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Here we are at the

Here we are at the end of the year with a couple of weeks left to sift things through before everyone leaves for the Xmas holiday, and I'm only just starting to hear about screenings of two big-studio comedies -- Dean Parisot's Fun With Dick and Jane (Columbia, 12.21) and Rob Reiner's Rumor Has it (Warner Bros., 12.25). We all know that a typical Meathead movie (i.e., one directed by Rob Reiner) will be conservative and tonally smoothed-out as well as diametrically opposed to any kind of loosey-goosey 1980s Pedro Almodovar sensibility, so that kind of diminishes the Rumor want-to-see right off the top of the deck. (Honestly? I'm more interested right now in those Jennifer Aniston papparazzi boob shots that her attorney has been threatening magazine editors about.) I just got invited to a December 12th London screening of Fun With Dick and Jane by Sony's Anna Whelan...but the Culver City Sony team is curiously silent. (Wait...have I been taken off the screening list because of my Geisha comments?) The irony is that Dean Parisot (director of the great Galaxy Quest and the under-valued Home Fries) is a good guy with good instincts...but leave it to Sony's p.r. team to convey the opposite impression. Dick and Jane, a remake of a not-very-good 1977 comedy that was co-written by Judd Apatow, Nicholas Stoller and Peter Tolan, was said to be a "troubled" during production...but that's just talk. It's about ideal married couple Dick (Jim Carrey) and Jane (Tea Leoni) freaking and turning to larceny when their income dries up.

Posted by Jeffrey Wells on December 6, 2005 at 7:20 AM

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