Nine clips of some seriously "Funny People"

Not a whole lot of time this morning, since I worked last night and have to be right back this morning, but I would be remiss if I didn't offer kudos to Tina Mabry.

Mabry's "Mississippi Damned," while more than a little hard to watch because of the family and life issues it deals with, was easily one of the best movies I had the pleasure of seeing at this year's Atlanta Film Festival 365. It's just an extremely compelling drama, and it features the best all-black cast I've seen since Darnell Martin's "Cadillac Records."

No word yet on when it might be hitting DVD, but it seems that over the weekend Mabry and her movie won the grand jury award for outstanding dramatic feature at Outfest. Huzzah!

And after that, all I've got is these nine clips from Judd Apatow's "Funny People," all courtesy of Collider. The movie, starring Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Eric Bana, Jonah Hill and many other "Funny People," is set to come July 31, and it's certainly on my must-see list. Enjoy, and have a perfectly passable Monday. Peace out.

Well, there is an "Arrested Development" movie in the works, but ...

"Well, if there was a drinking game where one had to drink every time a character cursed then the player of that game would be dead in ten minutes. Seriously. Don’t play that game."
- Judd Apatow, about the amount of cursing in his new movie, "Funny People"

I love that quote, and it's easily the funniest thing in a recent interview Apatow gave to MTV Movies.

Even better, and I'm more than happy to swipe it - with credit, of course - the MTV Movies Blog also had an interview with Charlie Day of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" which contained this rather juicy description of an upcoming show:

“One of my favorite scripts right now is an episode called ‘The Gang Wrestles for the Troop.' In our attempt to honor the troops coming back from Iraq, we try and put on a wrestling match and ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper is appearing in that. He’s playing a down on his luck wrestler called Da Maniac. All great wrestling performers had a good entrance song, so we’ve written our own entrance song about the Birds of War, which is what we call ourselves.”

Wow .. I can picture all that, and in my mind at least, it's just insanely funny. Day, who is somehow going to star in a romantic comedy called "Going the Distance" with Drew Barrymore, Christina Applegate and Justin Long, also promised some shenanigans with ponzi schemes and perhaps maybe even an octomom, so I'll definitely be watching when the show finally returns Sept. 17.

But, as the rather cruel headline promised, what I wanted to mention today was an "Arrested Development" movie of sorts, though certainly not the one many people have been hoping for.

Instead, as you can see from the trailer below, it's a documentary project by two rather crazed AD fans named Neil and Jeff, and I'm really not sure what to make of it. On the one hand, I can certainly admire and respect (actually, I just realized the Federer-Haas match is in a first-set tie-breaker ... be right back ... OK, Federer won, I'm back) that level of rather obsessed fandom, but I really can't imagine that 90 minutes of talking heads (though, not, apparently, stars who are still working, meaning Jason Bateman or Michael Cera) waxing nostalgic for this seriously great show, without apparently any clips, will be all that entertaining.

But, like I said, I can certainly support this level of obsession, so check out the site here, enjoy this trailer for what they're cooking up, and have a great weekend. Peace out.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Cheer up, kids ... It will be Sunny in Philadelphia again!

I was beginning to wonder if FX had somehow given up on, in my book, its two best shows in the blissfully disgusting "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and the motorcycle gang drama "Sons of Anarchy." Well, thankfully, apparently not.

Instead, it seems they're just moving them to the fall to take on the networks, and with shows this good, why not?

First up will be "Sons of Anarchy," which stars Charlie Hunnam, Katey Segal and Ron Perlman and will move to Tuesday nights at 10 p.m. beginning Sept. 8. If you like intense TV dramas I can't recommend this one high enough, and with Adam Arkin and Henry Rollins coming up as guests in season two, it can only get better.

"Sunny," which has made an art of piggybacking on NBC's Thursday night comedy lineup, will do so again, timing its fifth season to begin at 10 p.m. Sept. 17, the same night that "The Office" and other NBC shows make their return. Season five will be 12 episodes, which means they're already contracted for at least another 27 after that. Bring it on!

And in a final, odd TV note, Alia Shawkat, the extremely funny Maeby Funke on "Arrested Development" has somehow ended up in the cast of the upcoming biopic about the Runaways. Take a second to ingest that one.

I can't say I see any way this will be terribly good, but it at least looks like there's no way it will be boring. So, with video director Floria Sigismondi at the helm, here's the band roster for this imminent disaster: Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett, Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie, Scout Taylor-Compton as Lita Ford, Stella Maeve as Sandy West and now Maeby as some kind of fictional composite bass player. I can guarantee you I'll watch that.

And to round it out today, here's a couple of pretty good clips, one of which comes from the so far very funny viral marketing campaign for Judd Apatow's next flick, "Funny People," scheduled to drop July 31. They seem to be giving a Web site and fake career to even the most minor of characters, and Aziz Ansari is the latest to get the treatment.

You may know him for his work on NBC's "Parks and Recreation," but this is something completely different, a standup comedian that gleefully revels in the lowest common denominator. So, of course his Web site, where you can watch several rather seriously not safe for work clips, is called Laugh Your Dick Off.

I've included here a clip of him performing as the character, Randy, at Athens, GA.'s fabulous 40 Watt club, describing how he likes to freak out CVS employees. Enjoy.



And finally, here's the trailer for a new Steven Soderbergh flick coming in September that I have to confess I had never heard of until seeing this clip. Starring Matt Damon, it's called "The Informant" and appears to be a screwball comedy about corporate espionage, which all sounds good to me. Enjoy, and have a perfectly passable Wednesday. Peace out.

Trailer Thursday: A trio of fun clips

Actually, the first and most distressing news this morning comes from Latino Review, who I've never known to get anything wrong, as much as I wish they would this time.

Yesterday came the news that "Friday Night Lights" ultra-hottie (for lack of a more technical or less piggish) term Adrianne Palicki, along with Chris Hemsworth and Josh Peck, would be joining the cast of a remake of "Red Dawn." Unaddressed in that news, of course, is the question of why in the world anyone would want to remake "Red Dawn," but I really don't want to get into that today ...

Instead let's just deal with the rather depressing fact that none other than Tony Gilroy has apparently already turned in a rewrite of this monstrosity. Now, I thought "Michael Clayton" was perhaps a tad overrated but still very enjoyable, and I think I'm one of the very few people in the world who loved Gilroy's "Duplicity" almost unconditionally. Even if you didn't, I'd imagine it's gotta be pretty much a consensus that the man deserves better than this.

Oh well, I'll just say I hope he's being very well paid for this, and move on to three things that are just thoroughly fun time-wasters.

First up is another viral marketing installment from the makers of Judd Apatow's "Funny People," and I have to say, judging from the two clips they've put together so far, there's little doubt Apatow's third directorial effort will be thoroughly entertaining when it comes out at the end of July.

First came the trailer for the fake NBC tv show "Yo Teach!" starring Jason Schwartzman, which you can still watch here, and the clip below is even funnier. I don't want to spoil it too much, but it's Adam Sandler and Justin Long in a dead-on spoof of "Little Man" and any other flick that makes the always hilarious (sarcasm, in case it doesn't come through) move of putting a man's face on the body of a baby. Enjoy.



I was thinking the other day about doing a midyear scorecard of sorts, listing my 10 top movies from the first half of 2009, but I decided to cheat and put that off until the end of July to include the aforementioned Apatow flick and Michael Mann's "Public Enemies," set to drop July 1 with Johnny Depp, Marion Cotillard and Christian Bale in the saga of John Dillinger vs. the FBI. Those would have to be the two flicks I'm most looking forward to for the rest of this summer (unless Hayao Miyazaki's "Ponyo" somehow gets a wide theatrical release, keep hope alive!), so enjoy this 90-second clip "Assault" clip, because what workday isn't just a little bit better with a good gun battle?



And finally, like apparently everyone else in the world, I just can't get enough of vampires. I've made my love for "Let the Right One In" (for the sorry American remake, that title is apparently too long - it will simply be "Let Me In" - blurg!) clear on this site many times, and I thought the second season premiere of "True Blood" just set things up perfectly (and I'm about to dive into the fourth of Charlayne Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels, on which it's based.)

But the one vampire vehicle I'm most looking forward to this year would have to be Chan-wook Park's "Thirst," the poster for which is at left. Of Park's movies so far, I've only managed to see "Oldboy" (another lame American remake alert - see a theme here?) and "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," and those were both just fantastic. As you can see from the (redband, though I really can't imagine why after watching it) trailer below, the flick is about a priest who goes to Africa to find the cure for a deadly disease but, of course, comes back as one of the walking dead. Enjoy, and have a perfectly passable Thursday. Peace out.

Friday morning links

Actually, the best news out there is that, with a revamped starting pitching staff and the best outfield in the American League, the Baltimore Orioles are now 6-1 in their last seven games. And, even better, supercatcher Matt Wieters finally makes his debut tonight against the Detroit Tigers.

With all this coming together, I can even see a .500 finish - poetically known in this corner as the "Run for 81" - in sight. Hey, one can dream, right?

And I'm almost as excited about the fact that this is clearly the best movie weekend of the year, even if it doesn't include Rian Johnson's "The Brothers Bloom." Because of my 10-10-10-5-5 (crazy, I know) schedule, I should be off of work by 4:30 or so today, and I'm gonna try and check out a screening of "Up!" for my supper.

I've been just as happy, though, to see that Sam Raimi's "Drag Me to Hell" has fared almost as well with the critics at Rotten Tomatoes - 98% for "Up" to 95% for "Drag Me to Hell" (actually, I looked through the six pages of reviews at RT to find the one splat for "Up" but couldn't find any ... I think they're just making it up.) It's clear that Sam Raimi is having fun again, and that we will too. For a great Raimi profile from the New York Times, click here (and the correction about the print headline is a hoot too ... that one had me scratching my head.)

But beyond that, here today it's about two sites I found recently that offer a little Friday morning time-wasting, the first way better than the second.

Anyone who's been here before knows that if there's a single upcoming movie I'm most obsessed with for the rest of this year, it would have to be Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are," and that really has nothing to do with all the ridiculous hoops that Warner Brothers has made Jonze and his crew jump through just to get it released.

From everything I've seen so far, they've managed to take my favorite childhood story and bring it to life with all its wild spirit intact. We won't get to see the final product until sometime in October, I believe, but just the trailers featuring that great Arcade Fire song "Wake Up" have been enough to get me thoroughly jazzed for this.

And now, the folks who are putting this together have started (well, it actually may have been going for sometime now already) a blog of sorts that's loosely about the movie, but moreso just about random thoughts that are always at least mildly diverting. The site, We Love You So, is well worth checking out, if for no other reason than right now, if you scroll down far enough, it contains a photo of a "Where the Wild Things Are" bento box. Yes, really.

Today's second site may simply be a bit of "viral marketing," but for that it is at least pretty clever. Judd Apatow's "Funny People," set to come out at the end of July, is certainly one of the summer movies I'm amped for, even if it seems like they did give away the entire plot in the trailer.

Though the main stars are Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen, the movie also features Eric Bana, Jonah Hill and a host of other hopefully "Funny People," including Jason Schwartzman, who this latest gimmick site is about.

His character in the movie, Mark Taylor, has a sitcom (or at least a pilot) on NBC called "Yo! Teach," so of course NBC has made a site devoted to it. The good news is that the three-minute-or-so clip on the first page is a pretty dead-on skewering of teacher sitcoms, and yes, that is indeed Roger from "What's Happening!!". Click here to check it out.

And, though I'm sure no one needs any incentive to go see "Up," I'll leave you with this clip introducing Doug the talking dog. Although "Ratatouille" will always be my favorite Pixar flick, I have a feeling this one will be right up there with "The Incredibles" competing for second place. Peace out.

The joys of summer: Ten (or maybe 13) flicks I'm really looking forward to

Actually, the most important thing happening possibly today for fans of great television is that DirecTV and NBC are expected to announce whether or not they've come to an agreement for a fourth and fifth season of "Friday Night Lights."

Now, I know I talk about this show a whole lot, but you'll just have to believe me that it's that good. It's the best TV drama since "The Wire," and in the interest of full disclosure, it routinely comes very close to making this grownass man cry at its most touching moments.

If you've missed out on the ride thus far, it's easy to catch up, and free too. I was rather amazed to find you can watch the first two seasons and the second half of the current one on Hulu, so I encourage anyone to give it a try.

The final decision, of course, will come down to money, specifically how much DirecTV is willing to pay to air the shows before they hit NBC. I'll definitely pass on what I hear as soon as I can, but here today it's all about summer, and what's in the movie pipeline.

There's actually some pretty good stuff coming before summer, which for argument's sake will start in May, including this week Greg Mottola's "Adventureland" and - if you live in a bigger city than me - "Sunshine Cleaning" and Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's baseball flick "Sugar," and next week Jody Hill's "Observe and Report." For a look at what comes after those that intrigues me, here goes (and please forgive any misspellings, because the Blogger spell check just wouldn't work this morning):

May 21: Terminator Salvation

I really had little to no interest in this one until I saw the latest trailer, but am now fairly convinced that McG will cook up something both genuinely gritty and fun with it. McG? Yes, McG.

May 29: Three definitely worth waiting for

The Brothers Bloom: Memorial day weekend will probably be the single best movie weekend of 2009 if Rian Johnson's sophomore flick actually manages to play wide enough to reach my little corner of the world. It was originally supposed to come out late last year, and I've certainly been ready to see this con man flick starring Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel Weisz and Rinko Kikuchi since then.



Drag Me to Hell: If anyone short of Sam Raimi were promising a return to "real horror" I'd probably just laugh and move on, but judging from the trailer above I think he's come up with exactly that. If you hooked her up to a lie detector I bet Ellen Page would reveal she regrets passing on the lead in this tale of an old woman's rather nasty curse and handing the role to Alison Lohman.

Up: Having seen just last weekend what 3D can do in the wrong hands, being thoroughly bored from start to finish by Dreamworks' "Monsters Vs. Aliens," I can't wait to see it used for the forces of good again by Pixar. Everything I've seen and heard about this tale of an adventurous septuagenarian (Ed Asner) and his flying house says it's gonna be yet another Pixar winner.

June 19

Whatever Works: After countless years of casting his muse of the moment, Woody Allen has finally looked in the mirror and turned to a cranky old man as the lead in this one, and thankfully it's veryfunnyman Larry David. Here's hoping the success of "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" (my favorite comedy of 2009) means this return to NYC for Mr. Allen will play very wide.



Year One: As you can see from the trailer above, the humor in this Harold Ramis flick will be extremely broad but hopefully also on the mark. Jack Black and Michael Cera play the leads in this biblical laugher, which Ramis promises was made in the spirit of Monty Python. I have my doubts, but bring it on so we can find out.

July 1: Public Enemies

Having tried it out on one of my Johnny Depp-obsessed co-workers when she was having a particularly bad day, I can attest that there's just something extremely therapeutic about seeing him tote a tommy gun. Christian Bale will be the lawman who pursues Depp's John Dillinger in Michael Mann's flick, and you've also got Marion Cotillard as Dillinger's mol and Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover, which all sounds pretty great to me.

July 10: Bruno

I'm not sure I'm ready for more of Sacha Baron Cohen's antics, but I laughed through just about every minute of "Borat," so I'll give him another shot. Besides, early word is that his exploits as the Austrian fashion reporter Bruno are at least as outrageous as anything he came up with the first time out, so it should at least never be boring.

July 17: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

It will be interesting to see if Harry Potter mania will still be running strong after such a long layoff. Given what director David Yates did with "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" and that this installment is easily my favorite of the books, I'm betting this one will be both a critical and box-office winner.



July 31: Funny People

As you can see from the trailer above (which reveals perhaps too much of the flick's story), there's a whole lot more than stand-up comedy going on in this Judd Apatow movie starring Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen. Given how often we hear the "Freaks and Geeks" creator's name nowadays, it's surprising (to me, at least) that this will be only the third flick he's actually directed, preceded by "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up" (the far superior of the two).

August 7: Julie and Julia

Far too girly for the heat of August, perhaps, but when you've got Meryl Streep and adorable Amy Adams in a movie that's all about food, I'm there. Streep will play master chef Julia Child and Adams a woman who decides to cook her way through Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in one year's time in her small kitchen. Sounds like nothing but fun to me.



August 14: Taking Woodstock

Out of some odd misguided loyalty to Dave Chappelle I've thus far resisted watching Comedy Central's latest sketch comedy star, Demetri Martin, but I'm beginning to think I'm really missing out on something good. Should I give in? As you can see from the trailer above, Mr. Martin also plays the lead role of Elliot Tiber in Ang Lee's flick about the famed hippie fest, which looks like it will be as simply silly as it is hopefully entertaining.

August 21: Inglourious Basterds

We finish, fittingly enough, with Quentin Tarantino's version of a World War II flick, assuming he actually both finishes it in time and decides to cut it enough to release it as only one movie. After watching Eli Roth removing a Nazi's head with a baseball bat I have serious doubts that this will be any good, but I'll definitely be there to see how it all turns out.

And there you have it. There are also certainly some pending blockbusters ("GI Joe", "Star Trek" and "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" among them) that simply don't interest me all that much, but if there are any other summer flicks I've omitted but should put on my radar, certainly let me know, and have a perfectly passable Monday. Peace out.

Bludgeoning "Battlestar Galactica," and the first glimpse of Apatow's "Funny People"

Actually, the best news out there this morning was that Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" has entered extremely elite territory as it crossed the $1 billion mark worldwide.

With a combined domestic and international gross of $1,001,082,160, it joins "Titanic" (still the overall leader at $1.8 billion), "The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" as the only four flicks to cross the billion-dollar line. Huzzah!

But the thing that most piqued my interest (and, well, ire) was news that Universal is in negotiations to make a big-screen "Battlestar Galactica" movie. Great news, right? Wrong. This won't be Ronald Moore's vision or anything like it. Instead, they're going to the original TV source, Glen A. Larson, to create something along the lines of the first series that aired on ABC in 1978.

Part of me wants to just say fair enough. The fact that Will Ferrell (and, because I guess everyone has to work, simply adorable Anna Friel from "Pushing Daisies") are about to star in a big-screen treatment of "Land of the Lost" proves there's an interminable market for campy updates of '70s fluff, and I can normally just shrug it off and move on.

But not this time, because as anyone who watches the Sci-Fi show which now only has five episodes left knows, Moore didn't just continue the story that began in 1978. He completely reimagined the concept, factoring in the atmosphere of post-9/11 America and imbuing his show with big ideas about religion, politics and government to go along with all the big space battles. Along with "The Wire" and "Friday Night Lights," it's easily one of the best TV dramas of recent years, so how in the world do you come back from that and return to the '70s camp?

The short answer, for me at least, is I won't, but I just wanted to share that bit of Saturday morning bile with everyone anyway. Things get more cheerful from here on out, I promise, even if it does involve Adam Sandler's possible impending death (which I guess would make some people cheerful anyway.)

A seriously funny trailer for "Funny People"

Until this trailer appeared on Moviefone, I really had no idea what Judd Apatow's third flick, "Funny People," was all about beyond what its title implies.

As you'll see from the long trailer, the flick - starring Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Eric Bana, Jason Schartzman and, of course, Mrs. Apatow herself, Leslie Mann - does indeed bring the funny, but also throws in a serious side too. But with real funny people Dave Atell, Sarah Silverman and Norm MacDonald, among others, all set for cameos when this comes out at the end of July, I'm somehow betting the funny will win out in the end.

My favorite thing in it would have to "That was like a scene from 'The Deer Hunter'," but at only three minutes, there's still a lot to enjoy here. Enjoy, and if you want to laugh some more, go see "Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail," as I'm gonna do in about four hours. Peace out.