It hasn’t been a great time for respected TV creators turning their hand to films. Sopranos man David Chase found little success with his first effort, Not Fade Away and now his former mafia-writing lieutenant-turned-Mad Men wrangler Matthew Weiner saw his film directing debut, Are You Here, greeted with cold reactions at the Toronto Film Festival, when it bowed as **You Are Here **last year. He’s worked on it a little further and the first trailer is up via Yahoo.
The story follows Ben Baker (Zach Galifianakis), who inherits his estranged father’s fortune and teams with womanizing local weatherman Steve Dallas (Owen Wilson) to battle the legal challenge brought by Ben’s sister Terri (Amy Poehler). Given that the cast also includes Jenna Fischer, Rosemarie DeWitt, Joel Gretsch and a wealth of other funny folk, hopes were high for the film.
But the idea of Galifianakis channelling a character that feels like a variant on The Hangover’s Alan doesn’t exactly grab us, our grammar patrol is annoyed by the lack of a quesiton mark in the title and we’ll have to wait and see whether the reaction is better once the movie hits general audiences. That’ll happen on August 22 in the States, but there’s no indication of a UK release date yet.