Ed Helms to star in Naked Gun reboot

http://latino-review.com/2013/12/frank-drebin-will-ride-naked-gun-remake/

No thanks.

Ed who?

This will suck harder than that movie where Adam Sandler plays a dude and also the dude's sister.

I agree this is a bad idea. Of course I thought the idea of remaking "The Longest Yard" was a bad idea. The original was awesome...the Adam Sandler remake was atrocious.

Dunno when Helms is due to start this, but ANOTHER comedy franchise reboot/belated sequel starring him has begun shooting ... he's a grown-up Rusty Griswold in the latest 'National Lampoon's Vacation' instalment.

Last I heard was that Liam Neeson was in talks to take over. It has been a while, so maybe the whole thing has been dropped?
Meanwhile, found this cool interview with Leslie:

Comedy as a genre is basically non-existent these days. There was never anything too edgy about Naked Gun, mind you, but the entire cultural sphere revolves around Xanax'd purple-haired degenerates so unlikely we'll see it being produced any time soon.

The Wiki article on Naked Gun says that filming on the new one is tentatively scheduled to start this summer, PC. I didn't follow the references though to get the whole credibility picture.

CJB wrote:

Comedy as a genre is basically non-existent these days.

Maybe alone here but biggest comedy hole for me is the sitcom. That rhythm of setup, joke, punchline, audience laughter is stamped into me on a cellular level.

In terms of films, I'm sure they are still making them but it does seem to be few and far between. Or maybe they aren't making any good ones. I haven't heard buzz around a comedy in a long time. Most of the ones that go for comedy now seem dark, satirical, solemn even.

Must be hard figuring out who exactly to make them for when offense seems too easily taken at many turns.

On Liam Neeson and comedy ... here's the big man 'consulting' (by way of deadpan self-mockery) with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant on how to improve his comedy chops in a bit from Life's Too Short, their mockumentary with Warwick Davis -

Somerset wrote:

Maybe alone here but biggest comedy hole for me is the sitcom. That rhythm of setup, joke, punchline, audience laughter is stamped into me on a cellular level.

Seinfeld and Friends are still beloved, so you're not alone there. Doubt anyone will remember Shytes Creek -  or whatever the most popular comedy is these days - in 20 years.

Somerset wrote:

In terms of films, I'm sure they are still making them but it does seem to be few and far between. Or maybe they aren't making any good ones. I haven't heard buzz around a comedy in a long time. Most of the ones that go for comedy now seem dark, satirical, solemn even.

Must be hard figuring out who exactly to make them for when offense seems too easily taken at many turns.

Sticking with the Ed Helms theme, The Hangover is case in point. Fairly dumb, juvenile humour that couldn't be made today. None of us who were adults in 2009 thought anything of any gags (including "Paging Dr...") because we understood comedic context. Those who've only sprouted purple-dyed pubes thereafter, however, believe themselves to be the ultimate arbiters of morality - like co-ideologues such as the Ayatollah of Iran & co. - and so God forbid anyone is allowed to laugh at anything before it's academically dissected for "problems."

Phantom Commander wrote:

Last I heard was that Liam Neeson was in talks to take over. It has been a while, so maybe the whole thing has been dropped?
Meanwhile, found this cool interview with Leslie:

So far as I know, Nielsen was always a class act. A friend of mine got into the making-of jouranlist/article thing for awhile about a decade ahead of me, and he made a set visit to one of the first post-AIRPLANE projects with Nielsen, an ill-fated film called THE CREATURE WASN'T NICE that years later was eventually released on a very limited basis under the title SPACESHIP.

My friend told me that the extremely low-budget production was hampered mainly by attitude from Cindy Williams, who apparently felt after LAVERNE & SHIRLEY and working with Lucas and Coppola that she was above this kind of thing, but that Nielsen never had a bad word to say and seemed to be the total professional (except for his incessant use of a hidden fart-sound device, that is.)

Trivia about SPACESHIP that I still remember, even though I never made it through more than 20 minutes of the film on VHS: Lee Cole, the lady who handled set graphics on the first two STAR TREK features (best known for her time working with the government on aerospace, from when she pointed out that designs for the B-1 bomber had switches for EJECTOR SEAT and TOILET FLUSH right next to each other before they were finally corrected), also worked on this film. My friend recalled that she was frantically trying to punch up the interiors by using the stickers from leftover copies of her STAR TREK PEEL-OFF GRAPHICS BOOK. We thought this was hilarious; we were both zero-budget filmmakers -- almost double-zero filmmakers in my case, as I began with Bond parodies -- and had bought up many of these peel-off graphics books ourselves to use in our own garage-built spaceship interiors (though I at least cut them up to mask their origins somewhat.)

EDIT ADD-ON: one more thing about Nielsen. His performance in FORBIDDEN PLANET is not exactly what he delivered on the set. CINEFANTASTIQUE did some huge and impressive coverage on the film in the late 70s, and apparently the rough cut for the film featured a lot more in the way of thoughtful or wistful pauses on his part (and more meandering on the part of Walter Pigeon), but the tightening made Nielsen's commander into a more no-nonsense type (kind of unfortunate, as a cut scene with him and the ship's doctor is practically a prototype for the Kirk/McCoy relationship a decade later in STAR TREK.) Always wanted to see a longer cut of the film, and actually used the laserdisc to crudely insert some cut scenes back into the feature, though obviously there was no way to see it as originally assembled.