The New 'Naked Gun' Movie Looks... Good?
Liam Neeson, Paul Walter Hauser, and the director of 'Popstar.'
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the late aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
—
For dudes of a certain age like me, there’s probably no bigger movie-related question for the summer than “do you think this Naked Gun remake is actually going to be good, or what?”
There is no genre of movie I enjoyed more at any point in my life than the run of Zucker Brothers (or Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker) spoofs from Airplane! (1980) to Top Secret! (1984) through to Naked Gun (1988) and its sequels (I do enjoy Mel Brooks’ spoofs too, if not quite as much).
My podcast co-host Brendan likes to tell the story of how he got sent to the principal’s office in third grade because he spontaneously remembered the scene where Frank Drebin keeps his microphone on while he’s taking a leak and couldn’t stop laughing. Most of my friends have similar seminal origin story moments involving ZAZ movies. I showed all of the Naked Gun movies to my son, stepson, and nephew a few years back, and they were still a hit with everyone. Excellent films. They never seem to age, even with a multiple murderer playing a prominent role (OJ Simpson was, sadly, excellent as Nordberg).
But do we need a remake? Comedy sequels are pretty much never good, and I have to imagine remakes/reboots are an even lower percentage. And yet… when they cast Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin, many of us were cautiously intrigued. One of the things that made the Zucker spoofs so great was how straight Leslie Nielson played everything. Neeson has a similar dramatic background as Nielson (albeit much, much higher profile), and if you ever saw Neeson’s cameo in Life’s Too Short, you know that he’s clearly capable of playing his persona for comedy.
Paramount also got Akiva Shaffer from The Lonely Island to direct, previously of Popstar (the best modern spoof since Walk Hard) and 11 episodes of I Think You Should Leave. It was enough to make a man cautiously optimistic about the whole thing.
Now there’s a trailer (above) and you can judge for yourself, provided you don’t mind spoiling a few of the jokes from the movie. I watched about 50 seconds of the two-and-half minute trailer and it was good enough that I restrained myself from watching the rest. It looks… possibly good? And Paul Walter Hauser? Count me in. He’s my favorite Hauser since Doogie.
Opens August 3rd.
—
King George from ‘Ren Faire’ Has Died
Remember HBO’s Ren Faire? We had director Lance Oppenheimer on the podcast (for the second time) to discuss it. If you’ll remember, the three-episode HBO series followed the eccentric CEO of the Texas Renaissance Faire, George Coulam, as he used his svangali-like powers to manipulate his underlings while they basically catered to his every whim. Released just weeks before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and months before Donald Trump got elected a second time, Ren Faire offered a devastating and prescient portrait of what it looks like to be ruled by a failing gerontocracy who won’t clear the way for a successor no matter how obvious their failings become.
News hit that Coulam had died in late May, and by early June, the cause of death was revealed to be suicide. Coulam, 87, was bizarre in so many ways that even an excellent three-part documentary couldn’t entirely do it justice.