Advertisement

On The Big Screen

Well, the trailer for Date Night sure looks inconsistent! It starts with yet another freakin’ joke about Tina Fey and her retainer (see Rosenberg, Alyssa: pet peeves). But fortunately, it moves on to strongly imply that her character may have had an affair with a terrifyingly buff Mark Wahlberg, and to the hilarious sight of James Franco and Mila Kunis as slightly grubby-looking semi-hipsters condemning Fey and Steve Carell for stealing their reservation at a restaurant, a decision that sets off most of the action.

But really, I’m mostly excited that Jimmi Simpson has a role in Date Night. I love him. He is hilarious as Jordana Brewster’s henchman in the highly underrated lesbian spy caper spoof D.E.B.S., which contains perhaps the best Erasure lip-synching sequence of all time (sorry, could only find a version dubbed in Spanish):

Advertisement

And he’s haunted and haunting in a small role in Zodiac (which is one of my favorite movies of all time, even if I can’t watch the scene in the basement because it makes me do crazy-lady things like accidentally lock the door to my grandmother’s basement from the inside) as the only person who survives an attack by the Zodiac Killer and can remember what his face looks like. Simpson’s never going to be a leading man. He’s a sallow-looking dude. But he can do funny, he can do drama. I’m glad he’s getting steady work.