I think that everyone who loves Michael Cera's comedy – and that should be practically everyone – is a little worried about Michael Cera. Because even as Arrested Development becomes legend, Superbad wins over every twentysomething in sight, and Juno charms the pants off the entire nation, the hushed, often unspoken question is: how long can he milk this? Cera's shtick is killer, but it's also ultra-specific – he's the shy, unprepossessing, painfully awkward adolescent, a nice guy who's self-aware enough to get embarrassed but not confident enough to avoid it.

Cera is so good at playing this part in a way that's both touching and hysterical that it's propelled him to stardom. For me to say that I haven't enjoyed any of the incarnations of George Michael Bluth that he's given us over the past couple years would be a bald-faced lie. Indeed, I think the character he's crafted is one of the most impressive comic achievements of my adult lifetime. But even as I relish it, I start to fidget, because I can sense exasperation and annoyance threatening from just around the bend. Oh, maybe not mine – I could watch Cera do this forever, I tell myself – but certainly other people will soon lose patience and turn on the guy. One-trick pony, they'll yell. Do something else.

"The girl whose face will always be etched in my mind."

As soon as I read today that Mae Whitman has taken over the voice of Tinker Bell from Brittany Murphy, I had to go back in time for a little Arrested Development. Sure, Whitman was in Independence Day, and has a whopping 69 other roles under her belt from the last 14 years, but her time as Ann Veal is, by far, my favorite.

Above is a collection of bits about Ann, as well as moments with her on the show. (Forgive the music; I don't know why it's all CSI.) Poor George Michael just wanted to be loved, and be a man. But all Michael remembers is "Yam," "Bland," "Annabelle," "Plain"... and, ultimately, he gets dumped for a certain older man.

If you want more Whitman and have no interest in Tinker Bell, she's also got parts in the upcoming films Nights in Rodanthe, Barry Munday, Spring Breakdown, and The Factory.

With five nominations, it looks like Superbad will be the star of the 2008 MTV Movie Awards, and its three jubilant male leads -- Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse -- deserve the kudos. But one major talent behind the whole affair has stayed relatively anonymous while these young up-and-comers bathe in the spotlight: Director Greg Mottola. The erstwhile independent filmmaker, responsible for some of the best installments of Arrested Developed and Undeclared, launched his career a solid decade before the rise of Judd Apatow with a charming little low budget comedy called The Daytrippers. Starring Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Parker Posey and a host of other fantastic character actors, the film follows a wildly dysfunctional family over the course of a single day, as Davis, playing a worrisome housewife, tries to track down her unfaithful husband (Tucci).

Mixing warm humanity with pitch-perfect screwball timing, Daytrippers marked the sort of debut that told you a filmmaker had a big career ahead of him. After a modest premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival, it landed at Cannes, barely got a theatrical release and promptly vanished thereafter. Mottola turned to TV work, and slipped out of the film scene for a good ten years. These days, it's no easy task to track down Daytrippers on DVD -- you can nab second-hand copies on Amazon for decent rates, but not a single retail outlet carries it. Aside from the occasionally airings on cable, the movie has vanished.

Mike Judge made a lot of friends and Fox made a lot of enemies when Judge's last live-action feature, Idiocracy, was dumped into a couple of theaters (it made a whopping $438,000) and then ushered to DVD. Those who saw it (myself among them) raved, making the movie a minor cult hit, but it certainly got a lot less exposure than anything from the creator of Office Space should have.

Judge will attempt to remedy that with his next movie, which will be called Extract, and which its distributor (Miramax) will hopefully actually distribute. Jason Bateman, rightly adored by everyone, is attached to star. Variety, which broke the story, provides only a very cryptic plot description: "Extract explores what it's like to be the boss when everything seems to be shifting around you." No word on what the protagonist is the boss of or exactly what is shifting around him.

What can I say? It's hard to be anything less than enthusiastic about something in which both Judge and Bateman are prominently involved, even if I did miss the boat on Office Space when it first came out. I do hope that Bateman will still have time for that Arrested Development movie we've been sort-of promised. The thought of that actually happening makes me cry happy tears.

So I've spent the past couple days holed up in Shreveport, Louisiana (of all places) visiting the set of The Year One, directed by Harold Ramis, produced by Judd Apatow and starring Jack Black, Michael Cera, David Cross ... and a whole bunch of nutty lunatics. Unfortunately, I cannot talk about how insane that film is going to be just yet (but I will, eventually, because there's soooo much to talk about), however I am allowed to dish on a few of the interviews we conducted -- two of which were with Michael Cera and David Cross. We already know there's been talk of an Arrested Development movie taking place at some point in the near future, and Jason Bateman recently chatted up the flick on the Oscar's red carpet saying it was all but a done deal and the script was being written. But was he biting off a bit more than he could chew?

Seems so, because both Cera and Cross haven't heard a peep about the film. When Cera was told they were supposedly working on a script, he looked stunned -- spitting out an "Is this true? Really? Well [Jason Bateman] would probably know more about it than I would." Would he want to do it? "Um, yeah, I think so. Yeah, I would love to do it ... it'd be fun." Says Cross, "I've been hearing about this since the day [the show] got canceled. Nobody's talked to me. I know nothing. Zero. The only thing I've seen is what's on the Entertainment Weekly website ... which I've never seen." On whether he'd be interested in reprising his role as Tobias, Cross said, "As long as I don't have to paint myself blue or wear a fatsuit, I'd love to. I would do that in a heartbeat. That was a really fun character to do, and it'd be great to work with all those guys again. I'd do it in a second."

So the good news is the guys desperately want to make an Arrested Development film -- now all that's left is for someone to actually call them and ask.

Those of us who watched Arrested Development on Fox from 2003-2006 remember it as one of the most brilliantly funny TV shows ever made. Some of us still weep softly from time to time, mourning its demise. We remember the hopeful last lines of the last episode, when Maeby pitched her family's story to Ron Howard, who said: "I just don't see it as a TV series. Maybe a movie?"

Now E! Online's TV maven Kristin Dos Santos reports that an Arrested Development movie might indeed be happening.

Folks, this is even more exciting than Motherboy. There has been speculation ever since that tantalizing bit of final dialogue, but now Kristin says that two of the stars, Jason Bateman and Jeffrey Tambor, have confirmed getting calls from series creator Mitch Hurwitz and producer Ron Howard, asking if they're on board for a movie. And of course they're on board! Kristin says "other sources" tell her that other cast members have been approached, too, and are just as eager.

She says: "Insiders also tell me that while creator Mitch Hurwitz does not yet have a script, he has a good, solid understanding of what he'd like to do for the movie, and Universal is very much interested."

So it would seem that Hurwitz & Co. are serious about it -- not tossing off a self-referential joke at the end of the final episode, but actually planning to go through with it. Now we have even more reason to hope the strike ends soon! I'm so excited I might need an extra visit to my analrapist. (That's analyst/therapist, for you non-AD types. If you had watched the show I wouldn't have to explain these references to you.)

Sort of. In an entertaining interview over at The Guardian, flavor of the month Jason Bateman opens up somewhat about his many years in the Hollywood wilderness, and comes across as genuinely shaken by how randomly an actor like himself can go from unemployable to a hot property in the blink of an eye, for no good reason. Specifically, Bateman talks about the randomness of choosing the Arrested Development series, his big comeback vehicle. "I would have done a show half as good as Arrested Development," he says. "Things were few and far between. I didn't give a shit at the time. I just got really lucky." He says that around the same time Arrested Development was offered, he also got an offer to appear on another show that would have tanked, and his big rebirth would never have happened. "The more obvious choice was the other series," he says. "It had a big star, it paid better, it probably had guaranteed air time. It could have buried me."

Continuing with his 'it's all a coin toss' analogy, he posits the following hilarious scenario: "Let's say, God forbid, Gary Coleman got kidnapped tomorrow. That would lead the national news. Then he would get released, maybe in a month, but now he is revitalised, currently relevant, and a great piece of casting for a new project. If he does that project and he's halfway decent in it, he's got another career. It's an awful way to make a living if your success is predicated on some arbitrary moment of exposure." Am I the only who thinks that there's at least a 50-50 chance that Coleman will read this article and then hire someone to kidnap him?

It is hard enough being a nerdy kid searching for love. It is doubly hard to be that kid when you know love sucks and rarely works out. I remember being a teen conflicted by the desire for a date and the constant reminder that divorce is the best-case scenario for what that date will lead to. Now it seems Plum Pictures is making the story of my life, in the indie teen comedy Bart Got a Room. According to Variety, the film will star Steven Kaplan as a nerdy kid living with his parents (William H. Macy and Cheryl Hines) in a retirement community in Hollywood, Florida. At the moment in his life when he's seeking love, or at least a prom date, his parents are going through a divorce. Playing his best friend -- and let me guess also his eventual love interest -- is Alia Shawkat, who is best known as "Maeby" from the best television show ever, Arrested Development. The film is the feature debut of writer-director Brian Hecker and it will be produced by Grace is Gone's Celine Rattray, Galt Niederhoffer and Daniela Taplin Lundberg.

I have to point out -- because my mom reads Cinematical -- that my own parents divorced much, much earlier than my teen years, and I wasn't actually completely traumatized nor did the divorce ruin my ability to find love. So, Bart Got a Room will not parallel my life, though I do think I could relate to it anyway. And I'm sure I won't be alone there. The high school years are probably the most formative time in our lives regarding love and relationships, and certainly we look around us, to our parents, friends and relatives for guidance in how to figure it all out. Certainly a failing marriage in the home could have a negative impact on the experience, and I'm sure that's what Hecker is focusing on here. It kinda reminds me of Sixteen Candles, actually, in that it probably deals with a selfish lack of attention on the parents' part. Of course, with great talents like Macy and Hines at the reigns of Bart's family, we'll hopefully see more concentration on the parents in this than in that.

It's not every day that one gets to see a film that's charming, sweet, intelligent and also happens to be written by an erstwhile stripper/phone sex operator (who, incidentally, owns a cat named Douchepacker). I had that pleasure at the Toronto Film Festival, however, when I took in Juno, penned with surprising astuteness by first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody (the aforementioned former stripper), directed by Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking), and starring Ellen Page (Hard Candy), Michael Cera (Superbad), Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner.

In the film, 16-year-old Juno MacGuff (Page) discovers that she's all knocked up after just one foray into sex with her best bud Paulie Bleeker (Cera), a sweet but clueless orange-Tic-Tac-addicted track star who seems perfectly content to let Juno have an abortion. She doesn't. Instead, she decides to keep the child and let a "perfect" young yuppie couple (Bateman and Garner), who can't have kids of their own, adopt her baby-to-be. The result is a hilarious, endearing and moving picture that explores family and friendship, loyalty and loss, and what it truly means to love someone, all while expertly avoiding turning into a gooey, steaming pile of melodrama.

I sat down with Jason Bateman and Ellen Page to talk about the film, and -- while the full interview won't be posted until the December release date nears -- I thought I'd give you a small yet delicious (some might say orange-Tic-Tac-like) taste of what I learned ...

"Hey Scott, you wanna see a screwball comedy starring Zach Braff, Jason Bateman and Amanda Peet?"

Hell yes I do, Got a trailer for me?

"Sure do, buddy. Here you go!"

Oh cool, lemme just settle in here ... OK, so ... yeah. Hmm, it's about a guy in a wheelchair who tries to woo the wife of his inter-office nemesis? Sounds watchable... Yeah, it's... Wow, it's gonna be extra slapsticky, right? Sure looks like it. Oh. Oh jeez. The biggest set piece in the movie is when one guy drops a paraplegic man down a flight of stairs.

"Yep, what's wrong? Don't you love Zach Braff in Scrubs and Jason Bateman in Arrested Development?"

Of course I do, and damn you for even questioning those things. But those shows come from people like Bill Lawrence and Mitch Hurwitz...

"Yeah, and?"

And this desperate-looking flick was written by the guys who did, well, they've done nothing so far. And if Fast Track is little more than "watch the cripple kick butt/fall down" gags, I think I'll just stick to my Scrubs and Arrested Development DVDs.

"What about that supporting cast?"

Donal Logue, Charles Grodin, Mia Farrow, Paul Rudd, Fred Armisen... OK, not bad at all. Didn't see a whole lot of 'em in the trailer, though...

"So you could be completely wrong about this movie."

Yep, marketing's a tricky game. Guess we'll find out on December 29.

"(Limited.)"

Yes, limited. January 17 is the wide release. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, brief language and a drug reference -- because nowadays I guess it's not considered "violence" when someone drops a handicapped man down the stairs.

Some months back, Erik Davis wrote a very definitive piece on the cancellation of television show Arrested Development. Like Erik, I adored the show and was distraught when it finally got canned (after a long-fought battle). Though there were rumors of the show jumping either to a different channel or turning into a motion picture, nothing developed, and the creators seemed willing to just let the thing die after such a disappointing fight.

Following on the back of comments made by AD writers, however, Will Arnett (one of the show's stars, for the foolish among you who didn't watch it) recently told IGN Filmforce he wouldn't be surprised to see the Bluts jump to a movie in the future. Arnett said: "Yeah, there has been talk of that. I don't know exactly where they're at with that. I've talked about it with Mitch [Hurwitz] and Jason [Bateman] and a little bit with a bunch of people involved with the show and different producers." He later noted that any final decision would rest with Hurwitz, the creator of the show, saying "If the story was right and you felt like that the story was right, and by story I mean money, was large enough, then he'd do it ...".

Not sure how the format of the television should would translate into a film, but I'm willing to give Hurwitz 100% faith.

As a loyal viewer, I feel I did everything I possibly could (aside from creating a gigantic sign and running through the streets of Manhattan naked) to get more people to watch Arrested Development. At one point, I got down on my hands and knees and begged a few of my friends to please give it a try. However, in the end, people just didn't get it. They didn't get the cast, they didn't get the humor, they didn't get the fact that what they were watching was, perhaps, the best television show to surface in the past 10 years.

Now that he's officially quit the show, series creator Mitch Hurwitz all but sealed the fate of Arrested Development by pretty much saying (Note: Not an actual quote), "Hell, if I can't develop this thing into a hit, then no one can." While those of us who have remained faithful to the show knew this was coming eventually, it does mark a sad day for television. It would be kind of you to allow a brief moment of silence.

Was that brief enough? Good. Anyway, although he's left the show, Hurwitz did hint that a feature film is a possibility. Could Arrested Development follow in the footsteps of Firefly and take a chance at the big screen? Personally, I feel the sci-fi nuts are a bit more loyal then us comedy freaks. Heck, I'd go see the film but, although I adore the TV series, I'm not so sure it has the legs to go feature film. What say you?

[via Movie Blog]