Seth Rogen (Really) Makes a Porno
Kevin Smith’s upcoming comedy Zack and Miri Make a Porno, with Elizabeth Banks and Seth Rogen, may actually be a porno. No, seriously. The MPAA is trying to slap it with an NC-17 rating, meaning you’d have a tough time seeing it down at the megaplex.
So what’s in this thing that makes it so, like, porny? We asked Seth, and here’s what he said…
“It’s like a romantic comedy,” Rogen told us this week, at the press day for The Pineapple Express, which opens in August. “It’s a romantic relationship moviewith a lot of porn and balls.”
Wait, whose balls? “My balls are not in it,” he clarified.
Still, Smith is fighting for an R rating, as he did when Clerks first got slapped with an NC-17simply for dirty language. “You can disembowel someone in a youth hostel in Romania, but you can’t show people having sex,” Rogen said. “I think it’s weird.”
If Zack and Miri does get an NC-17, Rogen thinks his hit flicks Knocked Up and Superbad should have, too.
“This is not anything outside of what we’ve done before,” he told us. “The word porno is in the title, and that kind of freaks people out.”
Well, that and the balls, maybe.
ABC obtains rights to new Mike Judge animated series
Mike Judge has not created a new animated series since 1997. I guess 10-plus years is long enough because he’s entered a deal with ABC to create a new series called The Goode Family.
The series has a 13 episode order and is being produced by indie studio Media Rights Capital. It is the result of an independent deal between the studio and the writers so it’s not affected by the WGA Strike.
Judge is best known for MTV’s Beavis and Butthead cartoons. He also created King of the Hill for Fox. According to the article, The Goode Family “centers around a do-gooder family that tries to do the right thing in all facets of life”.
While I’m not a die-hard Judge fan, I have enjoyed his previous works as well as his movie Office Space (and I even got a chuckle or two out of Idiocracy). I hope ABC treats this show better than Clerks, its last attempt at an adult animated series.
Zack and Miri Make a Movie Trailer
Kevin Smith is hard at work filming and editing his latest, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which stars Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson, and Jason Mewes. Our friends at NewsAskew are reporting that the current hope is to have the official movie trailer attached to Pineapple Express, the Judd Apatow-produced Seth Rogen comedy which hits theaters on August 8th 2008.
This means that Zack and Miri would probably hit theaters in October or November. Clerks and Mallrats were released in the month of October, while Smith’s highest grossing domestic release, Dogma, hit theaters in November. So I’m thinking that November is probably the smart bet. The timing could also be perfect for a premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. This is all just speculation.
via: FilmSchoolRejects
Sundance Movie Review: Baghead
People complain that Sundance has sold out. That every film in the festival features a big name movie star or a returning filmmaker. And for the most part, that might be true. But I don’t think Sundance has sold out, at least not in the film selection. I think Independent cinema has changed into an altogether different beast. And maybe in ten years the YouTube generation might penetrate and create a whole new independent revolution, but until then, it’s become what it now is.
A few years ago I walked into a screening of The Puffy Chair expecting nothing, and left floored. It was an incredibly enjoyable low low low budget film starring, produced, directed, and shot by The Duplass Brothers.
Four years later the Brothers return to the Prospector theater in Park City to premiere their new film Baghead. Part relationship drama, part thriller, part comedy, Baghead is the kind of film I imagined Sundance to be fifteen years ago. Shot in sequence, partly improved, on a extremely small budget using HD cameras, Baghead tells the story of a group of desperate actor friends who decide to take a weekend trip to a Condo in the woods of California to shoot a movie. Without a script, they come up with the idea for a horror movie about a group of friends who are terrorized by a man with a brown paper bag on his head. But what happens with Baghead actually shows up?
Baghead is a one of a kind experience which will fill your stomach with joy, and hope for the future of indie cinema. Puffy Chair and Baghead just might be the Slacker and Clerks for the youtube generation.