Before he directed Patch Adams – I’m pretty sure that little nugget of information will rear its head again further down this article – Tom Shadyac had a strong hand in making Jim Carrey the man he is today. Shadyac directed Ace Venture: Pet Detective, the film that essentially launched Carrey’s career into super stardom and eventually landed him a few $20m paying jobs. Shadyac, on the other hand, was easy to get for the film’s commentary track. And that’s what we’re doing for this week’s Commentary Commentary. Here’s hoping it’s loaded with deep analysis on the character and the slaps in the face Shadyac had to give Carrey in order for the performance to bleed through. Who am I kidding? There’s probably plenty of laughter and talking about the first time he saw Carrey talking out of his ass. Let’s find out, shall we?

As 2011 crawls to a close and 2012 peeks its head over the horizon, many of us wayward souls find ourselves using the changing of the calendar as an excuse to make big changes in our lives and start over fresh. ‘Tis the season for resolutions. Some of us will resolve to cease destructive behaviors, others will vow to start new things that will enrich us and make us better people. But for each the goal is clear – we’re done with the past, finished with who we were, and starting from this moment forward, it’s going to be a new day. Naturally, all of this thought about what my resolutions are going to be and who I want to be in 2012 has me thinking about movies that I’ve seen where people are trying to let go of the past and begin a new journey. More specifically, I’ve closed in on two movies from the early part of the last decade that are about relationships ending and their messy aftermaths. The Michel Gondry-directed and Charlie Kaufman-penned Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is about a fictional service that will erase bad relationships from people’s memories, it stars Jim Carrey as a man wrestling with the question of how to best deal with painful memories, either by blocking them out or by accepting and processing them. Two years before that, Philip Seymour Hoffman starred in a movie called Love Liza about a broken man dealing with a relationship that had [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Sadly, this article arrives far, far too late. I come to bury Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey, not to praise them. But they’re not dead. No, they are both very much alive and making movies, which is a little unfortunate. Not that they’re alive. That they’re making movies. Or at least that they’re making the movies they do. Yes, this article is years behind, but after revisiting some comedy classics like Ace Ventura: Pet Detecitve and Billy Madison, I just can’t look at another fucking Jack and Jill billboard without saying something. What happened to these guys? Money, success, power, time. Yes, all of those things happened to them and generally that leads to a downslide in movie quality. Or at least a downslide to a different type of comedy. Maybe there is an age where even the most immature of us suddenly grows up and doesn’t want to talk out of his asshole or argue the finer points of shampoo versus conditioner. Fear not, dear readers, for I have not yet reached that age.

Possible introductory pieces of wordsmithery to lead off this post – “not worth nyuk-ing about!” or even “better than a poke in the eye!” or possibly a longer rife on the use of “just say Moe” as the film’s tagline. Yet all of those cracks at humor are rendered absolutely and starkly unnecessary by this first trailer for the Farrelly Brothers‘ The Three Stooges, which is so painfully unfunny that it makes even related humor feel useless. The Farrellys have been wanting to make a Stooges feature film for years, proclaiming it a passion project, but its journey to the screen has been filled with its own pratfalls and slams to the face – development delays and huge casting issues abounded. The film was originally rumored to star Jim Carrey, Benicico del Toro, and Sean Penn, but when they all dropped the project, other potential casting options were mentioned and reported, including Hank Azaria, Johnny Knoxville, Andy Samberg, and Shane Jacobson. Which doesn’t explain how we ended up with a cast that includes Chris Diamantopoulos as Moe Howard, Sean Hayes as Larry Fine, and Will Sasso as Curly Howard. And Snooki is there, because why not make something that looks terrible look even more bogglingly awful? If you don’t value your eyes, your soul, or the possibility that Hollywood would greenlight an original and creative project, check out the first trailer for The Three Stooges after the break.

I’ve found that this list comes up fairly often on the Internet – however every time I read one I’m surprised by how many redundancies they all share. While a few of said redundancies will also appear in the following (because sometimes you just can’t deny a good performance) I’m going to try and mix this up and give a you a few of my personal favorite and slightly less talked about non-funny roles some real funny people took on. Let’s get started with a picture of a pen jabbed into Jon Stewart’s eye.

Every bit of movie news has to be taken with a fistful of salt. With so many moving parts, even the biggest players in the game sometimes see their work fall into the tall grass of development hell. That’s the bad news. The good news is that all of those times you shake your fist at a new project (be it remake or reboot) are warranted, but they don’t always get made. Sometimes, the stuff we’re dreading goes down in flames too. So it’s with that bittersweet spirit that we look back on a few announced projects that still haven’t been made. And might never be.

For a while there, whenever somebody talked about the upcoming comedy about dueling magicians, Burt Wonderstone, it was often just viewed as the next starring vehicle for Steve Carell. He’s long been attached to the lead role of an aging illusionist whose less than fresh magic act has lost its steam. The questions of who would play the flashier, younger magician who takes his place in the hearts and minds of magic fans, or who some of the other characters would be, never seemed to get much attention. But once the movie got a director and another re-write, it became time to start filling out the rest of the cast. And they’ve been doing a pretty bang-up job so far. Big names like Jim Carrey and James Gandolfini have been mentioned as negotiating for the film, and at this point are assumed to be on board. Carrey will play the flashier magician to Carell’s outdated dud, and Gandolfini is said to be playing a casino owner. And now, joining those names are a couple more actors that you might have heard of: sex symbols Olivia Wilde and Steve Buscemi. Wilde is negotiating to play the role of Carell’s love interest (yeah, right!), a magician’s assistant who bounces back and forth between his character and Carrey’s. And Buscemi is negotiating to play Carell’s long-time partner, who ends up quitting the act.

This is so much better than The Three Stooges. Having wrapped that “dream project,” it looks like Peter and Bobby Farrelly are interested in working on a film that, oh, I don’t know, people might actually want to see? Getting back to their glory days, the Farrellys have set a pair of writers to pen a Dumb and Dumber sequel. We will all gracefully bow our heads and tip our orange top hats forward to have a brief moment of silence for that other sequel, the abomination known as Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, 2003′s horrific prequel that starred Eric Christian Olsen and Derek Richardson as Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne in their high school years. Shia LaBeouf also starred as another student (fun trivia!). The entire film centered on a pervasive lie that Lloyd, Harry, the ol’ Beefster, and a bunch of other kids were actually mentally challenged. Hilarious, right? Everyone loves making fun of mentally challenged kids! Ugh. Forgetting that nightmare, Sean Anders and John Morris have been hired to pen the sequel. The hope is to bring back both Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, which answers the “but when will this potential sequel take place?” question quite handily. Nowish!

To start – a news flash. The collecting world holds it breath in slightly anxious anticipation this week as The Bridge Direct, Inc dominated the merch-related news columns thanks to first being confirmed as Warner Bros toy maker of choice for next year’s massively prestigious The Hobbit line, and then blaming Justin Bieber’s haircut for losing them $100,000 in unsellable mop-topped dolls. The company have some previous in the merch arena, though nothing this grand yet, so it’s difficult to say whether they’ll meet expectations, and potentially pull a Star Wars action figures on us or not. My vote goes with not – there just isn’t the same fever in buying action figures these days, outside of Games Workshops, and those places are GRIM. Anyway, while we wait for those particular items (released next fall), which will include Basic Action Figures, Adventure Packs, Beast Packs, and Collector Figures, as well as “premium role play items” such as a Basic Sting Sword, a Basic Orcrist Sword, a Dwarven Battle Axe, and a Deluxe Sting Sword, here’s the usual weekly look at what else is out there for those interested in buying merch. Or at least mentally spending the thousands of dollars it would take to make these suggestions into a real collection… Hold tight for three hugely important auction lots from around the world’s greatest auction houses, including some letters written by a Rebel Without a Cause, Jim Carrey’s most puzzlesome film costume and Henry Winkler’s two wheeled nemesis. And yes, [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Back in 1990 a Rob Reiner-directed horror thriller called Misery took an underappreciated actor named Kathy Bates and rocketed her to the top of the world. Her portrayal of the homely but psychotic Annie Wilkes got tons of critical praise, had the mainstream talking, and eventually won her a Best Actress Oscar. In 1994 an oddball comedy named Ace Ventura: Pet Detective took a relatively obscure comedian named Jim Carrey and made him one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. That’s not the movie I’m going to be talking about though. The movie I’m going to talk about came two years later, it’s called The Cable Guy, and it was seen as the first disappointment of Carrey’s gigantic post Ace Ventura career. His portrayal of the troubled “Chip Douglas” didn’t register with critics or audiences who previously had no trouble accepting him as a pet detective that talked out of his butt, a walking cartoon character with a booger for a head, and a sociopath named Lloyd Christmas who sold a dead bird to a blind kid. Was Misery really that much better a movie than The Cable Guy? Was Bates’s performance as Annie really that much better than Carrey’s as the unnamed cable installer? Or is this just the case of a movie that was a little bit ahead of it’s time getting a bad rap?

As many fellow conflicted yet faithful Netflix subscribers know, last week marked the beginning of the separation of Instant and disc-only memberships. I had been trying to whittle down my streaming queue for a few months, but we all know that is a nearly impossible task with that devilish recommendation list appearing every time you go to the site’s homepage. Suffice it to say, my queue had actually grown since the announcement, making the budgeting decision for me. One of the films at the top of my queue was 2010’s long-awaited gay love story I love You Phillip Morris starring the forever not-sexy Jim Carrey and the always delicious Ewan McGregor as two convicts head-over-heels in love with each other. I could spend an entire column writing about this rapid, surprisingly honest and tender romance sprinkled with deception and humor, however my greatest take away from this man on man sexiness was the unexpectedly hot chemistry (and subsequent love scenes) between Carrey and McGregor.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr dresses up in green and black spandex and parades around town telling people that he is a superhero who can create anything out of sheer will. Of course, it seems that the only thing he’s able to create is an ever-growing arrest report. Later, Kevin takes a trip to his local zoo where he sneaks into the penguin habitat in order to forge a bond with these flightless birds. Unfortunately, the penguins don’t take too well to him and peck him to near death, leaving Kevin to skulk away to the local movie theater in order to catch a double feature of Green Lantern and Mr. Popper’s Penguins.

I recently read a figure somewhere that said 2011 would have more sequels, prequels, reboots, and remakes of pre-existing films than any other year in history. Even if that isn’t true, it certainly feels true, so it doesn’t come as a shock to me that when he was recently questioned about future plans, Jim Carrey said that he would probably be working on some sequels of past hits. In an upcoming interview with Coming Soon, Carrey said of his possible next projects, “We’re talking about maybe returning to some old characters that everyone has been asking about. There’s Bruce Almighty and we’re talking about maybe another Dumb and Dumber.” Okay, so it sounds like his next move is more likely to be a revisiting of his Godly character from Bruce Almighty, but I’m not going to focus on that because I can’t imagine there’s anybody out there who’s really clamoring for another go around on the Almighty train (though I’m certain if that person exists they’re going to find me in the comments section). What I believe would be more interesting to more people is the possibility of Carrey and Jeff Daniels getting back together to make another Dumb and Dumber. Seventeen years after that film’s release there is still one guy in every crowd who will yell out, “kick his ass, Sea Bass” every time it looks like a fight is going to break out. People remember that movie very fondly. Of course, there was already the prequel film [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a movie news round-up column that comes to you from deep space. It comes as a protector of all that is good and interesting in the movie news world. It also totally swoons over Michael Fassbender. Seriously, have you seen this guy act? He’s the man… man. As my good friend Rusty Gordon pointed out to me this evening, “this summer is already better than last summer,” and it’s just now June. With two-thirds of its movie releasing to go, Summer 2011 is already coming along great. With that, there’s plenty to still be excited about. Like Green Lantern, which continues to look cool as WB dumps a giant batch of photos on the web. So much detail, so much cool.

Episodes and seasons and weeks after its inspiration and its humor have peaked, I still continue to watch new episodes of The Office week in and week out. I don’t know why – I never do this with dramatic shows, only with comedies – but I tend to stick with comedy shows whose legacy I appreciate even if their time has passed, either out of respect, blind hope, or simply the desire to have some noise in the room while I take a break to eat a meal or fold laundry. While The Office certainly isn’t what it used to be, even before Steve Carell left, it’s still an inoffensive and enjoyable way to pass some time. I can’t deny that the affinity I developed for the show’s characters early on in the series has carried me through a lot of its creative droughts (in other words, I hardly watch it only for its comedy) even as more recent network sitcoms like Modern Family, Community, and (especially) Parks and Recreation have made me LOL significantly more often. But in the bizarre cameos leading up to a strange and dry seventh season finale, The Office seems to have encountered much greater problems than a rudimentary lack of inspiration typical for the (possibly cyclical) lifespan of a long-running television show. The Office seems to have rejected the defining characteristics that made it unique in the first place.

Like an antidote for all that stuffy Oscar nonsense, the Farrelly Brothers have let fly that they’re interested in revisiting the world of Dumb & Dumber. Maybe that will finally wake James Franco up. Fortunately, in an interview with Movie Hole, The Farrellys not only claimed that conversations had been put in motion to make the sequel a reality, they added that they’d only want to do it with Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels back in the roles. Thus, the Farrelly Brothers joined a long line of filmmakers who had a terrible idea and a great idea at the same time. There’s no demand for this movie beyond a new-found love of outdated sequels floating around the studio system. However, if there’s a creative demand, and the Farrelly Brothers have a great story cooked up, why not support something like this? We’re nearly two decades away from the 1994 comedic triumph, it would be interesting to see the directors go back to their first film, and if they got the talent, it could be another strange trip into a world of idiots. Speaking of which, The Farrelly Brothers will begin shooting their Three Stooges flick in a few months, which means definitive casting will be announced sooner rather than later. Check back with us to have your day made/ruined. Any bets on whether Lauren Holly is available for this?

Even though I’m constantly enticed to post up videos of cute puppies, elephants playing on the beach, and kittens dressed up like the characters from Back to the Future, I always fear I’ll be called out for them being not movie-related enough. Except the last one. Which doesn’t exist, but needs to. Fortunately, some adorable pictures have shown up online over at USA Today – giving us our first look at Mr. Popper’s Penguins. Check out what those lovable, ice-loving scamps are up to after the jump:

Back when Tim Burton was going to direct a biopic of Robert Ripley (the journalist behind Ripley’s Believe It Or Not), I could not wait to see the project get off the ground. With its epic nature and colorful period piece-ness, it seemed like a mixture of Big Fish (a movie he’d just directed) and Ed Wood and Indiana Jones. Burton seemed perfect for the project. Now, that may be a different story. And the script itself will be a different story, because (according to Deadline Dalesville) Paramount has hired Eric Roth to do a completely clean slate script re-write. What does that mean? The screenwriter behind Forrest Gump will most likely make this a sprawling travelogue that focuses on the people more than the oddities. The movie (the script at least) will be huge but feel close to home. Granted, Roth tends to steal from himself a lot, so Robert Ripley (still set to be played by Jim Carrey) might look a bit too much like Gump or Button. It remains to be seen, of course, but Roth is an undeniable talent, and his addition to the project seems like Paramount is making a big move in the right direction.

I Love You Phillip Morris has taken its sweet ‘ole time getting to the big screen. It’s been over a year and a half since its Sundance premiere, and who would have thought a Jim Carrey starring vehicle would have such a difficult time finding distribution? Well, the material makes it understandable. But it’s pretty sad considering it’s not too often we get a good Carrey film, and, even rarer, one with a great performance. What many will be thrown off guard by is the tone of the film. This isn’t wacky Jim Carrey, sorry Fun with Dick and Jane fans. Instead, it’s a comedic drama. It’s a difficult blend to create. Writing (and now directing) duo Glenn Ficarra and John Requa know that. If you don’t know Ficarra and Requa by name, they scribed the cult classic Bad Santa and the original Cats & Dogs; this is more similar to the former. This is their directorial debut. Instead of turning out a 90-minute film with easy, on-the-nose gay jokes, they made a love story about a truly delusional (and lovable) protagonist. Here’s what directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa had to say in our brief phone interview:

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr thumbs his nose at the major studio releases like The Warrior’s Way and The Nutcracker in 3D. Not only do they look like direct-to-DVD releases at best and stinkers of the year at worst, the studios didn’t let him see any of them. So he turns his sights on some award-bait films in limited release: Black Swan and I Love You, Phillip Morris.