Screenhead

…Will Ferrell.

You know, I’m not surprised.  Really.  I’d also include words like “overrated” and “over the hill” too, because frankly, I haven’t laughed at much he’s done since the Butomi era on Saturday Night Live, and even then because he was with Chris Kattan, whose wide-eyed insanity made Ferrell seem like a straight man.

Oh, sure, Elf could’ve been a LOT worse than it was, but my stomach still churns at the thought of Step Brothers, and I still can’t make it through a performance of Semi-Pro without wishing Michigan would fall into one of the lakes, even IF it took me with it.

Ferrell, on average, only brings in about three times what he’s paid, which is actually good by any objective standard, but in Hollywood, in which budgets on single films can easily surpass the GDP of entire countries (here I am thinking of pretty much anywhere in Africa), it takes a lot more than a three to one ratio to justify the big payday.

Oh, sure, Ferrell’s known for a good joke or two, but he often spends his time in one of three basic modes:

1. Whiny man-child Will

2. Entirely too confident of his appearance Will

3. Naked Will

And frankly, I think we’ve all had enough of number three by now.  Number one makes me want to gouge out most of my sensory apparatus and number two is just boring.

Sometimes, folks, movie news is so epic that it can’t immediately be discerned whether it’s epically good or epically bad.  All I know is that this is a big lump of something, though whether it’s a big lump of awesome or a big lump of suck will remain to be seen.

Seems that Will Ferrell (on the producer slot) and Tommy Wirkola (whose name you’ll recognize from zombie Nazi epic Dead Snow) have banded together to get working on a remake of the Hansel and Gretel story, along with writer Dante Harper.

A basic synopsis is now available, and it boggles my mind.  Picture a funny version of The Brothers Grimm, and you’ll have a good idea what’s going on. Basically, fifteen years after the duo in question jammed a cannibal witch into a scorching hot oven to die, they’ve decided it’s time to take up a new line of work–witch bounty hunting.  Apparently there’s a LOT of witches around, and it’s up to Hansel and Gretel to kill them off but good.

See what I mean?  Good? Bad?  It could go either way and do so on an unimaginable scale.  But how will it turn out?  We’ll have a ways to wait before we find that one out.

Will Ferrell is set to star in an independent comedy, Everything Must Go, with first time feature director Dan Rush.  They start production in March with the film costing under $10 million. Ferrell is taking a different path, instead of big bucks he is going for quality. 

Rush wrote the script based on Raymond Carver story.  Ferrell will play a guy who loses his job and gets locked out of the house by his wife. She deposits his belongings on the front lawn, and he spends the next four days trying to sell his possessions.

Rush has built his reputation by directing commercials with a humorous bent.  His talent has pulled in offers for movie deals, but he turned them down in favor of writing a film for him to direct.

Everything Must Go is his first screenplay and opened doors to meetings with numerous leading men who liked the script. But Ferrell got the gig and signed on because he was impressed by Rush.

It will be interesting to see how this movie ends up on the screen.

(Source)

The Other Guys set photos appear at a couple of places on the Internet. I am surprised because a couple of days ago I posted a piece about Mark Wahlberg working on The Fighter with set photos and behind-the-scene clip.  I doubt he is working on two films simultaneously.  I just don’t know which one came first.   Anyway, the movie stars Wahlberg and Will Ferrell who play the other guys to all-star cops Samuel Jackson and Dwayne Johnson in the cop comedy. First Showing has more set photos of The Other Guys.  Simply click on the picture and you’ll go to the rest of the pictures.

(Source)

I’m not exactly sure why Judd Apatow is busy talking about an Anchorman sequel when the first Anchorman was A. nothing great and B. a pretty low-grade cash-based success, but he is, and he’s got some discouraging news for those of us, like me, who thought the first one was vapid trash: they could do the new one AT ANY TIME.  According to Apatow, the only thing stopping it is the nonstop flurry of projects by Will Ferrell (what flurry would that be?  The IMDB has him in two projects right now, and one of them is the cartoon Oobermind. ) and director Adam McKay.

So it’s not exactly a real long shot stopping Anchorman 2, especially since any age could play an anchor–think about how old “Gunga Dan” Rather was when he finally folded up the chair.  It’s just that, apparently, two of the principals behind any Anchorman sequel are just too gosh-darn busy spewing out crap and cheesy cash-grabs (at least in Ferrell’s case) to be bothered with a completely different piece of crap.

But cheer up, Anchorman fans–there’s plenty of time yet, and even the IMDB is convinced it’ll come out eventually.

So after seeing–and enjoying!–the trailers for Despicable Me, it’s interesting to see that another supervillain-centrated cartoon will be hitting theatres.

After catching my colleague Kenna’s take on the whole thing, I had to throw in my own two cents–this is just bizarre.  Really, bizarre.  Took about two minutes to scrape my jaw off the floor after THAT little chunk of news hit.  I mean, in what universe do you replace   ROBERT DOWNEY JR. with Will Ferrell?  Isn’t this like replacing A-Rod with Charlie Brown?

And, even on the off chance you’re going to try and replace Robert Downey Jr. with ANYONE, why Will Ferrell?  I can think of a hundred better candidates off the top of my head! Seriously–couldn’t Stiller call in some help from his Mystery Man days?  Surely William H. Macy could’ve handled the job.  After playing The Shoveler, I can’t see how he couldn’t get Metro Man down.  Dan Castellaneta’s Blue Raja comes easily to mind, and even Paul Reubens’ The Spleen could’ve probably done a better job than Will Ferrell.

Will this incredibly brave–or incredibly stupid–move pay off?  We’ll have to wait to see–this is slated for a November 2010 release.

You’d think that, if Will Ferrell were involved in a movie, especially one that purports to be a comedy, it would wind up being, you know, funny.  But apparently Ferrell’s comedy chops have been badly dulled by being chased by dinosaurs and dressing up like elves, because if this is Ferrell’s standard, he wouldn’t recognize a comedy if it crawled up his pant leg and started licking him.

Today we’re tackling The Foot Fist Way, a comedy in name only that will thoroughly fail on many levels.

When a small-town tae kwon do instructor, a lunatic obsessive control-freak by the name of Mr. Simmons, gets wind of his wife’s infidelities, he snaps completely.  Forced to confront his own inner nature, he sets out on a pilgrimage to meet his personal hero, martial arts legend Chuck “The Truck” Wallace.  But when he discovers that the Truck has more problems than he does, will it break the snapped man completely, or will it help the man heal by showing him worse than he is?

As a comedy, The Foot Fist Way  falls tremendously flat.  In all honesty, I didn’t laugh for the first half hour.  I could spot several jokes, but not one of them managed to hit.  Simmons is way too big of a jerk to be that entertaining, especially early on as he doesn’t get much of a comeuppance for his unseemly behavior.  When he does, it seems too much like karma biting him hard in the ass to be anything funny.  It’s more satisfying than funny, but it’s a bitter sort of satisfaction.  Frankly, I want to beat the hell out of this guy myself.  By the time the movie was half over I found myself desperately longing to douse his little porn-star mustache in kerosene and light it up.

That having been said,  I did manage to get some laughs out of the second half, but even then, these were uncomfortable laughs coming from a guy who was so thoroughly unsettling that the only thing left to do was to laugh.

It tried, really it did, but the end result was just so flat, the jokes so frequently unsuccessful that it generated few laughs.  Half of those laughs were sad ones, besides.  The point of this, at the end of it all, just escapes me.  I spent this movie bored out of my skull, and how anyone could be interested in this is quite thoroughly beyond me.

You know there’s no way I’m going to recommend this slag heap to anyone.  It’s dull, it’s shoddy, the production values are like something out of the very worst direct to video sludge pile.  The dialogue is overblown and vastly overdone.  It makes entirely too much out of itself, and falls apart in virtually every point.

The Foot Fist Way is a sad little wreck of a film.  It fails on virtually every front–a comedy that can’t elicit laughs is meaningless–and may well be the single dullest thing I’ve seen in weeks.  The Screenhead Ten Scale is going to punish this lump of solid misery by giving it a full one out of ten.

At least it showed up.  It didn’t do much else, though.

Variety reports that Will Ferrell is in talks to star in the comedy Neighborhood Watch at 20^th Century Fox.

The film will follow an urbanite’s journey as he moves to a suburban community, joins the neighborhood watch and uncovers a large conspiracy.

Written by Jared Stern, the film is in negotiations to be directed by David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers).