Maybe I’m remembering things with shades that are a tad too rosy, but was movie comedy always so one-dimensional? Maybe I’m jaundiced by growing up in the Mel Brooks/Harold Ramis/Bill Murray era, but I thought comic actors could successfully develop more than one persona and comic directors could do a variety of styles while still delivering the funny. Nowadays, it seems like comedy talent both in front of and behind the camera keep making the same films over and over once they establish a niche for themselves. Take Todd Phillips, for instance. Seems like a nice guy (and he’s a pretty damn good poker player), but his career has pretty much consisted of rehashes of both specific properties (Starsky and Hutch) or specific genres (frat humor) without adding anything distinct to either. Even the projects he’s not exactly directing have the air of Xerox to them.
He’s teamed up with Warner Bros. to produce and possibly direct a film called The Chadster, which tells the story of a best man at a wedding who gets in trouble when a ker-azy childhood friend shows up and repeatedly embarrasses him. A relative unknown named Michael Samonek is writing the script based on his “original” pitch, which probably went something like this:
“You, Me, and Dupree. Wedding Crashers. Where’s my goddamn check?”