Seth Rogen joins Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut Being Mortal
Just two buddies, hanging out with Bill Murray and thinking about aging and death
Aux News Aziz Ansari
Seth Rogen is gearing up to—as we all must, some day—contemplate a Seth Rogen-free universe, as Deadline reports that the American Pickle star has signed on for a role in his buddy Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut, Being Mortal.
Said film is being adapted from Atul Gawande’s non-fiction book of the same name, in which the American surgeon muses on a wide variety of factors related to aging and death. Which sounds like a real laugh riot, especially when you’ve got Aziz and Seth yucking it up about assisted living, or dementia, or just the inevitable yawning chasm that will one day consume us all, rendering everything we do meaningless in any sense beyond the strictly transitory.
Bill Murray will also be there.
This will be the first major collaboration between Rogen and the noted NFT entrepreneur, which is kind of surprising, in that they’ve both operated in similar niches during their careers, offering up two different takes on the “smartass who is, deep down, a good guy” motif.
This is Ansari’s first feature film as a director, although he’s previously directed a number of episodes of his Netflix series Master Of None. (Including all five episodes of the show’s third season, during which Lena Waithe took over as the series’ star.) It’s not clear what sort of structure he’s going to impose on Gawande’s book, which isn’t, by all accounts, an especially narrative experience, despite featuring a number of anecdotes re: croaking. Ansari will also star in the film, which he wrote.
Rogen’s having a busy year of his own; he recently starred in Hulu’s Pam & Tommy as the guy who steals Pamela Anderson’s sex tape and broadcasts it to the world; he’s also lined up his first feature with Steven Spielberg, having been cast in a role in the director’s upcoming semi-autobiographical feature The Fabelmans.
22 Comments
At first glance I thought that said “Bill Mumy”, and was actually intrigued. No disrespect meant for Bill Murray, but, well, he’s had just a tad more exposure, after all…
Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads…
Not Bill Munny, outta Missouri, killer of women and children?
I do enjoy how the AV Club is making snarky comments about Bill Murray’s forays into NFT as if they’re common knowledge that everyone should know when you guys literally only published the first story about them a few hours ago.
It’s a meant to create FOMO. You’re supposed to panic at the idea that you haven’t heard about this new story that’s such old news people are talking about it like it’s a known fact.That’s why there’s no link to the Bill Murray NFT story, like you’d expect them to include (probably as the words “noted NFT entrepreneur” in that tacky way they do). Your shame is strong enough to motivate you to click back to the homepage and find it yourself, so they get extra ad impressions.It’s a “dark pattern” and it’s incredibly grossEDIT: actually scratch all that. I saw that this is Hughes, and he’s just fucking lazy. He probably literally thinks the Bill Murray thing is old news
EDIT: actually scratch all that. I saw that this is Hughes, and he’s just fucking lazy. He probably literally thinks the Bill Murray thing is old newsHanlon’s fucking Razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Not their first collaboration. Aziz was in Observe and Report
he did say first MAJOR collaboration, which them mouthing the words Fuck You at each other for 3 minutes is decidedly not
Wasn’t Seth Rogen the “I have no plans to work with harassers and abusers” guy? I’m not saying I think Aziz Ansari should be shunned or anything, but he made a whole thing of throwing James Franco under the bus, and I don’t know if anything he was accused of even reaches the level of what Ansari was, and that felt comparatively mild on the spectrum of #MeToo behavior.
Are you really suggesting that what James Franco is accused of is somehow less problematic than Aziz Ansari’s situation? Ansari was basically guilty of being sexually pushy on an otherwise consensual date, and the questionable reporting of the gossip story essentially doomed the now-defunct website that published it. Meanwhile, Franco has multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. Ansari’s career took a hit from the scandal, for sure, but he’s still making movies and getting Netflix specials, while Franco’s career pretty much seems to be toast.https://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-james-franco-allegations-20180111-htmlstory.html
See, the phrase “sexual misconduct,” while I guess it’s helpful to have something that can describe a wide range of things, is exactly what flattens everything together. According to the story, he wanted actors to do nude scenes, then got annoyed when they didn’t want to. Not pleasant, I’m sure, but not something that deserves to have a career end over it. And that, by the way, is assuming that everything he’s been accused of happened, which is of course not a certainty.
Didn’t Franco want actors to do nude scenes *in an acting class*, and forced them to remove any kind of modesty shields, plus had a history of predatory behavior?
The article says that he did the thing with the plastic guards; I think he denied it, but supposing he did, that could easily have been a miscommunication in the middle of filming a charged scene; I don’t know that it’s obvious that was predatory, and this was before intimacy coordinators or anything like that were on set. And I don’t know that he was accused of asking women to do nude scenes in a class so much as on shoots he asked who was willing to go topless, then getting annoyed when no one said yes. Again, maybe not the best way to handle it, but is he really going to lose a career over that? For what it’s worth, he was also investigated by HBO for The Deuce when that came out, and even the slightest issue probably would have been enough to fire him, and they found nothing. It’s not like I’m saying he acted perfectly–he probably didn’t–just that what he was accused of doesn’t seem cancel-able to me.
You’re missing some significant things that Franco was accused of.
It wasn’t “sexually pushy” though, the reporting did state that the woman said no and he didn’t listen. He just excused because he was meant to be “one of the good ones” and therefore would never do such a thing (because “the good ones” turning out to be the ones using that image to do horrible things has never happened before).
Are you really suggesting that what James Franco is accused of is somehow less problematic than Aziz Ansari’s situation? Ansari was basically guilty of being sexually pushy on an otherwise consensual date, and the shoddy reporting of the gossip story essentially doomed the now-defunct website that published it. Meanwhile, Franco has multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. Ansari’s career took a hit from the scandal, for sure, but he’s still making movies and getting Netflix specials, while Franco’s career pretty much seems to be toast.https://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-james-franco-allegations-20180111-htmlstory.html
Why you gotta Barsanti the comments.
I’m saying that he should be open to working with both. Barsanti would be calling for the excommunication of all three of them, and then end it with “trans women are women” even though it has nothing to do with anything.
I was just enjoying an AV Club page that was just about AV stuff, is all.
God, that sounds awful
Shame we’re all gonna have to watch it?
Rogen and Murray have different comedic personas, at least I think so. They may both like improvising, but Rogen generally projects genial goodwill towards everything he’s in, like he can’t believe he gets to be in movies – whereas Murray’s brand is more “eh, this movie I’m currently acting in is lame, but I’m above it.”**Unless the movie is not actually bad, in which case his approach somehow turns out to be refreshing, like a missing ingredient.