Junket Interview: Year One – Jack Black and Michael Cera

Junket interview with Jack Black and Michael Cera on their roles in Year One.

Junket Interview: Year One – Harold Ramis

Junket interview with Harold Ramis, the director, writer and producer of Year One.

Movie Reviews: Year One

Humor as fresh today as it was in B.C.

Evangelicals might take one look at ancestors Zed (Jack Black) and Oh (Michael Cera) and decide they’d rather descend from monkeys. Harold Ramis’ comedy is more evolved than the trailers let on, but after a solid hit to the popcorn audience’s vestigial funny bone, the humor retreats into a lazy, generic swamp. Weekend returns should be respectable, but few will excavate it for a second go-round on DVD.

Jack Black’s caveman is as primitive as his usual meatheads, his hair and eyes still wild, his social graces still equal to a stray dog. Here, however, he matches—not clashes—with his surrounding culture, and it’s Michael Cera who can’t get with the program of jackal dances and clubbing crush Eema (Juno Temple) on the head. Cera, too, is the same as ever. He speaks haltingly, adding unexpected pauses to his sentences like a gentle Christopher Walken—he’s so sweet, he talks to berries. But his Oh is harder to please than Cera’s usual virginal ingénues, and after Zed eats the forbidden fruit and gets them expelled from their jungle village, his resentment is a nice sour jolt.

The first half of Ramis and co-screenwriters Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg’s script has fun riffing off Biblical lore and caveman minds. Black charms his love Maya (June Diane Raphael) by making fun of how her parents were torn apart by a pack of wild dogs, and wives and sisters are offered around like after dinner mints. We meet Adam and Eve (Ramis and Rhoda Griffis), Cain and Abel (David Cross and Paul Rudd), Abraham and Isaac (Hank Azaria and Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and watch Zed and Oh get motion sick from the five-mile-an-hour speeds of an ox-drawn cart.

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Year One I Never Got a Sword Clip

Watch Year One I Never Got a Sword Clip

Year One Whence Comest Thou? Clip

Watch Year One Whence Comest Thou?

Year One Gathering Is Challenging Clip

Watch Year One Gathering Is Challenging Clip

Tv Spot: Year One – Old School

A special promo spot from “Year One” which takes a look at some of the classic duos in NBA Finals history.

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Weekend Box Office: ‘The Hangover’, ‘Up’ Hang On!

“The Hangover” is officially the summer’s biggest breakout hit. Its closest analogue is Wedding Crashers, which, four summers ago, was carried by positive word-of-mouth to a final gross nearly seven times its opening weekend. The Hangover has bigger raw numbers, but its second weekend drop — 25% — is comparable. For a film that opened to $45 million, and without any sort of holiday boost, that’s pretty remarkable. It will have some competition next weekend in the form of Year One, but it may not matter much; its word-of-mouth appears to be the stuff that dreams are made of.

Pixar’s Up is also going gangbusters in second place. It is now running a mere $4 million behind Pixar box office champion Finding Nemo. At this point it’s anybody’s game.

The weekend’s two wide openers — The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and Imagine That Imagine That opened pretty much to expectations. Pelham did a respectable $25 million, which is pretty close to previous Denzel Washington-Tony Scott collaborations (Man on Fire and Deja Vu). And Imagine That’s $5.7 million pretty much precisely mirrors the opening of Eddie Murphy’s Meet Dave this time next year. Murphy really needs to do something to shake things up a bit.

The full top 10 after the jump.

1 – The Hangover (Warner Bros.) – $33.42 ($9,960) – $105.39
2 – Up (Disney) – $30.52 ($7,853) – $187.18
3 – The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Sony) – $25.00 ($8,133) – $25.00
4 – Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (Fox) – $9.60 ($2,853) – $143.45
5 – Land of the Lost (Universal) – $9.15 ($2,590) – $34.98
6 – Imagine That (Paramount) – $5.70 ($1,895) – $5.70
7 – Star Trek (Paramount) – $5.60 ($2,123) – $232.03
8 – Terminator Salvation (Warner Bros.) – $4.70 ($1,772) – $113.83
9 – Angels & Demons (Sony) – $4.20 ($1,724) – $123.30
10 – Drag Me to Hell (Universal) – $3.86 ($1,700) – $35.15

Movie Interview: Year One – Olivia Wilde

Interview with Olivia Wilde, who plays Princess Inanna in Year One.

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Movie Interview: Year One – Michael Cera

Interview with Michael Cera, who plays Oh in Year One.

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