Here’s the trailer for the next Will Farrell flick, co-starring John C. Reilly and written and directed by Adam McKay. Not surprisingly, it looks a helluva lot funnier than Semi-Pro:

“Hello, Miss Lady!”

Yahoo Step Brothers Trailer

Unfortunately, until I can work out WordPress’s weird issue with embedded video, links will have to do.

Who here has beaten a concept to death?

“Wrestling the bear” isn’t quite as colorful a phrase as “jumping the shark.” But when you see Will Ferrell trying to fight a not-so-gentle Ben in his latest sports comedy, Semi-Pro, you can’t help but think the glory days of the former Saturday Night Live star’s dumb-guy shtick are over.

Ferrell’s Jackie Moon, the dim-but-arrogant owner/coach/promoter/star of an American Basketball Association team in Michigan, is a lot like his Chazz Michael Michaels in last year’s Blades of Glory and Ricky Bobby in 2006’s Talladega Nights. But unlike both of those movies, which coasted on their one-joke premises amiably enough, Semi-Pro starts out promisingly and tanks fast. Worse, it doesn’t even have a solid golden gag to carry it. A two-dude figure-skating team? Comic genius. Ball players in the ’70s? Eh.

The filmmakers—first-time director Kent Alterman and Starsky & Hutch writer Scot Armstrong—deserve some credit, however. The laughs that are there begin before we even catch a glimpse of the massively ’fro’d Jackie: The screen’s still fading into credits when we hear Ferrell whispering the filthy lyrics to “Love Me Sexy,” Jackie’s overexposed hit song that he refuses to let die. He’s singing it center-court before introducing his teammates with such give-it-up! descriptors as “He’s ugly as shit!” And on the sidelines are radio announcers played by Will Arnett and Andrew Daly, one lascivious and drunk, the other stick-up-his-ass squeaky. Good stuff.

But once the story kicks in about the sorry team’s attempt to prove itself worthy of being absorbed into the NBA—a plot that introduces Woody Harrelson as a former Celtic who was traded for a washing machine—the shallow characters flatten completely and Semi-Pro becomes just another dull underdog movie. Two of the more ambitious comic set pieces, involving a gun and masturbation, go from mildly funny to wince-inducing and creepy, while the many cameos—except for Jackie Earle Haley as an “extremely dirty hippie” named Dukes—are as forgettable as Maura Tierney’s underwritten love interest. Ferrell still has great moments, pulling off an occasional brilliant delivery or affronted expression. But when you wrestle the bear, it’s time to move on.

Boys to Men

City of Men has a lot in common with 2002’s Oscar-nominated City of God—the same producers, the same stars, practically the same title. But it’s not a sequel. Rather, it’s being promoted as a “companion piece” to the earlier film and the Brazilian TV show it inspired. Regardless, City of Men takes another look at the dark side of life in the favelas (shantytowns) of Rio de Janeiro, a violent above-ground underground not all that far removed from the pretty beaches overflowing with tourists.

Whereas City of God was frenetic and felt like a punch to the gut, Paulo Morelli’s film follows a more traditional and relatable narrative. The story focuses on best friends Ace and Wallace (Douglas Silva and Darlan Cunha, both also in God) as they face turning 18 and the adulthood that allegedly follows. But the pair have already been given a taste of it: Ace, whose father was killed, is married and has a son because he and his then-girlfriend couldn’t afford an abortion. And Wallace automatically became the man of his household, if in only the shallowest way, when the father he never knew got sent to jail for murder.

As Ace deals with the very real possibility that his wife, Cristiane (Camila Monteiro), is going to leave him with their boy so she can spend a year working in another city and Wallace tracks down his dad, they both try to avoid their neighborhood’s gang wars. That’s no easy feat: Nearly all of their peers chose to spend their adolescence learning about guns.

Morelli—who shares a story credit with Elena Soárez, who wrote the script—loads the film’s beginning with lots of sometimes-awkward exposition for the benefit of those who haven’t seen how the TV show tweaked City of God. A lot of characters are thrown at you right away, but it doesn’t take long for them to develop into unique and sympathetic individuals.

Against Rio’s blue-skied, sandy-coast background, violence is the overwhelming and viscerally unsettling theme, with gang battles resulting in sickening and seemingly thoughtless loss of life. But the story’s subtext is what leads kids to such aggression—and not unlike many of the film’s less-developed Hollywood counterparts, the film places significant blame on paternal absence specifically and poor parenting in general. Wallace is often the voice of this message, frequently asking Ace if he wants his son to grow up like they did whenever the young dad is negligent (in one heartbreaking scene, he forgets his terrified boy at the beach) or moans about having to take care of him.

City of Men’s title is clearly meant to be ironic—these are just boys who want to run around on their scooters and buy CDs and flirt with girls. But the realities they deal with—guns, poverty, parenting—are much more grown up than they are, and it’s a tough life to escape. After all the story’s tension, the film does end on a note of hope—a relief to both the characters and audience members who likely spent its running time gripping their armrests, with anxious stomachs.

Girls, girls, girls. Part of the reason I love Idol is watching all the glam and imagining  how fun it would be to get the head-to-toe treatment from a stylist. So what was up with these two?

And consider, this picture doesn’t make her look half-bad

I was so happy when Paula, in her gentle, roundabout way, called Amanda on her look and suggested she knock it off.  Amanda, you don’t need to make yourself all xxxxxtreme! to be a rock girl. To paraphrase your song from last night, lay your scary head to rest, dear.

(Though I doubt it’ll matter after tonight — underneath her growl, there does NOT lie a great voice. And the Elaine dance? Oh God, please just stop moving.)

On the other end of the spectrum was Alexandrea. Damn, I can’t find a photo of her from yesterday! But even dudes must have noticed her Alex Goes to Camp outfit: Cargo shorts! A vest! And HEELS to, you know, pull the look together!

Maybe she wanted to distract from her awful rendition of an awful song, Chicago’s “Please Don’t Go.” Your fans may be whispering this to their TVs tonight.

All dressed up and…etc.

Israeli writer-director Eran Kolirin’s debut, The Band’s Visit, is as thin in plot as it is bursting with story. The wispy 89-minute feature takes place in one day, its nonaction predicated on a mistake: The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra has traveled from Egypt to Israel to perform at the opening of an Arab cultural center. The officers arrive in full dress at the airport with no one to greet or guide them, so the conductor tasks one of his young underlings with getting directions. Soon they get on a bus to a town called Beit Tiqva. But when they arrive, they realize that their intended destination was Petah Tiqva. There are no more buses out of the deserted place that day, so the orchestra is forced to spend the night with a few hospitable restaurant workers.

That’s it. But crashing on couches in an area the band’s hostess describes as “dead” is all it takes to unveil a sweet film that’s heavy on musings about love and family instead of the perhaps more expected theme of political tension—Kolirin doesn’t ignore that, but he leaves it to haunt the film’s corners like a felt-but-not-seen ghost.

Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai) and his orchestra are formal and unfailingly polite when they show up at a small Beit Tiqva cafe owned by Dina (Ronit Elkabetz). After a funny exchange in which he and the three-person staff straighten out the confusion (in a conversation dominated by a series of exaggerated “b” and “p” enunciations), Tewfiq immediately leads his single-file line of sky-blue-uniformed musicians on a parade to nowhere. That is, until Haled (Saleh Bakri), the lanky, unflappable ladies’ man whose mistake got them here in the first place, complains that he wants to eat. After the rest of them agree, Tewfiq silently leads them back to the restaurant and meekly asks Dina if she might feed them. And after she informs Tewfiq that there’s no way they’re getting out of town before morning, she persuades her co-workers to each take a few of the band members in for the night.

From that point, the film alternates between two of the makeshift hotels: the home of Itzik (Rubi Moscovich), which is filled with tension as a handful of officers very unwillingly intrude on a birthday dinner for Itzik’s wife, and Dina’s place, where Tewfiq and Haled experience tension of a more provocative kind due to their hostess’s wiggle and red toenails. Besides Haled, no one in either place so much as loosens his tie. “Don’t you want to take your hat off?” Dina finally asks Tewfiq after she suggests taking him—and not his subordinate—out to see what there is of the town. Haled finds his own action, though, tagging along with the shy, awkward Papi (Shlomi Avraham) on his blind roller-rink date with a friend’s girlfriend’s “gloomy” cousin.

There’s a lot of sadness in Kolirin’s script, including Tewfiq and Dina’s discussions about their former relationships, Itzik’s unhappiness in his current one, and Papi’s continual failure to even land a girl in the first place. The cast is skilled at revealing each character’s layers: Gabai’s Tewfiq seems especially mournful under his well-­mannered demeanor; Elkabetz’s Dina, meanwhile, can hardly disguise her loneliness in her attempt to seduce the conductor. Even when the roles don’t require multiple notes, the actors are natural and wonderful to watch, particularly Avraham as the wide-eyed, heartbreaking Papi and Bakri, whose smoothness recalls Benicio Del Toro.

But despite all that melancholy, The Band’s Visit is often quite humorous and warm; its underlying message of common humanity is elegantly rendered, not only by emphasizing universal topics but by having the characters communicate mostly in English instead of fumbling in their native tongues. (In a lovely moment, Dina asks Tewfiq to say something in Arabic, “just to hear the music.”) In fact, the film’s preponderance of English disqualified it as a Best Foreign Language Film contender, which is unfortunate: The profile boost might have given it a fighting chance against the short runs and small audiences that so many similar imported gems suffer.

I learned it by watching you!

In my earlier review of this godawful movie, I joked:

“The brain-scrambling static that invades TV sets, radios, and telephones in The Signal is so powerful it makes people homicidal. You, too, may be feeling violently angry by the time the movie ends. Did writer-directors David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry—who passed the baton to individually helm the film’s beginning, middle, and end—sprinkle their reels with the script’s airwave-riding rage-ohol?”

Ha, ha! Of course not. That’s just me being silly. I know that such a thing is not possible. I don’t walk around with tinfoil on my head!

Er, but maybe I should. From the Los Angeles Times:

Police are searching for a man suspected of stabbing two people who were watching a bloody horror movie in a Fullerton theater Sunday night, in what authorities describe as a random attack.

The male suspect stood over a lone moviegoer in the AMC theater in the 1000 block of South Lemon Street and stabbed him at about 7:30 p.m. after “The Signal” had begun. He then walked toward the rear exit of the theater, where he stabbed the second victim, police said.

So a big pffbbtttt (or something like that) to all you who make fun of my tendency to set my head to swivel whenever I’m in a mostly empty theater. I’m not crazy! These things do happen! Now, where’s that tinfoil?

That was Simon’s obvious if accurate advice to the guys at the start of the show tonight, and I’m hoping they take it seriously. Really, for all the this-year-is-AWESOME! blather they’ve slathered us with, I think this season is one of the worst so far.

The bottom-scrapers:

1. Streak Boy, aka Jason Yeager. Dude, you don’t flash a Vegas grin and do sassy head-cocks when singing lines like, “She lost her home and her family/And she won’t be comin’ back!” Does he even realize what “Long Train Runnin’” is about? And wait — good God, he did bite his lower lip while gazing into the camera. I apologize to my DVR for making it replay that moment.

Hey! Anybody out there ready to classic-rock?

2. Trying-too-hard-to-disguise-his-receding-hairline rocker David Cook. Cook’s version of “All Right Now” wasn’t terrible, but I’m starting to question the decision to allow the contestants to play instruments. I was OK with Jason Castro strumming away again this week, but I found Cook’s going electric totally distracting — and like the judges love to say, this is a singing competition. Who cares if you can shred? (Not that he did.) Plus, he lost even more points with me when he got testy with Simon. Does anyone ever really think it’s going to help them to show what wiseasses they can be?

3. I dig Danny Noriega, and I dig the Carpenters. But when he started droning “Superstar” I thought, He is not actually doing this, is he? A snoozer, even if his vocals were OK.

4. Sigh, I hate to say it, but: Michael Johns. “Go Your Own Way” might have been a good choice if he didn’t decide to add a weird vibrato half the time and injected a little more energy into his performance. And maybe it’s just me, but it seemed like that raised eyebrow to Paula was code for “Hey baby, maybe you can ‘coach’ me after the show.”

5. Robbie Carrico – meh. And no, we’re not exactly surprised that you’re into drag racing. Have you looked in a mirror lately?

Yeah, man!

My favorite performance of the night was Chikezie’s, which surprised me because 1) I hated his outfit and 2) I didn’t recognize the song — and anyone who’s dared played the radio while in a car with me can attest that I could totally own Singing Bee. But man, he belted it, and was one of the few guys who came off as a pro tonight. Just lose the polo shirts!

And, of course, chipmunk extraordinaire David Archuleta was technically perfect as usual. (And man, I’m floored every time I see footage of him belting it out back when he was, like, an embryo.) I wasn’t crazy about his interpretation of “Imagine,” but good is good.

A big, fat sack of yes.

Because they totally got things right this year.

Marion Cotillard really was the best actress, for instance, and “Falling Slowly” the best song. (And it was up against three Disney confections, all from a movie that made much, much more money than Once did. And AND the producers let singer/songwriter/breath of fresh air Marketa Irglova back onstage to make her speech, after the fucking jackasses cut her off with music the second she got up to the mike.)

Wow.

I wasn’t in any Oscar pools this year, but even though my Who Should Win predictions (see below) for the big categories were pretty accurate, I probably wouldn’t be rolling in cash had I bet — years of voting my heart have taught me that it’s generally a bad idea. Not this time, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Obviously, No Country for Old Men deserved all its accolades. That piece of brilliance cured me of a pretty miserable migraine I had going into the screening. (Behold, the power of art.) If a film can make me forget that there’s an ice pick lodged in my eye, it’s a keeper.

I teared up when they called Diablo Cody’s name. Although I don’t necessarily think that Juno was the best screenplay of 2007, it was definitely the most original. And, OK, I admit it — maybe I’m a little bit partial to black-haired lapsed Catholics and alt-weekly writers. Maybe I’m projecting a bit when I get excited about their success. And maybe I’m heading to a Target with my own cliche-busting idea and laptop right now! (Or not. At least not today, considering I’m still in my PJs, nursing coffee, and have work to do.)

My patron saint.

Anyway, back to the ceremony: Jon Stewart, I thought, did a consistently fine job. No real gut-busters, but nothing that fell flat, either. He had me at “Writers don’t mingle” during his opening monologue about the canceled Vanity Fair bash. (Funny ’cause it’s true.)

And thank GOD they cut down on montages this year (or was I just too giddy to notice them?). Actually, let me backtrack, because there was one gag that made me choke on my taco: “An Oscar Tribute to Binoculars and Periscopes.” Very dry, Steve Martin kinda humor. (Martin, incidentally, is still my favorite host, on the very small chance you were wondering.)

Of course, Tilda Swinton was the true upset of the night — and I’m not just talking about her outfit:

Now, I have no problem with the brow-and-lash-free alien look she usually rocks, and actually find it somewhat mesmerizing. But Tilda, darling, we’re not living in a George Costanza world. It’s not yet socially acceptable to drape yourself in velvet — at least not without some tailoring. Seriously, what was with that sack?

Considering I’m posting this about 10 hours later than other sites anyway, I guess I’ll just wrap it up. I thought about doing a live-blogging thing a la E! (er, do they still do that?) but decided that I just have too much fun watching the show to sit through the whole thing with a ‘top on my lap.

My parting words: If you haven’t seen this man, run.

It’s probably not a great idea to use this blog to call attention to other people’s AI wrap-ups. But this MTV video is just too funny not to share:

American Idol in 60 Seconds