Margaret here with an update on upcoming projects from Paul Feig, the bannerman for blockbuster female-driven comedy. He's following up the roaring success of Bridesmaids and The Heat with two more big-budget Melissa McCarthy projects due over the next couple summers.
The buzzier of the projects is a female-led Ghostbusters reboot, whose main cast has just been announced. It's a wonderful lineup: Feig muse Melissa McCarthy, post-Bridesmaids movie star Kristen Wiig, the hilarious rubber-faced Saturday Night Live MVP Kate McKinnon, and comedy vet Leslie Jones, a recent addition to SNL as both a writer and a featured player. These choices, exciting on their own, are all the more gratifying when one considers all those rumors circa the Sony leak that they were looking at gamine young A-listers like Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone.
While we bask in the casting news (and speculate wildly on the movie's plot), let's take a look at the Feig/McCarthy project coming to us mere months from now: the espionage thriller parody Spy...
- The straight-faced opening scene is promising! Every good parody has to have a solid grip on the genre it's lampooning.
- Inspired casting of the super-spies: Jude Law's comic chops are criminally underutilized and it'll be great to see Jason Statham riff on his persona.
- Maybe, just maybe, all the people kvetching about how Melissa McCarthy plays too many sloppy women with funny voices can pipe down about this one. She's playing it pretty straight, just letting that aces comic timing do the work ("She used to write that in my lunchboxes") and looks plenty cute.
- Allison Janney is forever and always a yes, no matter the size of her part.
- This trailer is under two minutes long but I counted at least five wigs. This is a yes because, as we all know, the number of wigs in a movie is directly proportional to its quality. I am very excited about this.
- Most spy comedies this century have been atrocious. The Pink Panther remake and its sequel, the latter Austin Powers movies, Johnny English... It doesn't inspire confidence. In one sense, it's a low bar to clear, but we have to hope Feig is bringing new ideas to the table.
- The red-band trailer gets pretty salty, which isn't a bad thing, but it makes one fear they might rest on Melissa-McCarthy-has-a-potty-mouth humor.
- Its movie poster, which I'll grant you doesn't reflect on the trailer, is so broad and rote that it makes me tired:
- Paul Feig's last two hits with McCarthy were both written by other people. This will be his first major screenplay (he wrote several episodes of TV masterpiece Freaks and Geeks back in '99), which tosses a pretty major variable into the formula.
- Is it just me, or does Jude Law's American accent sound extremely silly? No? It's just me?
- Rose Byrne is on a comedy roll right now (critics loved her work in Neighbors) but it's hard to tell if her role will give her more to play than just Hot Villain.