing to mostly positive reviews, no small feat in a country full of critics who write like this:

“From time to time, clever ideas rear their heads, but they soon return to the film’s default setting of laddish japes.” [TheIndependant]

OH NO, NOT LADDISH JAPES!  Cor bloimey, guv, dey’s ruined da souffles dey ‘as!  Curse you, laddish japes!  (*gestures angrily with parasol*)  But like I said, the pans were in the minority.  And if you can get those splotchy-faced gravy chuckers to agree on anything for more than five seconds, you get hereditary title and an estate in York.

Read the rest of this entry »

After many nights of me hoping and praying it would finally happen, it appears the Seth Rogen-Barbra Streisand road trip comedy has gotten a greenlight.  Paramount plans to shoot My Mother’s Curse this spring.  Aw, that’s not a nice thing to say about Judaism.

Anne Fletcher (Step Up, 27 Dresses, The Proposal) will direct the project with a script by Dan Fogelman (Cars, Fred Claus, Bolt, Tangled), which he wrote based on his own experience traveling with his mother.  The story follows an inventor (Rogen) who invites his mother (Streisand) on a cross-country trip as he tries to sell his new product while also reuniting her with a lost love. [THR]

Why, it sounds like Little Miss Sunshine meets Letters to Juliet!  From the director of 27 Dresses and The Proposal!  I’D BUY TICKETS RIGHT NOW IF ONLY AN EAGLE HADN’T STOLEN MY BLACKBERRY!

It’s probably unfair of me to hate Barbra Streisand.  All the bad stuff I’ve heard about her comes from second or third-hand stories, and I’ve never actually heard any of her music, I just know the only people who like it are a million years old.  The way I understand it, she opens her mouth and Kenny G sax music comes out.

"Look at the kitty over there, George, do you see the kitty? If you're a good boy you can go pet the kitty, George."

The ancient Mayans believed the world would end in 2012, as evidenced by the fact that the calendars they made 2000 years ago mysteriously stopped at 2012 (scientist call this “the mystery of holy crap my arm is tired”).  Adding credence to these apocalyptic rumors of late are mysterious bird mass bird deaths and Willow Smith’s burgeoning music career.  Still, only a child-like jackass would believe apocalypse rumors, which brings us to George Lucas.

Said Seth Rogen about a meeting he had with Spielberg and Lucas, according to WENN:

“George Lucas sits down and seriously proceeds to talk for around 25 minutes about how he thinks the world is gonna end in the year 2012, like, for real. He thinks it.
“He’s going on about the tectonic plates and all the time Spielberg is, like, rolling his eyes, like, ’My nerdy friend won’t shut up, I’m sorry…’”

Weird, that’s exactly how I always imagined their relationship.

“I first thought he (Lucas) was joking… and then I totally realized he was serious and then I started thinking, ’If you’re George Lucas and you actually think the world is gonna end in a year, there’s no way you haven’t built a spaceship for yourself… So I asked him… ’Can I have a seat on it?’
“He claimed he didn’t have a spaceship, but there’s no doubt there’s a Millennium Falcon in a garage somewhere with a pilot just waiting to go… It’s gonna be him and Steven Spielberg and I’ll be blown up like the rest of us.”

WENN is the most consistently and egregiously inaccurate news source on the internet second only to ContactMusic, but since this was only a means to make fun of George Lucas anyway, I’ll play along.  I think it says something about George Lucas that people imagine that the only person he’d allow in his apocalypse space pod is not a wife, not a concubine, not his children, but Steven Spielberg.  “I brought only my most important possessions — my best friend, a racecar bed, my erector set, and 27 cats, which, if we breed ‘em right, should feed us until we can reach Alpha Centauri.”