hangover Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Todd Phillips scored a hit in 2003 with the raucous R-rated comedy Old School, then for some reason moved to tamer waters for Starsky & Hutch and School for Scoundrels, neither of which amounted to anything. Duly chastened, he now returns home with The Hangover, a movie that's as gleefully dirty as Old School, and maybe funnier.

It's a story of friendship, camaraderie, and alcohol. As such, it can only be set in Las Vegas. That is where Doug (Justin Bartha), who is getting married Sunday, is taken by his friends for an epic bachelor party: Phil (Bradley Cooper), a schoolteacher who hates his students almost as much as he hates being married, is the ringleader; Stu (Ed Helms), a wimpy dentist with a controlling shrew for a girlfriend, is the nervous nellie; Alan (Zach Galifianakis), Doug's soon-to-be brother-in-law, is the spacey, grubby, possibly mentally handicapped one who recalls Will Ferrell in Old School (which means he also recalls John Belushi in Animal House).

The four embark on a night of revelry. The next morning, Phil, Stu, and Alan wake up in their hotel suite with a tiger and a baby. There's no sign of Doug, the groom-to-be. And no one can remember anything that happened the night before.

As comedy premises go, this one is brilliantly simple. Three hungover guys stumble around Las Vegas in search of clues as to their missing friend's whereabouts, not to mention the origin of the baby and the tiger, and not to mention the other various things that have gone awry that, well, I won't mention. (Spoiler: Ed Helms is missing that tooth in real life.)

From one sexy role to another: Carla Gugino will soon (hopefully) be on the big screen as Sally Jupiter, hero and pin-up girl of Watchmen, and now she's taking on another seductive role. Variety reports the gal will be the last point in the romantic love triangle called Every Day, which got cooking earlier this month. Liev Schreiber plays a guy who writes for a "semi-pornographic TV show" (that wasn't in the earlier news release!) that gets propositioned by his colleague (Gugino). But the man already has wife Helen Hunt at home, and this "strains his marriage to the breaking point." Could you resist if Gugino was tempting you?

Meanwhile, we've got Rachael Harris, who stood her own against mockumentary heavyweights in For Your Consideration (she played Mary Pat Hooligan, the actress who played the lesbian coming out to her family in Home for Purim). Variety reports that she's going to nurse Todd Phillips' The Hangover with the likes of Bradley Cooper, Heather Graham, and more. Graham is already playing a Vegas local, so maybe Harris will play the bride who might get left at the altar. But the actress isn't all laughs -- one of her upcoming films is The Soloist.

Lastly, we've got a cute, Korean hip-hop dancer on the way -- Som Dam-bi has signed onto Hype Nation. But this isn't just a tale of dancing: "An American dance crew goes head to head with a crew from South Korea," one that mixes hip-hop moves with at least one gun-toter. Oooh, it's like You've Been Served International!

We told you about Todd Phillips' next directorial project, Hangover, way back in October, but there hasn't been any further word on it since then. But apparently someone's been thinking about it -- The Hollywood Reporter says Ed Helms and Bradley Cooper are in final negotiations to star in it, and the flick is entering pre-production. In other words, stock up on your electrolytes, because Hangover is on its way.

Hangover is a comedy about three friends who wake up after some pre-wedding festivities in Las Vegas to discover that they have misplaced the groom. (I think we've all been there.) Helms and Cooper will be two of the friends; the third has not yet been cast. Presumably the groom is a relatively minor character, given that he is missing for much of the film.

Helms (on the left) is a favorite these days from his work on The Daily Show and The Office, while Cooper, probably best known for TV's Alias and Kitchen Confidential, has slowly started adding movie comedies to his résumé. He shows up in this summer's The Rocker as a heavy-metaller whose bandmates are Will Arnett, Fred Armisen, and Rainn Wilson, which is pretty good company, comedy-wise.

It's worth noting that the Hangover, written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, was on the list of Hollywood insiders' favorite unproduced screenplays of 2007. On the other hand, Lucas and Moore's previous screenplay was the Martin Lawrence comedy Rebound. Still, one remains optimistic.

Phillips garnered a lot of fans for Old School in 2003, then stumbled with Starsky & Hutch and School for Scoundrels. Hangover sounds like a return to the Old School paradigm, and that sounds good to me. What do you think?

It looks like that collaboration between Jack Black and Todd Phillips won't be happening after all. Black pulled out of Phillips' Man-Witch, reportedly due to doubts about the director's commitment to make the supernatural comedy his next project. The film -- about a man who discovers he's a witch and enrolls in an all-female witch school -- is still in active development, with Phillips and his team looking for an actor to replace Black.

The other movie Phillips is mulling is the much more amusing-sounding Hangover, about a trio of guys who wake up after a rowdy Vegas bachelor party to discover that they've misplaced the groom. That could be legitimately funny with the right cast and a decent script -- though the fact that the writers are the guys behind the Martin Lawrence basketball "comedy" Rebound isn't too promising. Anyway, maybe losing Black will push Phillips toward doing Hangover first.

Meanwhile, all has mostly been quiet on the possibility of a sequel to Old School, the frat-house romp that rocketed Todd Phillips to the A-list. Though not the biggest Old School fan, I feel like that would be a more productive use of his time than what sounds like a half-baked Harry Potter parody -- especially after the relative anonymity of his last effort, School for Scoundrels.

The interesting thing about the big strike that's looming is that it's causing all these filmmakers to come out of the woodwork and acquire pre-strike gigs with projects nobody's ever heard before. Here's one: Todd Phillips is set to direct and produce Hangover, which is a spec script Warner Bros. just bought from Rebound scribes Jon Lucas and Scott Moore for $2 million. Sounding like a cross between Bachelor Party, Dude, Where's My Car? and Phillips' own Old School (mostly because I picture that cast in this), the comedy will be about three guys who apparently wake up the morning after a Vegas bachelor party and realize they've lost the groom. So, they have to retrace their steps from the night before and find him before the wedding. According to Variety, Phillips said the premise spoke to him.

Another frat boy farce from Phillips? I'm sold, even if I haven't liked much that he's done since Old School, which was probably my favorite comedy of the early 2000s -- it was at least the one I watched the most times, anyway. As I mentioned, I can totally see the cast of Old School being in Hangover, especially Will Ferrell, since I'm imagining it being Frank the Tank's fault the groom has been "misplaced." Then again, the movie could also work with a young, college-age cast, with say Seann William Scott, who starred in both Phillips' Road Trip (and appears in Old School) and Dude, Where's My Car? I know, I'm just kinda rattling off potential names here, but I'm doing so because in a pre-strike world, this is also what Hollywood is doing -- acting fast and thinking quickly in order to lock things into place a.s.a.p.