Saturday, October 18, 2008

HOLLYWOOD TALES WITH RICHARD JENKINS

If you've seen Richard Jenkins' hilarious work in films like There's Something About Mary (1998), Me, Myself, and Irene (2000), Step Brothers (2008), or Burn After Reading (2008), then you already know that the potential 2008 Best Actor nominee for the The Visitor (Overture, 4/18, trailer) is every bit as good at comedy as drama. If you haven't, or if you need a reminder, look no further than his self-parodying scenes in an online series called "Hollywood Tales with Richard Jenkins," embedded below, which he recorded at the behest of his Step Brothers collaborators/fans Will Ferrell and Adam McKay for their web site "Funny or Die" (also home to the cult-favorite short "The Landlord," which has generated 58 million hits since its debut in 2007)...



Posted by Editor at 15:35:01 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Thursday, July 17, 2008

I THINK I'LL GO TO BOSTON

I drove up to Boston Wednesday afternoon for a 24-hour or so rush through three screenings and three meetings. Things got off to a terrific start when—silly me—I assumed there was only one Jordan's Furniture IMAX theater within a half-hour radius of Boston. This turned out not to be the case, and as a result I missed my last chance to see The Dark Knight (Warner Brothers, 7/18, trailer) before its opening weekend (which is apparently tracking to be a record-shatterer). C'est la vie. Anyway, tomorrow morning, I am going to stop by and observe a very successful summer camp for young actors from the Boston area that is being run by a friend of mine, and then head downtown for press screenings of Oscar-possibility Vicky Cristina Barcelona (The Weinstein Company, 8/15, trailer)—my second attempt—and Oscar-impossibility Step Brothers (Columbia, 7/25, trailer). I should have more on those for you tomorrow night.

UPDATE (7/17, 10:04pm): Today, I got my theaters straightened out, but not my expectations. I'm going to withhold comment on Vicky Cristina Barcelona for a little while, as there is still about a month to go before it hits theaters; I will, however, share some general reactions to Step Brothers, since that opens nationwide a week from tomorrow, and since I was so pleasantly surprised by it: aside from the other Judd Apatow production, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, it's easily the funniest movie of the year so far, offering more laugh-out-loud moments than any other in which Will Ferrell has starred. He and co-star John C. Reilly were sporadically funny in their one previous collaboration, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby—which, like this film, was directed by Adam McKay—but, to me at least, it didn't quite click; this time, it does. Sure, it's infantile, crude, vulgar, and everything else that the usual haters of Ferrell/Sandler/Vaughn/Wilson/Carrey/Black/Rogen/et. al. despise... but it's also wildly amusing escapism that only a complete stiff would not chuckle at. (It's also important to remember that silly big movies like Step Brothers pay the bills for great character actors like Richard Jenkins, allowing them to make serious little movies like The Visitor, which is reason enough to tolerate them!)

Posted by Editor at 15:31:30 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |