‘Schmucks’ is chock full of screwball characters masquerading as normal and an oddly unhealthy love of dead mice.  Still it has to be one of the funniest films I’ve seen this summer.  Steve Carell, Paul Rudd and the rest of the cast deliver!  I needed a good laugh and this film delivered in a gut-busting way.  Be prepared for some unique ranglings amongst a severely ‘off’ group of individuals and that’s just the supposed normal ones.

‘Schmucks’ follows Tim (Paul Rudd – The Shape Of Things), a young executive looking to move up in his big corporate stock brokerage (actually it’s nothing like a stock brokerage).  When the opportunity to rise presents itself, Tim seizes it with a pitch to the big boss on how to snag a new client.  With his move to a higher floor, supposedly better co-workers, and a pat life practically assured, Tim finds out that the catalyst for his eventual promotion is tied to his ability to produce the best guest at a dinner for idiots hosted by the company President.  Whoever can bring the strangest, most perverse friend wins the competition. Through happenstance (witness the dangers of texting and driving), Tim meets Barry (Steve Carell – Bruce Almighty), a recently divorced social pariah who spends his days and nights recovering dead mice and turning them into magnificent frozen works of art.  Barry becomes human fly paper to Tim who wants nothing more than to use him as a means to get his promotion.   A human wrecking ball of spills and calamities, Barry proceeds to reunite Tim with a one-night stand he had years ago with a psychotic  pain loving freak, wreck the delicate relationship Tim has with his current girlfriend, demolish his house and all of this happens before the dinner even takes place.  The dinner itself is a cavalcade of oddities and personalities (none of which I will spoil for you here), that culminates in Tim’s realization of true friendship, what you really want out of life, and just how detailed you can get when creating masterpieces of art…using dead mice.

I got the feeling the cast had a great deal of fun making this film.  Their cohesive nature and sharp timing made for some really great laughs.  As you’d expect, Zach Galifianakis (The Hangover) is in great form.  He seems to be relegated to playing oddball characters but in ‘Schmucks’ it fits with the script and he shines as Therman, the mind controlling IRS agent.  Jemaine Clement (TV’s Flight Of The Conchords) is his HBO character ‘Jemaine’ personified into the form of an artistic neophyte.  With his self indulgent needs of creativity, and self-centered art, it almost seemed a graduation of the character he plays so well in the HBO series.  Another ‘Conchords’ alum, Kristen Schaal (Norbit)  joins the cast as Susana, Tim’s able bodied and pushy assistant.

The film is far from superb, and at times eerie, witness the Swedish couple in the promo’s icy blue eyes.  They almost seemed like ‘pod’ people, and I questioned if anyone from Sweden has eyes of such distinction (I Google’d it…and they do).  Still, it couldn’t ruin a steady stream of laughter throughout the film.  Director Jay Roach (Meet The Parents) notches another great comedy, and box office willing a follow up which will regale us with even more idiot dinners filled with characters just as entertaining and zany.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Atomic Popcorn is proud to present to you, the Baltimorons, a sneak peak at Paramount’s upcoming comedy, DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS, starring Paul Rudd and Steve Carell. We are having a screening on Thursday, July 29th all lined up for and ready to make you pee your pants.

If you have been living under a rock lately and have been avoiding the internet or television like the plague, well you deserve to miss out on this comedy. Make sure you get tickets to this one, this is sure to make your side hurt.

Synopsis:

The comedy, “Dinner for Schmucks,” tells the story of Tim (Paul Rudd), an up-and-coming executive who has just received his first invitation to the “dinner for idiots” – a monthly event hosted by his boss, which promises bragging rights (and maybe more) to the exec who shows up with the biggest buffoon. Tim’s girlfriend, Julie (Stephanie Szostak), finds it distasteful and Tim agrees to skip the dinner, until he bumps into Barry (Steve Carell) an IRS employee who devotes his spare time to building elaborate taxidermy mouse dioramas – and quickly realizes he’s struck idiot gold.  Tim can’t resist, and invites Barry, whose blundering good intentions soon send Tim’s life into a frenzied downward spiral and a series of comic misadventures, threatening a major business deal, bringing a crazy stalker ex-girlfriend, Darla (Lucy Punch), back into Tim’s life and driving Julie (or so Tim thinks) into the arms of another man.

Trailer:

Check out the film’s official trailer at http://www.dinnerforschmucks.com/.

DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS opens in theaters nationwide Friday, July 30!

CLICK HERE FOR YOUR PASS: and enter

ATOMICYMX3 for the RSVP code!

Instructions for the winners:

1. If you haven’t already, you will need to register on Gofobo.com in order to download your passes.
2. Utilizing your Gofobo Code (see above), you can then download your screening pass from the website.

Make sure you check out our other free screenings in the Baltimore and DC Area.

Illumination’s Despicable Me is a wholly enjoyable foray into the same family friendly animation sandbox that Pixar usually plays in. It’s a testament to both Carell’s voice-acting and the gifted work of the art team that Despicable casts off the moniker of rip-off and begins to ascend to the status of equal. It never quite gets there, trading in its frantic, comic set-pieces for some unsuccessful sentiment a bit too soon, but this will do nicely as a fine debut for the fledgling animation studio. 

Carell is voicing the evil super-villain Gru, who yearns more for the status of world’s greatest baddie than he does for any real gleeful destruction.  Toiling for years in relative obscurity (in the basement of his mom’s house no less), always one step away from taking the crown, he’s finally got a plan, hatched with the help of his senile and hilarious inventor, Dr. Nefario and an army of yellow glove-people known only as ‘minions’. Using a shrink ray, Gru plans to steal the moon itself, ambitious even for one so satirically carved from the Bond-esque mold of megalomania. Unfortunately for Gru, the dorky but scheming Vector—his primary competition–steals the weapon and with it all of the ‘old guy’s’ thunder.

Up until this point, the film is soaring along as a kind of milder version of the old Mad Magazine comic strip, Spy Vs. Spy, replacing the more violent bits with a wonderfully playful wit. Julie Andrews voices Gru’s mother, and some of her lines, although hurtful in the context of the story (yes, it has a story!), are both acerbic and hilarious. The artists make Gru a kind of stilt-legged penguin, like the deranged parody of a Batman villain, and the soft-edged, colorful animation technique brings him to a fluid life that works for the bursting personality Carell has prepared for him. Jason Segal skirts the edge of annoyance as Vector, but he’s throwing himself into this so completely, that by the close, he had really grown on me. Extra points for Russell Brand’s Q-like inventor, who’s hitting the comedy button better and more often than Brand’s live-action persona did in the more adult Get Him To The Greek.

Not only borrowing the vibrant and crisp visual palette of a Pixar film, Despicable Me also attempts to duplicate the story depth and emotional heart that many associate with that other studio. For the most part, they succeed, giving Gru more complexity than we could expect or even conceive of, given the basic premise. What doesn’t work so well are the three young orphan girls that enter the story at mid-point. For narrative purposes, this happens because Gru needs some unsuspecting innocents to infiltrate Vector’s home and steal back the shrink ray. Their manifest cuteness and the resulting impact it has on Gru’s soul happens because the movie needs to get away with having a super-villain as the central character in a family film.

The catalyst for Gru’s eventual and obvious conversion, including an in-road to deal with his monster mommy issues, the three young girls are carbon copies of precocious children that would pop up in a lesser animated picture. They don’t capsize the movie, and they give Carrell’s zaniness an opportunity to reflect a gentler, more somber side, but their presence forces Despicable Me down a less despicable path, and as it turns out, less despicable means more boring.

 Illumination nearly hits it out of the park on their first try, and they might have managed a great, nimble comedy surrounding sinister deeds and whiz-bang technology. Instead they try to force a bright concept into a dimmer screenplay than it deserves. The result is akin to almost stealing the moon; you didn’t get away with it, but it is the moon after all, and it’s a grand thing to even attempt.

Rating: ★★★½☆ 

On the last day before closing for the holidays, WME and Industry Entertainment sealed one final deal for the year. Warner Bros. spent nearly $2 million to buy a script by Dan Fogelman, writer of animated pic Cars.

The script is said to have a vibe similar to Love Actually, and follows a father trying to maintain his relationships with his kids in the midst of a marital crisis.

Fogelman wrote the story specifically for The Office star Steve Carell, which is partially responsible for the high price of the script.

Carell is still weighing his options for what his next film will be, so isn’t yet attached to the film as a star, but will serve as producer for the project under his own Carousel banner.

Other possibilities for Carell to take the lead will also be produced by Carousel, with Mail-Order Groom, starring Tina Fey, being a front-runner for Carell. Carell has already been working alongside Fey in the upcoming comedy Date Night, so the two would already be familiar starring with each other.

Catch Carell in next year’s animated film Despicable Me, and with Paul Rudd in next summer’s Dinner for Schmuck’s.

Warner Bros. studios recently picked up the rights to Missing Links, a comedy based on a novel by ESPN magazine columnist Rick Reilly.

The novel tells the story of a group of golfers who get tired of playing the shabby municipal course in their working-class neighborhood, and try to scheme their way to moving up to an elite club instead.

Steve Carell has signed on to produce the film under the Carousel Prods. banner, and is unofficially set to star in Missing Links as well. Jay Lavender, writer of The Break-Up, will be writing the screenplay for the film.

No production details have been revealed yet.

Ron Livingston is the beating heart of Mike Judge’s Office Space, a movie that has transcended cult status and is pretty much one of the finest comedies to be released in the 1990s. He’s also pretty notable for the role of Captain Lewis Nixon in Band of Brothers on HBO.

Now, he’ll be joining director Jay Roach (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents) for his new film Dinner for Schmucks.

According to Variety, the film “is an adaptation of the Francis Veber-helmed French film Le dinner de cons, in which a group of bourgeois friends regularly invite the biggest schmucks to dinner to ridicule them.”

The cast that’s shaping up for this film is phenomenal. It’ll be headed up by I Love You, Man‘s Paul Rudd and The Office‘s Steve Carell, who of course acted together in The 40-Year-Old-Virgin. They’ll be joined by Zach Galifianakis and Star Trek‘s Bruce Greenwood.

The script is being worked on by a handful of folks, including Andy Borowitz, who did uncredited work on the original French comedy, as well as Ken Daurio and The Simpsons alum Jon Vitti.

Roach is also gearing up to produce a second sequel to Meet the Parents, entitled Little Fockers, as well as possibly directing Austin Powers 4.

Check out the pics of Tina Fey and Steve Carell on the set of their upcoming comedy, Date Night. Taken during production in downtown Manhattan, you can see the hilarious (HILARIOUS!) duo as they embark on their date. Might I suggest that Mr.Carell is trying to tip a man. Wacky stuff there. Wacky.

Date Night is directed by A Night at the Museum 1-2 director Shawn Levy and also stars Mark Wahlberg, James Franco, Taraji Henson, Kristen Wiig, Ray Liotta (the list keeps going), Mila Kunis and, of course, Mark Ruffalo. The film is due out next summer.

Source: Coming Soon