Henson and McCarthy team up for "The Happytime Murders"

By Robert Balkovich

Melissa McCarthy has been positioning herself as one of the great comedic actors of the 21st century for quite some time now. Like most stars she has her share of hits (The Heat, Spy) and misses (Tammy, The Boss), but even if the movie flops, McCarthy always brings it. On that note, be extremely excited about her newest project:, a puppet/human hybrid dark R rated comedy directed by heir to the Muppets Brian Henson called The Happytime Murders...

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11 Days Until Oscar -- Big Double-Honors Trivia!

11 is the magic number today and 11 comes with big and appropriately twinned A list Oscar trivia.

the great Fay Bainter was the first actor double-nominated in a single year

11 is the number of actors who have been double nominated for lead & supporting within the same year! Pretty cool, right? Details and adjacent trivia starring Lange, Bergman, Blanchett, De Niro, SigWeavie, and more after the jump...

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The Furniture: Fame Flattens Your Dreamgirls, Boys

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

 This probably goes without saying, but movie musicals tend not to take place in the real world. Gene Kelly doesn’t just serenade French children in An American in Paris, he leads the cast through a dream ballet of wild abstraction. The oddness of public singing is often just the door to an even more fantastical world. Even those about actual musicians, who need no special excuse to croon, often break free from realism.

In this context, Dreamgirls is a bit of an odd duck. Director Bill Condon tries to split the difference. Some of the songs are entirely within the context of a real performance, while others incorporate non-musician characters and non-realistic settings. The back and forth can be a bit confounding...

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Yes, No, Maybe So: "Annie" and Kneejerk Musical Reactions

"How many 'Tomorrow's until Annie comes out?"
"293, kids!"

Quvenzhané Wallis stars as little orphan "Annie"

That means we just need to get through 294 days of internet hyperbole BEFORE ANYONE SEES IT about how the new Annie (the third filmed version after a 1982 feature and a 1999 telefilm) is the worst thing that ever existed and musicals suck and it's going to kill everyone's career... Give me strength! BUT in fairness to whatever social media hatred happened (I only saw a little but I'm assuming there was more since I wasn't online much last night) the new trailer which is embedded at the end of the post, does ring alarm bells.

Here's the thing. I realize that my own kneejerk defensiveness/love for any and all new musicals before I see them, is, in some ways exactly like the internet's kneejerk distrust/hatred of any and all new musicals before they see them. Both reactions have less basis in reality than in indoctrination. But the reason my indoctrination is superior (heh) is because its self-indoctrination - a connosieur's faith in his own taste and in the possibilites of the genre and not lazy long-since disproven cultural indoctrination that this genre is over or passé. I can blather about this peculiar problem for HOURS but I should probably spare you and we'll get back to "Annie".

After the jump we'll discuss the pros, cons, and "which column do I put this in" beats from the trailer. 

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Twins: Electro & Mr Freeze

Have you seen the first official still of Electro (Jamie Foxx) from The Amazing Spider-Man 2. This is it, albeit quite, um, altered by my photoshoppin' whimsy.

Can The Amazing Spider-Man 2 be as terrible as I want it to be? I mean please please please for the love of all that is holy in comic book cinema please don't be just dull and bland and redundant like The Amazing Spider-Man reboot. Please be just straight-up terrible so that you're fun to hate! Like Batman and Robin (1997)!