Will Ferrell Tagged Articles at Cinematical

You can't keep a spunky redhead down, even after she's confessed to being a shopaholic. After being unfairly painted as the poster child of conspicuous consumption, Isla Fisher has moved on and scored a one-two punch of comedies. Variety reports that Fisher has signed on to star and produce in Life Coach, and to star in an untitled romantic comedy for Universal.

Life Coach is centers on a woman who hires a (shocker!) life coach to sort her life out. In a twist of twists, the life coach is more messed up than she is. On the outside, it looks like it could be a very typical girl comedy (wacky job, problematic boyfriend, credit card debt), but it is being co-produced by Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, and Chris Henchy, and is being penned by Liz`Cackowski and Maggie Carrey. I think it might actually be a little more offbeat and more along the lines of Funny or Die, and not fall into a romantic comedy trap. An actual comedy starring a woman would be a nice thing to find outside of television's 30 Rock.

The same probably can't be said for Fisher's other gig at Universal. The untitled romantic comedy is based on a French script titled Un Jour mes princes viendront (Some Day My Princes Will Come). Universal wouldn't reveal the plotline, but I'm making the wild guess that it involves a girl looking for Prince Charming, or even more than one Prince Charming. The script is being penned by Audrey Wells, who has made a recent specialty of plots centered around individuals trying to decide to navigate love and life. But there's always the possibility of being surprised by a hearts-and-flowers script, so I'll refrain from criticizing and hope that both scripts offer an opportunity for Fisher to shine as a comedic talent.

Hollywood has cooked up a new twist. This may not be in league with Javier Bardem being replaced by actress Carmen Maura in a gig, but it's still surprising. Variety reports that DreamWorks has lined up its voice talent for 2010's Oobermind -- Robert Downey Jr.'s lead baddie has been replaced by Will Ferrell, and he'll be joined by Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill (not to mention Tina Fey, who signed on earlier).

The satire focuses on a big-noggined supervillain called Oobermind. He has defeated his hero rival Metro Man (Pitt), and finds post-hero-fighting life to be boring. So he creates a new superhero called Titan (Hill), to fight. Only this dude wants to be a bad guy as well, which forces Oobermind to switch sides himself. (Can you spot all the Venture Brothers similarities?) Fey, meanwhile, voices a reporter trying to keep up with the many superhero/villain changes.

Switching from Downey Jr. to Ferrell is sure to have a big impact on the film. You've got RDJ, who can be delightfully evil and would surely offer a textured and intriguing villain, and then Ferrell, who may have proved his range with gigs like Stranger Than Fiction, but still tends to offer that same blissed-out cluelessness that made him famous. DreamWorks is planning to release Oobermind in the fall of 2010, as part of a cinematic push to make up for Monsters vs. Aliens performance, but I wonder: Can Ferrell deliver the goods, and make up for Downey Jr.'s departure?

It's rare that even a movie's biggest fan can recall all of the little throwaway lines of dialogue and performance details from supporting players. But if that supporting player is Jeremy Piven, you can almost guarantee it will come immediately to mind, whether he's an assaultive partygoer who turns introspective during a Gas 'N Sip hangout session in Say Anything, or a pal searching for romantic redemption during his high school reunion in Grosse Pointe Blank. Finally in charge of his own film, The Goods, Piven is no less generous with his comedic set-ups, sharing the screen with a talented ensemble of players (including Ving Rhames, Katheryn Hahn and Rob Riggle) who find themselves tasked with the challenge of liquidating an entire dealership's stock of cars over the Fourth of July holiday.

Cinematical recently spoke to Piven via telephone to discuss his participation in the film, which is produced by Adam McKay (Step Brothers) and directed by Neil Brennan (Chappelle's Show). In addition to talking about the good fortune that found him at the helm of a summer comedy, Piven discussed the prospect of making a car salesman a charming fellow, and reflected on the reasons why folks seem to find him such a convincing con man.

Cinematical: A car salesman is perhaps not the first person you think about when you imagine a sympathetic character. How much did you want this guy to be genuinely likeable and how much of a snake-oil salesman did you want him to be?

So many comedians don't really play well with others. They're mostly scene-stealers with little regard for anyone who gets in their way. So it's always a treat to find some that click together. If they click, their connection usually passes on to the audience. Two mega-comedians, Adam Sandler & Seth Rogen, team up for the first time in this week's Funny People. It remains to be seen just what kind of chemistry they'll have, or if it deserves to be repeated, but in any case, it's a good time to revisit some of cinema's greatest comedy team-ups. [Note: I thought I would stay modern and therefore exclude Martin & Lewis, Laurel & Hardy, Fields & West, Abbott & Costello, Hepburn & Grant, Hepburn & Tracy, etc. Just because it goes without saying.]

Well, leave it to the comedy duo of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay to remind me of one of the better B-movie curios sitting on my shelf, a film that even combines their own site's merits of 'funny' and 'die' into one sharp satire that's already gone overlooked and underappreciated since its 2001 release (into a whopping ten theaters, it seems).

Series 7: The Contenders plays like a 90-minute marathon of a supposed TV show in which contestants are chosen at random and tasked with killing the competition. Everyday citizens have to take out other everyday citizens while the cameras are rolling, and the last man or woman standing wins, plain and simple.

It's funny in the ways it dead-on skewers the manipulations and absurdity of reality programming, and it's funny in more bleakly matter-of-fact ways as we grow slowly but surely engaged by the characters, just as the show itself would intend to. Besides, in what other movie would you see Paul Giamatti's mom from Sideways and the girl from the well in The Silence of the Lambs duke it out, with Will Arnett narrating throughout? Now that's something I would watch...

One big-budget box office disappointment does not usually signal the end of a movie star's reign. The woeful under performance of Land of the Lost has observers looking for someone to blame, however, and Will Ferrell is under suspicion. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, columnist Patrick Goldstein suggests: "He's in danger of becoming the comedy equivalent of George Clooney, someone who enjoys a great deal of goodwill but who isn't actually a real movie star."

Goldstein doesn't provide his definition of a "real movie star," but in the context of his column, it clearly is all about the ability to open a big tent pole production to big box office numbers. Goldstein claims: "The verdict in Hollywood: Ferrell hasn't done a good job of managing his brand. [Adam] Sandler is the master of dumb hijinks. Eddie Murphy has become a cuddly family star. But who is Will Ferrell? No one knows anymore."

The theory is that Ferrell made his bones playing "the stupid guy" in a string of raunchy comedies (Old School, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby) but hasn't been accepted when it's branched out (Melinda and Melinda, Bewitched, Stranger Than Fiction). Ferrell evidently plays another "stupid guy" in Land of the Lost, but it wasn't sufficiently outrageous for the teen/20s crowd, who flocked to The Hangover, and was too potentially scary for families, who returned to Up.

Why did you skip Land of the Lost? Confused by the marketing? Burned out on Will Ferrell? Do you want to see him return to raunchy, R-rated comedies -- like The Hangover? Are Ferrell and George Clooney "real" movie stars?

It's that time again -- time for you to scrape together an absurd amount of money to go see a summer movie in theaters this weekend, and then report back on its quality by telling us what you thought on a scale of 1-10. We've been doing this all summer long, and so far it looks like Pixar's Up might have stolen a little thunder from Star Trek, as last I checked it was rockin' a perfect 10. But keep in mind it also depends on how many people vote, so Trek definitely still has a shot, as does this weekend's big special effects-laden summer blockbuster: Land of the Lost, starring Will Ferrell as a down-on-his-luck scientist who embarks on what looks like the trippiest alternate dimension vacation ever.

From Todd Gilchrist's review: "If Hunter S. Thompson were to write a story about his trip to a parallel, prehistoric dimension, then Land of the Lost might be the most accurate representation possible of its subsequent film adaptation. Directed by Brad Silberling and starring Will Ferrell, this update on the Sid and Marty Krofft television series from the 1970s is the strangest, filthiest summer movie I think I've ever seen – and it opens against one that features Mike Tyson, a tiger and Zach Galifianakis. But just as strangely, it's also damn entertaining, although it's hard to know whether you should or definitely shouldn't be indoctrinated beforehand to its weirdness."

You know what to do next -- feel free to vote in our poll and share your comments on the film below.

Because of the commercial pressures Hollywood places on filmmakers these days, many directors adopt a sort of "one for them, one for me" career strategy that allows them to exercise their creativity while maintaining a degree of viability at the box office. Brad Silberling, despite an array of films that really do run the gamut from intimate character studies to effects-laden opuses, seems to have effectively synthesized the two more and more effectively with each subsequent effort. Starting with straightforward studio fare like Casper, he quickly graduated to meatier projects, including the semi-autobiographical Moonlight Mile, before tackling an adaptation of the first book in Daniel Handler's Lemony Snicket series.

But he seems to have truly captured both his own creative idiosyncrasies and the demands of a summer blockbuster with Land of the Lost, a sprawling, bizarre big-screen reimagining of the Sid and Marty Krofft TV series from the 1970s. The film stars Will Ferrell as a disgraced scientist trying to rebuild his reputation while dodging aliens, dinosaurs, and oversized crabs, and Silberling brilliantly brings the film's fantastic world to life. Cinematical recently spoke to the director via telephone from the film's Los Angeles press day, where he discussed the prospect of making a madcap, foul-mouthed summer movie, explained how (and why) he managed to include an extended homage to "A Chorus Line," and talked about the summer movie that inspired him to become a filmmaker.

If Hunter S. Thompson were to write a story about his trip to a parallel, prehistoric dimension, then Land of the Lost might be the most accurate representation possible of its subsequent film adaptation. Directed by Brad Silberling and starring Will Ferrell, this update on the Sid and Marty Krofft television series from the 1970s is the strangest, filthiest summer movie I think I've ever seen – and it opens against one that features Mike Tyson, a tiger and Zach Galifianakis. But just as strangely, it's also damn entertaining, although it's hard to know whether you should or definitely shouldn't be indoctrinated beforehand to its weirdness. Regardless, Land of the Lost offers a sobering alternative to the pre-packaged and otherwise conventional blockbuster fare offered by studios this summer, even if its charms would ultimately benefit from (if not require) chemical enhancement of some kind to be properly enjoyed.