Another day, another squeal-worthy Arrested Development teaser. Hot on the heels of the trailer for the new season (May 26! May 26! MAY 26!) comes a bit of found footage, tweeted out by famed voice-over actor Ron Howard: "Just got a video reel from Dr. Tobias Fünke at http://InsertMeAnywhere.biz. Anybody seen this guy? Inspiring Stuff." Touting Fünke's revolutionary "insertion" technology, it's a whirlwind 79 seconds chock-full of cannons, machine guns, and excitable cowboys riding tigers. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that this is definitely going to change cinema forever.
It’s Friday night, and we’re in a mansion high atop a mountain somewhere in nearby Deer Valley, the kind of place that doesn’t have an address. A cab driver takes me over. He reminisces about the old days at Sundance. “I’ve had some crazy times, man.” I ask him what he means. “Oh, you know: big parties, hot tubs, cougars.” He’s a local, remembers sending the yellow cabs that drive up from Salt Lake City during Sundance on wild goose chases around town. But GPS put an end to that, he says, sadly.
Which I’m grateful for tonight, actually: It’s all we can do to find the hotel at the base of the mountain, where in the lobby I give my name to a waiting factotum, who dispatches another factotum, who brings another car around. I get in and we drive for a while, heading up the hill. There is no address because this road is private: We pass through one gate manned by a security guard, and then another, pairs of leaping deer glinting off the ironwork. Up the mountain we go, making lefts and rights at seeming random, speeding up in the dark.
While I haven't seen Bret Ratner's movie about a group of small-time crooks and hotel employees planning a major heist (and have no particular plans to), the idiotic Tower Heist theme song gets stuck in my head a minimum of once a day. It's a tower heist!
