BuzzSugar

Buzz News Roundup, 7/31

BuzzSugar — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:30:55 -0700

Amy Poehler will anchor a couple of episodes of Saturday Night Live: Weekend Update Thursday to promote Parks and Recreation. - Entertainment Weekly
Matthew McConaughey and Eva Mendes are in talks to star in the drama Southbound. - ComingSoon
Russell Crowe will star in The Next Three Days, the adaptation of the 2008 French film Pour Elle, for Crash director Paul Haggis. - Variety
Jamie Foxx, Queen Latifah, and Carter Jenkins have joined the all-star cast of Garry Marshall's romantic comedy Valentine's Day. - The Hollywood Reporter
House executive producer David Shore is working on a remake of The Rockford Files for NBC. - Variety
Ridley Scott is reportedly confirmed to direct the Alien prequel. - Entertainment Weekly
Kimberly Peirce, the award-winning filmmaker behind Boys Don't Cry, is working with Judd Apatow on an "untitled romantic sex comedy." - ComingSoon
Christopher Gorham will join Piper Perabo in USA's Covert Affairs, while Donal Logue will star in FX's Terriers. - The Hollywood Reporter
Ron Howard is in talks to direct The Parsifal Mosaic, an adaptation of the espionage thriller by The Bourne Identity author Robert Ludlum. - Variety

Amy Poehler Is a Mischievous Lunch Lady

BuzzSugar — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:30:03 -0700

It's like cute overload over here with this Lunch Lady news. Amy Poehler is attached to star in a film adaptation of a children's graphic novel series, Lunch Lady. The books focus on "a mild-mannered school cafeteria server who secretly dishes out helpings of justice as she and her assistant investigate wrongdoings. The books also feature three kids who try to figure out her double life."

Adorable. Who's better for this kind of thing? Kristen Chenoweth is great with fun kids' stuff, but I like that, for this particular role, it maybe calls for someone a little scrappier and Amy Poehler is a perfect choice. I'm not even the target audience for this and I don't have any kids, but I'm excited to see it because Poehler never fails to entertain.

Source and Source

TV Tonight: Parks and Recreation

BuzzSugar — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:30:19 -0700

The majority of you were into last week's premiere of Parks and Recreation - but will you be tuning back in tonight? I liked the pilot well enough, but now I'm curious to see what the Parks and Rec team does with the characters we met last week.

Tonight, they're canvassing. Leslie wants to present her pit-into-park idea to the public, so she decides to take a door-to-door approach. Naturally, that doesn't quite go according to plan, as Leslie has a knack for saying just the wrong thing at just the wrong time. (I hope to stop comparing this show to The Office soon, but does that sound like anyone else we know?) I have a feeling this episode could have some funny moments for Aziz Ansari as Tom, as he wanders away from the rest of the group and uses his own questionable recruiting tactics. I wonder if they'll be like the ones he attempted to use on Ann in the pilot?

Parks and Rec got decent ratings for the premiere, and I'd love to see the show keep up its momentum tonight. To check out a preview clip, just read more.

Photo courtesy of NBC

Pilot Watch: Parks and Recreation

BuzzSugar — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:30:49 -0700

Quite a few new shows are hitting our TVs this week, but none's more anticipated than tomorrow's premiere of Parks and Recreation, the comedy starring Amy Poehler from the creators of The Office. I've seen the first episode of the series, and here's my initial take:

What's it about? Leslie Knope is a mid-level Parks and Recreation Department bureaucrat in Pawnee, IN, who dreams of a life in the public spotlight. In the first episode, she's attempting to lead her very first subcommittee, hoping to fill in a giant pit in an empty lot and turn it into a public park. The show is filmed mockumentary-style like The Office, with the crew supposedly following Leslie's quest to fix the pit.

Who's in it? Amy Poehler, Aziz Ansari, Rashida Jones, Aubrey Plaza, Paul Schneider, Nick Offerman

The good: The lead role could be just "Michael Scott in the public sector," but Poehler's performance is better than that. Her Leslie is the adult version of a perpetual student government vice president: not as politically gifted as she thinks she is and deluded into believing her star's still on the rise. The other characters in the parks department are plenty quirky - Ansari's Tom is vaguely (and sometimes overtly) lecherous; Offerman's Ron has a weapons cache in his office - and I'm excited to get to know them better. I got a kick out of Plaza as the department's intern; granted, she doesn't do much in the pilot besides chew gum and look bored, but if I were calculating the characters' humor potential per second of screen time, she might win.

The bad: I truly wish this series hadn't been filmed as a mockumentary. It would have been funnier and more original without that device, and it's the major reason it feels so close to The Office. I'm also worried that the show has tied itself to one plot too early. There's a lot of humor in the minutiae of small-town government life, but it seems that Leslie's crew will be stuck mainly on the pit project. Related to that concern is the fact that Jones's character seems shoehorned in; Jones is very funny as the straight woman to Poehler's spacey Leslie, but I also kind of wish her character weren't on board long term.

Will I watch? Sure. The show's not quite there yet; I'd give three stars out of five. But the pilot does a lot of work just to show us who these characters are, and I don't think we'll know how they'll gel into a show until we see what they do.

To check out some clips from the first episode and a gallery of photos, just read more.

View 8 Photos ›

Photos courtesy of NBC

Is Parks and Recreation in Trouble? Maybe, Maybe Not

BuzzSugar — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:30:13 -0700

There's been some less-than-encouraging news this week for Parks and Recreation, NBC's upcoming comedy starring Amy Poehler. A focus group study found some pretty serious problems with an early cut of the show, which premieres April 9, including: The pacing's too slow, it's too much like The Office, and there's a lack of "datable" men.

First of all, Aziz Ansari is totally datable. But moving on: NBC's Ben Silverman isn't concerned about these results, saying such focus group findings aren't unusual for new shows. "If you had seen the initial research on all of ours and our competitors' successful shows, it tends to be like that," Silverman told Entertainment Weekly. And getting good focus group results definitely doesn't guarantee success, because Journeyman tested great back in '07 and where is it now? Not on TV, that's for sure.

I hope NBC gives Parks and Recreation some time to find its footing. After all, those early episodes of The Office were pretty slow and a little too close to the British show that inspired it, but it didn't take long to come into its own. Having read the pilot script, I do think some of the criticisms are valid (the show could stand to get away from "the pit" - the empty lot that Poehler's character and Rashida Jones's character want to turn into a park - and tell other stories about bumbling local government officials). But all pilots have their issues. This one has such high expectations that lowering them a little couldn't really hurt. And besides, would another Office-esque show really be the worst thing NBC could put on the air?

Photo courtesy of NBC

Chris Pratt Books Parks Job Alongside Rashida Jones - And Paul Schneider and Nick Offerman are Joining Him

BuzzSugar — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:34:07 -0800

NBC's oft-renamed Parks and Recreation finally has another cast member! Everwood alum Chris Pratt has joined the show, playing the boyfriend of Rashida Jones's nurse character, Ann.

Update: The final two major characters have also now been cast! Paul Schneider and Nick Offerman have been cast in the final two major roles for the pilot, with Schneider playing a parks and recreation committee member alongside Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope and Offerman playing their supervisor.

In some ways, Pratt's character is the one who sets the whole show in motion: It's his accident in the big, empty pit in Pawnee, Indiana (you know, the one Poehler's cleaning up in this promo) that brings Ann to the parks committee meeting in the first place. The pilot script didn't have a ton of other details about him - other than that he's a struggling musician, which effectively means he's unemployed.

To hear about Schneider and Offerman's characters, just read more.

Schneider (that's him on the right) plays Mark, one of my favorite characters from the pilot: He once had a one-night stand with Poehler's character, but let's just say Leslie has assigned a bit more significance to the event than Mark has. Meanwhile, Offerman (on the left) will play Ron, the head of the parks and recreation department who ultimately wields a lot of power over the rest of the characters.

With those roles cast, the pilot should be ready to go. I'll be curious to see how it turns out when it hits our screens April 9!

Source

First Look: Amy Poehler in Parks and Recreation

BuzzSugar — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:32:37 -0800

Amy Poehler and Rashida Jones hopped on set to start filming their new sitcom last week, and it looks like it was just in time! The first ad for the new show, now called Parks and Recreation, aired during the special post-Super Bowl episode of The Office last night.

The short promo shows Poehler as Leslie Knope, a parks committee member from Pawnee, Indiana, wandering around an abandoned pit and picking up trash while talking about her vow to turn it into a lovely park. Things get a little dicey, however, when she finds a particularly unappetizing specimen.

I have to say, I'm not in love with the name Parks and Recreation - can you really hear anyone saying, "Nah, I gotta stay in tonight and watch the new Parks and Recreation"? I might have preferred the previous rumored title - Public Service - but as NBC's Ben Silverman told the New York Times, they didn't "want to seem mean" about making fun of public service. Eh, OK. To check out the promo, just read more.

Flynet

Buzz News Roundup, 1/26

BuzzSugar — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:34:48 -0800

NBC's Amy Poehler comedy has a likely title: Public Service. - New York Times
Anchor Bay has bought the rights to the comedy starring Ashton Kutcher, Spread, which just premiered at Sundance. - Variety
The next Real World season will be set in Cancun. - The Hollywood Reporter
It looks like the next Batman movie, a sequel to The Dark Knight, will hit theaters in 2011. - ComingSoon
Radiohead, Kanye West, and Paul McCartney have joined the lineup of performers for this year's Grammy Awards. - Billboard
A 3-D porn movie is in the works in Hong Kong. - Variety
Fox has ordered a pilot for the US remake of Absolutely Fabulous. - Zap2it

Source

Amy Poehler's Show Has a Lot of Funny People (But No Title)

BuzzSugar — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:35:23 -0800

Amy Poehler, Aziz Ansari, Rashida Jones, and writers Greg Daniels and Michael Schur just got the room laughing here at the TCA press tour in their first session for their new show. (Seriously, go here to hear about Poehler's Jason Bourne connection.)The show's still untitled, but we now know a little bit about the plot: Poehler plays Leslie, a mid-level local government operative who partners with Jones's character to help get a park built. Ansari plays a schmoozing networker who's most interested in his own rise. Here's some of what we learned:

Despite Poehler's role as a woman in local politics who believes she could one day rise to the top, we shouldn't look at the show as a satire of any recent political events. "It really doesn't specifically deal in any way with tapping into any of those women," Poehler said. "But [Leslie] certainly looks at a lot of the women in media and politics right now as her heroes. They're sort of her Cal Ripkins."
More about Leslie: "Leslie is an optimist, and she's really ambitious," Poehler said. "She's really kind of hoping that the place she is now is not the place she's going to stay. So she really is struggling to find her way in a man's world, to kind of make her mark. Along the way, she's deluded." She's nice, but not too nice: "it's going to be very easy to humiliate and be mean to me in the show."
About that title: Daniels said they just haven't found the right words to sum up the show yet - but they kind of spoof their own difficulties in the pilot with a section about finding the perfect name for their public works project.
The realm of local politics isn't new to Poehler: "My parents watch town council metings on their TV," she said. "They sit and wtch them and care, obviously, about what is next to them - what is being built, or are they going to put a prison where the muffin shop used to be."

To find out why Poehler took the job and whether there will ever be a proper Office spinoff, read more.

Poehler took the job because she wanted to work with Schur and Daniels, and she also "was excited at the idea of being able to turn the volume down a little bit and sit with a character for a while."
The project started out being described as an Office spinoff mostly because at the time, "we didn't have any ideas," Daniels said. They considered ideas both spinning directly off Dunder Mifflin and ones outside, but "as we thought of different ideas, the ideas that were set in the paper industry or something like that, it felt hard to get far enough away from The Office that you would consider it justified for a whole different show," he said.
That said, there is now another idea for a true spinoff involving some Office characters that could materialize someday. No details on that, though.
No plans at this time for any actual politicians to show up on this show - but "anybody who's the hot comptroller could come on," Poehler cracked.

Source

Two Bits of Office-Related News

BuzzSugar — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 12:33:31 -0800

It's NBC day at TCA, and I'm most looking forward to the session with Amy Poehler, Rashida Jones, Aziz Ansari, and the creators of the non-spinoff spinoff of The Office. The show is still technically untitled, but some bits of the plot have dribbled out thanks to copies of the pilot script that were left in reporters' hotel rooms last night. Meanwhile, The Office mothership is getting an exciting new cast member - well, at least for fans of The Wire. Read on . . .

First things first: The Amy Poehler series is set in Pawnee, Indiana, where Leslie Knope (Poehler),is a "mid-level bureaucrat in the Parks and Recreation Department." The show will be filmed in the same mockumentary style as The Office, and comedian Aubrey Plaza has just been cast to play her intern, April.
Second: Idris Elba, maybe best known as Stringer Bell from The Wire, will appear in six episodes of The Office this season as a new nemesis for Michael Scott in Dunder Mifflin corporate. You know, Stringer Bell always did have some business sense about him . . .

What do you think of the news so far? To watch a clip of Elba's previous, er, "business experience" (beware of some NSFW language), just read more.

Source