Summer wedding season.  Your friends tap you to be in their wedding party.  You’ve gotta stay sober ‘til the reception.  The ushers aren’t nearly as good looking as your soon-to-be-wed buddy promised.  And you’ll never wear that ugly satin dress again, not even if you just shorten it.  But you don’t need an ugly dress or a history of wedding-induced trauma to enjoy Bridesmaids.  Though a hot usher wouldn’t hurt.

Think of this as The Hangover, with chicks.  And without the tiger and Mike Tyson.  That shortcut summary is just my way of saying that this movie is girly, yes, but dudes will like it too.  Annie (Kristen Wiig) gets tapped to be her best friend Lillian’s (Maya Rudolph) Maid Of Honor, but with Annie’s life on a downward spiral, Lillian’s nuptuals aren’t going to be anything featured in Brides Magazine.  And thank goodness.  I’m a huge fan of girly rom-coms (as a female, it’s the law), but after a while you can start cranking out the storylines in your sleep.  With Bridesmaids you know you’re in for a roller-coaster ride of chaos, but unlike standard romance flicks, you’re never sure what’s around the corner.  Another good thing is the men are kept to a minimum in this movie; the focus isn’t on the wedding, it’s on the interaction between Lillian and her best friend/worst bridesmaid Annie.  There is a bit of romance in Bridesmaids, but it’s used to illustrate Annie’s inability to move forward with her life.

Rounding out the wedding party are Rose Byrne as over-achiever Helen, Ellie Kemper as naive Becca, Wendi McLendon-Covey as wild-woman Rita and Melissa McCarthy as token bridesmaid/sister-of-the-groom Megan.  Melissa McCarthy all but steals every scene she’s in with her ability to throw herself into her character.  Megan ain’t the sweet Sookie St. James of Gilmore Girls, but a blue-collar gal that is hilarious and a breath of fresh air.  Come on; Fight Club as a wedding shower theme?  And her scenes with real-life husband Ben Falcone (as fellow air traveler Jon) are a scream.  Jill Clayburg gets into the act as Annie’s off-the-wall mom, and I couldn’t help thinking about her own riot grrl films of her era, Starting Over and An Unmarried Woman.  Bridesmaids is Ms. Clayburg’s last performance (she passed away November, 2010), and she gives her character charm and goofy humor.

Underneath the gross-out humor and sight gags of Bridesmaids is a good look at the competitiveness of female relationships.  Annie and Helen’s passive-aggressive competition is all too true to life, even though here it’s played for laughs.  So is the relationship between Annie and Lillian.  Annie is overjoyed for her friend, but fears being left behind as everyone else she knows moves forward with their lives.  Bridesmaids shows female friendships as the messy, bitchy, loving relationships they really are.  This movie also lets women be human, which made me hark back to My Best Friend’s Wedding, another movie where a woman is allowed to have thoughts that aren’t all puppies and rainbows.  Thanks for Bridesmaid’s success in telling it like it is goes to writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, as well as director Paul Feig, who has shown his ability to craft believable humor with his work on Freaks and Geeks and Arrested Development.

Women who flock to this movie thinking they’re in for a Sex and the City or 27 Dresses romp will be in for a shock.  These ladies are much more true-to-life than the sweethearts in those films.  Which means there’s swearing, booze, food poisoning and crazy sex with John Hamm.  (Yes, you’re uncredited here, but don’t think I don’t recognize you, John.)  Head out to catch Bridesmaids before the next wedding you’ve got on your calendar.  Or better yet, go after and smuggle in a piece of wedding cake and a flask of champagne.  Just leave the dress at home.

Photo © 2010 Getty Images All rights reserved.

Weed Road and Imagine Entertainment are seeking the rights to Stephen King’s seven-book series The Dark Tower.

An intermingling of spaghetti westerns and fantasies like Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, The Dark Tower is set in an alternate world which resembles the Old West, but adds magic into the mix. The series focuses on a “gunslinger,” the last of his kind, a member of an ancient order. He is on a quest to find a tower which is a nexus to other universes. The series was published between 1982 and 2004.

Universal Pictures (who owns Imagine Entertainment) and Warner Brothers (who owns Weed Road) are currently competing for the project.  Plans are to begin with a film trilogy and lead into a television series. Right now, both are in the process of development. However, no deals have been made just yet.

Original plans for the film trilogy include the same group of people who adapted Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons from novel to screen. Akiva Goldsman is set to write the script and Brian Grazer to produce, with Ron Howard sitting in the director’s chair.

The Dark Tower has also been published as a five-part series of graphic novels from Marvel Comics. Released from December 2009 through April 2010, there are plans to publish all five parts as a hardcover compilation sometime this year.

King is also involved in the creation of a pilot for the SyFy channel called “Haven.” Adam Kane (The Mentalist, Heroes) is set to direct. They are currently under production in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, which is being used to represent the fictional town of Haven, Maine. Cast members include Emily Rose (of ER fame) who plays an FBI agent trying to solve the murder of a local Maine ex-convict. Lucas Bryant, Eric Balrouf, Richard Donat, and John Dunsworth are also set to appear.

Slumdog Millionaire’s female lead, Freida Pinto is reportedly locked to star in Dawn Of War, a new Greek action-epic from acclaimed director Tarsem Singh (The Fall, The Cell.)

Variety is reporting that the film will follow the adventures of Theseus, portrayed by The Tudors star Henry Cavill, who is on a quest to prevent a massive war from erupting between the kingdom that he calls home and the staggeringly powerful Titans who hope to harness an army of mystical demons. Pinto will star opposite Cavill as Phaedra, an “oracle priestess” that joins Theseus on his journey.

The script from Charley and Vlas Parlapanides, originally titled War Of The Gods, was considered for Warner Brothers’ Clash Of The Titans remake that is due out in April, but was passed over, allowing Singh the opportunity to grab the screenplay and apply his unique and incredible visual touch to the tale.

In a recent interview with Empire, Singh had this to say about his vision for the project:

“It’s turning into, basically, Caravaggio meets Fight Club,” he said. “It’s a really hardcore action film done in Renaissance painting style. I want to see how that goes; it’s turned into something really cool. This guy who I really love, who’s the only one person in it right now, is the brother inThe Tudors, Henry Cavill. I’m going for a very contemporary look on top of that so I’m kind of going with, you know, Renaissance time with electricity. So it’s a bit like Baz Luhrman doing Romeo + Juliet in Mexico; it’s just talking a particular Greek tale and half contemporising it and telling it.”

Universal Pictures will be producing and releasing the film, and they are hoping to get production underway by this April.

Whether you love or hate Just Friends (an inconsequential little comedy that came out a few years ago), you have to admit that Ryan Reynolds and Anna Faris shared a great deal of comic chemistry. This is largely due to the fact that Reynolds is incapable of being anything but charming, while Faris is unstoppably cute and has mastered the “smart chick in the guise of dumb blonde” routine.

It looks like we’ll be seeing a reunion of the two actors in Universal Pictures’ TMI, scripted by Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith (10 Things I Hate About You) and Marc Klein (Serendipity, A Good Year).

The pitch for the film is that “while honesty is the best policy for a relationship, ‘too much information’ might not be the best thing.” That says nothing.

Hopefully we’ll be seeing an edgy comedy in which Reynolds and Faris can really thrive, but regardless, I’m looking forward to it.

You know you’re working in the bizarre world of Hollywood when your film is delayed even with a name like Cate Blanchett attached to star. Your movie can have everything going for it, but one little shift in the tide and it will be iced indefinitely.

That’s what has happened to Indian Summer, the Cate Blanchett film that Universal Pictures has delayed, ostensibly due to “how challenging the environment for upscale, adult-oriented drama has become.”

Director Joe Wright (helmer of Pride & Prejudice and Atonement) has designed his film to be “an adaptation of Alex von Tunzelmann’s book about the last days of Britain’s colonial rule of India and the symbolic end of Blighty’s status as a world superpower … Blanchett was cast as Edna Mountbatten, wife of Lord Mountbatten, who was the last viceroy of the British Indian Empire and oversaw the country’s transition to independence in 1947.”

There are several reasons why Wright’s film has been put on the backburner. The first is that the studio has deemed audiences uninterested in a $40 million period piece. This seems to not make sense, because Pride & Prejudice and Atonement were whopping successes. However, Indian Summer does lack as strong of an audience hook as those films possessed.

Second came the logistical problems of shooting in India — a setting in which the location would control a large amount of the film’s subject material. Wright said that the film was “in between a rock and a hard place … the Indian government wanted us to make less of the love story while the studio wanted us to make more of the love story.”

While the film has been indefinitely postponed, Blanchett and Wright will be attached for the foreseeable future.

Can you see what's awkward in this picture?

Universal Pictures and Awkward Family Photos are teaming up for a contest inspired by the newest comedy film, Couple’s Retreat.

Couple’s Retreat Photo Contest will run for two weeks and submissions will be judged by the Awkward Family Photos staff who will select the Top 5 entries. For the first time, all contest submissions will appear on the official Couples Retreat Awkward Couples Photo Contest page (www.awkwardfamilyphotos.com/couples-retreat-photo-contest). From October 4-8, viewers will have the opportunity to vote for their top pick among the Top 5. The winning photo will receive top billing, i.e., “ruling the homepage for a day.”

Vince Vaughn, Jason Bateman, Jon Favreau, Malin Akerman, Kristin Davis, Kristen Bell and Faizon Love star in this comedy about four Midwestern couples who embark on a journey to a tropical island resort. While one of the couples is there to work on their marriage, the other three set out to jet ski, spa and enjoy some fun in the sun. They soon discover that participation in the resort’s couples therapy is not optional. Suddenly, their group-rate vacation comes at a price.  What follows is a hilarious look at real world problems faced by all couples. This Peter Billingsley directed feature comes out in theaters everywhere on October 9th.

Jack Kirby, co-creator of such comic book creations like the X-Men, Fantastic Four and Captain America, is coming back for copyright vengeance. Well, at least his estate is. The estate of Jack Kirby is going straight for the jugular, as BleedingCool has more:

[The Kirby Estate] has sent notices terminating copyright to publishers Marvel and Disney, as well as film studios that have made movies and TV shows based on characters he created or co-created, including Sony, Universal, 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures. Just as the Jerry Siegel estate has done so with rights to Superman, so Kirby’s estate is looking to regain his share of copyright in the characters and their use in comics and other media.

What does this mean in the world of comics? If the lawsuit is successful, it would hit starting from 2014 and, as always, its worth noting that Marvel/Disney will still own the trademarks of the characters in comics, and the studios in movies. The likelihood is that, if successful, the Kirby estate would enter into negotiation with Marvel over terms to continue publishing comics based on his work.

We’ll keep you updated on the latest of this comic book battle as it progresses on.

In a cost-saving move that is undoubtedly the product of a messed up economy, Universal Pictures will stop spending money to develop advancing projects for the remainder of this year. Thus, unless a project is being fast-tracked, no progress will be made on films under Universal’s umbrella until January.

Why is the studio freezing developments so late in the game — doesn’t September seem awfully late?

While not all projects have been yielded — those that will constitute the bulk of the studio’s 2011 slate are still moving forward — this means that any smaller projects that are weak on Universal’s radar will be drastically shifted back in time. Furthermore, Variety notes that this has an unseen harsh impact upon writers:

“[T]he development is a blow to the dealmaking community, particularly writers’ reps. Across the post-strike studio landscape, writers’ reps are having a hard time making sizable deals for clients. Reps say despite some assertions in the press that the strike was worthwhile, they are dealing with residual animosity toward scribes that started a slide from past quotes — a dip that was cemented by the economic collapse.”

Other studios such as Warner Bros. and Disney have slowed their production spending down, but only Universal has announced their intention to immediately cease spending altogether.

The whole situation reeks of strange studio politics, but it’s hard not to imagine the sizeable chunk of money that can be saved by 3.5 months of relative inactivity on behalf of one of the industry’s largest studios. The true repercussions of this move (negative and positive) will only be fully realized in a few years when halted projects are finally slated for release.