Lena Dunham pokes a nice-sized hole in The New Yorker's we're-witty-not-funny facade with her promotional-film-within-a-film for the magazine's new iPhone app.
In the first part of the clip, the Tiny Furniture filmmaker and Girls creator — who never lets her ego get in the way of good comedy — lolls around in a ridiculous pair of pants on a talk show hosted by Mad Men's Jon Hamm. After explaining to Hamm's technologically retarded character just what an iPhone app is, Dunham does what every talk-show guest does eventually: urges him to play her clip. more »
Also in Friday morning's news round up, The Weinstein Company picks up a pair of films (including a documentary by Bernard-Henri Lévy), Boy Toy gets a leading lady, North America is set to Sleep Tight, and more...
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Well! Quite a week for inspired Russian-history film news! If it's not Paul Schrader adapting ballerina biopics, then its Jon Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe pairing up to play the same guy in Sky Arts' four-part series A Young Doctor's Notebook.
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For an independently produced comedy that mostly revolves around adults talking to each other — sometimes with child accessories — in varying degrees of inebriation, Friends with Kids is finding a modest amount of success. It’s not perfect, but somehow it manages to be funny without any accidental drug trips, grandmas shooting guns at the dinner table, or Tom Cruise rescuing Cameron Diaz from a crashing plane. Writer-director-co-star Jennifer Westfeldt has returned us a bit to the days of comedies of manners, instead of the awful dichotomy between shrill “romantic” comedy and Apatovian gross-out comedy where Hollywood seems stuck these days. In that spirit, here are four lessons future adult comedies should take from Friends with Kids.
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Stephanie Zacharek's review pretty much confirmed this, but! For the record, Dear Consumer: "The advertisements emphasize the Bridesmaids pseudo-reunion, making it look like it's a rollicking comedic romp with Kristen Wiig, Jon Hamm, Maya Rudolph, and Chris O'Dowd all just giggling and making silly faces. [...] Those four, the Bridesmaids folk, they really don't have much to do other than pop in every 20 minutes or so to comment on the action, a sort of Greek chorus surrounding our two heroes. It's also worth noting that none of them is actually funny, by design. You know that scene you've seen the commercial where Wiig and Hamm sneak out of the restaurant bathroom, post coitus? That's in the first five minutes of the movie, right before a 'Four Years Later' insert. Wiig spends the rest of the film crying into various glasses of wine while Hamm yells at her. It's a real laugh riot." [Deadspin]
Jennifer Westfeldt's sort-of romantic comedy Friends with Kids is on to something, even if in the end it suffers from a failure of nerve. This is actor and screenwriter Westfeldt's directorial debut (she co-wrote and starred in the 2001 feature Kissing Jessica Stein), and it's polished to the point of shallow glossiness -- it could benefit from being a little rougher, a little messier.
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If there's one thing we still need to discuss, it's the 2011 Oscars and how co-host James Franco bungled them up. (If you believe that, I have bunch of leftover Sarah Palin jokes I'd like to fly for you.) Fellow Freaks and Geeks alum Seth Rogen responded to a question regarding Mr. Franco, and he finally weighed in on the Oscars' decision to hire young hosts. Specifically, he thinks the Academy screwed James Franco over.
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Happy Thanksgiving, my naughty little puritans. Before I jump headfirst into the HoKa turkey that Gloria Virtel is graciously preparing, I thought I'd share the five filmic things I'm most thankful for in 2011. Join me as I thank national treasures like Jon Hamm, Penn Badgley, and Twitter's new empress.
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How do you even begin to wrap your head around Zack Snyder's latest epic, Sucker Punch? The anachronistic pop fantasy mash-up follows '60s-era insane asylum inmate Babydoll (Emily Browning) who plots escape with four fellow prisoners (Abbie Cornish as Sweet Pea, Jena Malone as Rocket, Vanessa Hudgens as Blondie, and Jamie Chung as Amber) by going into a dream world within another dream world to fight dragons, zombie Nazis, and evil nightclub pimps. And as Snyder and Co. revealed while making the press rounds, what hits theaters this Friday is only one version of what Sucker Punch ever was, is, and still could be whenever Snyder's unveils his full Director's Cut.
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