It’s been a long time coming, but it looks like the reigning king of crass-geekdom, Kevin Smith (Dogma, Zach and Miri Make a Porno, this year’s Cop Out,) may finally be painting the state red! Smith has long been talking about a project named Red State which has, so far, only existed as an unproduced script written by Smith himself. Now, according to his Twitter page, the writer/director may start filming the horror flick before his expected next film, the hockey comedy Hit Somebody.

Smith posted via his Twitter:

I talk about lots of stuff I wanna do that either happens years later or never happens at all. Happy to report RED STATE is not the latter. First draft was dated 9/5/07. Looks like we start shooting this July. Took nearly three years, but we’re finally gonna roll on RED.

A lot of controversy has surrounded the project, which centers on a town run by a maniacal religious leader modeled after the head of a hateful band of  lunatics known as the Westboro Baptist Church.

According to Smith, the film will not resemble most other horror movies, and he expects that many people will not really consider it a horror film at all.

It’s weird because for a few months I’ve been saying ‘horror movie’ and technically it is, but it’s also not a very traditional horror movie in the sense that people have been asking me, ‘Is it a slasher movie? Is it like the Japanese horror flicks?’ It’d be much easier to just show it to them when I’m done and be like, ‘This is what I meant.’ At which point I’m sure there will be people saying, ‘This ain’t a horror movie!’ But to me, it is.”

The controversy hovering around the film’s subject matter has been the main reason that funding has been hard to come by, and there is no real word yet on who will be shelling out the money for a movie that has every reason to not pay off at the box office. Either way, this project has been very important to Smith for a few years and I can’t wait to see how he pulls it off and what kind of reaction it incites.

I must confess, I’m rather intrigued by Kevin Smith’s Cop Out. How, exactly, did a big budget movie with a roster of talent like this end up so terrible?  Willis looks sad, bored and tired, Morgan bops and babbles like he’s full of Ketamines, and Kevin Smith doesn’t even seem to have been on the set. Many have been buzzing about the director’s weight fiasco last week, but I say cut the guy some slack. It’s really his new movie that’s the fat, bloated slob.

Where do we begin and who’s to blame? Probably everyone, but as is usually the case, we could start with the script. I’m not the world’s biggest Smith fan, but the trouble starts here with the fact he didn’t write this one himself. I’m not actually sure anyone wrote it, despite the fact we have names in the credits. It feels like they filmed a series of notes scrawled on the back of a coaster at Chili’s by a bunch of guys drunkenly rehashing half-remembered buddy cop movies. In the places where there were memorable chase scenes and witty comaraderie, they just filled it in with actors flashing guns at the camera and Tracey Morgan waxing poetic about his bowel condition.

One is tempted to point an accusing finger at the tired, old formula, but that would be silly. The formula works and it has given us a number of good entries like the Lethal Weapon movies, Rush Hour, and Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang (yea, I know they weren’t technically cops). Cop Out just doesn’t seem to understand the formula, and as a result it flails about aimlessly trying to find something to hold onto.

The basics are here; Willis is a divorced cop whose struggling with his teenage daughter, estranged wife and her smarmy second husband. Morgan is his partner, and as the plot requires, also a sassy black man. The potentially interesting twist, that he’s also frightfully insecure about his wife’s fidelity, is smashed into pieces and emerges as the film’s most clueless and wrong-headed attempt at comedy.

The two of them end up embarking on a series of misadventures (or is it misfires?) that pit them against a Latino druglord, an annoying cat burglar who practices Parkour, and the typically beautiful woman on the run from the bad guys. We get scenes of the police chief chastizing their methods and taking their badges, Willis smiling coyly and firing his gun haphazardly in the general direction of the perps, and an extra added bonus involving Morgan tailing a suspect on a kid’s bike while wearing a giant cellphone costume. Hardy har-har.

The cast is surprisingly flat and bland. None of them bring any of what we expect to the table. I usually like Willis, whether he’s going daftly over-the-top (The Fifth Element) or building subtle nuance into his characters (The Sixth Sense). But here, he doesn’t seem to be playing anything. He just stands there, looking forlorn and waiting for Die Hard 5 to pick him up at the bus stop so he can leave the movie. Sean William Scott shows up as the thief, and he’s beyond annoying; he’s mind numbing.  He tries to make that old “guy repeats everything the others say” routine feel like it wasn’t shuttled off the preschool playground. Obviously, he fails. Michelle Trachtenberg as Willis’ daughter and  Rashida Jones as Morgan’s wife are just wasted pretty faces. The villain of the piece is so eye rollingly bad in his role, I’d feel bad singling the actor out. The only one really trying here is Tracey Morgan.

That’s right. Tracey gives the movie his all. He’s approaching the role not as an actor examining a character but as a star trying to outshine the rest of the film. He screams, he smirks, he rails on and on with jokes that weren’t funny when they started, and if the movie had continued I’m perfectly confident he would have eventually donned a tophat, played the kazoo and started moonwalking next to Willis.

I think Morgan can be funny when he has someone who knows how to channel and direct his brand of comedic energy, but here, stranded alone with Willis on lunch break, he goes overboard. The result is like watching a man courageously save a woman from drowning and try to pump air back into her lungs while everyone else watching can see all too clearly she’s long dead.

Finally, there’s Kevin Smith. I cannot see a single mark of his style, humor, or instinct anywhere on this picture. The friend I saw this with commented “If I didn’t know better I’d just assume this was some other Kevin Smith”. He’s right, for as much as it matters to the final result, C.More Butts could have directed this movie; it’s cookie cutter all the way.

There’s really not much more to say. This is a complete failure, albeit there are one or two jokes that almost hit the mark. Worst of all, you could substitute all the collaboraters with unknowns and the result would be the same.  I went into this movie curious, wondering what a cop comedy starring Willis and Morgan  and directed by Smith would look like. Strangely, I’m still wondering.

Rating: ★½☆☆☆ 

Good and bad news for fans of director Kevin Smith: he’s got a couple of projects in the works. If you’re a fan of Smith’s, this should be good news, so what’s the bad? Smith is going in a different direction than what we’ve all grown used to.

When Kevin Smith released Jersey Girl in 2004, he veered drastically from the type of films that had given him a name in film-making. From movies that centered their comedic value around sarcasm, crassness, and marijuana, Smith went to the opposite extreme, giving audiences sweet, yet fairly drab, family comedy. His subsequent films, Clerks II and Zack and Miri Make a Porno, while not quite the caliber of his first films, seemed like Smith was making a return to his former style. But alas, it was not to be.

Instead, Smith is working on a buddy cop flick, A Couple of Dicks, and Hit Somebody, about a guy trying to fulfill his dream as a professional hockey player through brute force. Smith has also finally gotten the funding to go ahead with Red State, a horror film he’s been discussing for the last 2 years. All told, this is definitely not the type of content we’d expect from Smith, who admits the films don’t fall into his usual m.o.

Time will tell if Kevin Smith can successfully make the transition to a different style, but one things for certain: good-bye to Jay and Silent Bob.

According to MTV Movies Blog, Moviehole’s older rumor about 80s action hero Bruce Willis’ cameo in The Expendables was in fact true. Willis’ old friend Sylvester Stallone is directing the action film, which hearkens back to a golden era of disposable action movies and testosterone-fueled rampages.

While Willis is currently shooting A Couple of Dicks with Kevin Smith, he has reportedly opened up his schedule for filming a cameo alongside actors such as Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Jason Statham, and Randy Couture. Interestingly, it appears that Willis’ scene will be unique to the film and also involve one name that’s been shouted since the film began production: Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Terminator, John McClane, and Rambo saddling up alongside each other for one last mission? I can almost smell the poorly cooked Planet Hollywood food wafting through the air.

The Expendables is scheduled for release in April of 2010.

Longtime resident of the View Askew Universe, Jason Lee, will have a role in Kevin Smith’s upcoming buddy-cop film A Couple of Dicks.

Fuzzy

According to /Film, the Clerks director revealed that the star of the now canceled sitcom My Name is Earl, will have an undetermined role in the movie.

Lee has starred in some of Smith’s earlier films including Mallrats (my personal favorite –screw you if you don’t like it), Chasing Amy, Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

A Couple of Dicks stars Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis as a couple of longtime LAPD detectives who track down a priceless, mint-condition, 1952 baseball card that was stolen by a “memorabilia-obsessed gangster.” The film also stars Nacho Libre and Mexican TV star, the lovely Ana de la Reguera.

Written by TV scribes Robb and Marc Cullen, the movie drops February 26, 2010.

Brody's one of the other Dicks.

Kevin Smith, popular director of films from Clerks to Zack & Miri Make A Porno, got himself some dicks for his latest movie. Properly titled A Couple of Dicks, this flick is a comedy about two cops whose adventures include locating a stolen baseball card, rescuing a woman, and dealing with gangsters and their laundered money. Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan are both already locked on top play the two main cops, while Adam Brody (In The Land of Women) is set to be another detective none too pleased working alongside the two. Sean William Scott (Role Models) plays the ‘Shit Bandit’, a thief who’s well known for leaving ‘souvenirs’ at the scene of his crimes.

All tied up within the obvious View Askew Pictures, Marc Platt Productions & Warner Bros Pictures who seems to be attached to every other decent picture out nowadays, A Couple of Dicks will come out in theaters everywhere on February 26th 2010. Filming is already slated to begin at the start of next week.

Someone once told me it’s impossible for men and women to be friends. It just is. There’s always the inherent possibility of sex happening somewhere down the line, I guess, so every male/female friendship isn’t really friendship, it’s just a booty call that hasn’t been dialed yet.

Zack and Miri (short for Miriam, natch) are male and female lifelong friends who, even by living together and sharing expenses, struggle to get by. Neither has a meaningful arelationship, career aspirations, or financial independence. Their easy solution: go to their high school reunion, where Miri can hook up with rich Bobby Long (played by Christopher Reeve-lookalike Brandon Routh), who can help pay off her debts. As Miri hits on him (and rather pathetically), Zack meets Bobby’s, um, boyfriend, played by a throaty-sounding Justin Long. Zack introduces Miri to the boyfriend, who, of course, is crushed. Bobby’s fortune is actually the result of his work in gay porn films, which he’d managed to keep secret until his boyfriend causes a scene during the reunion.

When Zack and Miri return home, they find out that their overdue bills have finally caught up with them – the power is turned off, and the water is shut off. As they sit in a bar to enjoy the complimentary electricity, they wonder what they can do for money…

… and Zack, of course, suggests making a porno.

And of course, the name of the film gives the plot development away, and the duo begin putting together a film. They find a financial backer (Zack’s friend and co-worker who was saving for a giant TV), a set, costumes, and they even cast actual actors to appear in the film. Their idea? Star Whores: a pornographic re-imagining of the film Star Wars. Original, right?

Of course, what happens from there is the real meat of the film (wow, no pun intended, seriously), and it centers around the possibility of feelings between Zack and Miri. The problem, though, is that at times, the film does a really great job of creating actual chemistry between the leads, and with the rest of the cast. Yes, that’s a problem. If it was a simple horny comedy that didn’t rely on empathy, we’d have a simple series of gags and body parts, and we’d be set. But, when this film relies on said empathy creation to carry it – it works. It’s just that the film can’t decide if it wants to be the surprisingly touching film that happens to be about making a porno, or if it wants to be the simple horny comedy that has a weak subplot about unrealized love. There are just too many scenes that really feel like the actors are reading their lines robotically from cue cards. It’s fascinating – the scenes that come off flat and fail to generate emotion happen in one scene, and as we transition to another setting, then they somehow remembered how to act. It creates such an unbalanced, uneven feel, that it’s hard to connect with the film, and it gets a little frustrating. This is really obvious at the end, with tacked on speeches about true love and all that jazz, and it just flops. I feel like I have to blame this entirely on director Kevin Smith, because I know he can do better.

It’s not a terrible film, not by any means. I did genuinely enjoy it. But it just has too many holes (NOT A PUN), and too many failings to be anything memorable. Whenever it does something right, and manages to seem clever, it immediately defeats itself with a horrible one-liner or bad acting.

Lightly recommended for Smith or Rogen fans.

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆ 

Thanks to those hooked up folks over at MySpace for releasing a very tame version of the redband trailer for the upcoming Kevin Smith film Zack and Miri make a Porno. From the early reviews of the film, one from us, the show is a must see, laugh out loud comedy. Of couse full of all kinds of sexual inuendoes.

This film has garnered a pretty big following already due to the media stink it has created in its advertising. Some states are not allowing the advertising with the word “Porno” in it. Of course I hope you checked out our Halloween Costumes of Zack and Miri here.

Zack and Miri make a Porno debuts in theaters October 31st. Check back here for the review early Friday morning, or if you will forget – sign up for our newsfeed up in the upper corner of the site.