Terrence Howard joins a slew of stars in a cop caper. Also in Friday's round-up of news, the weekend is not shaping up to be a kind one for Playing for Keeps at the box office; James Marsden is strolling toward a Walk of Shame with Elizabeth Banks; Hyde Park On Hudson, In Our Nature and California Solo are among the weekend's Specialty Release newcomers; and Rubberneck & Redflag head to theaters via Tribeca Film.
Terrence Howard Joins Chain Gang in Prisoners
Also starring Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Melissa Leo, Viola Davis, Maria Bello and Paul Dano, the film follows a small-town carpenter (Jackman) whose daughter and her best friend are abducted. The cops cannot find them and he takes the law into his own hands. In the process, he comes into contact with a detective (Gyllenhaal) who oozes confidence, Deadline reports.
Weekend Box Office Preview: Playing for Keeps Likely a Flop
Gerard Butler's soccer romantic comedy Playing for Keeps with Jessica Biel, Uma Thurman, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Dennis Quaid may only open in the $6 million range, THR reports.
James Marsden Strolling a Walk of Shame
Marsden will join Steven Brill's Walk of Shame with Elizabeth Banks. Banks plays a news anchor who has a wild night out and is locked out on the street without money, phone, ID etc and has a series of misadventures while winding a path to the most important job interview of her life, TOH reports.
Specialty Release Preview: Hyde Park on Hudson, In Our Nature, California Solo & More
Oscar hopeful Hyde Park on Hudson with Bill Murray as Franklin Delano Roosevelt is this weekend’s highest profile debut in the specialty market. There’s also In Our Nature with Jena Malone and John Slattery, and Robert Carlyle headlines California Solo in a role written with him in mind. The late Ernest Borgnine stars in The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez in a role that turns the idea of celebrity upside-down, Deadline reports.
Rubberneck and Red Flag Head to Theaters via Tribeca
Rubberneck revolves around a workplace obsession gone wrong. Boston scientist Paul lusts after a co-worker and though at first it's polite flirtation at first, things go south when the co-worker begins to date someone else on the job. Red Flag centers on a solipsistic filmmaker takes his independent film on tour. Hoping to escape the pain of his recent breakup. Tribeca Film picked up both films directed by Alex Karpovsky and will be released theatrically in February.
To say there’s nothing on the contemporary movie landscape like Alex Kurtzman’s People Like Us is to suggest that the picture is a groundbreaking work with special effects unlike any we’ve ever seen, that it’s fresh and original in its use of characters or situations from old movies (or even older comic books), that its 3-D wow factor rivals that of Avatar. But People Like Us is something odder: This is a straightforward family comedy-drama, a movie made for adults, and one that actually gives its actors – among them Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Pfeiffer and Philip Baker Hall – something to do. That’s more of a rarity on today’s landscape than it should be.
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Bad news, Charlie Kaufman fans: While some cast members had been hopeful in recent months that Frank or Francis would move ahead, Elizabeth Banks (doing the press rounds for People Like Us) spilled news to the contrary.
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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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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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The new trailer for People Like Us (nee Welcome to People) is here, featuring Chris Pine and Elizabeth Banks as siblings who meet only after their father dies. The inheritance/estrangement/salvation plot (and a vaguely incestuous vibe that the trailer mostly counteracts with a few key shots of Olivia Wilde as Pine's wife) thickens around the family, with Michelle Pfeiffer dropping in as Pine's mother, which is just as bizarre as I expected it would be. Overall, though? Screenwriter Alex Kurtzman's directorial debut looks all right!
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The new trailer for People Like Us (nee Welcome to People) is here, featuring Chris Pine and Elizabeth Banks as siblings who meet only after their father dies. The inheritance/estrangement/salvation plot (and a vaguely incestuous vibe that the trailer mostly counteracts with a few key shots of Olivia Wilde as Pine's wife) thickens around the family, with Michelle Pfeiffer dropping in as Pine's mother, which is just as bizarre as I expected it would be. Overall, though? Screenwriter Alex Kurtzman's directorial debut looks all right!
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Movie events have become deadly little things, highly mechanized gadgets thrown by studio marketing departments into an audience’s midst in advance; then we just stand around and wait for them to explode. The Hunger Games, adapted from the first of Suzanne Collins’ hugely successful trio of young adult novels, was decreed an event long before it became anything close to a movie: More than a year ago its studio, Lionsgate, launched a not-so-stealthy advertising campaign that made extensive use of social media to coax potential fans into convincing one another that they had to see this movie. The marketing was so nervily persuasive that you had to wonder: How could any movie – especially one that, as it turns out, is largely and surprisingly naturalistic, as opposed to the usual toppling tower of special effects – possibly hope to measure up?
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Young heroes rebel against a fascist government that controls its citizenry through institutionalized terror and reality television, igniting a revolution that spreads across an isolated land via broadcast images and word of mouth. The Arab Spring? Nope. Try The Hunger Games, set in a dystopian sci-fi future that parallels current global unrest, which stars Jennifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Banks, and Donald Sutherland say they hope could spur a generation of YA-consuming youths into political action.
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As The Hunger Games' March 23 release fast approaches, Lionsgate is churning out a steady stream of stills and goodies and tie-ins to stoke the fires of fandom and they've put a surprising bit of marketing muscle behind not only star Jennifer Lawrence, but co-star Elizabeth Banks and her supporting character, Effie Trinket. On second thought, maybe that's not so surprising; Effie's strikingly gaudy visual look, representative of image-obsessed Capitol culture in the fictional nation of Panem, offers more in the way of marketing opportunities than Katniss Everdeen's tomboy-turned-teen warrior ensembles.
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It’s so hard to find a reasonably enjoyable thriller these days that anything with a marginally intriguing premise and fewer than 10 plot holes has come to seem like a minor miracle. Man on a Ledge might have been that kind of modest miracle: Sam Worthington stars as Nick Cassidy, a pissed-off ex-cop who’s been convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. Somehow – and the whole of Man on a Ledge deals with the whys and wherefores of that somehow – he springs himself from Sing Sing, suits up in some phenomenally nice-looking threads, and checks himself (under an assumed name) into a room on one of the upper floors of a midtown Manhattan luxury hotel. After a room-service breakfast of champagne, lobster and French fries, he creeps out onto the ledge and greets the cops who respond to the call with some very specific demands.
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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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At this point, it seems like The Hunger Games will be a slideshow of moody profile portraits and outdoorsy stills, but Lionsgate is determined to prove that it's going to be a real movie -- with another outdoorsy still. Here, Jennifer Lawrence (as the fearsome Katniss Everdeen) raises her bow and arrow to fire. Where's she aiming? Debate with us after the jump.
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The Hunger Games preys on the box office in March, but in the meantime eight of the battledome-savvy characters are squaring off in new posters for the film. Jennifer Lawrence looks fetching under a golden haze, Lenny Kravitz looks a lot like Lenny Kravitz, and Josh Hutcherson keeps looking younger and younger. Seriously, he's wearing his Bridge to Terabithia face here.
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Now that Lionsgate's Hunger Games casting roll-out is juuuuust about done (where art thou, President Snow? [UPDATE: There you are!]), Movieline has assembled the cast members of Gary Ross's YA now-filming novel adaptation for your perusal. After the jump, behold the faces of District 12 heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and her friends, family, fellow fresh-meat tributes, and key players.
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