In Theaters Now: The Hangover, Land of the Lost, My Life in Ruins & More

The Hangover
directed by Todd Phillips
With such films as Road Trip and Old School under his belt, director Todd Phillips seems the right choice to helm The Hangover, a movie that’s in the same bawdy, macho-idiotic vein. Zach Galifianakis (underground comedy superstar), Ed Helms (“The Office,” “The Daily Show”) and Bradley Cooper (that one guy in that one movie you saw once) star as three groomsmen who lose their about-to-be-wed buddy after a night of black-out-inducing Las Vegas partying. The poster for the movie clearly latches on to the whole WTF party-in-Vegas stigma, with Helms looking beat up and missing a tooth, Galifianakis inexplicably lugging around an infant and Cooper looking appropriately shocked to be featured on a movie poster. Early promotional screenings have garnered a positive response, with Galifianakis emerging as a new comedy superstar (above ground this time) and IMDb already listing The Hangover 2 as “In Development.”

My Life in Ruins
directed by Donald Petrie
She hasn’t been in too many movies in a while but you may remember Nia Vardalos from a little movie she made in 2004 about a Greek woman who marries a guy in a big—some would say fat—Greek wedding. This time around, How To Lose and Guy in Ten Days helmer, Petrie directs Vardalos in the Tom Hanks-produced My Life in Ruins, a movie about a Greek-American travel guide who discovers her adventurous side—and finds love with her Greek bus driver—as she takes a group of tourists around Greece. I think Nia Vardalos is Greek.

Land of the Lost
directed by Brad Silberling
Based on a 1970s Saturday morning children’s series, Land of The Lost tells the story of Dr. Rick Marshall, a guy who, along with his research assistant and a redneck survivalist, gets sucked into a space-time vortex and taken to a land full of dinosaurs, monkey-people and the occasional humanoid-lizard. Fans of the original series are up in arms about some of the creative liberties director Brad Silberling (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events) has taken on this new version, like turning Will and Holly—Marshall’s children in the original—into a potential love interest (“Pushing Daisy’s” Anna Friel) and a role for Ferrell’s friend and protégé Danny McBride. But something tells me scribes Dennis McNicholas (“SNL”) and Chris Henchy (“Brooke Shields’ husband”) didn’t care about courting the old fans so much as enticing the kind of people who like to watch Ferrell get chased by a dinosaur. And that’s a lot of people.

Away We Go
directed by Sam Mendes
With Away We Go, Sam Mendes takes a more comedic look at some of the themes he’s explored in his other marriage and family movies like Revolutionary Road and American Beauty, only with much less heartache and death (one hopes). John Krasinski (“The Office”) and “SNL” alum Maya Rudolph take star-making turns as Burt Farlander and Verona De Tessant, an expectant couple traveling across the U.S. in order to find the perfect place to start their family. Judging from the trailer you’ll either love the movie’s quirky charm or you’re part of the growing faction deriding it for its trying-too-hard “indie” feel. But just because it appropriates the same hand-written title font Juno had and it’s got a song by an unheard of indie artist playing in the background and it was co-written by indie icon Dave Eggers and his wife and publisher of indie mag The Believer, Vendela Vida, it doesn’t mean… Actually, yes, this has got Spirit Award written all over it.