Oscar-winning screenwriter Matt Damon hasn’t spent much time behind the scenes since Good Will Hunting kicked started his career. He’s been a little busy with a few acting gigs, but after longtime buddy Ben Affleck got into the directing game with Gone Baby Gone and The Town, I guess Damon has decided that it’s finally time for him to run his own set as well.
For quite a while Damon has been hovering around a screenplay called Father Daughter Time: A Tale Of Armed Robbery And Eskimo Kisses (let’s hope the movie is better than the title) and today he’s officially signed on to direct the movie.
Damon will also star (obviously) as a salesman who comes into a small town and finds his entire life called into question. Then he somehow ends up embarking on a crime spree with his daughter across the United States. It sounds like a decent enough crime comedy and apparently award-winning author Dave Eggers was involved with the screenplay.
It’ll be interesting to see how Damon does as a director given that he’s been able to learn from some of the best in the business over his acting career (ex: Steven Soderbergh, Martin Scorsese, Gus Van Sant, and Paul Greengrass, just to name a few). Given that he’s such a talented actor and one of the few stars with the power to get virtually any movie he likes a greenlight, hopefully this doesn’t mean that he’ll soon abandon his in-front-of-the-camera duties for a directing career.
It was actually somewhat of a relief when Ben Affleck decided to do that, but we need talented movie stars like Matty Damon, so let’s hope this whole “directing” thing turns out to be a high profile hobby.
The Bad Teacher Team Plans A New Movie
Bad Teacher was actually a pleasant, offensive comedy surprise when it plopped onto screens last summer. The concept of seeing Cameron Diaz behave poorly in front of a classroom full of kids didn’t exactly sound like the world’s freshest comedy, but it worked surprisingly well and now the core team behind the project have started work on a new movie. Director Jake Kasdan (Walk Hard) and the screenwriting team of Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky (Year One) came into Bad Teacher with a couple of bombs under their belts and after the comedy’s unexpected $215 million success worldwide, they’re now Hollywood players again.
Their new untitled comedy will revolve around a manager of a Supercuts who advises his best friend to break off his engagement and then falls in love with the former bride-to-be. Ok, so that doesn’t sound like a particularly original comedy, but if these guys could make Bad Teacher work together, then they must have some sort of plan.
It’s too early for any actors to be attached to the project yet, but keep an eye on this column as I’m sure that will change very, very soon.
A Very Harold And Kumar Christmas Gets An R-rated Trailer
Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but there are few movies coming this year that I’m more excited to see than A Very Harold And Kumar Christmas. The stoner comedy franchise has already been responsible for some of the funniest movies of the last ten years and something about putting the ethnically diverse reefer addicts against Santa Claus and Neil Patrick Harris sounds about right.
A new trailer has launched today that makes the movie look funnier than ever before. It is R-rated though, so if you’re in a place where you can’t watch a trailer where a baby is given cocaine and a woman says the line, “fuck a baby into me,” you might want to save this joyous little clip until later. However, I’ll say right now that the trailer's funny enough that it might be worth getting fired over. Just depends on how much you hate your job, I suppose.
