Considering its relatively mundane subject matter -- Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann's Knocked Up characters, Pete and Debbie, go into mid-life crisis mode when age 40 approaches -- there's a deceptive amount of classic signatures in Judd Apatow's This is 40. Yes, I'm talking about dick jokes. And boners and nipples and vagina tree rings and whatever it is that Rudd is gazing at through a mirror without his pants on. In other words: Comedy gold! Right?
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The Five-Year Engagement begins where a lot of movies would end, with a proposal. Tom (Jason Segel), a chef, is driving to a New Year's Eve party with his girlfriend of a year, Violet (Emily Blunt), a psychology postdoc. He's so visibly nervous that she's worried he's unwell, questioning him until he pulls over to the side of the road, slams down a box containing a ring and confesses that he was going to ask her to marry him that night. He still does, and she still insists on going through with his plan of a surprise rooftop romantic dinner at the restaurant in which he works. That's because Tom and Violet are in love, and they're also nice, down-to-earth, well-intentioned people, qualities that suffuse the film as well, generally for the better but sometimes to its detriment.
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Nick Stoller took a moment while promoting his Five-Year Engagement to fuel speculation about the forthcoming (and Jason Segel-less) Muppets sequel, which he says Disney rather unrealistically wanted to release next summer. "It is a comedy caper," he spilled to Collider. This sounds familiar -- next stop Manhattan, Treasure Island and then, perhaps... space?
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You have to admire the chutzpah, if not necessarily the filmmaking skills, of Jay and Mark Duplass, the duo behind the stay-at-home-son comedy-drama Jeff, Who Lives at Home. With their 2005 debut, The Puffy Chair, the Duplass brothers took an uninteresting story fleshed out with lackadaisical dialogue and, using barely rudimentary camera skills, fashioned a noodly tale about love, life and relationships. It’s easier, maybe, to admire the Duplasses' boldness more than the actual product, but you have to say this much for them: They sure do keep moving.
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Here is a trailer for Jeff Who Lives at Home, which tells the very unusual story of sibling men-children (Jason Segel and Ed Helms) dealing with crises of various import. Epiphanies are had, edgy humor is achieved, Porsches are wrecked. Susan Sarandon cries and enjoys the cathartic eruption of office fire sprinklers. Some kids sing cheerily over the closing credits. It opens March 16. What did I miss?
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Another year, another couple hundred entries in the ever-deepening conversational archive known as The Movieline Interview. They're the collective backbone of our site, and in 2011, it was at its strongest. Look back with us now at the highlights, including the luminary likes of Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jason Segel, Jodie Foster, Paul Giamatti, and a certain honey badger of a director.
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The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn might have held onto the #1 slot during the Thanksgiving frame, but holiday buzz lifted those plucky Muppets to a strong second place showing; with $24.7 million over three days, Jason Segel, Kermit, and Co. should ride the Rainbow Connection all the way to a very nice pile of green by weekend's end. Meanwhile, Happy Feet Two continues to slide and Aardman Animation's fellow wintry offering Arthur Christmas opened with a modest $4.5 million Friday. Martin Scorsese's 3-D fall family flick Hugo, on the other hand, enjoyed a strong debut on a fraction of the screens. Maybe audiences weren't quite ready to ring in the yuletide cheer?
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Miss Piggy has been a TV and movie star for decades, but in The Muppets, she finally gets the spotlight to herself and dominates the entire film start to finish -- or so she'd have us believe. The Muppets is a showcase for many of her colleagues, but she's the only character who gets a split-screen duet with Amy Adams and a very contemporary wardrobe. Movieline caught up with the porcine superstar (who is voiced by Eric Jacobsen) to discuss the new movie, her new look,and the bodily secret that Kermit doesn't want you to know.
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Jason Segel, the roving Apatow muse and Jim Henson scion, has joined Twitter in a last-minute PR blitz for The Muppets, which hits theaters November 23. Thus far he's tweeted about five times, which means we should rate each 140-character quip and help Mr. Segel to better his tweeting skills. I'm ready to judge!
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For Mark and Jay Duplass, the sibling team behind The Puffy Chair, Baghead, and last year's Cyrus, success came only after years of frustration -- and only by happy accident. "All we were doing in the late '90s, in our twenties, was trying to be the Coen brothers," Jay Duplass laughed to Movieline, "and failing at that, because the Coen brothers are awesome and they're already the Coen brothers." It was only when the brothers Duplass stopped trying so hard, at the end of their creative rope and after years of fruitless attempts, that they found the formula for personal filmmaking that would become their signature.
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Of course The Muppets begins with a happy-clappy street symphony that looks like an outtake from Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet." It's The Muppets, dammit! Perkiness on tap, puppetry on parade. Here, in this opening scene from the new movie, Jason Segel and his Muppet brother Walter don matching suits and sing about lovin' life. Because they do.
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If you thought you had seen the last Muppets parody trailer, think again. With less than a month until Kermit and Miss Piggy storm the theaters for their movie comeback, The Muppets Studio has a released another promo in which the fuzzy gang pokes fun at Paranormal Activity 3, Puss In Boots, Breaking Dawn and themselves.
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In addition to giving the Gaddafi assassination the ol' Taiwanese 'toon treatment, the good folks at Next Media Animation have processed the recent Avengers trailer through their kooky CG filters. The result? One and a half minutes of hilarious superhero (and gyrating ScarJo) action that imagines the titular crime fighters are called to assemble to battle the evil, cell phone-hacking, nude pic-distributing Loki. There's no way the actual movie will be this entertaining. Stick around for more Buzz Break!
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It has been a long, wonderful, trailer-laden lead-up to The Muppets big screen comeback. We've enjoyed clever promos of the Green Lantern parody, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo send-up and straight-forward varieties. And now, for the final hurrah before Kermit, Miss Piggy, Jason Segel and the gang storm theaters November 27, here's the latest (straightforward) preview. Beware! Uplifting spoilers ahead.
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The parody trailers for The Muppets have tackled rom coms, Green Lantern, and more over the course of the marketing campaign for the Jason Segel-led November release, but this one takes the cake. Because you haven't really thought enough about Kermit and Miss Piggy until you've seen them posing as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander. (Sans pierced-nipple nudity, but still.) Muppets, you win.
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