film babble blog: Bill Hader

Showing posts with label Bill Hader. Show all posts

Friday, May 20, 2016

THE ANGRY BIRDS MOVIE: Not Bad For A Movie Based On An App

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

THE ANGRY BIRDS MOVIE
(Dir. Clay Kaytis & Fergal Reilly, 2016)

Now, I’ve never played Angry Birds, the biggest selling mobile app ever, so I can't offer any comparisons, but I can say that Sony Pictures Imageworks’ new 3D animated comedy based on the game actually isn’t bad – for a movie based on an app that is.

That’s probably because I was expecting it to be crap. It looked like yet another dumb, brightly colored kids cartoon crammed with celebrity voices primed to sell a lot of toys and kick off another useless franchise.

Well, yeah, that’s what it is, but the voice cast’s energy is appealing and a surprising number of the jokes hit their mark. This is largely due to Jason Sudeikis as the protagonist Red, a puffy cardinal with Eugene Levy-esque eyebrows. Sudeikis’ sharp ultra sarcastic delivery keeps the laughs, or at least the mild chuckles, coming.

Set on an island paradise populated entirely by happy, flightless birds, Red is an orphaned outcast whose temper lands him in an anger management class where he begrudgingly bonds with a fast yellow bird named Chuck (voiced by Josh Gad), and a beefy black bird named Bomb (Danny McBride), who literally explodes if he gets too upset. Also in the class is a large red fowl named Terence, who’s voiced by the biggest name here, Sean Penn, but don’t get too excited about the Oscar winner’s presence here as his dialogue is all low grunts and growls.

Suddenly a ship with a few green pigs shows up in the bay, with their bearded leader named Leonard (Sudeikis' SNL buddy Bill Hader) announcing to the bird community that they come in peace from Piggy Island (I guess every animal has their own island in this world). Red doesn’t trust the pigs, mainly because the anchor of their ship crushed his beachfront house, but he’s overruled and the pigs and birds have a big celebration featuring a cowboy show that’s a transparent excuse to showcase a Blake Shelton pop country single recorded exclusively for the soundtrack. Cha-ching!

Unable to convince the others that the pigs are dangerous, Red, Chuck, and Bomb decide to seek out Mighty Eagle, said to be the protector of the island, who lives on the treacherous peak of Bird Mountain. Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage voices Mighty Eagle and gets to sing his own theme song, but the joke that the character is a washed-up has been of a hero is a predictably lame cliché – add that to the film’s clunkers.

When the pigs steal the birds’ eggs and head back home, the feathered islanders realize that Red was right and that the only way for them to get even is to get mad. So they build a boat and sail to Piggy Island to wage war and get back their babies. This involves a ginormous slingshot that flings the birds one by one at the pigs’ city which I am guessing is like the game.

The directorial debut of a couple of longtime animators, Clay Kaytis and Fergal Reilly, THE ANGRY BIRDS MOVIE is far from great, and I cringed at many gags (especially some of the surprising instances of gross-out humor), but Jon Vitti’s screenplay has a fair amount of fine comic invention so I believe I laughed more than I winced. Vitti is a veteran of some high quality comic efforts, having written for The Simpsons, The Larry Sanders Show, and SNL, but he’s also one of the scribes behind the ALVIN AND THE CHIPMONK fiascos so that icky sensibility must be factored in as well.

So there you have it, an animated 3D feature based on a mobile phone game that makes for a throwaway matinee.

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Friday, July 17, 2015

Judd Apatow Makes Amy Schumer A Movie Star In TRAINWRECK

Opening today at a multiplex near you:

TRAINWRECK (Dir. Judd Apatow, 2015)

In his fifth feature, TRAINWRECK, Judd Apatow gives comedienne and Comedy Central star Amy Schumer her first starring role, and he let her write the movie too.

This is a first for Apatow as he wrote or co-wrote his previous films (THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, KNOCKED UP, FUNNY PEOPLE, and THIS IS 40) but his confidence in Schumer’s filthy, feminist brand of comedy shines through, maybe a little too much, as like with all of his other movies, it could’ve been edited down considerably.

Schumer plays New Yorker Amy (no last name given), a writer for S'Nuff, a snotty men’s magazine run by an eccentrically unhinged editor-in-chief hilariously portrayed by an almost unrecognizable Tilda Swinton.

In a cold opening/flashback, we learn that Amy was taught by her father (longtime comic Colin Quinn in his best screen role) that “monogamy doesn’t work,” so we learn up front why her life consists of a series of one night stands. In her voice-over narration she tells us that she is actually seeing somebody – a lughead body builder played by WWE superstar John Cena – but, of course, not exclusively.

After getting dumped by Cena when he finds out, Amy surprises herself by developing actual feelings for a sports doctor (ex-Saturday Night Live cast member Bill Hader) she’s assigned to do a story on. However, initially she treats it like just another one night stand.

Hader, in one of his most grounded in reality roles, winningly keeps up with Schumer’s wisecracks. Their courtship is convincing, even when we can see the conflicts that will have them breaking up from a mile away.

The New York setting is another first for Apatow, but as expected he fills it with a bunch of recognizable faces like Dave Attell as a homeless guy that lives outside Amy’s apartment building, SNL’s Vanessa Bayer as one of her co-workers, current indie “it” girl Brie Larson as her settled down sister , Mike Birbiglia as Larson’s husband (Schumer was in comic Birbiglia’s SLEEPWALK WITH ME), and Ezra Miller (PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER) as an eager young intern at the magazine.

But most notably there’s LeBron James as a version of himself, one of Hader’s patients, who does his amusingly droll spin on the advice giving best friend.

Schumer and Apatow embrace many rom com tropes here, mostly taken from the ANNIE HALL rulebook. The twist is that usually it’s the male who’s the commitment-phobe who has to make the climatic mad dash to win back their love when they finally realize what they want.

We know Schumer’s boozy, pot-smoking, slutty character will be redeemed by the end, but the question is are there enough laughs along the way to make it worthwhile?

The answer is yes – there are a lot of genuinely funny moments throughout TRAINWRECK, but, as I mentioned before, it’s longer than it should be. It clocks in at just over 2 hours, when this material could’ve been shaped into a tidy 90 minutes – the ideal length for a comedy imho.

It’s like they couldn’t bear to cut anything that got a laugh out. In the aforementioned mad dash, they even work in a subway cameo by SNL’s Leslie Jones. It is funny, but it’s got “deleted scene” for a latter Blu ray/DVD release written all over it. So does a lot of shtick here (most of the Cena stuff should've been cut - no offense, Mr. Wrestling Champion).

But the best stuff is comedy gold, and there’s a warm and touching undercurrent to the proceedings. Schumer’s exchanges with Hader, Larson, and especially Quinn as her ailing father help flesh out that feeling.

TRAINWRECK will make Schumer fans happy (I'm one and I left the theater smiling), while turning a lot of newcomers into fans. It’s as flawed as its protagonist, but it brings the funny again and again and that’s way more important.

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Friday, June 19, 2015

Pixar’s INSIDE OUT Pulls Every Heartstring There Is

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

INSIDE OUT
(Dirs. Pete Docter & Ronaldo Del Carmen, 2015)

Pixar’s entry into this year’s summer event movie sweepstakes is one of the trusty animation studios’ most purely pleasurable productions.

Its strengths are many: it’s not another sequel, it has an incredibly solid comic cast headed by Amy Poehler, it’s a dazzling display of colorful concepts, it has the right amount of light, the right amount of darkness, it’s hilarious, it’s heartfelt, and it has a much better female-centric scenario than BRAVE.

Most of INSIDE OUT takes place inside the psyche of an 11-year old girl named Riley, voiced by Kaitlyn Dais. We learn right off the bat that there are five emotions behind the control panel of Riley’s mind: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear, which are respectively personified by Poehler, Phyllis Smith (best known as Phyllis from The Office), Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling (another Office alumni), and Bill Hader (Poehler’s former SNL co-star).

When Riley and her parents (voiced by Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) move from Minnesota to San Francisco, Sadness starts to affect her core memories (represented by glowing orbs which are gathered on shelves in a vast long-term storage library). These core memories power personality islands – i.e. essential components of Riley’s identity – with names like Friendship Island, Hockey Island, Goofball Island, and Honesty Island, which are connected to the central control room via thin bridges.

Joy tries to stop a sad core memory of Riley crying in front of her class on the first day at her new school from becoming part of her being, but ends up getting sucked with Sadness, and other core memories, through a vacuum tube and deposited into the far reaches of the ever-growing more despondent girl’s mind.

So Joy and Sadness have to make their way back to headquarters, which is faltering due to Anger, Disgust, and Fear being in charge. Joy and Sadness journey through realms such as the Center for Abstract Thinking, Imagination Land, and Dream Production, but most significantly they encounter Riley’s long forgotten imaginary friend, Bing Bong, adorably voiced by Richard Kind.

Bing Bong, a hot pink hybrid of elephant, cat, and dolphin outfitted with a porkpie hat and bowtie, who cries hard candy, is eager to help the stranded emotions get back by way of the Train of Thought though Riley’s subconscious. Meanwhile, the identity islands are collapsing, and Anger plants the idea to have Riley run away back to Minnesota in a misguided attempt to fix things.

Poehler brings a can-do gusto to her lead role of Joy that would make her Parks and Recreation character Leslie Knope proud, while Smith’s Sadness gets to do more than just amusingly mope through – her developmental arc is key. The remaining emotions have their funny moments, especially Black’s red hot Anger, whose concern for learning curse words is a great running gag. I wouldn’t have minded more of Kaling and Hader’s takes on Disgust and Fear, but maybe less really is more.

As for the outside of Riley, Lane and MacLachlan provide a grounded parental presence – we get to see inside their heads in one of the film’s funniest scenes – that we see in flashes as being as stressed in adjusting to the move as their daughter. Dias does a good job as the everygirl Riley, wonderfully capturing the awkwardness, confusion, and pain that any kid and adult can relate to.

INSIDE OUT is on par with the best of Pixar. It maybe doesn’t scale the heights of Docter’s previous masterpiece UP, but that it gets so close is reason to rejoice. Its screenplay, courtesy of Docter, Josh Cooley, and Meg LeFauve, definitely re-establishes the studio's high standards of humor, invention, and emotional pull that had gotten a little misplaced in one too many sequels (that one being CARS 2).

As usual, the obligatory 3D presentation didn’t do much for me, but I was glad that I had the glasses on throughout as they helped to hide how much I kept tearing up. Consider every heartstring pulled.

More later...

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Bill Hader And Kristen Wiig Excel As THE SKELETON TWINS

Now playing at an indie art house near me:

THE SKELETON TWINS

(Dir. Craig Johnson, 2014)

Former Saturday Night Live cast member Bill Hader has been in dozens of movies since 2006, but other than voicing the lead character in the CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS movies, most have been bit parts with credits like “Man at Store” or “Recumbent Biker” or brief cameos.

Now Hader gets to carry a film in the flesh, along with co-star (and former SNL collegue) Kristen Wiig, in Craig Johnson’s second feature film THE SKELETON TWINS opening today at an indie art house near me.

Hader and Wiig star as Milo and Maggie, a couple of long estranged twins who get back in touch after both coincidentally attempt suicide on the same day. So yeah, it’s a darkly comic drama.

Wiig’s Maggie invites her brother to stay with her and her husband (Luke Wilson in “bro mode”) at their Nyack, New York home, until he can get back on his feet after being hospitalized for slashing his wrists (her attempt involving almost taking an overdose of pills she keeps secret).

Despite Wilson’s super nice guy demeanor, Wiig has been sleeping with others (most recently her douche scuba instructor played by Boyd Holbrook), and is taking birth control pills while her husband thinks they’re trying to have a baby. Again, this is info she keeps to herself so that she can seem to be the stable sister, while she treats her brother like a “special needs kid,” as Hader’s Milo puts it.

Meanwhile Hader purposely runs into his former high school English teacher (Modern Fmaily’s Ty Burrell in a neatly nuanced performance), now working at a bookstore. Burrell, a conflicted, closeted man, had seduced Hader when he was his student and lost his job over the inappropriate relationship.

One of the most amusing sequences in the film concerns Johanna Gleason, a veteran of a few Woody Allen films and just about every sitcom in the last 30 years, as Hader and Wiig’s mother, a neglectful mother turned New Age guru, being invited for dinner by Hader to Wiig’s chagrin. The twins’ father had committed suicide when they were 14, and their mother appears to have checked out of parenting as a result. This makes for a realistically edgy and awkward, as well as wickedly funny, dinner scene that anybody with tension in their family can relate to.

Another standout scene has Hader and Wiig clowning around on nitrous oxide at the dental office she works at. Their SNL training most prepared them for this bit, which proves that a comedy drama about suicide can effectively fit in fart jokes.

It’s a joy to see this very believable brother and sister pairing come together to lip synch and dance to Starship’s “Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now,” even if you can’t stand the song, and when they fight towards the end of the film – really taking it all out at each other – their acting is so sharp that I felt like I was violating their privacy watching them.

Hader has shown time and time again that he’s a first class impressionist, and a reliably goofy presence in many projects, but his performance as Milo is a career best that shows the layers of depth the actor has to share. It recalls his former SNL co-star Will Forte’s fine dramatic work in NEBRASKA last year, and makes me want to see more of these funny folks try on more serious roles.

Wiig has carried movies before - most notably her breakthrough 2010 comedy smash BRIDESMAIDS – but this may be my favorite of her screen roles. Wiig’s Maggie is a sad mess of a human being, as screwed up as her brother (possibly more even) that has a real feeling sense of humor, but the worried look in her eyes gives her inner torment away. Her character’s turns late in the film are heartbreaking, and a little hard to watch, but Wiig movingly pulls it off beautifully.

THE SKELETON TWINS is a well made, well written (it well deserved the Screenwriting Award that director Johnson and co-writer Mark Heyman won at Sundance), and extremely well acted film that may very well make my top 10 list of the year’s best. It’s also the most emotionally charged movie starring a couple of SNL cast members since…well, ever.

More later...

Friday, September 27, 2013

Cloudy With A Chance Of More Of The Same

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2
(Dir. Cody Cameron & Kris Pearn, 2013)

I’m not much of a fan of Sony Pictures Animation. If DreamWorks Animation is second to the mighty Pixar these days, then Sony Pictures Animation is a distant third. Still, I kind of liked CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS, their 2009 adaptation of a popular children’s book from the late '70s.

I just recently caught up with it and found it to be a colorfully feisty blend of funny gags, and inventive visuals, with a great cast of voices headed by SNL’s Bill Hader. It was a hit with most critics and audiences too.

But its inevitable follow-up, releasing today everywhere, is such a standard-issue sequel that it seems to take seriously what Mad Magazine called “the Sly Stallone philosophy: If at first you DO succeed, do it over and over and over again!”

Hader returns to voice protagonist Flint Lockwood, the scruffy inventor who in the first film wrecked havoc upon his tiny fictional island hometown Swallow Falls with a machine that converts rain into food.

The sequel begins right after the first one ended with the island of Swallow Falls in need of a massive clean-up, as Flint and his new squeeze, TV weather girl in waiting, Sam Sparks (energetically voiced by the returning Anna Farris) start planning their future involving sharing an ultra customized house together. But then in swoops famous inventor and CEO of Live Corp, the Steve Jobs-ish Chester V (voiced by Hader’s former SNL cohort Will Forte) who offers Flint a dream job at his company in California.

It’s obvious up front that Chester has sinister purposes in mind involving the food polluted island of Swallow Falls, and the unveiling of his company’s new Food Bar 8.0, but Flint accepts the offer and he and his crew, including James Caan reprising his roles as Flint’s father, the also returning Baby Brent (another former SNL-er, Andy Samberg), Sam’s cameraman Manny (Benjamin Bratt), and policeman Earl (Terry Crews in place of Mr. T for some reason), relocate to San Fran Jose, California.

This is where screenwriters John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, and Erica Rivinoja (none of whom worked on the first one) get to use a bunch of discarded jokes from the first one – wacky invention ideas that didn’t make the cut according to the original's DVD commentary – until Flint is called upon by Chester to revisit his home island because the water-into-food machine is still causing trouble.

You see, what they’ve got now to top the perfect food storm of the first one is here to make the food come alive - “foodimals” Flint calls them - so there’s no shortage of animal/food crossover gags to go around.

So Flint and his friends make their way through the island of cheese spiders (giant cheese burgers with French fry legs and hundreds of sinister sesame-seed eyes), shrimpanzees, hungry tacodile supremes, peanut butter and jellyfish mosquitoasts, watermelophants, apple pie-thons, and all other kinds of cringe-worthy pun creations so that they can stop Flint’s machine from making more of these sentient beasts.

This allows for JURASSIC PARK-style sweeping shots of the land of the living food, something they apparently can't resist doing over and over.

Many of the same jokes from the first one are repeated, and the ultimate decision Flint has to make between obeying Chester to advance his career or going with his friends, who have started to form connections with the foodimals, is a halfhearted attempt to give the film some moral depth when you know it cares more about getting cheap laughs.

I giggled slightly a few times, but mostly stared at this sequel as it was fussily trying too hard to be funny and exciting at every turn. A running gag about Chester’s use of holograms gets increasingly annoying, especially as it figures heavily in the big climax set in a massive floating food fortress.

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 will probably satisfy hardcore fans of the first one for being more of the same. And, of course, kids who haven’t formed much in the way of critical thinking will probably dig it too. As for me, I got a nice meal of a movie the first time at the plate, but I feel overstuffed and a bit queasy after this round of sloppy seconds.

More later...

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Late 80's Amusement Park Blues

ADVENTURELAND (Dir. Greg Mottola, 2009)

Greg Mottola's follow-up to the hilarious and touching SUPERBAD immediately announces its thematic stance with The Replacements anthem of adolescent angst "Bastards Of Young" blaring at the very beginning. In 1987 Pittsburgh, Jesse Eisenberg (THE SQUID AND THE WHALE) is indeed the "mess on the ladder of success" that song wailed on as he finds that his parents have cancelled his dream trip to Europe due to his father being transferred at work. After failing to find anything close to upscale work, Eisenberg gets a summer job working game booths at Adventureland - a garrish amusement park so cheap one risks being fired if they give away prizes such as stuffed giant Pandas simply because they're running out of them. Eisenberg falls for a co-worker (Kristen Stewart of TWILIGHT) while suffering daily indignities such as ridicule from his former best friend (Matt Bush) who has a penchant for decking him in the crotch and almost being knifed by a redneck father for one of the prized "big ass" Pandas.

Luckily Eisenberg has a few things that help him get through this. He is given a bag of joints by a yuppie friend (Michael Zegen) who actually gets to go on his summer vacation, he befriends Martin Starr (Freaks And Geeks) as a burnt out carnie and confides about his crush on Stewart with a laid back Ryan Reynolds, a handyman who is semi-legendary in the park because he supposedly jammed with Lou Reed. Reed appears in the almost wall-to-wall mix of 70's and 80's music that blankets every scene lovingly. Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" seems to never stop playing on the park's PA system but the likes of well chosen Big Star, Crowded House, Velvet Underground, Hüsker Dü, New York Dolls, and Bowie cuts that fill out the soundtrack more than make up for that.

The appearance of SNL's Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as Eisenberg's bosses made me expect a broader and definitely wackier movie but the wack has been held back in favor of character development over crude jokes - though there are a few. A number of narrative threads aren't fully fleshed out; there seems to have been stuff cut from the parents' (Jack Gilpin and Wendy Mallick) story and Reynolds just has the bare bones of an identity yet he still slickly glides through. Eisenberg is likable in his Michael Cera-like awkwardness even when he performs some cringe worthy actions such as taking the park's lusted after Lisa P (Margarita Levieva ) for a date on the side. There aren't big laughs; just a steady stream of snickers but enough to keep me smiling throughout. It's apt for a film set in the late 80's about coming of age in the era post Pacman and pre Beavis And Butt-head that it has a heart more akin to John Hughes than Judd Apatow. A comic valentine to a plastic but palpable time, ADVENTURELAND is a good, not great, ride. Post note: New Jersey Indie rock heroes Yo La Tengo scored the film and contributed a track called "Leaving Adventureland" which plays over the end credits and is well worth a download. It's Yo La Tengo instrumental dreaminess at its best. More later...

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Finally Catching Up With FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL (Dir. Nicholas Stoller, 2008)

This is one I really wish I had seen when it came to theaters last spring. The raving reviews and accolades have piled up so much that by this point it can’t possibly be as funny as all that, can it? Almost comparable to the hype of THE DARK KNIGHT being immediately called one of the greatest films ever, this got an instant comedy classic stamp on it and I’ve seen it appear on several premature “best of 2008” so, yeah, my expectations couldn’t help from hitting the ceiling.

Well, after watching it on DVD I can say that it definitely was far from a letdown with many laughs and likable characters though not exactly the experience Richard Roeper gushed about: “I want to just get down on my knees and declare my undying love for this movie”. Boston Globe critic Ty Burr also seemed a bit over the top when he wrote: “it delivers belly laughs that explode from the meeting of wit and shock”. But to be honest, I believe that if I had seen it on its original release I probably would’ve gotten carried away and might have said some similar things too.

Sure, it has a flimsy sitcom premise – boy loses girl, boy goes on Hawaiian vacation in order to get over girl, boy runs into girl with her new boyfriend who happen to be staying at the same resort, crude wackiness ensues etc. but the whole deal is as affable as its protagonist. The boy is Jason Segel whose persona as a hapless schmuck he began perfecting on the late great one seasoner Freaks And Geeks.

He’s an LA musician who writes incidental music for a CSI-derived TV drama starring his girlfriend (Kristen Bell). Bell tells him that their 5 year relationship is over in a scene that sets the tone by featuring Segel refusing to put clothes on as his heart breaks: “Oh, would you like to pick out the outfit that you break up with me in?!!?” Segel, who wrote the screenplay, appears to have no shame portraying a guy who feels nothing but shame as he cries in the nude and shakes uncontrollably in emotional pain while eating from an oversized bowl of cereal.

After some comic consoling by his best friend (SNL’s Bill Hader who spends most of the film as a head on a laptop) he makes that fateful trip to one of the world’s most famous vacation spots and, yep, he has to face his former love in the arms of a major pop star played by the sleazily charming Brit Russell Brand.

Luckily there’s Mila Kunis (That 70’s Show, voice of Meg Griffin on Family Guy) as a flirting hotel clerk that may be the key to helping him recover (you think?), Paul Rudd as a perpetually stoned surfer, Jonah Hill as Matthew the Waiter who is obviously hiding a man crush on Brand, and a Christian newlywed couple (30 Rock’s Jack McBayer and newcomer Taylor Wily) who are definitely not having a good go at consummating their marriage.

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL is another in the series of Judd Apatow produced flicks about pop culture obsessed immature men coping with growing up as they endure a plethora of awkward sexual circumstances - i.e. THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN, KNOCKED UP, and SUPERBAD. It helps that this has a few somewhat plausible female characters and an actual moral code beneath the scatological silliness.

None of things realy matters though as what folks were raving about is simply how freakin’ funny this flick is. It is certainly much funnier than many comedies, especially recent rom coms (a genre this film seems to want to reconstruct by way of ‘just add more dick jokes’) so maybe those people were on to something. But “comedy classic”? Let’s just give it some more time and I'll get back to you.

Post Notes - Bonus Material With A Shout Out:

There is not much difference between the unrated extended version and the theatrical cut on the DVD except for some excised lines and a mildly amusing Kristen Wiig (SNL) yoga class scene.

The gag reel is, like the movie, funnier than most flicks’ flubs while the patented Apatow “line-o-rama” has a lot of great alternate lines like Segel’s reaction to Kunis’s over-reaction to seeing her ex-boyfriend: "You were like David O. Russell when he was yelling at Lily Tomlin!” Jonah Hill has some good unused ones too: “I think it’s cool though, you just come and eat dinner by yourself. I wouldn’t do it, I would rather stay in the room and jerk it, if you know what I’m saying? Don’t tell anybody I said that.”

The shout-out goes to the great barely known comic actor Bill Hader who was in a couple of other possible future comedy classics over the last few months.

Though many would classify them as bit parts - his turns as Private Miller in PINEAPPLE EXPRESS and studio executive Rob Slolom in TROPIC THUNDER, which had him hold his own up against Tom Cruise, are great sideline roles. With hope he will get some more substantial film work alongside his current gig at SNL but with projects like NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM 2 and something called CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS on his cinematic horizon, I wouldn't hold my breath.

More later...