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Scoop:

According to IMDB, Broken Lizard already has a movie in the can.  Broken Lizard's the Slammin' Salmon was filmed last year but is apparently having trouble finding a distributor, so who knows if it will be released before Super Troopers 2: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1135525/

J

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To: Scoop

Re: Signs of the Apocalypse

Helen Mirren is using a body double in Love Ranch
 
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3220529/resume
 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1125929/

Spaz

 

 

Still Waiting ...

It's a long-buried masterpiece, Samuel Beckett's sequel to Waiting for Godot. Most literary scholars had felt it to be lost forever.

SPOILER:

He never shows.

END SPOILERS:

I'm just fuckin' witcha. It's actually a straight-to-vid sequel of a lowbrow comedy called Waiting ..., minus the biggest names who appeared in the first. Anna Faris and Ryan Reynolds did not elect to appear in the sequel, probably because they read the script. Justin Long did appear, but his part was more or less a cameo, and was probably filmed in a single day.

Once again the story takes place within a single day in the life of a chain restaurant. The site manager would really like to make it to the district manager position, but if he fails to reach the top of his metaphorical thermometer, the corporate heavy breathers will not consider him for the promotion. Unfortunately for him, he seems doomed to failure because of a new competitor next door. His Shenanigan's (read Bennigan's, minus the lawsuit) is facing stiff competition from the neighboring Ta-Tas (read Hooters), which is not only taking away customers, but his hottest female employees as well. There is only one day left in his current reporting period, and he can't make his quarterly goal without a miraculous and unprecedented gross on that day. As a result, he has to push the staff extra hard, using the time-honored motivational tactics of fear and deceit.

The one thing that made the original script a pretty good piece of comedy was that it really revealed the truth about life in the service industry. The characters were drawn from life, and the story revealed a lot of crazy things that can transpire behind the scenes. Watching it was like eavesdropping on service industry workers who are amusing one another with their best "war stories." Uncharacteristically for a lowbrow comedy, IMDb contributors frequently comment on the film's accuracy! It's rated 6.9 at IMDb, which is almost unheard of for a lowbrow comedy. To give you an idea how good that is, it's a hair below There's Something About Mary and a hair above Kingpin. Pretty impressive.

The level of humor in the second one is similar to the first, but the originality and appropriateness are not. The sequel is generic and  could pretty much take place in any workplace. Very little is industry-specific. Take the same script, modify it just slightly, and it could take place in a convenience store or a department store or a furniture store or even outside of retail. Moreover, the characters and situations have left reality and entered the fantasy world, especially at the Ta-Tas next door.

Adam Carolla is pretty funny as the world's worst self-help guru, whose tape is watched by the shy Shenanigan's manager. Of course, that is a throwaway bit which has nothing to do with the restaurant business. The one funny major character in Still Waiting ... is the hostess, a burnt-out alcoholic hottie with a major chip on her shoulder and a vocabulary that would seem a bit extreme at a Tourette's convention. Her attitude gets even worse when the neighboring Ta-Tas turns her down for a job because she doesn't have the obligatory perma-smile required by that chain to match her admittedly impressive ta-tas. This rejection leads to the film's only nudity, when she gets drunk and despondent enough to show her "credentials" to the rest of the Shenanigan's employees. (As they say, "Nice rack." Unfortunately, the nudity appears to have been done by a body double, and the aforementioned credentials don't seem to be factory originals.)