MonstersBall Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Sometimes a movie's concept tells you everything you need to know about it. Other times you hear one and go "well, that's kind of weird -- I wonder what they'll make of this." Surprisingly, Will Ferrell's latest project fits into the latter category. It's a dramedy called Two Face, written by X-Files vet Vince Gilligan, who also had a hand in the Hancock screenplay. The pitch: Ferrell will play a virulent racist who develops a split personality after an accident, and his alter ego turns out to be a bleeding-heart liberal.

I think the success of this concept depends on how frankly they're willing to approach the racism angle. Obviously there are certain things you're not supposed to say even in unflattering portrayals of racist characters, and certain things that Will Ferrell probably doesn't want to say for the sake of his career. (Side note: I find it a bit curious that period movies can get away with patently offensive displays of racism while movies set in the present tend to shy away, as if we're all pretending that we've solved the racism problem. Any counterexamples? Monster's Ball, maybe.) There's a lot of potential for trenchant satire in something like this, and a lot of potential to make something anodyne and boring, too.

No word on what comes first, this or Sherlock Holmes.

I haven't picked up an issue of Premiere Magazine in quite some time, but a friend of mine recently recommended I visit the publication's newly refurbished website. So I did. Pretty solid content across the board, I'm happy to opine -- but one particular article caught my eye, tickled my fancy, and squatted in my brain long enough to recommend it here.

Basically, a bunch of the Premiere writers were asked to come up with their picks for Most Overrated Film of All Time -- and while most of the sacred cows slaughtered here are pretty darn obvious ones, the opinions and explanations as to why each film was chosen, well, I thought they were fairly compelling. Frankly, I'm thrilled to see someone call Field of Dreams "just too on the nose," because it absolutely is.

Fully prepared for the onslaught of How Dare YE!! hate mail, the Premiere posse has wisely decided to add an equally pithy rebuttal in defense of each movie. So when someone has the audacity to impugn The Wizard of Oz, we sane people have a defender who'll say Dude, Please. I've placed the 20 titles under the jump, just to help spark discussion, but do not let that stop you from reading through the whole article. It might make you think a little differently about some of those Unquestioned Classics that everyone's afraid to admit they don't really dig. (Yep, 2001: A Space Odyssey is overrated; I said it and I'm proud.)