While I'm sure we'll all agree that these past few years have given us some wonderful little comedic gems, it's often unfortunate to see most of the attention thrown at one particular sex, or, in some cases, one particular man: Judd Apatow. But this post won't be about Judd Apatow, or Seth Rogen ,or Jonah Hill, or Michael Cera, or Will Ferrell, or Adam McKay, or Vince Vaughn, or Owen Wilson, or Kevin Smith ... or any of the male names that currently populate (and dominate) some of your favorite comedies. Nope, because it's about damn time we give the ladies some respect.

I'm sick of the female roles in comedies today. She's either the bland girlfriend, or the bland friend, or the bland enemy -- she's full of cliches, and only serves two purposes: 1) to help move the story along, and 2) to make her male counterpart appear funnier. That said, Hollywood is beginning to take more chances on the female-driven comedy, with films like Baby Mama, The House Bunny, Sex and the City, Bride Wars and Confessions of a Shopaholic all arriving in theaters this year or in early 2009. But is this enough? Is there better, smarter and funnier material for women out there, somewhere ... over the rainbow? While you ponder that, here, in my opinion, are the funniest ladies of 2008 (in no particular order) ...


1. Tina Fey

Right now you know her as "that woman who does the awesome Sarah Palin impersonation," but people forget Fey has been making us laugh for a good while now. One of three four women on this list who began their career on Saturday Night Live, Fey brings hilarity from multiple directions. Whether she's producing, writing or starring, anything with her name on it is guaranteed to bring in more than a few laughs ... and then some. (See: Mean Girls, 30 Rock, Baby Mama)

Here's a movie that's getting stranger and stranger the more details we get -- and I'm loving it. First, Mike Judge's Extract was simply a movie that "explores what it's like to be the boss when everything seems to be shifting around you." Then it became about a guy who owns an industrial flower-extract plant and has to deal with workplace issues and a cheating wife. Now, it turns out that one of the "workplace issues" is an employee who loses a body part in a freak accident, and that the wife is cheating on the protagonist with a gigolo. Awesome.

Jason Bateman plays the factory owner -- that, we already knew. We also knew that the amazing Kristen Wiig is playing the wife, and Mila Kunis another employee. The new info is that Clifton Collins, Jr. has joined the cast as the maiming victim, and Ben Affleck as an ambulance-chasing lawyer who, I'd imagine, wants to milk Bateman's character for all he's worth. No word on who's playing the gigolo.

I got pelted with poop for praising Mike Judge's last movie, the largely direct-to-DVD Idiocracy, the first time I wrote about this project, but I stand by comments. It would have been easy for Judge to do Office Space 2, but it's been gratifying to watch him go in some even more offbeat directions instead.

After years of Beavis and Butt-Head, there was Office Space. But after red Swingline staplers and the need for flair, Mike Judge took a number of years off from directing -- until the largely ignored Idiocracy. This time around, however, we don't have to wait as long (as Eugene pointed out in April). Extract is on the way, and now EW's Hollywood Insider has shared more of the plot, and who's in talks to co-star alongside Jason Bateman.

The film will focus on a guy who owns a flower-extract plant -- the industrial sort, not the leafy sort. In typical, professional Judge fashion, the guy is having a bunch of bad luck, which includes "workplace issues and a cheating wife." EW sources say that Kristen Wiig is looking into playing the wife, while Mila Kunis might grab a role as a plant employee. That sounds like a set up for Forgetting Sarah Marshall, revisited -- the man can choose between his crappy partner and the wonderful nice girl right in front of him.

Between the possible murk of an actors' strike and Wiig's SNL schedule, the film is slated to start production in August.

At the beginning of this year, there was news that Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page were setting their sights on Whip It! -- a flick about snarky chicks, toughness, and roller derby action. It sounded like a whole wackload of fun. The rumored March start date came and went without a sound, but now, luckily, things are on track for this summer. Even better: The Hollywood Reporter posts that joining Page and Barrymore on-screen will be Marcia Gay Harden, Kristen Wiig, Juliette Lewis, and Zoe Bell.

Page is playing Bliss Cavendar, a beauty queen who runs away to join the roller derby league in Austin, Texas. Harden will play her mom, an ex-beauty queen herself who wants her daughter out of the skates and back on the beauty circuit. Meanwhile, Wiig will play Bliss' rolling mentor, Malice in Wonderland, Lewis will be top star Dinah Might, and Bell will be "a medical technician moonlighting as derby star Bloody Holly." With first-time feature director Drew Barrymore taking on a role as Page's teammate, that's one heck of a roller roster.

I wonder if 5'1" Page will have to take on 5'8" Bell? Hell, I'm trying to imagine how she'd do against anyone, being as teeny as she is. We should find out soon enough -- the film heads into production this summer in Texas and Michigan.

When I told a friend of mine that I was heading to a screening of Baby Mama, he immediately replied: "Oh, the Saturday Night Live movie?" Hmm -- well, sort of. The comedy -- which premiered at Tribeca and goes wide this weekend -- was produced by SNL honcho Lorne Michaels, and stars show veterans Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. On the other hand, it's not based on an SNL sketch, and doesn't feature any characters from the show.

Baby Mama's pre-release reputation as a "Saturday Night Live movie" probably isn't helpful: movies falling into that category don't have the best track record in the minds of people who pay attention. At the same time, the show has contributed a lot to the movies, mostly in its capacity as a breeding ground for comedic talent. This installment of Cinematical Seven collects films with an SNL connection that have actually been good, or in some way significant. I limited the pool to the last ten years; we all know that The Blues Brothers and Wayne's World are classics that started out as SNL sketches, but what has the show done for us lately?

Here's another entry in the Good Sundance Movies with Rotten Titles category: Pretty Bird. The directorial debut of Paul Schneider (he wrote All the Real Girls and acted in movies like Elizabethtown, The Family Stone and The Assassination of Jesse James), Pretty Bird has nothing to do with birds. The closest the film comes to "birds" is the jet-propelled "rocket belt" that causes all sorts of problems for everyone involved. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Curtis Prentiss (Billy Crudup) is one hell of a schmoozer. He may not have many talents -- heck, he's not even all that smart -- but Curtis does have some very strong social skills -- and he seems like he could easily sell ice cubes to an Eskimo if he had to. Prentiss pops in to visit an old college friend named Kenny (the excellent David Hornsby), who is more than happy to invest in Curtis latest venture: a rocket belt. Kenny throws a whole lot of cash Curtis' way, and then the duo decides that they need an actual engineer to get this project "off the ground" -- and to that end they hire an out-of-work (and hot-tempered) rocket expert named Rick Honeycutt (the hilarious Paul Giamatti).

The parody subgenre once gave us comedy classics like Young Frankenstein, Airplane!, Top Secret!, and The Naked Gun. This glorious tradition has been disgracefully violated in recent years by the likes of the cleverly titled Epic Movie and Date Movie. (As for the latter -- a spoof of comedies? Outstanding idea!) Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a parody of musical biopics like Walk the Line and Ray, marks the pretty damn triumphant return of the spoof film. The movie also marks the return of Judd Apatow, and I'm pleased to report that Walk Hard completes a 2007 hat trick for the man. It easily joins Knocked Up and Superbad to form the unholy trinity of the year's superior comedies.

Starting in fictional rock star Dewey Cox's boyhood Tennessee home and ending some sixty years later after his bouts with women, booze, and pills, the film traces the blood pumping rise...of Cox. (First and last Cox joke, I promise.) The script gets Cox making music quickly, and good thing. I'm not sure why the first ten minutes of Walk Hard were released online as part of the marketing plan, they're easily the weakest scenes of the film. But once John C. Reilly enters the picture, portraying Cox at age fourteen despite being 25 years older (a dig at Kevin Spacey in Beyond the Sea?), it's pretty much smooth sailing.

The stars of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story recently made their way to the offices of Columbia Pictures in Manhattan and did some roundtable interviews about the film. The highlight of the day was probably John C. Reilly comparing the film's money -- Willie the Chimp -- to Elvis's pet chimp Scatter and pointing out that Scatter ended up freezing to death in an outdoor cage while the Dewey Cox monkey was given a good home in Northern California after his usefulness came to an end. Other than that, it was pretty much what you might expect -- lots of questions about the life and times of Dewey Cox, the occasional question about the strike and how it's affecting actors, and assorted other tidbits. Here are some samples from the roundtables of John C. Reilly and Jenna Fischer.


John C. Reilly

You have to navigate a lot of different musical styles in this film.

Yeah, it really suited me well, I thought. As an actor I kind of think of myself as a chameleon, you know? Not really someone who plays my own personality. I'm not even really sure what my own personality is. I'm sort of a collection of the characters I've played. So playing all these different musical styles was great for me because rather than having to pick one thing that I was gonna specialize in, I could just go with the times like Dewey does. That was one of the things, as we kind of discover the character -- we recorded the music six months before we made the movie and we recorded something like 40 original songs. After we did a couple of songs we were trying to figure out, as we go from the 50s to the 60s, how is this guy gonna change with the times? Who is he? And I said to Jake that we should just decide what the guy's nickname is, because once we have the nickname then it gives us a guide to where to go with the music. So we kept recording music and it became apparent, the guy's nickname is The Chameleon or The Changeling or The Shape-Shifter. Dewey's almost like this Forrest Gump-like character -- he transforms with the times

How did you decide on what music to include?

Well, it was a few different things. The songs needed to be funny but they also needed to be really listenable, because there's so much music in the movie. We didn't want it to be just silly joke songs that would be tough to listen to, you know? Also, the musicians involved had a lot of pride on the line. They weren't going to just make some thing that sounds stupid. So yeah, we were trying to make stuff sound good and be funny but also be specific to the character, and that's why it was really helpful to have Jake Kasdan, the director, there in the recording studio every day when we were making this music. Sometimes we'd be trying to evoke a certain artist and other times and other times we were just trying to make the song fit into a time period and other times we were just trying to have the song reflect what the character was going through at a different point in the movie.

Okay... Before I get to the wonder that is Bruce Campbell, I've got to take a second and complain. If you remember anything about our previous coverage of Ghost Town, such as David Koepp signing on to direct Greg Kinnear and Ricky Gervais, Tea Leoni signing on, and then Kristen Wiig, you probably remember the premise. A dentist (Gervais) heads in for a colonoscopy under the knife of Wiig, and he dies for seven minutes. When he comes back to life, he can see the dead -- especially a ghostly businessman (Kinnear) who wants him to break up his widow's (Leoni) upcoming marriage.

Anal surgery is no longer the culprit. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the dentist temporarily kicks the bucket during a "routine dental surgery." Now that is a really boring and lame change. What's wrong with a colonoscopy? Gah. At least we've got Campbell to soften the news. He has signed on to play Leoni's character's fiance -- the one that the dentist really isn't into. Since this ghostly apparition isn't through Whoopi, I keep wondering if it'll end up with Kinnear taking over Gervais' body to have a second chance with his wife. Or maybe Campbell will go Ash on his ass and take him out of the picture. He could always just say Deadites possessed the dude. Shooting has already begun in New York, and hopefully they haven't vanilla-ed anything else.

Post edited as the original THR post now says "Billy Campbell" is the other man, and not Bruce. Thanks to ***Lance*** for spotting that. What a shame.

The Toronto International Film Festival may be winding down toward its close tonight, but that doesn't mean the dealing has stopped. Late Thursday night, according to The Hollywood Reporter, First Look Studios ponied up more than $3 million for US rights to the comedy Bill, starring Aaron Eckhart and Jessica Alba, with Elizabeth Banks and Timothy Olyphant also featured. THR says the price makes it "the heftiest sale of the event."

Bill is based on a script by Melisa Wallack and directed by Wallack and Bernie Goldmann. Eckhart plays the titular character, who is "fed up with his job, his wife and his life," according to a description by GreeneStreet Films. "Bill's life hits an all-time low when he catches his wife having an affair with a local news anchor." He turns to an "unruly, but curiously wise" teen that he's mentoring for inspiration. Banks plays his wife, Olyphant is the news anchor, Logan Lerman is the teen, and Alba is a lingerie salesgirl (!!!) who helps him in more ways than the obvious (we hope). Reliable comedy players Craig Bierko, Melissa Coughlan and Kristen Wiig round out the cast.

Eckhart can be deadpan funny, as in Thank You for Smoking, and I've loved both Banks and Olyphant in most everything they've done lately. With this role and Good Luck Chuck, it looks like Alba is at least trying to expand her range a bit. Co-director Goldmann has been a producer for years, with 300 and George A. Romero's Land of the Dead being his most prominent credits. Wallack appears to be a newcomer. First Look Studios plans a theatrical release for Bill, though no date has been set.