Salon.com > Susannah Gora

In defense of Ferris Bueller, car salesman

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:47:00 +0000

Honda owes Matthew Broderick a great, big "Danke Schoen."

Thanks to him, the Japanese carmaker can boast that it's got this year’s most buzzed-about Super Bowl ad: a commercial for the Honda CR-V featuring Broderick in an homage to his most well-loved character, Ferris Bueller.

This time around, Broderick isn’t portraying a charming teenage truant who feigns sickness and skips school to drive around Chicago in a Ferrari 250 GT with his best friend and girlfriend, and dance on a parade float while lip syncing Wayne Newton and the Beatles. Rather, Broderick plays a fictionalized version of his actual, off-screen self: a middle-aged guy feigning sickness to take a day off from shooting a movie so that he can tool around Los Angeles in an SUV. The ad, which was directed by Todd Phillips — of “The Hangover” and “Old School” fame -- has been viewed over 3 million times on YouTube, is a top trending topic on Twitter -- but has divided fans who aren't sure whether to thrill to the nostalgia or be horrified that the free-spirited Bueller is shilling for an SUV.

Why would anyone remake “Footloose”?

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:34:00 +0000

It was the year that Wendy’s ads popularized the phrase “Where’s the beef,” the Detroit Tigers were one of the hottest teams in baseball and a dance movie called “Footloose,” starring mostly unknown actors, was released.

The year: 2011.

Of course, all of those events happened for the first time in 1984. But while Clara Peller of the Wendy's ads is long dead and these Tigers' World Series dreams teeter precariously, the “Footloose” remake out today bares a comfortable resemblance to the Kevin Bacon near-classic released 27 years ago — the same year, incidentally, that its star Kenny Wormald, was born.

Wormald plays Ren MacCormack, the character created by Bacon. Ren is a big city boy (Chicago then, Boston now) who finds himself in a small town where dancing and loud music have been outlawed. In the original film, the merriment is prohibited because the town’s reverend (John Lithgow) is a religious fanatic who fears for the teenagers’ souls. He also doesn’t like his foxy daughter (Lori Singer) hanging around with Ren. In the 2011 edition, a tragic car crash in which five teens were killed coming home from a dance is the plot engine which leads to a teen rebellion and the eventual need for Ren to help everybody lose … their blues.

Are comedians funnier when they're fat?

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:24:00 +0000

When Jonah Hill appeared on "Live With Regis and Kelly" earlier this week, he probably thought he was there to promote his role in the new film "Moneyball." As it turned out, what they really wanted to talk about was how good Hill looked in his skinny jeans.

In case you haven’t seen him looking svelte on the couches of Letterman, Fallon and Conan, Jonah Hill isn’t fat anymore. He’s trim, stylish -- and almost completely unrecognizable from the portly schlub that audiences fell in love with in films like "Superbad."

"I decided I wanted to be healthier, and I stuck with that decision," Hill told Regis and Kelly, in a variation on the same talking points he's used in interviews all week. Hill said he knew it was time to make some changes when his nutritionist "had me write down what my favorite foods were, and it was like, the menu of a 6-year-old’s birthday party."

Cameron Crowe revisits “Say Anything”

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:32:00 +0000

For Gen-Xers still under the spell of Lloyd Dobler, the boombox-hoisting, trench coat-wearing antihero played by John Cusack in Cameron Crowe’s 1989 teen romance "Say Anything," it’s been a pretty eventful summer.

While discussing his upcoming films "Pearl Jam Twenty" and "We Bought a Zoo" at the Television Critics Association press conference in July, Crowe said he'd consider a "Say Anything" sequel. But just as fans started getting excited about Dobler Part Deux, they suffered a collective buzz kill Monday when Crowe told IFC that while he thinks about what might have happened to the film's characters, a sequel remains a pipe dream.