Director Paul Weitz wanted Tina Fey so badly for his new movie Admission that he was willing to keep her clothed. ”Originally the movie was closer to the book in that it had a couple of legitimate sex scenes in it and I was like ‘Urk!’” Fey tells me. “So they were kind enough to accommodate that.”
That doesn’t mean though that she and co-star Paul Rudd didn’t enjoy good chemistry. Rudd says he was “predisposed to liking her anyway” as they share many of the same friends. As for the film’s Princeton setting, the actor admitted that making Admission was the only way he could ever get on the campus as his “GPA was very middling”.
Is Weitz worried that colleges will hold Admission — which is also very candid about the college admissions process — against his kids when they apply to college later down the line? Turns out he already has a plan! ”I’m going to change their names!” But Princeton won’t hold a grudge, as Weitz says they agreed to let him film on campus because “they liked the idea of having Tina Fey around for a little bit”.
However, he adds, the actual Princeton admissions office does not appear in the film because it remains “super-duper top secret”!
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Though smarter than your average dramedy, Paul Weitz’s forced Admission faces some major identity issues. Tina Fey plays a discombobulated Princeton admissions officer who must confront the limits of her morals when she learns that a potential Princeton applicant might be the son she gave up for adoption. What appears on paper to be an ideal three-dimensional, morally complex role for the quick-witted comedienne backfires in practice, relying on Fey to be funny in a movie that works better serious. Despite offering consolation to the world’s many Ivy League rejects that the gatekeepers sometimes make mistakes, low entrance levels await.
Clearly, what Weitz wanted was to recapture some of Fey’s Baby Mama mojo (it earned a surprise $60 million, after all), relying on the actress to bring the same vulnerable uncertainty to another harried working-woman role. But that film was conceived as a traditional laffer, whereas Admission is based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s more nuanced novel, in which Fey’s seemingly straightlaced character is thrown for a loop by a highly unusual applicant.
While the book treats this wrinkle as its big surprise, the more plot-driven adaptation serves it up as a central concept, positioning Fey’s Portia Nathan as an increasingly screwball character struggling (and mostly failing) to maintain her professional ethics amid a messy personal crisis. Through a series of clunky, on-the-nose character-development scenes, the pic establishes Portia’s life — or, more accurately, her current state of denial: She’s fallen into a predictable routine with her tweedy lit-professor b.f. (Michael Sheen), her fastidiously clean workspace and her general intolerance of kids.
Instead of indulging auds’ natural curiosity with a look inside the closed-door world of college admissions, the pic leaves Fey and her co-stars to play dress-up in a wood-paneled office where
Though it’s always a bad idea to review a director’s intentions at the expense of the actual results, there’s something about Paul Weitz’s movies that makes you want to cut him a little extra slack. Weitz, with his brother Chris, was one-half of the directing team that brought us About a Boy (an affecting and well-crafted adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel), as well as American Pie (which, despite its reputation as a teen raunchfest, was surprisingly in tune with the complexities of sexual relationships as they’re experienced by young women). The pictures Weitz has directed on his own have been either unjustly overlooked (as in the case of the freewheeling satire American Dreamz) or justifiably lambasted (there’s not much to say about the icky gun-for-hire vehicle Little Fockers). But when Weitz is at his best, his films show an easygoing open-heartedness that more technically gifted directors – we’re looking at you, Alexander Payne – can’t even begin to muster. There may not be a single misanthropic bone in his body.
Which is a way of saying that the vibe of Weitz’s latest, Being Flynn, may have a greater impact than the sum of its parts. Jonathan Flynn (Robert De Niro) is an aging, crabby, racist nutter of a cab driver who’s convinced he’s the most brilliant (undiscovered) writer of his time: He’s got a multi-volume opus — with the rather ominously intriguing title “The Button Man” – stored away in his jam-packed rat’s cubby of an apartment. His son, Nick (Paul Dano), is also an aspiring writer, and he too is struggling to understand exactly how that shapes his identity. But Jonathan and Nick must suffer their respective delusions and anxieties separately: They’ve been estranged for as long as Nick can remember, and he’s been raised by his…
Happy Friday! As if heading into the weekend wasn’t already wonderful enough, here comes a casting move that oughta keep you tickled for days: According to The Hollywood Reporter, James Franco is in talks to star in Brian Koppelman and David Levien’s The Game, adapted from Neil Strauss’s dating how-to bestseller, in the role of famed, instantly unforgettable pick-up master Mystery. Hollywood can pretty much drop the mic as Friday closes out, because no other casting move this week can possibly top this.
If you weren’t familiar with Mystery (born Erik von Markovik), the expert pick-up artiste whom Strauss learned from to write The Game, well, where do I begin? Co-writer of such helpful tomes as The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed and The Pickup Artist: The New and Improved Art of Seduction, Mystery even dallied in reality television in his 2007 VH1 reality series The Pick-Up Artist, in which he taught clueless schlubs how to cast out their lines and reel in the ladies.
Also? He looks like this:
What? It’s called peacocking! How else can a man stand out from the crowd enough to catch a woman’s eye?
Anyway, MGM’s The Game is produced by Chris and Paul Weitz. And I for one cannot wait to see Franco decked out a la Mystery, soul patch and all.
James Franco in Talks to Star as Pick-Up Artist in ‘The Game’ [THR]
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According to The Hollywood Reporter, MGM will team up with A Solitary Man writer Brian Koppelman and director David Levien to bring Neil Strauss’s dating how-to book The Game to the big screen. Others have tried before to make Strauss’s best-selling pick-up tome into a film, but maybe Koppelman and Levien are the right guys for the job; after all, they gave Michael Douglas a great vehicle playing a skeevy womanizer in A Solitary Man. Maybe they can do the same for magician-turned-pick-up artist Mystery?
Koppelman will script with Levien directing (the pair previously co-wrote Rounders, Knockaround Guys, Walking Tall, The Girlfriend Experience, Oceans Thirteen and Runaway Jury); Chris and Paul Weitz are onboard to produce.
The Game (full title: The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-up Artists), if you recall, was the 2005 how-to guide to meeting and seducing women written by reporter Strauss about his experiences in the “seduction community.” If you’re a guy, you probably read it for tips on snagging the ladies. If you’re a lady, you probably gagged when you heard about its existence.
Either way, here’s to hoping The Game turns out to be less offensive than I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. While we’re on the subject, let’s get to casting Mystery! Who (besides Tommy Lee, maybe, or Vanilla Ice) could play the infamous pick-up artist?
⢠MGM Picks Up Neil Strauss’ ‘The Game,’ Taps ‘Solitary Man’ Team to Write and Direct [THR]
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