Sacha Baron Cohen, Will Ferrell to Star in Judd Apatow’s Sherlock Holmes
Sacha Baron Cohen will play Holmes, and Will Ferrell, Watson, in a comedic take on Sherlock Holmes for super-producer Judd Apatow. To avoid confusion, last month we reported on Guy Ritchie’s forthcoming, unrelated “Bond-like” take of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic English sleuth for Warner Bros.
No director is attached, and the flick, which see the two comedic stars re-teaming for the second time after their smash, Talladega Nights, is untitled at this time. Etan Cohen (Idiocracy, Tropic Thunder, no relation to Sacha) is writing the script for Columbia Pictures.
If it were not for the involvement of Judd Apatow and Etan Cohen, I could easily see this project wandering off into the realm of broad family comedy and “hang glider hi-jinks.” Talladega Nights, which Apatow produced, has its “low brow” and “class-ist” detractors, but there is some really smart, subversive comedy and writing therein. Also, Walker Texas Ranger. It’s tied with Stranger Than Fiction as my favorite Will Ferrell film thus far, and if Ferrell and Cohen can once again match or top their performances, their Sherlock Holmes could conjure Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein…or Beavis and Butt-Head. All counts of “Apatow-fatigue” aside, we’re looking forward to this one either way.
via Variety
Disaster Movie Trailer - Why?!
On theCast tonight a discussion about the new Disaster Movie trailer turned into an examination of the spoof film. Neil from FilmSchoolRejects had to remind me that spoof movies were not always the bottom of the comedy genre. Mel Brooks and Monty Python created highbrow (or at least highbrow in comparison to contemporary spoof films) films which were not only praised during their time, but have gone on to become classics.
What is the difference? What has become of this genre. Watching the Disaster Movie trailer you will quickly realize that the film doesn’t even stick to the core concept presented in the title. What does Iron Man, Juno, Enchanted or Hancock have to do with disaster movies? Modern spoof films rely too much on recent pop culture references, likely because the audience for these films have such small attention spans. Any core story elements are lost, and the pop culture overload results in the loss of timelessness. The movie is only funny (if funny at all) at this moment in time.
A film like Spaceballs will always be funny because it works on its own. Sure, it helps that the subject of the spoof - Star Wars, is timeless, but even if you lived in a vacuum where Star Wars was never made available, Spaceballs would still be funny. You invest yourself in the characters and story, and in effect the comedy is elevated. I seriously doubt much time was spent on the story or characters in any one of the spoof comedies that have plagued our cinemas for the last decade. They are shot and dumped into theaters in a fraction of the time that it takes a real screenwriter to produce a first draft. That said, enjoy the Disaster Movie trailer below. Tell me your thoughts in the comments.
You can watch the trailer in High Definition on MySpace. Disaster Movie his theaters on August 29th 2008.
Carol Burnett Cohort Harvey Korman Dies
Harvey Korman was always goodif not better than mostfor a laugh.
The Emmy-winning actor, best known for his rib-tickling antics on The Carol Burnett Show and one of Mel Brooks’ favorite go-to funnymen, died Thursday at UCLA Medical Center. He was 81.
According to the hospital, Korman died of complications from an abdominal aortic aneurysm that ruptured four months ago.
While his most memorable film role had to be his turn as the overly sensitive Hedley Lamarr in Brooks’ classic Western spoof Blazing Saddles, it was Korman’s work in parody sketches such as “Went With the Wind” and “As the Stomach Turns” during his 10 years on The Carol Burnett Show that made him a top comedian.
Korman, a former Navy man who couldn’t make it on Broadway but had comic timing to spare, won four Emmy Awards while on the show.
“Carol is absolutely devastated,” said Burnett’s personal assistant, AngieHorejsi said. “She loved him very much.”
In the late 1990s, he and Carol Burnett costar Tim Conway teamed for a successful traveling act, Tim Conway and Harvey Korman: Together Again, that lasted until December, with the septuagenarians performing up to 120 dates a year.
“I don’t know whether either one of us was the straight man,” Conway told the Los Angeles Times Thursday. “The most important thing in comedy when you’re working together is for one guy to know when to shut up. And we both knew when to shut up; quiet show, actually.”
In addition to Blazing Saddles, Korman appeared in the Brooks films High Anxiety, History of the World: Part I and Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
“A world without Harvey Kormanit’s a more serious world,” Brooks said. “It was very dangerous for me to work with him because if our eyes met we’d crash to floor in comic ecstasy. It was comedy heaven to make Harvey Korman laugh.”
But aside from his “dazzling” comedic talent, Brooks said, “Harvey was such a good solid actor that he could have done Shakespearean drama just as well and easily as he did comedy.”
Over the years, he made dozens of guest-star appearances in TV series such as ER, Roseanne, The Love Boat, Perry Mason and Burke’s Law, and showed up in a number of films, including two of the Pink Panther sequels and the big-screen adaptation of Gypsy.
Korman is survived by his wife Deborah; daughters Kate, Laura and Maria; son Chris and three grandchildren.
Get Smart Secrets Revealed
Things nearly got bloody as Anne Hathaway tussled with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson on the set of the upcoming Get Smart movie.
The two were shooting a fight scene when Hathaway accidentally kicked Johnson in the head with the heel of her shoe, according to the film's director, Peter Segal.
"The stunt coordinator was saying, 'Her foot will come within six inches of your face, but from this angle it will look like it connects,' ” Segal told me earlier today. “Dwayne started to say, ‘This looks closer than six inches. Are you sure she’s going to be able to pull her kick in time so she doesn’t hit me?’ The stunt coordinator said, ‘Oh, yeah; everything’s fine.' "
Luckily, Johnson wasn't hurt. “Anne was mortified and so apologetic, but he milked it,” Segal said. “He painted little bruises on his forehead and came up to her later and pretended that he was wounded.”
Hathaway also connected with costar Steve Carell. But in a much different sort of way.
"Anne is such a sick, crazy Office fan,” Segal said. “I swear to God, she knows every line from every episode. She insisted on auditioning even though we said, ‘No, it’s not really necessary.’ But then at the moment she sat down next to Steve, he started ad-libbing a little bit and then she started ad-libbing to catch up with him, and before long, I found myself feverishly writing notes of what they were saying. Later on after we hired her and we were shooting the movie, we shot a lot of those ad-libs.” (Segal promises the audition tape will be part of the eventual DVD release.)
Now about Maxwell Smart’s famous shoe phone. “At the time, the shoe phone was the coolest thing in the world,” Segal says of the original 1960s television series created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. “We didn’t have cordless phones, let alone cell phones. So now the thought of somebody actually putting a shoe to their face is kind of disgusting. But we did talk to Apple about possibly making a screen saver for iPhones. It would look like the bottom of a shoe.”