Here’s a new article featuring Jemaine Clement talking about Men in Black III and his character, Boris. There’s some additional plot details revealed, and he also mentions just how long he was in makeup to achieve his look. (Note: he is in costume during the interview, which looks great!) Additionally, if you’re interested in some b-roll footage of the upcoming film, you can check out clips here: parts one and two.

According to The New Zealand Herald, Bret McKenzie is offering himself up for auction to support Oxfam’s fair trade campaign. The winner will have a chance to sit with Bret over a “fair trade cuppa,” and they will also received a guitar signed by both members of Flight Of The Conchords. The Trade Me auction is Oxfam’s awareness campaign to help underdeveloped countries receive fair trade agreements, stabilizing their communities in the process. A statement from Bret can be read below:

McKenzie said buying fair trade products was a simple way of making the world a better place.

“So go and buy them now. Stop what you’re doing and buy some fair trade goods,” he said in a statement.

“Move away from the computer. Stand up. Put some clothes on and go to the shops and get some fair trade stuff.

“What’s wrong with you? Why are you still reading this? Are you addicted to reading? Get a friend to help you stop reading.

Meet them at a cafe and have a cup of fair trade coffee and talk about your reading addiction. Get moving. Hurry, before it’s too late to make the world a better place.”

A new clip from the upcoming movie, Men In Black III, has surfaced today. At just under a minute, the teaser briefly highlights a chase sequence, with Jemaine Clement’s Boris featured as speeding away from Agents K (Josh Brolin) and J (Will Smith).

In an interview with MTV, Barry Sonnenfeld revealed some information on his upcoming film, Men In Black III. Specifically, the director brought up what to expect with Jemaine Clement’s character, Boris, and here’s a big clue: he’s “not being funny” in this role.

MTV: You mentioned that this is the most emotional of the “Men in Black” movies. What’s interesting to me is that the villain this time around is played by someone who is traditionally viewed as a comedian. How does Jemaine’s villain factor into the emotional aspect of this film? Is he more on the comedy side, or can we expect a more dramatic performance?
Sonnenfeld: Jemaine delivers a totally villainous performance. If there’s any comedy at all, it’s just through frustration. [laughs] The great thing about Earth is that it can be a frustrating place for aliens. We don’t think clearly, we’re not logical all the time. But Jemaine is not on board this movie for comic relief. His performance is really strong and really villainous. Think about it: If you had not seen the first “Men in Black,” and people had told you that Tommy lee Jones was funny, you wouldn’t have believed it. This is the same thing — no one is trying to be funny. I want my actors to be real. If it’s a funny situation, I want it to be funny. But I don’t want anyone to play to the comedy. Let the audience find the comedy; I don’t want to tell any [of the cast or crew] where it is. So, Jemaine does not deliver a comedic performance. While there are moments of humor that the audience will find funny, Jemaine himself is not being funny, if you get that.

Click on the image above to be brought to the video.

Bret McKenzie attended the premiere of the Kiwi-made western, Good For Nothing, just last night. Filmmakers Mike Wallis and Inge Rademeyer were also in attendance. For those interested in checking it out, the film is released in New Zealand on May 3rd.

Great news for Aussie fans: Flight of the Conchords will be heading to Australia later this year, in July! This, according to Sky News. It will be the band’s first headlining tour in the country. In a statement regarding the announcement, Jemaine Clement said, “We are finally returning to Australia. Mostly to apologise.” Tour dates are as follows:

July 5th: Sydney Opera House
July 7th: Brisbane Entertainment Centre
July 10th: Newcastle Entertainment Centre
July 11th: WIN Entertainment Centre (Wollongong)
July 14th: The Plenary (Melbourne)
July 18th: Challenge Stadium (Perth)

With the help of Bret McKenzie, the Muppets have new songs on their lips and a new place in the cultural consciousness.

They’re back from holiday, anyway.

Until recently best known as half of the folk-comedy duo The Flight of the Conchords, McKenzie, 35, served as music supervisor on the characters’ newest movie, “The Muppets,” writing or co-writing four original songs, including the Oscar-winning power ballad “Man or Muppet.”

“The Muppets,” which recently debuted on DVD and Blu-ray, was the first film for the lovably witty band of felt friends since 1999?s largely ignored “Muppets from Space.” And thanks to McKenzie’s existential anthem, it is the first of the franchise to earn an Academy Award.

“I grew up in New Zealand watching the Muppets on TV, never dreamed I’d get to work with them. And I was genuinely star struck when I finally met Kermit the Frog, but once you get to know him, he’s just a normal frog,” McKenzie joked during his Oscar acceptance speech.

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While the Muppets were ubiquitous in the 1970s and ‘80s, they had fallen out of favor until actor Jason Segel spearheaded a cinematic return for the franchise, which indeed hadn’t been the same since Henson’s sudden death of pneumonia complications back in 1990. With the exception of a few well-received YouTube performances, Henson’s creations had mostly remained dormant since becoming part of the Disney empire in 2004.

Asked why the Muppets went away, McKenzie proved again that he is just as quick with a quip as he was during his time on the HBO series “The Flight of the Conchords” at a fall press conference at the famed Beverly Hilton Hotel.

“They went on holiday” McKenzie suggested, making the other filmmakers on the panel laugh.

“It’s something like people under 26 didn’t grow up with the Muppets ‘cause I’ve got younger friends who I was like, ‘I’m doing ‘The Muppets,’ and they were like ‘Ahhh, is that Miss Piggy?’ and they didn’t really know another character … so it’s been 20 years since they had any real presence in the media,” McKenzie added.

Segel had no trouble finding fellow Muppets fans to lead the project once he got the Muppets revival rolling. His co-writer Nicholas Stoller previously directed Segel in the raunchy 2008 comedy “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which ended in a lavish puppet musical featuring characters created by The Jim Henson Co. “The Muppets” director James Bobin and McKenzie are alumni of the acclaimed TV show “The Flight of the Conchords.”

The quirky, music-filled HBO show, which ran for two seasons in 2007-09, starred McKenzie and his musical partner Jemaine Clement as a New Zealand music duo called The Flight of the Conchords who move to New York City to chase their dreams of music stardom.

“In my opinion, ‘Flight of the Conchords’ is very Muppet-y on its own: It’s about two kind of wide-eyed innocents making their way through tough New York who are never mean to anyone. It’s very much how I feel about the Muppets. So it was a good union of styles,” Segel said a press conference last fall at the Beverly Hilton.

In the new film, Segel plays Gary, a Smalltown, USA, resident whose brother Walter happens to be a Muppet. When Gary, his girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) and Walter take a trip to Los Angeles, they discover that the Muppets have broken up, their theater is crumbling, and villainous oil baron Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) plans to seize the studio and have it razed so he can drill beneath it. Saving the Muppets old stomping grounds will take $10 million, so the trio teams up with Kermit the Frog to reunite Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo the Great and the rest of the troupe for one last big fundraising show.

McKenzie also found likenesses in writing for the Conchords and the Muppets.

“Less sex jokes, but yeah, very similar,” he said, again making his collaborators laugh, something they rarely stopped doing.

“Bret actually is a Muppet,” Stoller added.

“I guess Jermaine was Kermit and I was Miss Piggy,” McKenzie said. “The film had very specific song placement, so I had to write them to fit new characters and everything, but it’s not that dissimilar to writing for the Conchords.”

Bobin, who co-created “The Flight of the Conchords” with McKenzie and Clement before taking the helm of “The Muppets,” also found striking similarities in the two projects.

“‘Conchords’ was basically a world whereby everyone had a slightly weird world view. And they’re all …,” Bobin said.

“Stupid,” McKenzie interjected. “Very, very stupid.”

“It’s a group of fools, basically, and the Muppets have a similar sense,” Bobin continued with a grin. “They are all very optimistic but … you instantly feel for the underdog. I thought that was a very similar thing with Conchords and Muppets, they had a very similar tone in that sense, but also obviously in the music and the sort of innocent charm of the comedy. … It felt like a very natural progression.”

McKenzie started his work on “The Muppets” by penning the grand song-and-dance opening number “Life’s a Happy Song,” which is reprised in another huge musical spectacle at the end of the film.

“In order for a comedy song to work you can’t have too much production in the way because if it goes too big you lose some of the comedy. So within the Muppets film, it gets big, but then it also strips right back down,” McKenzie said, who is reuniting with Clement for a New Zealand tour in June.

“One of my favorite moments is when Amy Adams sings at the window, this rainy window … and she does this amazing melisma and really channels her (inner) Beyonce,” he added, grinning as his collaborators oohed over his use of the impressive musical term.

At first the suddenly stormy weather at the window seems to reflect the turmoil that Adams’ character is feeling. But in a rather “Conchordian” moment, it turns out just to be a janitor watering the bushes.
“It wasn’t that dissimilar (from ‘Conchords’) in terms of using music and comedy at the same time, using the music to support the joke or suddenly taking the music away so that the joke hits harder.”

In addition, McKenzie co-wrote “Me Party,” a duet for Adams and Miss Piggy, and “Let’s Talk About Me,” a hip-hop baddie’s theme for Cooper, which meant he got to coach the Oscar-winning actor on how to rap. He turned “The Muppet Movie’s” classic anthem “The Rainbow Connection,” which earned Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher a best original song Oscar nomination back in 1980, into a heartwarming reunion number for Kermit and his pals.

“We just tried to respect the original,” McKenzie said during the filmmakers’ press conference.

He also developed plenty of respect for original Muppeteers Steve Whitmire and Dave Goelz, who worked on “The Muppet Show” back in the ’70s and returned for the new film. They had insight into the franchise that even the superfans who orchestrated the Muppets’ comeback didn’t know.

“We were recording this big number with lots of Muppets singing, and I was like, ‘OK, and the chickens …’ And they were like, ‘Ah, the chickens can’t sing. They can’t talk,’” McKenzie said. “‘OK, but frogs can?’ ‘Every other animal can talk but chickens can only cluck.’ It’s like, ‘OK, guys. All right, chickens, let’s do this.’”

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Aussie actor, Hamish Blake, will be making his film debut later this year with Two Little Boys, also starring Bret McKenzie. He recently talked to PopSugar about several subjects, including the Logies (the Australian equivalent of the Emmys) and his experience while working on the film. Check out the source for more of the interview, if you’re interested:

What was it like to shoot your first feature film, Two Little Boys?
It was amazing. Again, I felt like I’d won a competition to pretend to be in a film. It was with Bret McKenzie from Flight of the Conchords, and he is an awesome guy, and hilarious — pretty much as you would expect and hope him to be if you’re a fan of the Conchords, which I was. We were stuck at the bottom of New Zealand for a long time in a very small town, but having Bret there was great, and my beautiful lady Zoë came across and kept soup on the stove for me, so that was awesome. It’s quite a dark film, quite a grim black comedy, but in terms of the experience of shooting a film, it was amazing fun.

If you win a Logie, do you think it will compare to Bret’s Oscar?
Yes. I will offer to him that he can keep the Logie at his house in the extremely small chance I win. He can keep it at his house and we’ll see if they can breed to make a Loscar! I don’t know if there’s too many shots of a Logie and an Oscar kissing, so I would like to get that.

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Five film stills from Jemaine’s upcoming film, Men In Black III, have been added to the gallery. One is an earlier still released a few months ago; the two newer finds appear to be a behind-the-scenes look at the production. Remember: MIB3 is due in theaters just next month on May 25th!

Welcome to Flight Of The Conchords Fan, your newest source for all things on the New Zealand comedy duo. I’ve been a fan of the band for several years now and wanted to finally maintain a site for them, supporting their professional endeavors as both Bret and Jemaine achieve more and more success across various mediums. (Congratulations goes to Bret on his recent Oscar win!)

The site is still a work in progress, with plenty of content and pictures soon to be added. In the meantime, you can peruse through the gallery, as I have added screen caps and stills of every “Flight Of The Conchords” episode to date. You can also follow FOTCF’s Twitter account, as future updates will be posted there as well.

And can we talk about the amazing layout the site is sporting? After commissioning other layouts from her, Flor over at Sweet Revelation has wowed me yet again. I highly recommend her as a designer, as her work is terrific and she’s a great listener.

FOTCF hopes to be a great one-stop destination for all things Conchords. Thanks for stopping by!