Hollywood has a way of telling us who we are and who we should be, and there’s no one more amenable to its requests than its own biggest commodities — actors. The handful of molds are generally unchanging: the blonde bimbo, the unmarriageable brunette, the debonair gentleman, the dopey, dorky friend. Any number of people can fill these steadfast forms — Jean Harlows are replaced by Grace Kellys are replaced by Marilyn Monroes are replaced by Madonnas. But once an actor has been molded into an archetype, it’s often difficult for them to be anything else. Still, even those who get caught in the quicksand of typecasting can sometimes eventually make it out, like these pigeonholed actors, who, for better or for worse, finally played a kind of different role.

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Nestled among this week’s new theatrical releases is The Big Year, a rather syrupy looking Bucket List riff co-starring Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson. Let’s be clear: we have not yet seen it. But we’re not holding out much hope for a movie that puts those three guys together and cannot find one single laugh to put in a trailer.

How could you combine three men as (granted, not always reliably) funny as these and not come up with a laugh riot? Quite easily, turns out. The recent cinema is all but littered with pictures that teamed up established comedic talents and thus sounded like sure-fire crowd pleasers, but which ended up tickling the funny bones of neither critics nor moviegoers. After the jump, we’ll run down ten comic combinations that misfired.

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Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. It’s rather a light week, presumably due to the holiday and/or the kickoff of the Toronto Film Festival (which serves as something of a starter’s pistol for the fall movie season), but you can check out the meager pickings after the jump.

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Woody Allen isn’t always the protagonist in his movies — in fact, in recent years, he’s often declined to appear onscreen at all — but we’d be hard pressed to come up with one of his films that does feature the Woody Allen Character. You know him: the neurotic, stammering, death-obsessed artist type who’s always complaining about pseudo-intellectuals. He’s been played by everyone from Kenneth Branagh to Jason Biggs. Owen Wilson is the latest actor to play Woody, in the delightful Midnight in Paris, and the role even fell to a woman once — Rebecca Hall in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Now, the folks at Filmdrunk have put together a supercut of other actors assuming Allen’s mannerisms. Watch “A Retrospective of Woody Allen Surrogates” after the jump.

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While there are plenty of cinephiles who would argue that everything that Woody Allen has produced since his heyday is absolute crap, we were actually fond of Match Point and Vicky Christina Barcelona. Unfortunately, Midnight in Paris — which opens May 20th and will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival — looks to be one of his duds in spite of its lovely setting. It probably doesn’t help that Owen Wilson is playing the Allen stand-in here, which just makes the whole thing feel slightly off, like some kind of self parody. Or maybe we’re just biased because of the rather barfy poster, which looks like someone’s kid ‘shopped it. Click through to watch the trailer, and let us know what you think in the comments.

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Woody Allen’s latest film, a romantic comedy called Midnight in Paris which stars Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, and Adrien Brody — and features a brief cameo by Carla Bruni-Sarkozy as a Parisian museum director — has been selected to open the Cannes Film Festival on May 11. Hopefully this means that it’s better than the only other Allen film we can think of that’s set in the City of Lights, 1996’s Everyone Says I Love You. “Midnight in Paris is a wonderful love letter to Paris,” said Cannes director Thierry Fremaux. “It’s a film in which Woody Allen takes a deeper look at the issues raised in his last films: our relationship with history, art, pleasure and life. His 41st feature reveals once again his inspiration.” Allen won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes in 1985 for his film The Purple Rose of Cairo. [via The Wrap]

1. Public service announcement: Despite what you may have heard, Owen Wilson and Eddie Murphy are both still alive. [via NY Daily News]

2. Defense attorneys for Dr. Conrad Murray, who stands accused of Michael Jackson‘s murder, will argue that the King of Pop committed suicide, according to prosecutors on the case. [via AP]

3. Grant McCune, the special effects artist who created the shark in Jaws and won an Academy Award for his work on Star Wars, has died of pancreatic cancer at age 67. The model maker also contributed to other geek classics, including Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Spaceballs, and Caddyshack. [via Digital Spy]

4. Chris Brown and Raz B are having a Twitter war over — sigh — Rihanna. Following a string of tweets praising Rihanna, Raz B wrote, “I’m just sittin here thinking how can n—as like [Eric Benet] and [Chris Brown] disrespect women as intelligent as Halle Berry, Rihanna.” Classy as ever, Brown responded with some homophobia and then freaked out over the suggestion that he’s homophobic. [via MTV]

5. When Oprah Winfrey‘s OWN network debuts on Saturday, it will be available in 85 million homes. That’s five million more than its predecessor, Discovery Health, but 15 million less than the original Discovery Channel. [via WSJ]

Bonus link: Muppets with People Eyes

1. Owen Wilson is Woody Allen‘s new muse for his next project, but the jury’s still out on whether he will be starring opposite Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. [via THR]
2. From Thurston Moore‘s new blog: “kim [Gordon] and i will be recording a trio LP w/ yoko [Ono] this year with blindfolds.” [via TwentyFourBit]
3. Is Dave Eggers is the best candidate for editorship of The Paris Review? [via The Millions]
4. Andrew Lloyd Webber wants to save Abbey Road studios. (Is it just us, or does this make Paul McCartney look bad?) [via Guardian]
5. A musical theater adaptation of Pedro Almodovar‘s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which director Bartlett Sher and the filmmaker have been developing in workshops for over a year, will debut in Lincoln Center Theater‘s 2010-11 season. [via NYT]

Bonus Giveaway: We use Yahoo! Search to help find the top culture stories of the day. Now we’re giving you the chance to play editor, and you just might win a trip to Coachella.

Use Yahoo! Search to find an interesting link about Woody Allen, and drop it below in the comments. Our favorite entry will receive The Woody Allen Collection, Set 1 (Annie Hall/Manhattan/Sleeper/Bananas/Interiors/Stardust Memories/Love and Death/Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask), and more importantly, be entered to win a VIP trip for two to Coachella. Topics will be changing throughout the week, so get your search on and keep playing to increase your chances of winning!

Today at Flavorpill, looking at modern gingerbread houses made us hungry. We wondered where John Lennon’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star wandered off to. We questioned the faithfulness of Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes. We were impressed by both Rihanna and Jay-Z’s sticktoitiveness. We strongly disliked the idea of a warm-fuzzy web — but that might be because we were born before email. We wanted Gwen Stefani’s cable-inspired jacket. But not as much as this giant pickle jar replica. We met Gregor Brown — an existentially-challenged not-so-distant relative of Charlie. We counted down Hipster Runoff’s Most Authentic/Relevant/Successful Artists+Bands of the Decade. We took in some cool outdoor installations in Berlin. We watched the teaser trailer for Marmaduke, who is voiced by Owen Wilson. It’s not good. And finally, we used some of 2009′s catchphrases and buzzwords. Aporkalypse, birther, meep, sexting — we’ve gotta use ‘em while we still can.

1. Julian Casablancas is releasing a cover of “I Wish It Was Christmas Today” — which was originally performed by the cast of Saturday Night Live — as a single. [via NME]
2. The Berenstain Bears are getting the film treatment courtesy of Shawn Levy, director of the Night at the Museum movies; it will be a mix of live action and animation. [via USA Today]
3. After watching Paranormal Activity, the Blair Witch filmmakers felt inspired to pitch a third film to Lionsgate. They were not involved with Blair Witch 2. [via Vulture]
4. Owen Wilson will voice Marmaduke in an upcoming film adaptation of the comic strip. [via Hollywood Reporter]
5. It turns out German people hate 30 Rock even more than middle Americans do. [via Hollywood Reporter]