VinceGilligan Tagged Articles at Cinematical
Will Ferrell Plays 'Two Face' -- Not to Be Confused with Harvey Dent
Filed under: Comedy », Casting », Celebrities and Controversy »
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.
Will Ferrell and His Talking Fly
Filed under: Comedy », Deals », Universal », Scripts », DIY/Filmmaking », Newsstand »
Usually, when an actor or actress appears in a film alongside a bunch of talking animals it means their career is beginning to take a turn for the worse. (What? No one mentioned the name Eddie Murphy.) Yet, that doesn't seem to be the case for Will Ferrell, who is one of the hottest funny-men in Hollywood at the moment -- thanks, in part, to his various collaborations with writer-director Judd Apatow Adam Mckay, a man who knows all of Ferrell's strengths and weaknesses when it comes to making an audience laugh.
However, I'm not sure what to think of his latest venture, a film called Fly on the Wall for Universal and Landscape Entertainment. Vince Gilligan (The X-Files, Tonight, He Comes) has just been tapped to rewrite the script, in which Ferrell is currently attached to star. Story revolves around an anti-social man whose life remarkably changes for the better thanks to his new best friend, a talking fly. Err, okay. So Ferrell will go from speaking to an invisible voice (Stranger Than Fiction) to conversing with a fly. And, somewhere in between, he'll be ice skating with Jon Heder (Blades of Glory). Not for nothing, but with the exception of Stranger Than Fiction (which looks awesome), I'm not too excited about his next couple films. Could Fly on the Wall be the beginning of the end for Will Ferrell?
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