Rob Riggle describes his struggles as the only new cast member on his season of SNL, and shares the advice that Will Ferrell gave him while he was there.
There's this one episode of Married With Children where Al Bundy fills his attractive ditz daughter's brain with all of his worldly information so she can compete on a local sports trivia show in his stead. Everything goes great until the final question: Who rushed for four touchdowns for the Polk High School Panthers in the 1966 championship game? The answer, of course, is Al Bundy — but Kelly only has a finite amount of information she can fit into her brain, and the answer, devastatingly, eludes her. The moral of this very important story is that, if we only have a finite amount of pop culture information we can squeeze into our brains, knowing who won what at the MTV Movie Awards is one thing we're probably safe skipping. That said: The MTV Movie Awards were last night, and some stuff happened.
Host Rebel Wilson and the cast of best movie ever Pitch Perfect opened the show. And the question on everyone's minds: Seriously, what the hell was Anna Kendrick doing that was more important than this?
Harmony Korine's Letterman legacy gave us the inspiration for this week's HOF: a look back on all the times the predictable rhythm of a talk show has been shaken up by its guests and taken to another level, for better or, oftentimes, for worse.
Where has Kristen Wiig been since Bridesmaids made her a bankable movie star? Straight stackin’ ’em, yo. Since her big cinematic breakout in 2011, Wiig's got five flicks wrapped up and ready to go: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Despicable Me 2, Girl Most Likely, The Skeleton Twins, and Hateship, Loveship. And that's not even counting Anchorman: The Legend Continues, shooting now.
Are you a huge fan of sex panthers, and diapers full of Indian food, and tridents to the chest, and the breaking of the glass ceiling, and all the rest of the good stuff from Anchorman? Have you been waiting years for the sequel? Want to know everything you can about Anchorman: The Legend Continues? Well, you can't. You can't know everything. It's just started shooting and, frankly, they're not going to let all the details go just yet. It just doesn't make sense, for the movie, to do that. I'm sorry. You gotta maintain the mystery.
After years of industry chatter, production rumors, and not an inconsequential amount of sexual innuendo, the Anchorman sequel is up and running. It's got a new subtitle — The Legend Continues! — and it's got its cast back: Champ, Brick, Brian Fontana, and Ron mf'ing Burgundy himself are all on board. (Rumored to be joining them: Kristen Wiig. Very excellent). OK, and now the news you're here for: The release date for the flick has just been announced, and it is ... December 20, 2013. Yes, exactly a year from today. Presumably Paramount wants to get this thing in by December so as to qualify it for the 2014 Academy Awards? Anyway, this is great news that certainly smells nothing at all like Big Foot's dick.
The Campaign
Just in time for Election Day, here's your chance to watch the Will Ferrell–Zach Galifianakis satire The Campaign in the comfort of your home — the very place where you may have already planned to spend the weekend pondering your political options! To be honest, "satire" is a pretty strong word for The Campaign: Though there is some pretty savage stuff in there about the Koch brothers (extremely thinly veiled versions of whom are played here by Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow, using their money to influence the titular campaign), most of what happens is pure silliness.
Though I wouldn't put The Campaign in the top tier of Will Ferrell movies, it's a serviceable entry at the level of, let's say, Talladega Nights. What put it over for me was Galifianakis's performance as Marty Huggins, a local boob thrown into the political arena by the wealthy, connected father he's pitifully desperate to please. Marty is basically a sweet idiot who's woefully ill-equipped to handle the effects that a brutal campaign will have on his personal life; if we didn't have the naive Marty to root for, The Campaign might be unwatchable for being too depressingly real.
Congressman Cam Brady is running for reelection in North Carolina. When the hotly contested race suddenly turned ugly, his campaign had him fill out a probing questionnaire to uncover any other possible points of attack by his opponent, Marty Huggins. Grantland has obtained Brady's confidential answers and is releasing them online in the name of public service.
If asked to release your last 10 years of tax returns, is there anything in your financial history that we should know about?
My tax returns, if released, and they never will be, would read like any other citizen's. Between 1988 and 1992 I earned money under the name Dr. Randall Escalow. Also, in 1978, I earned $55 and a model race car track by selling seeds and Grit magazine door-to-door. Other than that, it's just a bunch of boring numbers. Oh, and I've never paid a dime in taxes. Boring, right?
Before DVRs, part of the charm of Saturday Night Live was that it created a sort of community of viewers — granted, the kind of community who didn’t have anywhere to be on a Saturday evening, so not necessarily a club you wanted to join four times a month. Its jokes became like prehistoric viral culture, a consolation prize to rehashing the best moments of the weekend’s rager. It gave you something to talk about at brunch (brunch sucks; I’m saying “brunch” hypothetically) at the dining hall if you’d been stuck inside all weekend writing a term paper and had missed the physical experience of the club, the bar, the house party. Its relevance has always been at least partially related to the repetition of catchphrases, pratfalls, and goof-ups, within the show (legions of “What Up With That”s, “MacGruber”s, “Church Lady”s) and without (the far-reaching effects of “More Cowbell” made it leap from the mirror like Bloody Mary; “More Cowbell” essentially slimed out of our televisions and entered society in 3-D). Ever since Saturday Night Live has been available for consumption as Sunday Morning Hangover or Wednesday Afternoon Lunch Break, and perhaps even more so since the introduction of the digital short in 2005 (Lettuce), it’s become somehow more satisfying to revisit, even as it so often revisits itself. That’s why this weekend’s episode with host Will Ferrell, and a self-fellating celebration of the 100th digital short, was so good.
Really! Will Ferrell showed up on Conan Wednesday night in full Ron Burgundy gear — complete with mustache, jazz flute, and insults — and made it very clear: "I want to announce this to everyone here in the Americas ... to our friends in Spain, Turkey, and the U.K., including England ... that as of 0900 Mountain Time, Paramount Pictures and myself, Ronald Joseph Aaron Burgundy, have come to terms on a sequel to Anchorman ... it is official: There will be a sequel to Anchorman." Burgundy also tweeted, "Hey America & Hawaii. Looks like Paramount & my lawyer Gene Tigerworthy have agreed to terms on a sequel to Anchorman. Whiskey sours on me!" Well, I don't know about you, but to me, this news smells exactly like the opposite of a used diaper filled with Indian food.
Is 2012 going to be Christina Aguilera's year? The past few years have seen her take a few faltering steps involving shading a soon-to-be-everywhere Lady Gaga, developing a drunk diva reputation in the tabloids after her divorce, dropping an eclectic electropop album called Bionic right when electropop became beyond oversaturated, and getting her period onstage while performing at Etta James's funeral. She has regained some ground over the past year, emerging as the highest-paid judge and queen bitch of The Voice and guesting on the relentlessly annoying/catchy/omnipresent Maroon 5 song "Moves Like Jagger." Aguilera is a perfectionist whose tendency to overdo it on runs and melismas is her biggest weakness. I heard "Beautiful" on the easy-listening station in my car earlier today and was noticing just how spare and sensitive the vocals are for an Aguilera song. She gets accused of wasting her instrument by embroidering songs without adding any real emotion. But because we know she is capable of turning it out when she feels like it and is given the proper material, we expect her to turn it the fuck out every single time.
Rembert Browne: Will Ferrell is in a great place right now. This is the fourth wave of his career and perhaps the Era of Ferrell I'm most excited about. He has already had his rise to fame (SNL), his string of classics (Old School, Zoolander, Anchorman), and his Sandler phase (Kicking & Screaming, Semi-Pro). The key is that he successfully made it through the Sandler "I am just going to keep making movies because I can and I don't care if fewer and fewer people laugh because I got bills, son" period, remembered how to be really funny again, and is now getting weird and experimental. That's what Casa De Mi Padre, an absurd movie completely in subtitles, screams out to the public. "Get weird with your old pal, Will." I don't know what I'm getting myself into with this movie, but I genuinely can't wait.
Dan Silver: When discussing the Wrath of the Titans trailer, the predictable snide critiques would most likely revolve around how the filmmakers have clearly channeled their inner “Michael Bay-hem” to forgo any sense of story and just create an orgy of computer rendered havoc OR how it’s now clear that any producer can play dress-up with such venerable performers as Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson if you pay them enough OR even how the best part of the trailer is the use of Marilyn Manson’s “Sweet Dreams”. Even though all this is true, the pieces of the trailer which stood out most to me were how fresh and unsoiled the film’s female lead (Rosamund Pike) looked. She’s in four shots (at :59, 1:08, 1:35, and 1:36) and in each one she almost sparkles. For a film that is supposed to take place in the sand and dust enveloped ancient Greece, she looks like she’s just walked out of her trailer after taking a shower. It’s immensely distracting. But ultimately, who cares right? Although beautiful and talented, audiences are not coming to the theater to see her. They're buying their ticket to see a two sided, sword wielding monster tear people down on a battlefield.
Rembert Browne: Silver, I’m so glad you brought up that two-sided monster, because it’s actually the only thing I have to discuss regarding this horrible trailer. Just curious, is that the first two-sided monster in the history of film? If not, I want to see any past films with two-sided monsters, ASAP. Judging by its skill set, agility, and complete disregard for life, it seems pretty unstoppable, so if this movie actually contains a plot where two-sided monsters are defeated, it better be by a four-sided monster. If not, I’m calling shenanigans and spinning out of the theater.
Southpaw, Eminem’s movie return, is back in development. The project was put in turnaround at its original studio, Dreamworks, but has been picked up by MGM. In the movie — co-written by Eminem and Sons of Anarchy’s Kurt Sutter, and to be directed by Antoine Fuqua — Em stars as a former lefty welterweight boxing champ staging a comeback after a personal tragedy. And if you’re worried this will be too similar to recent stirring underdog fighting flicks like Warrior, The Fighter, and Real Steel, think again: Were the protagonists of any of those other movies left-handed? Grade: A- [HR]
