Bee Movie

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

[Ravi]

Looks good, except for Renee Zellweger's voice.

[MacGuffin]

Seinfeld makes a leap at Cannes
For the "Bee Movie" star, no promotional stunt is too desperate.
Source: Los Angeles Times

CANNES, France -- Jerry Seinfeld is standing just a foot or two over my head, perched on a platform on the edge of the roof of the legendary Carlton Hotel. He's wearing an enormous bee costume, complete with head. And he's talking to me.

"Hey, Kenny," says the writer, producer and star of the forthcoming "Bee Movie." "There's nothing I hate more than anything that smacks of desperation in the promotion of a movie."

Seinfeld trades some quips via intercom with costar Chris Rock ("They told me Scorsese did the same thing last year for 'The Departed,' " Seinfeld says) and waits patiently eight stories off the ground as a handful of technicians fuss with the wire rigging. Then he takes off into the air, flies across the stopped traffic on Boulevard de la Croisette and ends up in the midst of a crowd at a big "Bee Movie" sign at the end of the Carlton pier 350 feet away. Then he turns around, gets winched back up to the roof and does it again.

"Now I'm happy," says a relieved-looking George Shapiro, Seinfeld's longtime manager, who's been standing with me on a hotel balcony and assuring me that he isn't worried a bit. "Now I'm really happy."

If there is anyone who truly wasn't worried about this stunt, it seems to be Seinfeld himself. He rehearsed it the day before — at 4:30 a.m., the better to avoid prying eyes. "It was fantastic, kind of like gliding," he says, and no special training was required.

"It's like being a suit at a dry cleaner's; you just go around the rack. You could put any suit on the rack and it's going to go around."

Besides, Seinfeld continues at breakfast a few hours before his leap, anyone who thinks this jump is scary just doesn't know about stand-up comedy.

"People have no idea how hard my regular job is," he says, sipping on noticeably strong coffee. "I recently walked on stage at a 4,300-seat theater in the middle of nowhere, a horribly designed building, nothing in your favor, and you have to go out there and perform by yourself for an hour and 20 minutes.

"If I had to fly off the roof and get laughs all the way down, that would be hard. Anything where you don't have to get laughs is easy."

The kind of deeply funny individual who can elicit laughs with just about any sentence, Seinfeld is also comforted by the fact that his flight will be handled by the same crew (the U.K.'s Summit Rigging) that pulled off the flying at the opening of the last Olympics. Also comforting is the fact that Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of DreamWorks Animation, will be running the show.

"Jeffrey is a very thorough person," Seinfeld says, "and I knew that as bad as it would be for me to become severely injured, it would be worse for him. So I wasn't worried."

Katzenberg, who thought up the flying stunt, was also crucial in getting Seinfeld to agree to do "Bee Movie," the biggest project the comedian has taken on since the end of his enormously successful TV show in 1998. As the man himself says, drawing the sentiment out with impeccable timing, "I really wasn't anxious to do anything."

This reluctance stemmed from a determination to do something "different from everything else I've done," in part because the show was so demanding and lasted for 180 episodes. "You know those gold brads [fastening devices] that you have in scripts — I see them and I can't go on," Seinfeld says, not completely joking. "It's like, 'The brads, the brads, don't show me the brads.' "

Seinfeld insists that "Bee Movie" first came to him as a title without any story attached, adding, "I made the movie just for the title; the hardest part is the title." He mentioned the title to Steven Spielberg, a DreamWorks principal, who mentioned it to Katzenberg. He in turn gave Seinfeld a tutorial in computer animation in which the comedian became fascinated by what he calls "the only movie medium where, if you can think of it, they can make it."

Seinfeld, as turns out, has a long-standing interest in bees: "I love the specialization of their tasks; there are bees that just check IDs at the door." So he eventually came up with the story of Barry B. Benson, a bee who wants more out of life. Benson becomes friendly with a florist named Vanessa (voiced by Renee Zellweger) and finds a crusade when he discovers humans have been stealing bee's honey.

"I have to admit, I've always enjoyed cartoons and puppets, and I saw this as a gigantic puppet show," Seinfeld says. "There are no marks on the floor with tape, there seem to be fewer brads, and I'd be involved with this technology and not actresses crying because they got locked out of their car and the dog has been in there for 45 minutes.

"I didn't want to deal with any more crying."

[modage]

Trailer here.

ANTZ WIDE SHUT

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer

[Kal]

I'm dying to see this... Seinfeld is just too funny even if the movie sucks

[MacGuffin]

Dolbee Digital Promo here.

[MacGuffin]

Seinfeld builds buzz for Bee Movie
The comic hits the road to promote his leap to the big screen
Source: The Globe And Mail

TORONTO -- Jerry Seinfeld came to Toronto yesterday, in an early-morning red-carpet event at the Varsity Cinemas to promote his new Bee Movie, his biggest project since his eponymous television show ended nine years ago.

The 53-year-old comic introduced clips from his new four-years-in-the-making animated film, along with some of the behind-the-scenes promotional clips that will be featured on NBC next month, to a media-packed audience.

After walking around the upstairs level of the Varsity for photographers, Seinfeld, in blue blazer and pink shirt, entered the theatre and stood at a podium to say good morning to the crowd. He introduced director Simon J. Smith and the two men took turns introducing selections from the film, which follows the adventures of Barry B. Benson (voiced by Seinfeld).

In the movie, Barry is a recent college graduate who rejects his prescribed role making honey for the Honex Corporation. Barry wants to be a "pollen jock," sort of a test pilot of the bee world, but during one scouting mission, he commits the cardinal bee sin of speaking to a human (a florist played by Renée Zellweger). They become friends, and through her he discovers that humans have been stealing bee honey for years. He decides to make legal history by taking humans to court for reparations. Some of the guest voices include Oprah Winfrey as the judge and Ray Liotta and Sting, playing themselves, as celebrity witnesses.

Before showing the film clips, Seinfeld gave the audience a taste of the observational stand-up comedy for which he's famous. He immediately linked the film to fatherhood. Married at 45, Seinfeld now has three children, a six-year-old girl and two boys, 4 and 2.

"I was one of those guys who just didn't get it," he acknowledged, saying he was mystified by watching parents push strollers around and the idea of living with another person who "craps in their pants while looking you right in the eye.

"I love the kids," he added, but said he still has a hard time with the endless chain of reciprocal birthday parties, at which "I envy the pinata."

Children "don't like to see humans on screen," but enjoy cartoon characters with human behaviour, he said.

He said bees seemed a natural choice: "They have an office, they have a product, they have bosses. ... [They have] a little corporation, hanging from a tree."

Seinfeld took a couple of questions from the audience before the film began to roll. Though the Seinfeld show famously worked under the motto "no hugs, no lessons," he acknowledged that there was an inadvertent environmental message in Bee Movie. "Since we started writing this four years ago, there has been a bee crisis. Have you heard of this? Colony collapse disorder. Bees have suddenly stopped working, following the exact plot line of the movie. It freaks me out. What we were writing about actually happening. I have to be more careful about what we write."

He also said he had been stung during the course of researching the film, when a French beekeeper convinced him that it would be better to look at a hive without protective clothing. The beekeeper, perhaps excited to show off to a celebrity, asked Seinfeld if he wanted to see the queen and began tearing into the hive.

"The bees got upset, so they sent one out to get me and it stung me on the nose."

Seinfeld said he picked Zellweger to play the bee's human friend, Vanessa, because "she has such a sweet personality and a voice like honey. She seemed like the kind of human a bee could fall for."

The movie also stars Matthew Broderick, Kathy Bates and Rip Torn as fellow bees, with Chris Rock as a mosquito.

Seinfeld said he first had the idea for Bee Movie while chewing on a licorice Twizzler before a performance in Nashville; he thought it might be funny if they made a movie about a bee called Bee Movie. Shortly after, he contacted director Steven Spielberg to help him make a commercial. Spielberg turned him down but asked him to dinner, which, as Seinfeld said last May at the Cannes Film Festival, "for a Jewish kid from Long Island, is like having a second bar mitzvah."

During a lull in the conversation, Seinfeld mentioned his Bee Movie idea and Spielberg got excited and called Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks films on his cellphone and the process was under way.

Later, at the Four Seasons Hotel, Seinfeld is on the phone to Katzenberg himself, summing up the morning's premiere, and a small glitch in which the wrong clip was shown: "We spread a little sand on the floor and did our dance," he says.

Later, sitting down for a brief interview, he looks at the hotel room and says in a surprisingly loud voice: "In New York, this would be a big place."

As is the case with all of his work, he says, there are likely autobiographical elements in Barry the bee's story. "I was thinking about that recently. It does kind of describe my reluctance to join in the normal ways of gainful employment."

Had he been resistant to the idea of making feature movies before this? "Clearly," he says.

"This was the thing I couldn't resist because of the freshness of the challenge. I think the audience wants something different. It's like ice cream. You want something different. You've done the chocolate and the vanilla, now let's go crazy.

"I couldn't do my best work unless I got excited and, to be honest with you, after 180 episodes and 90 hours of production, I was a little tired of that form. A live-action thing was just too similar, and if I wasn't stimulated, I wasn't going to do the work I wanted to do."

If he had to do it over again, would he have kept his mouth shut and not spent four years of his life making a movie? "I don't know. The four years was going to go by anyway. I couldn't stop the four years from going by so at least I have something to show for it."

[MacGuffin]

[Kal]

anyone?

[picolas]

i've been on the fence about modern, post-Comedian seinfeld ever since he denounced actors and acting as a profession on the larry sanders dvd. and before that the oscar speech come to think of it. and apparently this is pretty mediocre. that's all i've got.

[Pubrick]

jerry who? he fell off before seinfeld even finished.

blame his marriage. comedians are not funny married. unless that's their act.

louis ck's best material is still about poo.

[pumba]

I liked it. I guess this is Seinfeld's "Antz"...

Chris Rock is really funny in it, and although it's not pixar visuals, there was enough story and character juice for me.
moosh moosh

[Kal]

the mosquito (rock) is hilarious... granted is not pixar, but way better than others... and seinfeld is still great in my opinion. just listening to his voice and tone cracks me up.

[hedwig]

post-Comedian seinfeld

glad you mentioned that. Comedian is a really good movie.