While The Hangover receives a lot of credit for creating the recent R-rated comedy boom, the short-term memory of audiences has forgotten that back in 2005, director David Dobkin was behind the biggest R-rated comedy of all-time with Wedding Crashers.  The film grossed over $200 million domestic off a $40 million budget, and raked up a 75% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  But even if you set those other factors aside, you would still have a hilarious movie that stands on its own as Dobkin skillfully wove together raunchy comedy, dark humor, and a surprising amount of heart.  After taking a detour with the PG Fred Claus, Dobkin has returned to R-rated comedy and while eclipsing Wedding Crashers is a high bar, he may have cleared it with his new film The Change-Up.  The film stars Jason Batetman and Ryan Reynolds as two old friends who piss in a fountain and end up switching bodies.  Freaky Friday this is not.

My fellow movie bloggers and I spoke with Dobkin on the set of the film and talked about his return to R-rated comedy, borrowing the visual language of the traditionally family-film oriented “body-switching comedy”, what appealed to him about the story, and much more.  Hit the jump to check out the interview.  The Change-Up opens August 5th.

A couple weeks ago I was invited to participate in a roundtable interview with writer/director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy) to discuss the special edition Bluray release of his latest film Cop Out. While the focus of the roundtable was supposed to be the Cop Out Bluray’s Maximum Comedy Mode feature, Smith was very open to talk about many other topics. In fact, Smith extended our 15 minute interview in to a 45 minute interview. Put it this way: Smith is a publicist’s nightmare.

During our interview, Smith spoke not only about Cop Out and Maximum Comedy Mode (MCM) but also about Twitter, Comic Con, 3D, his upcoming projects and more. Look for several self-deprecating and brutally honest comments from Smith – he even talks about the “Southwest incident” and discusses the harsh critical reaction to Cop Out. It’s a great interview. Continue reading to read the full interview. Cop Out hits Bluray and DVD on Tuesday July 20.