For a movie with a comedic premise this simple – essentially: can you believe we made a movie with a premise this simple? – Casa de Mi Padre can feel pretty exhausting. Its comic arsenal is laid bare by the end of the credits sequence: There is Will Ferrell playing a Mexican ranchero and speaking Spanish; Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal as narco peacocks; telenovela melodrama played absurdly straight; self-conscious B-budget goofing; and plenty of guns and flames for ambiance. Are you not entertained?
A credits sequence or SNL sketch or Funny Or Die video is the natural habitat for this kind of hit-and-run goof. Conan O’Brien, playing the fiery Conando, made his telenovela riff Noches de Pasión a regular feature on his show a few years back, and a few minutes is really all it takes to get the job done. Ferrell has worked with his collaborators – director Matt Piedmont and writer Andrew Steele – at both SNL and Funny or Die, and like last year’s Your Highness, Casa de Mi Padre has the feeling of a very inside joke. The story of how the cowardly dupe Armando Alvarez (Ferrell) defends his family from drug-war fallout is told in terms so self-consciously broad that the “joke” becomes obscure again, suggesting that rarefied sense of what’s funny that comedians often develop after a couple of decades on the job.
For most of the rest of us it quickly becomes a struggle to find – or desperately root out – humor in much of the re-heated genre spoofing. The house of the title belongs to Miguel (Pedro Armendáriz Jr., who passed away this December), father to Armando and the prodigal Raul (Luna), who returns home at the beginning of the film with a fiancée to die for named…
Full Story »The premise for Argentinean director Juan Diego Solanas’s English-language sci-fi romance Upside Down has one helluva gimmick: Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturgess find true love against huge odds, the hitch being that they live on inverted planets and are forbidden to cross over to each other’s world. Hell, some people won’t date outside of their area code. Watch the dazzling first trailer and appreciate how much easier relationships are should be on a single planet by comparison.
I love how Jim Sturgess always has that sad romantic hero look about him, as if he hasn’t cut or brushed that dreamy tousle since Across the Universe. (And why should he? It works! Swoon.) Upside Down looks to lean heavily on the dystopian alternate sci-fi universe schtick the central gimmick posits (“I can’t talk to you… you’re from Down Below“) and the Inception gravity tumbling already gives me a bit of a headache. But how gorgeous this all looks! For some reason I get a bit of a Titanic vibe when Sturgess lets go and falls back down to his own world. I think that’s a good thing? (Never let go…)
Verdict: I’m so there. Double bill it with Melancholia, anyone?
[Bleeding Cool via HitFix]
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I’m not a huge supporter of remaking great foreign films; the trend runs from enticing (Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) to unnecessary (Let Me In). But because it’s inevitable that Hollywood will keep borrowing ideas from the outside world — and since the aptly named Fantastic Fest played host to so many of them over the past week — here are five international offerings I could see studios attempting to re-envision. Let’s just hope they don’t muck it up.
Sleepless Night (Nuit Blanche)
One of many Toronto hits that made it down to Austin (The Raid was a Fantastic Fest hopeful that couldn’t be secured to screen after all), Frederic Jardin’s taut French thriller is simple, but effective: A dirty cop (Tomer Sisley) navigates a sprawling, serpentine nightclub searching for his kidnapped son, who is being held ransom in exchange for a duffel bag full of stolen cocaine, while evading gangsters and internal affairs agents. Tight action, brutal fight choreography, Taken-esque paternal stakes, and a claustrophobic mastery of the single location set-up make for a thrillingly executed adrenaline ride that makes the most of its relatively simple premise; Warner Bros. is already planning an English-language remake.
Who should remake it: Bradley Cooper, since he’s Sisley’s American doppelganger.
Clown: The Movie (Klovn)
Curb Your Enthusiasm meets Danish comedy in this feature-length film installment of the Danish sitcom Klovn, in which semi-bumbling comedian Frank (Frank Hvam) joins his friend Casper (Casper Christiansen) on an annual canoe trip away from their significant others. Casper’s meant their adventure…
While it’s not quite enough to fuel a whole feature, the premise of Tucker & Dale vs Evil is a slice of meta-genre brilliance: What if the creepy, forbidding locals who always glare so unwelcomingly at slasher movie protagonists on their way to their haunted mansions and creepy cabins in the woods were actually just misunderstood? What if they were only trying to make conversation, and it’s the college students/horny teenagers/yuppie vacationers who rush to judge and act hostile and end up dying in the wilderness? In a particularly nice touch, the hillbilly heroes of this horror-comedy (which leans far heavier toward the latter half of that equation) are actually headed to a weekend getaway themselves. Tucker (Alan Tudyk) has saved up enough to buy a “fixer-upper,” a dilapidated cabin that evidence indicates might have once belonged to a psycho killer — but hey, it’s on a lake.
Tucker’s brought his best friend Dale (Tyler Labine) along to check out the place and do a little fishing, but while stopping at the gas station they cross paths with a group of college students on spring break, among them the pretty Allison (_30 Rock_’s Katrina Bowden) and the macho Chad (Jesse Moss). The kids have stopped to stock up on beer, and find Tucker and Dale and the whole location “sooo creepy” (for possibly good reason — what kind of convenience store carries six-pound jars of pickled eggs like the one Dale buys?). They turn out to be staying on the shores of the same lake as Tucker’s…
Full Story »The premise for the upcoming sci-fi thriller Looper is a juicy one: Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as a hitman who kills hooded victims sent to him via time travel from 30 years in future (where time travel exists, and is frowned upon). Things are great until his futuristic self (played by Bruce Willis) shows up to be executed, sans hood. Cue: plot-thickening music! The first image of Willis-as-older-Levitt has arrived online, and it looks just like Bruce Willis. With a machine gun. Click ahead for your first look at Looper.
[via Empire]
Looper comes from the fertile mind of Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom). Expect to see it in theaters sometime during 2012.
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