"Snakes on a Plane" news

If you ever wake up on a Monday morning and think nothing is happening, a visit to the fine folks at Comingsoon.net can dispel that notion immediately.

This morning comes this promising nugget about "Snakes on a Plane" director David R. Ellis. His next project will be called "Asylum," and will be about a group of college freshmen who learn that their dorm was once a notorious asylum.

If you read that and didn't laugh, just move on. It works for me because I knew the second I walked into my dorm at Catholic University that it indeed still was an asylum, though perhaps not notorious.

My freshman year roommate was a young man from New Jersey named Paul who had an odd but enduring love for all things Southern rock, an art form I detested at the time but have since grown to appreciate. Whenever I would do anything to piss him off, he would put on the Allman Brothers' "Mountain Jam" and play it in its entirety. For the uninitiated, this little ditty goes on for about 30 minutes. Pure torture from start to finish.

So whether our dorm was an asylum or not, it certainly drove me crazy until we reached a sort of detente and became friends. Last I heard, Paul was a high school teacher and football coach, so bully for him.

As for the movie, it just sounds like pure popcorn bliss. Is it healthy to get so excited about a director before seeing the finished products? Of course not, but it sure is fun.

Beerfest pics

Again from Comingsoon.net are these great pics from Broken Lizard's upcoming "Beerfest." They're from Warner Brothers and are too large to be posted on this blog, so go see them here.

What I love about the photos are the evident spirit (especially the track suits!). Comingsoon.net also offers a little more about the plot:

"When American brothers Todd and Jan Wolfhouse travel to Germany to spread their grandfather's ashes at Oktoberfest, they stumble upon a super-secret, centuries old, underground beer games competition – "Beerfest," the secret Olympics of beer drinking. The brothers receive a less than warm welcome from their German cousins, the Von Wolfhausens, who humiliate Todd and Jan, slander their relatives and finally cast them out of the event. Vowing to return in a year to defend their country and their family's honor, the Wolfhouse boys assemble a ragtag dream team of beer drinkers and gamers: Barry Badrinath, the consummate skills player with a dark past; Phil Krundle (aka Landfill), a one-man chugging machine; and Charlie "Fink" Finklestein, the lab tech with a PhD in All Things Beer. This Magnificent Five train relentlessly, using their hearts, minds and livers to drink faster, smarter and harder than they ever have before. But first they must battle their own demons... as well as a bunch of big, blond, German jerks who want to destroy the team before they can even make it back to Munich."

I love beer movies, when they're done right. And though I've said it here before, it's worth repeating that I've seen Broken Lizard's "Super Troopers" multiple times and always find something new to laugh at. This had better be good.

With this, "Snakes" and Kevin Smith's "Clerks 2" all coming in August, it looks like we will laugh a lot at the end of summer.