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    ‘Bad Monkey,’ Bad Deer, Bad Weather: The Fun of Filming in Florida

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    Alex Moffat, an actor and comedian best known for his work on “Saturday Night Live,” rarely shouts at deer. But during a tense scene in the new crime comedy “Bad Monkey,” a Key deer, a member of an endangered species native to the Florida Keys, kept entering the frame. In one exasperated moment, Moffat, in character as a disreputable real estate developer, turned to the deer and shouted, “Go back to the woods or whatever!”The line wasn’t in the script. But it’s definitely in the show.Developed by Bill Lawrence and debuting Wednesday on Apple TV+, “Bad Monkey” tracks a cop turned health inspector, Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn), who pursues a case involving a severed arm, Medicare fraud, voodoo-adjacent witchcraft and a menacing capuchin. It is based on Carl Hiaasen’s novel of the same title, and as with most Hiaasen tales, it is set in a version of the sunshine state defined by raw natural beauty and equally raw Florida-man shenanigans.Not a lot of shows shoot in Florida — blame the lack of film infrastructure; blame the absence of tax breaks; blame the deer and the gnats and the 99 percent humidity. Even shows set in the state will typically shoot in North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana or, as in the case of Lawrence’s Florida-centric comedy “Cougar Town,” Los Angeles. This is understandable. When you film in Culver City, you rarely need to hire armed alligator wranglers.Hiaasen, a former Miami Herald columnist, had been burned by Hollywood before. He strongly preferred a Florida shoot, especially for the scenes set in the Keys.“There’s nowhere in California that looks like that,” Hiaasen said.Lawrence (“Ted Lasso,” “Shrinking”), who had long had his sights on “Bad Monkey,” made that happen.“Feeling authentically Florida and a little sweaty and dirty, it really mattered,” he said.“We wanted to really capture the nature and the beauty of the state,” said Lawrence, right, with the actor Ronald Peet. Scenes set in the Bahamas, such as the one above, were also shot in Florida.John Brawley/ACSWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Interview’: Vince Vaughn Turned This Interview Into Self-Help

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      The Vince Vaughn who lives in my head is one of my favorite comedic actors. He’s the swaggering, charmingly sarcastic and cheerily ingratiating star of that great run of hit comedies from the early 2000s: “Old School,” “Dodgeball,” “Wedding Crashers,” “The Break-Up.” (His cameo in “Anchorman” and recurring role as Freddy Funkhouser on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” are also prime comedic Vaughniana.) And putting my own preferences aside, I’d argue that there’s a whole microgeneration of dudes who tried to swipe the neo-Rat Pack vibes that Vaughn was able to deploy so winningly in “Swingers.”Listen to the Conversation With Vince VaughnI went in expecting a swaggering, overconfident guy. I found something much more interesting.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon Music | NYT Audio AppIn more recent years, though, after the often R-rated, kind of bro-y comedies with which Vaughn made his mark lost some of their cultural mojo, he has focused more on dramatic roles: the highly anticipated, widely maligned and then critically reconsidered second season of “True Detective,” for example, or his performances in the brutally uncompromising crime films of the director S. Craig Zahler (“Brawl in Cell Block 99,” “Dragged Across Concrete”).But as good as Vaughn can be with darker characters, I never connected those parts to the man who played them. Ahead of our interview, I made the perhaps-common journalist’s mistake of expecting to talk with someone akin to the playfully glib guy from those comedies I love. (That’s in no small part thanks to how Vaughn’s role as a world-weary, wiseass former detective in the new Apple TV+ series “Bad Monkey” scans as a mature update of his comedic persona.) But what I was expecting from Vaughn wasn’t what I got. Instead, I found someone more provocative and earnest, who came most alive when he put me under the conversational microscope. Which is to say, I got a surprise.Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with R-rated comedies anymore. Why do you think they’ve become harder to crack? When you talk about the R comedies in Hollywood, I feel like there’s a set of rules that the executives follow. The goal is not to get fired — they can defend why they greenlit something. The R comedies that took off was the studio saying to young people that were funny, “Go ahead.” They didn’t micromanage. We were on the sets changing lines and trying to make each other laugh. It’s not done as well by committee. They started managing everything too much and trying to control it all.Vince Vaughn with John Favreau in “Swingers” (1996).Miramax Films, via Everett Collection More

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      ‘Queenpins’ Review: Suburban Scammers

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      Two cash-strapped neighbors devise a multimillion-dollar coupon swindle in this mildly entertaining comedy.“Queenpins” might have been a snappy little comedy had it lost 20 minutes and found a point beyond glorifying grand larceny. Erasing the lead character’s smug-perky narration wouldn’t have hurt, either.Set mainly in suburban Phoenix, Ariz. — with pit stops in other dehydrated locations — the movie smiles on Connie (Kristen Bell), a cash-strapped coupon cutter whose bland good cheer masks a desperate longing for a child.“You’re trying to replace a baby with coupons,” her husband (Joel McHale), a withdrawn I.R.S. agent, accurately observes before largely disappearing from the story. Connie’s true partner, though, is JoJo (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), a bubbly neighbor and vlogger looking for a break. Together, they hatch a scheme to steal coupons from a printing facility in Mexico and sell them on YouTube. What could possibly go wrong?Written and directed by the husband-and-wife team of Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly, “Queenpins,” inspired by actual events, can’t decide if its pink-collar criminals are fools or geniuses. Neither can the two men on their trail: a businesslike postal inspector (Vince Vaughn, starved for decent lines) and the movie’s true hero, Ken Miller (an excellent Paul Walter Hauser), an officious loss-prevention officer for a supermarket chain. Ken’s longing for respect makes him a ridiculous, even pathetic figure; but he has a dogged, shabby sense of honor that the film views as a joke and repeatedly undermines.Making no secret of where its sympathies lie, “Queenpins” scampers toward its ludicrous conclusion with less concern for logic than for ensuring that everyone gets what he or she wants. With the possible exception of the audience.QueenpinsRated R for iffy language and icky behavior. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and on Paramount+. More