STICK TO THE VOICE WORK, GUY
Because pissing all over your legacy is a great game he practiced with Robert De Niro, Billy Crystal will make his return to the big screen in Tooth Fairy, the family comedy starring The Rock as a hockey player who knocks loose enough molars to earn a sentence served as the real tooth fairy for a week. The script has been worked over like an aging porn starlet, which doesn’t even really matter because Fox is making the movie, so it could actually be the script David Foster Wallace had labored over in secret and you still know it’ll be a puddle of llama pus.
[Variety]
HIS DAUGHTER ISN’T HIS DAUGHTER
Variety finally picked up the story about Bruce Willis directing a film in Louisiana, and they’ve added a detail: the titular character in Three Stories About Joan will be played by the glorious Camilla Belle, and not the inglorious Rumer Willis as some supposed.
[Variety]
THE ALLURE OF OLD PEOPLE DODDERING
In keeping with his good but over-referenced ‘At Midnight I Will Kill George Lucas With A Shovel’ bit, Patton Oswalt took his appearance on Conan recently to slag off Indy 4. (Deservedly.) It’s a nice bit, but not as good as the ‘I Hate’ gag that follows. Which, I’ll crow, I got to see him do last Friday night. If the set I caught was any indication, look for his routine questioning whether an Obama victory could mean the end of racism, mostly for the mention of government-sponsored blowjob robots. And while you watch this segment (which is the next to last bit, beginning at about 29:15) try to resist the urge to email Devin about the fact that Oswalt saw The Dark Knight five times. Unless you are Patton Oswalt, in which case please write him.
[NBC, via the twittering of Mr. Beaks]
NOT AKIRA, THE OTHER ONE
In better, though wholly unrelated news than the Kurosawa story I’ll have up in a few minutes, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s well-received Tokyo Sonata has been picked up for North American distribution by Regent. Kurosawa (no relation) has a name in thrillers and horror because of films like Cure and Pulse (a movie I genuinely like and can still watch) but he’s always shown potential beyond the straightjacketed bounds of the genre. By many accounts this is the one where he breaks out. The film, which follows “a laid-off Japanese businessman whose effort to hide his unemployment leads to the demise of his family” will be at the New York Film Festival on October 9 then roll out early next year.
[THR]