"It's been awesome, it's been amazing, my life has really taken a turn," Gilman said before a packed news conference after the official photo shoot Wednesday morning.

Anderson said he picked his two young stars after 10 months of searching, but found both in what the two-time Oscar nominee described as a magical moment. "There are many people who come along the way," he explained, "but you always hope there's this one moment and you say, 'It's this.' I was very charmed by Jared [Gilman] immediately. He made me laugh. As for Kara [Hayward], I had seen so many people do the dialogue over and over and it was like she had just made the dialog up herself."

Suzy (Hayward) is surrounded by a large family, including her parents (played by McDormand and Murray). Sam, meanwhile, has no family and is not among the popular kids in his Boy Scout troop. But their union throws the whole island into a frenzy. "I used the memory of what I wanted to have happen as a young person," said Anderson, who wrote the script with Roman Coppola. "I remember the emotion of falling in love as a kid, and I hope it's a memory that people share. [...] Part of the reason for making this film is about their [sexual] discovery. They're finding something that is beyond them, and that's where the script came from."

While the script was an idealized adolescence story for Anderson, he did note there are at least some moments in the film that may have been usurped from his own upbringing. "There's a moment in the movie where Suzy [Hayward] sees a pamphlet on the refrigerator that says, 'Coping with a very troubled child,'" he said. "That is perhaps one part that is autobiographical."

Read more of Movieline's coverage of Cannes 2012 here.

Susanne Bier's Latest Lands at Sony Classics
A year after releasing Bier's Oscar-winning foreign-language feature In a Better World, the venerable art-house distributor has struck a deal to release her follow-up All You Need is Love. Pierce Brosnan leads the romantic comedy, which is set in Sorrento, Italy, and tells the story of "a group of people all seeking love, about passion and happiness, about jealousy and loneliness. First and foremost, it’s a story about having the courage to change your life – even when you think it’s too late."

And around the 'net...

Aaron Sorkin Makes Steve Jobs Deal with Sony
It's official: Sorkin will adapt Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography for the screen. "There is no writer working in Hollywood today who is more capable of capturing such an extraordinary life for the screen than Aaron Sorkin," said Sony chief Amy Pascal in a statement. "In his hands, we’re confident that the film will be everything that Jobs himself was: captivating, entertaining, and polarizing." Deadline reports.

Morgan Freeman's Political Comments Irk WB Shareholder
The actor's claims during the Dolphin Tale press tour that the Tea Party movement and Republican politics are "racist and wants to screw the country" drew fire from a shareholder on Tuesday's Time Warner conference call. TW CEO Jeff Bewkes, meanwhile, declined to intervene in Freeman's upcoming publicity duties for The Dark Knight Rises, THR reports.

Music Box Nabs Starlet
Director Sean Baker's controversial, sexually explicit SXSW sensation Starlet has a buyer in Music Box Films, which announced its acquisition of the Dree Hemingway-starrer today at Cannes. Variety reports.

John Woo to Grapple with Beast
Also from Cannes comes word of Day of the Beast, John Woo's planned remake of Seijun Suzuki’s 1963 Yakuza classic Youth of the Beast. "This remake is my salute to the great films and filmmakers produced by Nikkatsu’s 100 years in cinema history," Woo said in a statement. "It is exciting for me as well as an honor." Deadline reports.

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Behold, the squirmy delights ahead of us all in the June 8 release. All those times Ridley Scott waved away Alien connections as relatively loose associations seem moot after seeing space snakes crawl up into someone's head and glimpsing whatever it is that's going on in Noomi Rapace's belly. "Get it out of me!" is the new "Cut it out!" of Prometheus promo catchphrases.

And can we just talk about that hulking space man for a second? I have no idea what is actually going on here, but I'm getting flashes of Sunshine, if you know what I mean. Taking all speculations in the comments below.

[via i09]

By the time Berg asks, "Are you a draft dodger?" and shouts, "You've gotta join the army, motherfucker!" this has automatically become the stuff of legend.

Berg's big shiny summer blockbuster has a heavy military element -- it's very much pro-servicemen and women, and big on international cooperation between nations that, granted, can unite against a common extraterrestrial enemy without dealing with the tricky human realities of real world politics. Does Battleship give Berg the moral ground to badger a perfect stranger for not joining the army? Well, no. Is this 100 times more interesting than hearing him talk about ships and aliens and Rihanna? Hell yes. Make your weekend movie plans accordingly.

[Pajiba via Complex]

10 Win 39th Student Academy Awards
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 39th Annual Student Academy Awards were unveiled; the organization will host an awards ceremony June 9th. The winners in the Narrative category: Nani, Justin Tipping (American Film Institute); Narcocorrido, Ryan Prows (American Film Institute); Under, Mark Raso (Columbia University). Documentary: Dying Green, Ellen Tripler (American University); Hiro: A Story of Japanese Internment, Keiko Wright (NYU); Lost Country, Heather Burky (Art Inst. of Jacksonville). Animation: Eyrie, David Wolter (Calif. Institute of the Arts); The Jockstrap Raiders, Mark Nelson (UCLA); My Little Friend, Eric Prah (Ringling College of Art and Design). Alternative: The Reality Clock, Amanda Tasse (USC).

Exclusive Media Nabs Rights to Dennis Quaid, Zac Efron Starrer At Any Price
The film, directed by Chop Shop director Ramin Bahrani, also stars Kim Dickens and Heather Graham and revolves around rebellious Dean Whipple (Efron), who wants nothing more than to pursue his dream of becoming a professional race car driver, whilst trying to avoid the obligations to his family’s farming empire. But Dean’s ambitious father Henry (Quaid), whose manic pursuit of expansion has alienated the whole family, sets his sights on Dean’s succession.

Around the 'net...

How 48 Hours at Large in L.A. Turned Fellini into a Maestro
Fellini Black and White is set to explore what may have happened when the celebrated Italian film director Federico Fellini disappeared for 48 hours on his first visit to America, where he was due to attend the Oscar awards. Instead of a smooth trip to the 1957 ceremony, the man who was to make such classics as La Dolce Vita and 8½ almost missed the awards gala after going missing for two days somewhere in Los Angeles, The Guardian reports.

Universal Takes International Rights to Kathryn Bigelow's Untitled Bin Laden Film
Universal took select international rights to the true story about the team that hunted and killed Osama bin Laden last year. Sony Pictures will release the film starring Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, Jason Clarke, Mark Strong and Edgar Ramirez in the U.S., Deadline reports.

3-D Comes into Sharper Focus
Despite the format’s troubles, 2011 marked another record year for 3-D, with total box office revenue from 3-D movies hitting $6.9 billion, an 18 percent jump, according to provisional figures from Screen Digest, THR reports.

Cohen’s targets here include people who fly planes into buildings for religious reasons, people who hate Jews, and women with hair under their arms. As they used to say on Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the others, but those of you who like to cultivate fragrant jungles in your armpits will just have to deal. The satire in The Dictator is sharp but not exquisitely pointed, and the movie is better for it: It’s clear enough where Cohen’s sympathies lie — his jokes have a kind of sick buoyancy, instead of hammering you with their politics. Cohen’s humor is political, though in the end it may really only be humanitarian. At home in Wadiya, amongst his riches, his servants and his high-cost prostitutes (one of whom is Megan Fox, gamely playing herself), Aladeen likes to play video games, including a Wii-style amusement called “Munich Olympics.” I groaned, along with much of the audience, when he hit the “play” button, but there’s anger in the joke as well as audacity. Cohen doesn’t suffer bullies gladly, which makes a character like Aladeen an irresistible canvas for him.

The Dictator is a written-and-rehearsed picture, unlike the extended prank Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, and it’s probably the better film. As he did on that picture (and the more wayward Brüno), Cohen again pairs with director Larry Charles, who’s acutely in tune with his rhythms. Charles — who has worked extensively in TV as a producer and/or writer on shows like Seinfeld, Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and who also directed the gloriously woolly 2003 Bob Dylan fever dream Masked and Anonymous — has by this point proved to be a great midwife for the ideas of oddball intellects. He gives some shape and heft even to Cohen’s silliest gags, like the one in which it’s explained that Aladeen amended the Wadiyan language so that “negative” and “positive” are the same word — this bit of silliness occasions a great little cameo for Aasif Mandvi as a doctor who’s trying to give a patient the result of his AIDS test.

Add to that the pleasure of watching Cohen in all his long-legged, language-mangling glory: The Dictator works both as satire and as comedy, and the two don’t always mingle so easily. Cohen has a way of slinging lines that’s as casual as a cook flipping meat patties in a burger joint. “The police here are such fascists!” he says, aghast at the behavior of New York City cops, but he’s really just setting us up for the kicker: “And not in the good way!” By the time Aladeen has been in in New York for a while, his sartorial choices have been unduly influenced by crunchy-granola Zoey, to the point where he thinks nothing of wearing Crocs in public. When Nadal uses this footwear choice as evidence of how far Aladeen has fallen, the has-been tyrant can only agree: “Crocs," he says dejectedly, "the universal symbol of men who have given up hope.”

Cohen may be playing an autocrat, but he doesn’t let his ego run roughshod over his fellow actors. Anna Faris gets less screentime than Cohen does, but she stands up to him admirably, maybe because she’s willing to go just as far as he is for a laugh, even a painful one. As Zoey, a no-makeup martinet with firm ideas about equality among all peoples, she captures perfectly the tyrannical smugness of the tiny but powerful nation of white people known as Park Slope, Brooklyn. The Dictator, for all its liberal leanings, doesn’t let anyone off the hook, not even well-intentioned liberals. Cohen comes right out and says things that most of us, in polite conversation, wouldn’t dare. He knows it's the impolite conversation that really gets things moving.

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According to reports from CinemaCon (where similar footage from the film was screened, including portions of Hathaway's "I Dreamed a Dream" number), Hooper's plan was to film most of the musical numbers with his cast singing live, which might explain why Hathaway's voice sounds a bit unpolished. Or maybe that was intentional. Or maybe it's just me.

[Video removed at studio's request.]

Perez Hilton first posted the video today, along with fawning words for Hathaway's performance: "If we had any doubts about this, they are GONE now!!!" Over at The Atlantic Wire, Richard Lawson called it "unsettling," a reaction more in line with my own.

My theater nerd pal (and Popular Mechanics editor) Erin McCarthy immediately sent over this video of stage goddess Lea Salonga singing the same number with a much stronger, yet still deeply emotional voice, but perhaps the comparison — or any comparisons, as the entire film's cast is bound to suffer scrutiny — is unfair. Hathaway is a strong singer in her own right (see: The Oscars) but she's probably deep in character as the desperate Fantine and her vocal interpretation may reflect that. Was it wise to film the largely sung-through story with live singing? That's the biggest question so far as we await better looks at Hooper's Les Mis, due in theaters December 14.

[Perez Hilton, Atlantic Wire]