Friday, October 16, 2009

Will Ferrell, Everything Must Go, and what the fuck.


I...

I...

I...don't know what to say here. I'm still in shock. Will...Ferrell? For Everything Must Go? My favorite script? A dramatic coming-of-age movie about a man who gets locked out of his own house by his wife and starts living on his lawn (by the way, some people are reporting this as a romantic comedy - it's not a romantic comedy by any stretch).

Will Ferrell?

Will Ferrell??

I'm trying to wrap my head around this. I guess I deserve this, since it's my favorite script and I haven't even reviewed it on the site (The script is perfect in my memory - I'm afraid if I read it again, I might start finding faults).

This is just...it's strange. I always pictured Mark Ruffalo in the role, or Edward Norton, or Bruce Willis, or Robert Downy Jr. This is just such out-of-left-field casting I don't know what to do with it.

The reason I'm kinda freaking out right now is because this movie IS the lead's performance. It's about a man who sits in his yard all day. It's him observing the world, him talking to neighbors. It's all about him.

There are some comedic moments in the script for sure. The main character lives solely to find enough beer money to get him through to the next day, and his dealings with a kid who hangs out on the block to help him get the beer is consistently hilarious, but there's some real weight to this character and I think we've seen from Will Ferrell in the past that the only weight he has is in his abdomen area. I guess I should be happy that at least now the movie will be seen. They'll have an advertising campaign. People will know about it. But I imagine this nightmare scenario where the studio secretly tricks Ferrell into shooting the movie, but then they have "screenings," determine the film is "not working" then cut it to turn it into a comedy (which was really their plan all along). Cause the truth is, you could easily skew this to play as a comedy (it *is* about a guy who camps out on his own lawn). My feelings are I don't know what my feelings are. I'm going to need to sit on this for awhile.