LINKS: Official Victor Whitmill Web site; The Hangover Part II official Web site
What's in a weird-looking facial tattoo? Could be several million dollars, if you're tattoo artist S. Victor Whitmill. S-Vic is the guy who put that enormous inkstain on the face of boxer Mike Tyson several years ago, and he's apparently not thrilled that makeup artists for The Hangover Part II have replicated his handiwork on the mug of franchise star Ed Helms (who plays the meek dentist who lost a tooth in the first film). Helms's Stu discovers the facial mega-blemish when he wakes up after one night in Bangkok — which can make a hard man humble, as the song goes — that he and buddies Alan (Zach Galifianakis) and Phil (Bradley Cooper) will no doubt need an entire movie to recover from.
Whitmill attempted to give the new movie a hangover of its own earlier this year when he filed a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and seeking to delay the big Memorial Day weekend release of Part II. I didn't actually know any of this until the Warner Bros. issued an e-mail alert yesterday afternoon with a statement expressing gratitude to Judge Catherine D. Perry of Federal District Court in St. Louis for ruling that no injunction against Part II would be granted. Frankly, I think it's entirely commendable that somebody tried to prevent the release of a sequel to The Hangover, but that's just me. Actually, given the early reviews for Part II, I'd assumed that the plaintiffs in any lawsuit would be screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, whose original screenplay for The Hangover was apparently more or less carbon-copied by Craig Mazin and Scot Armstrong, the credited writers (with director Todd Phillips) of Part II.
Poor Whitmill. Or perhaps not, in fact, "poor" at all. The wronged tattooist may have lost a battle, but he could still win the war, or at least a fat settlement check from Warner Bros. Judge Perry declined to block the release of the movie, but allowed Whitmill's lawsuit to proceed, expressing the opinion, as reported in The New York Times, that S-Vic had a "strong likelihood of prevailing on the merits for copyright infringement." The Hangover Part II stumbles into theaters tomorrow, getting a one-day head start on the historically lucrative Memorial Day moviegoing weekend, but the part two that I'd recommend you see this weekend is the sublime Kung Fu Panda 2. Tangentially speaking, after last week's spate of stories about famous "fourquels" — inspired by the release of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film — I'm just lying in wait for the first waggish writer to slip up and write something about "twoquels." Believe it or not, we already have a word for that.
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