Results tagged “juddapatow”

      

Though it first aired a decade ago, most people still remember Samm Levine quite clearly from the cult TV show, Freaks and Geeks (look back at the cast and writers and marvel at the talent). Since then he has worked steadily, both in television (the best episode of Entourage ever) and film (the hilarious and underrated Not Another Teen Movie.) This Friday, Samm appears as one of Brad Pitt's basterds in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. LAist had a chance to speak with Samm recently about working on the film.

       

Despite facing a brutal marketing challenge, Funny People managed to top the box office this weekend. Though it was the lowest-performing champ of the summer, the Judd Apatow-helmed laugher brought in $23.4M to hold off a resilient Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ($17.7M | $255.4M). The awful G-Force was a hair behind ($17M | $66.4M), followed by the awful The Ugly Truth ($13M | $54.4M) and the, uh, awful Aliens in the Attic ($7.8M). Orphan ($7.2M | $26.7M), Ice Age 3 ($5.3M | $181.8M), The Hangover ($5M | $255.7M), The Proposal ($4.8M | $148.8M) and Transformers 2 ($4.6M | $388.1M) rounded out the top 10.

                     

If you're planning to see one movie this weekend, you should re-jigger your schedule and see four! Funny People would be an excellent place to start. It's Rogen, Apatow and Sandler's best film to date (LAist review here). Sure, it's not a straight comedy, but it is damn funny. You'll leave the film in a good mood, but that will quickly turn into righteous anger once you've seen The Cove. The best movie at the Sundance Film Festival this year (LAist reviews here and here), it's a thrilling and sad documentary about the annual dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan. I mean seriously, how many eco-documentaries have scenes inside ILM? The Cove is that cool. More to the point, it almost feels like a narrative film with all the intrigue and plot that go into capturing the wrenching footage of dolphins being mercilessly pitchforked in the water by giggling fisherman. See it!

                     

The lazy response to Judd Apatow's Funny People will be that it isn't as, well, funny as his two previous films, The 40 Year Old Virgin or Knocked Up. The subtext of that observation, of course, is that it isn't as good as those other films, and that is a howlingly wrong presumption. True, Funny People is not Apatow's funniest film, but -- true also -- it is his best. While not a straight comedy, it has plenty of laughs and inspired lunatic performances (Eric Bana, in particular, is a revelation). What it also has, though, is an interest in exploring the intersection of mortality and human failing, and it does so with great clarity and a requisite lack of pity.

Anyone see the "Doctor Who" presentation at Comic-Con? Yesterday the series got an award from the Guinness Book of World Records as "the most successful sci-fi series". Did anyone watch the "Doctor Who" premiere last night? Also at Comic-Con, a bunch of details of the "Lost" season finale, including the fact that there will essentially be a reunion of all the characters.

After a childhood in Boston and living most of his adult life in NY, Mike Viola has arrived...in LA. We met Mike at a screening of "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" and had the opportunity not only to watch the film but hear about how Mike and the team of songwriters created a catalog of songs for a fictional music star.

Boobies, bathroom humor and bongs collide in Pineapple Express, the latest DVD release from indie writer/director extraordinaire, David Gordon Green. The film follows two dimwitted stoners, Dale (Seth Rogen) and Saul (James Franco), whose connections to the underworld of illegal drugs inadvertently make them witnesses to murder. It's the classic tale of marijuana dealer meets boy, boy meets marijuana dealer and over the river and through the woods into a drug dealer's hideout with guns they go.

So-called ‘viral marketing’ has become such a pervasive element of the media landscape that it’s almost become a parody of itself. It is being utilized, to varying degrees of success, on almost all levels; the broke artists love being able to throw up a couple of websites and cryptic messages to start a movement, while the studio bigwigs can’t argue with the bottom line and the intriguing ability to mobilize a mass of people with one stick and a few well-placed carrots.

Ordinarily, I'm completely disinterested in the box office performance of a movie. Sure, my innate sense of justice leads me to wish that good films will do well and bad films poorly, but I never check Boxofficemojo over the weekend to see how a movie is doing. I may keep on eye on Forgetting Sarah Marshall, though, to see if the weakening Apatow brand can regain some strength after the relative failures of will restore some order to Judd's universe.

If you somehow missed both had top-drawer casts and the imprimatur of quality. Both were also awfully dull. Tom Cruise takes another step down from his previous perch of box office invincibility.

With a huge release hitting theaters virtually every Friday, it's rare that a movie tops the box office over successive weekends and yet that's exactly what being the other). Has Judd's stardust finally turned into potato flakes?

PaleyFest08 announced today that they’re hosting an X-Files retrospective with series creator Chris Carter and executive producer Frank Spotnitz on March 26. But if that doesn’t bust out your inner Mulder or Scully, then how’s this? Attendees will also get a sneak peek at The X-Files sequel planned for a summer release.

In a crowded weekend of new movies, it was zeroed in on $100 million ($4.1M/$98.3M).

One day the golden touch of Judd Apatow will fade and one of his films will bomb (--but I'll be piling into the theater along with everyone else this weekend to marvel at the daring of John C. Reilly.

When you have a huge music collection and you listen almost all the time, there tends to be a few artists that you come back to over and over. In our house, full of CD's, concert DVD's, and iPods a few artists reign supreme: The Beatles, Elvis Costello, and Loudon Wainwright III. Loudon's music can make you feel, make you smile, and make you think-- he is a master storyteller. Often listed with the...

From writing to recording and producing, Joe Henry knows how to keep himself busy. This year he released his CD "Civilians", wrote the music for "Knocked Up" with Loudon Wainwright III, and produced several tracks for Todd Hayne's Bob Dylan film "I'm Not There". In 2003 he won a Grammy for producing Solomon Burke's "Don't Give Up On Me". Burke has said about Joe Henry, "He's an exciting young man, a talented gentleman, he...

Though it's opening weekend box office total was surprisingly low, it was no surprise that critics savaged did okay). Comedies, of course, never get the critical respect that dramas do and vulgar comedies typically fare worst of all (with the notable exception of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen's recent work. Then again, who cares about reviews if a movie is funny, right?

became the first movie since late May to win back-to-back weekends, owing as much to a weak slate of openers as to its own relative strength. The Judd Apatow-produced dick montage hauled in 18 million bucks and helped push the summer box office to a record 4.003 billion dollars. It's the first 4 billion dollar summer ever, though higher ticket prices (and not increased admissions) account for that big, shiny number.

Late night is pretty good tonight - will have to make some tough choices or be handy with the remote. 8:00pm Big Brother CBS - Who gets the boot? 8:30pm The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer TCM - The always dapper Cary Grant squares off against a frigid but hot Myrna Loy and avoids the attentions of a grown up and horny Shirley Temple - a classic. 10:00pm Mad Men AMC - This is the...

In what the Wall Street crowd might call a flight to quality, North American audiences made nose-dived 65% after an auspicious opening, adding 25.6 million to run its total to 128.5 million.

Man, didn't you just love "Freaks and Geeks"? Weren't you pissed when it got cancelled, almost as pissed as you were when they cancelled "Arrested Development"? Or, if you discovered it post-axe, weren't you pissed there was only one season to savor on DVD? But then The Forty-Year-Old Virgin came out and was really funny and did really well at the box office, and you were still pissed about "Freaks and Geeks", but at...

At long last, little Judd Apatow is becoming a man. It all seems like it went by so fast- first his middle/high school days (Freaks and Geeks), then college (Undeclared), and who could forget when he lost his virginity? Well, the boy is finally settling down, via the new and hysterical Knocked Up.

The plucky underdogs are front and center this weekend during a brief break between the summer sequel heavyweights. They’ll be trying to steal what little bit of box office they can post-Pirates, pre-Ocean. Have to move fast though, Clooney and his Ocean’s crew seduce your ticket dollars next week with their sensitive eyes, well-tailored suits and charmingly witty speech-cadence. Knocked Up - Seth Rogen accidentally impregnates Katherine Heigl during a one-night-stand (I should be...

I could write a movie review of Knocked Up -- and maybe I still will -- but it will just be a long list of hilarious moments (there's the part where he does this one thing... and then she says this other thing...) in a movie overflowing with hilarity. Trust me on this: you will walk out of the movie floating on fluffly pink cloud of funny-ness, and I don't want to spoil a second...

A Word or 76: Finale-fest tonight! Enjoy now because re-runs and other sub-par programming is all we have on the horizon. Tonight - Tuesday - May 22, 2007 Brewers @ Dodgers (PRIME, 7:00 p.m.) Angels @ Tigers (Fox Sports, 7:30 p.m.) NCIS (CBS, 8:00 p.m.) The team's secrets unravel Dateline NBC (NBC, 8:00 p.m.) Author John Grisham discusses wrongful murder case The Bachelor: Officer and a Gentleman (ABC, 8:00 p.m.) The fiancee is chosen(!)...

      

Last night the Mann Village theater in Westwood hosted the premiere of writer Judd Apatow's latest comedy, Knocked Up. The movie is hilarious! From start to finish. And worth watching multiple times. But we'll save the review for another day.

It looks super funny.

TUESDAY