Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick (Twilight, Up in the Air) got her start on Broadway — nabbing a Tony nomination at the age of 12, no less — before making her film debut in 2003's musical Camp. In this week's infectiously fun college-set comedy Pitch Perfect she comes full circle playing Beca, an antisocial college freshman who reluctantly joins a ragtag campus a capella group as they attempt to pop song-warble their way to the top.
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If you can appreciate a musical that unabashedly uses a 1996 Blackstreet jam as a communal rallying cry, then Pitch Perfect will be the most fun you'll have all year. (Also, we can totally be friends.) Producers Elizabeth Banks and Max Handelman, joined at an LA screening by cast members Brittany Snow, Skylar Astin, Alexis Knapp, Hana Mae Lee, Anna Camp, and Ester Dean, revealed how they first saw the potential in a nonfiction book about real life college a capella competitions – or, in the parlance of Pitch Perfect: The a-ca-drama.
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Calling all ParaNorman fans both young and not so young! You now have a chance to be among the first to check out the new stop-motion animated comedy thriller. Movieline is giving away a pair of tickets to the World Premiere of ParaNorman in addition to the pic's soundtrack (composed by Jon Brion!). To decide our lucky winner who will get to attend the event this coming Sunday, August 5th at 2pm at the Hollywood Theater, we're hosting a good old fashioned Haiku contest - or more specifically - a ParaNorman Haiku contest. That's right, get your creative writing game on, and add your lovingly typed Haiku in the comments below.
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Hollywood, a humble request? I realize that abortion is has become too divisive a topic these days to drop into a mainstream movie product like What To Expect When You're Expecting, especially in what's an overall innocuous ensemble comedy based, somehow, on a bestselling pregnancy guidebook (between this and Battleship, it's one strange week for source material). It's also a tough topic from which to wring laughs. And in something carefully calculated to be as broad in appeal as possible, any mention of the option of terminating a pregnancy is just going to be one more thing that could isolate potential movie audiences, like an ugly poster, being in a foreign language or attempting analysis of the Iraq War.
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"From the writer of Training Day... and The Fast and the Furious..." Yeah, OK. The first trailer for the thriller End of Watch is all that lead-plated machismo and more jammed through the chaotic handheld prism of Crank and distilled with the essence of Jake Gyllenhaal until the potency has you lapsing into a cop-buddy-shoot-'em-up swoon, faceplanting helplessly into writer-director David Ayer's oversaturated L.A. grit. And it's got Michael Peña and Anna Kendrick. What could go wrong?
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Neither the ladies nor the guys have emerged from the What to Expect When You're Expecting marketing miasma unscathed, but at least now we can get all of our ensemble humiliation out of the way in one convenient new one-sheet.
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Signs continue to emerge suggesting that What to Expect When You're Expecting is a real movie with real stars and a very real prospect of opening theatrically, as opposed to one of those mock all-star trailers that the Funny or Die crew coughed up over bad Chinese food at the end of a 14-hour day. The latest indication: Character posters! It's like The Avengers of maternity anthologies! If, that is, the Avengers labored superhumanly on behalf of the beleaguered population of Cringe City.
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If you dug the first trailer for Jonathan Levine's (The Wackness) September pic 50/50 -- about a 27-year-old (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) coming to terms with his cancer diagnosis -- then enjoy the first batch of images, in which JGL shaves his head, lights fires with Seth Rogen, and unburdens himself to a comely young lady friend (Anna Kendrick).
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