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.

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Time for your mom's pelvic exam

Universal just released a new trailer for Paul, Greg Mottola’s homage to ET, Mac & Me, Harry and the Hendersons, etc., starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and a buttload of other comedic types.  It’s not the first trailer, so I don’t think I need to rehash my fervent Greg Mottola fandom for you again, but it is nice to see a trailer where no one gets hit in the nuts. Don’t get me wrong, I’d pay to see a trailer that was just Adam Levine or the Coldplay guy getting hit in the nuts over and over again, but in a movie, especially one I actually want to see, I worry it cheapens things.  And if I was the type of guy who wanted cheap, would I be dotting the I in my signature with a dollar sign?  I think not.

Paul opens March 10th, and I don’t want to get my hopes up TOO high, but 2010 was kind of a crappy one for comedy, and I’m hoping 2011 will be better.  I think I deserve that.

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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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Collider just debuted the new poster for Paul, and while I think the shelf life on Social Network parodies expired a couple months ago, I’m intrigued by how totally f*cking bizarre this movie looks. Two comic book dorks, played by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, happen upon a slacker alien, voiced by Seth Rogen, during a cross-country road trip.  Hijinks, presumably, ensue.

It sounds like an homage to Mac & Me and the kind of high-concept, family movies from the 80s that seem like they could only have been cooked up under the influence of a loooot of cocaine (Harry And the Hendersons, anyone?).  But this one comes from Greg Mottola (Superbad, Adventureland) who, aside from being one of my favorite directors currently working, is really, really good at making movies that feel like all the best parts of 80s movies — which is hard to do, because for the most part, the 80s sucked.  Just try to think of a decade more creatively bankrupt than the 80s.  Anyway, the fact that this looks so totally weird makes me strangely excited.  Seriously, get over here and feel this boner.

[opens March 11 -- trailer here]

Paul teams Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who also wrote the script, with director Greg Mottola, who I think is one of the best directors working today.  You might be tempted to disagree, but remember, I will fight you.

The plot concerns best friends Graeme and Clive (get it? they’re British), two comic-book nerds traveling through the US who encounter an alien named Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) near Area 51.  If this were anyone but Pegg/Frost/Mottola, I’d probably say this looks really dumb, but since it’s them, I’m going to assume it’s a clever take off on the old we-found-an-alien-but-we-have-to-hide-him-from-the-government genre that was bizarrely ubiquitous in the late 80s (Alf, Out of This World, E.T., Mac & Me, Harry and the Hendersons {sorta}…). Mottola would seem to be the perfect choice, as he has a special gift for recreating that glowy nostalgic feel of an 80s comedy.  But more importantly, this better include an elaborate dance party set at McDonald’s:

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