road trip Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Back in 2000, a week after it was out, my roommate and I went to see Road Trip. It was to be the funny cap to a long day -- she had thrown me a daytime surprise party, and we rushed to the theater once everyone left for a little movie fun. At the time, Tom Green was still pretty popular, and it seemed like the right end to the day. But while everyone else giggled, I grew more and more incensed. I had seen this film before. But the first time around, it didn't have a weird guy tonguing a mouse -- it had a super-cute pair by the names of Ivy Miller and Wyatt Tripps. Road Trip was a barely disguised copy of Overnight Delivery, which had come out two years before.

Maybe if it was five or ten years after the other, I would've let it slide as some sort of tribute. But even with a slightly different spin, it was too similar -- the loyal boyfriend, the fear of cheating, the needing to get back a letter sent to the girlfriend down South, the troubled road trip, the swiping of a vehicle, the violence needed to get the package back ... It was like Todd Phillips was given an outline of the first and just filled in the blanks in a different way.

It's far from the first time a movie mimicked a previous feature without being a remake, and sadly, it won't be the last. In a world full or remakes and reimaginings, what non-remakes drive you nuts? What blatant movie rip-offs make your head spin?

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for The Hangover, which, if you haven't seen the trailer yet, looks to already have solidified its position as this summer's craziest, most ridiculously uncontrollable gotta-see-it-like-ten-times comedy. Directed by Todd Phillips (Old School, Road Trip), The Hangover stars Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis as three soon-to-be groomsmen who lose their buddy (aka the groom) and their memory during a balls-to-the-wall Las Vegas bachelor party weekend, then race to retrace their steps and find their friend before the wedding.

The film has garnered so much advanced buzz that a sequel is already being set up, and it's fairly safe to say that this could be Phillips' best film since Old School. You've got Vegas, live tigers in the hotel bathroom, an unknown baby, a stolen police car, a missing tooth and Mike Tyson -- what's not to love? (Note to those guys currently planning Las Vegas bachelor parties: You might want to leave the fiance at home before venturing out to see this flick. Just a hunch, but something tells me she might have a few additional questions, concerns and demands after watching The Hangover. Unless she's totally cool with whatever; if that's the case, the more the merrier!)

The Hangover wakes up with a killer headache and lots of laughs on June 5. Check out a larger version of the poster below.

I can think of at least three movies in the coming two weeks that feature scenes that are strikingly out of tone with the film they're a respective part of and yet seemingly included as a means of getting people to tell their loved ones how ridiculous Bit X in Movie Y is. And so today's Cinematical Seven list will be an arbitrary, far from ultimate compilation of the most distractingly disgusting and supremely superfluous parts in recent movies. Sure, most of these are comedies, and yes, most of them seem to have been released from the year 2000 on, and as always, we welcome your comments below. Just make sure they're not too gross.

(Speaking of which, NSFW clips follow after the jump.)

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the video store, a whole new line of sequels threatens to crowd the new release shelves. Paramount Famous Prods. announced plans to raid the libraries of Paramount, Paramount Vantage, DreamWorks, MTV Films and Nickelodeon Movies in search of source material to sequelize, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Projects already in development include sequels to Mean Girls, Road Trip, The Naked Gun, Bad News Bears and Grease. First out of the gate will be Without a Paddle: Nature's Calling, due out in early 2009.

If you're saying to yourself, "Wait a minute, haven't some of these movies already been sequel-ized, sometimes more than once?" the answer is yes. (Naked Gun, Bad News Bears, Grease). If you're then wondering, "Why more sequels?" the answer is, as Deep Throat told Bob Woodward, "Follow the money." The unit is headed by Louis Feola, who formerly ran Universal Studios Home Entertainment, which made three direct-to-video sequels to American Pie and three to Bring It On. Each sold between one to two million copies, translating into many millions of dollars without the risks and expense of thearical distribution.

I have absolutely no problem with low-budget productions that trade on their resemblance to well-known titles, as long as they're smartly made with a degree of fun, intelligence, and style. That's been in short supply lately in the direct-to-video productions I've seen. We'll see what happens when Paramount Famous starts releasing their line in earnest starting in 2010, at a pace of five to six films annually.

Some say that Will Ferrell movies are just the same flick over and over again, but since I always get a giggle from them, I really can't complain. Movieweb is now hosting 10 new photos from Ferrell's latest sports-comedy, Semi-Pro. Farrell plays Jackie Moon, the owner and coach of the American Basketball Association's Flint Michigan Tropics. In hopes of getting the team status in a little organization called the NBA, he must turn his team into winners.

Semi-Pro was written by Scot Armstrong, who was also behind Road Trip, Old School, and The Heartbreak Kid. Armstrong is also hard at work on the sequel to Old School, but this time it will be without *Hank 'The Tank' by the looks of things. Even if you are not a big fan of Ferrell's particular style of comedy, you have to admit he does manage to put together some pretty great comedy casts. Joining Ferrell on Semi-Pro are Woody Harrelson, Will Arnett, Rob Corddry, and the criminally underused Andy Richter. Also joining in on the fun are Outkast's Andre Benjamin and Maura Tierney.

So while some of these pictures have already been released back in November, this latest set has a few new images plus your chance to get a look at Ferrell's 'fro in hi-res. So far, there have already been a few poster releases, a teaser, and the ever-popular "red band" trailer. But, let's be truthful here, if you are a Ferrell fan you are going to want to jump straight to the 'R' trailer for all the good jokes. Semi-Pro opens in theaters on February 29th.

*Correction: Ferrell will forever by haunted by the nickname Frank "the Tank", not Hank.

How far would you go to shack up with someone you met on the internet? Though it's kind of embarrassing to admit (and my fellow Cinematical writers will torture me for this), back in college during my sophomore year I flew all the way to Utah to meet up with a girl I met online. Three months of chatting through a computer screen? Check. Three months of talking on the phone? Check. Pictures? Check. But when I finally went all the way out there, I learned that she and Utah were very different from anything I'd ever experienced in New York. Suffice it to say, after six days of shooting guns, visiting square-dancing clubs, feeding rats to snakes and witnessing more than one fight in a Denny's parking lot, I left Utah and never spoke to her again. But anyway ....

... The Hollywood Reporter tells us Josh Zuckerman (Feast), Amanda Crew and James Marsden will star in Sean Anders' teen sex comedy Sex Drive. The concept? "... an unlucky in love teen meets a girl on the internet who sends him the message "U Drive All the Way Here 4 Me ... I'll Go All the Way with U." Guess what happens next? Yup, our teen, named Ian (Zuckerman), convinces his friends to drive from Chicago to Knoxville so that he can lose his virginity to this girl with a dazzling vocabulary. If Marsden signs on (he's still in talks), he'd be playing Ian's brother. Yeah, so it's like Road Trip meets ... Dateline's To Catch a Predator series? Sweet! Right now it looks like filming will begin by the end of the year off a screenplay written by Anders and John Morris (who's also producing). So, would you drive half-way across the country for that?

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.

Ivan Reitman and producing partner Tom Pollock have managed to score co-financing -- to the tune of $200 million over five years -- for 10 new films from their Montecito Picture Company. Mmm ... lots and lots of comedies. The deal is sort of complicated -- for example, the funding body, Cold Spring Pictures, also has the option of financial involvement in Montecito properties that don't get picked up by partner DreamWorks -- but the point is that Reitman and Pollack are very happy men this morning. When taken in combination with their recently extended first-look deal with DreamWorks, this news means they can make what they want, and that what they make will get distribution without a struggle.

Obviously, packages this sweet don't just appear out of the blue: Pollack and Reitman make movies that make money men happy. As Pollack himself told Variety, "The kinds of movies we make are in an exceptionally sweet spot in the studio system; we tend to make comedies at a price. When they work, like with Old School and Road Trip, they make a lot of money. When they don't, like EuroTrip, they don't lose much. From a Wall Street standpoint, that's a good risk."

Aside from its dialects and locations being distinctively English and Scottish, Driving Lessons feels very American. The coming-of-age film, which stars a stone-faced Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley from the Harry Potter films), has a story that seems straight off the assembly line of our own indie scene. Some of the conventions used in the script include the out-of-his-league crush, the casual virginity-loss, the overbearing and/or religious parent, the life-changing road-trip, and the cross-generational relationship that begins as student-mentor and ends as everlasting friendship. Such tried-and-true elements are not specific to the States, but with so many novice filmmakers here relying on generic adolescence as their easy starting point, the conventions have become staples of American cinema.

Grint plays Ben, a boy so far on the verge of manhood that he states his age as precisely 17½. He's not very ready for the world, though, thanks to his strict, protective mother (Laura Linney) and his weak father (Nicholas Farrell). When urged to get a summer job, Ben finds employment as an assistant for an aging actress named Dame Evie Walton (Julie Walters, who plays Grint's mom in the Harry Potter films), who not only helps him to grow up, but also helps him to have fun with the transition into adulthood, as well.

Before he directed Old School and Road Trip, Todd Phillips, along with his partner at the time, Andrew Gurland, won the 1998 Grand Jury Award at Sundance for their documentary, Frat House. Afterward, the film's rights were immediately snatched up by HBO when buzz for the flick was at its highest. However, something happened, and since then HBO has refused to air the documentary as well as allow the filmmakers to self distribute. Yes, it vanished...until now.

Pic, which follows Phillips and Gurland into the secret underworld of fraternity pledging, isn't exactly groundbreaking stuff, and although everyone has their opinion, until this day we still don't know why it disappeared. In my circles, friends say that, halfway through the filming, the fraternities woke up from their drunken stupor and realized a lot of the actions being caught on tape could be deemed criminal and, well, incredibly moronic.

Thus, they decided not to be involved anymore, which then forced Phillips and Gurland to stage the rest of the film. Could this be why HBO never aired it? Because it's a fake documentary? Either way, the film did little to slow down Phillips, who eventually went on to direct some of the more beloved comedies in recent years. Is it real? Is it fake? Judge for yourself, the thing just showed up online.