May-December romances "can be creepy" says Richard Jenkins, who's part of the cast of Josh Radnor's Liberal Arts, a movie about what might more appropriately might be termed a May-October romance on a college campus. In this particular case, Jenkins adds, "it isn't." The carefully groomed Radnor, who you may recognize from the TV sitcom How I Met Your Mother plays a guy in his 30s who goes back to his alma mater — the movie is set at Kenyon College in Ohio which Radnor actually attended — for a professor's retirement party and ends up falling for a much younger student there played by Elizabeth Olsen. more »
Josh Radnor has spent much of his time on television including most recently in How I Met Your Mother, but the actor also has two Sundance features he's directed, written and also starred in, including his latest, Liberal Arts, which premiered at the festival in January. The feature stars Radnor along with Elizabeth Olsen, Zac Efron, Allison Janney and Richard Jenkins. The trailer sets up the main premise of film. Disenchanted and newly single student counselor Jesse Fisher (Radnor) falls for younger college student, Zibby (Olsen).
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Elizabeth Olsen has given her two cents and two thumbs up to Fifty Shades of Grey, the best-selling erotic drama by E.L. James that has been the subject of a flurry of Twitter and blog posts over the summer over who will (or should) be cast in the lead roles. But the Martha Marcy May Marlene star who is currently filming Very Good Girls and has a couple of other projects in post-production said that the novel is "kind of great" for helping its female base to embrace fantasies and to openly discuss their sexuality.
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Red Lights, the new film from Buried director Rodrigo Cortés, weds an earnest, simplified exploration of the nature of faith with a goofy, gussied-up B-movie plot about a pair of academics who travel around debunking extrasensory phenomenon. As marriages go, it's a troubled one, but it certainly makes for some interesting fights across the dinner table.
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Jane Fonda shows up so infrequently in movies these days that it doesn’t matter if they look potentially good or dismal: Even when the performances (not to mention the movies around them) don’t quite work, Fonda always gives you something to watch. That’s certainly true in Bruce Beresford’s Peace, Love & Misunderstanding, an aimless if good-natured picture that casts Fonda in the role of a Woodstock-dwelling, ugly-art-making hippie-dippie mom who welcomes her estranged and very uptight daughter – played by Catherine Keener – back into her mother-earth arms. Her goal: To get her offspring, and her offspring’s offspring, to loosen up and start getting it on.
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A swarm of celebs including cast members turned out Monday night for the New York premiere of Jane Fonda and Catherine Keener starrer, Peace, Love & Misunderstanding at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The event, which benefited The Women's Media Center, held its post-screening bash at the Royalton Hotel in Midtown. The party didn't take a cue from the film's hippie-vibe, but who needs bohemian when there's champagne and sliders to guzzle! Along with Fonda and Keener, fellow cast members Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chace Crawford, NatWolff, Marissa O’Donnell and Maddie Corman joined in for the party hosted by Forevermark and The Wall Street Journal.
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Elizabeth Olsen looks modestly dressed in her Victorian-era full-length dresses and hats for her role in the erotic thriller Therese Raquin, which she is currently filming in Budapest, Hungary. Olsen plays the title character Therese Raquin in this project, directed by Charlie Stratton and also starring Harry Potter's Tom Felton and Jessica Lange. Her character is apparently forced into a loveless marriage with her sickly cousin Camille, played by Fenton.
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Also in Wednesday afternoon's Biz Break: A Taken star takes on another thriller in L.A., Logan Marshall Green gets set to play Tennessee Williams, and Matthew McConaughey and Cuba Gooding, Jr. take a look at White House historical drama.
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Silent House is not just a horror film but a Very Important Piece of Social Commentary, as you’ll see when you get to the movie’s third-act twist. In other words, it’s not asking you to watch a terrified woman’s face for some 90 minutes -- in sort-of real time, no less -- without an allegedly good reason. This is good-for-you, arthouse-style horror. Which doesn’t mean it’s necessarily any good.
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*: As determined by Movieline's Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics after crunching 23 weeks of data from the awards cognoscenti and beyond. Thank you for reading; our work here is done.
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You know that when two of the most respected pundits in all of Oscardom argue (within days of each other!) for curtailing both the epic Academy Awards season race and the ceremony in which it culminates, patience for all this crap is wearing thin. With that in mind — and also considering that the "race" for most of these categories ended weeks or months ago — who's up for an Oscar Index lightning round? (The entire staff at Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics raises its hands.) OK, then — to the Index!
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"Let's have a moment of silence for the suffering Oscar bloggers as they enter the most trying and mortifying weeks of their labors." Such was Glenn Kenny's tweeted lament earlier this week -- one eerily anticipating today's latest, sanity-thrashing edition of Oscar Index. And that's just its effect on readers! You really don't want to see the catatonic pall saturating Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics. On the other hand, we're gonna make a fortune recycling this mounting pile of wine bottles. To the Index!
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It's a little difficult for the specialists at Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics to come into work these days, what with the pall of predictability settling in over the awards landscape and the painstaking studies into backlash physics yielding less and less of practical substance. What's a frustrated kudologist to do? Besides drink for the next four weeks straight, I mean. Let's look for ideas and encouragement for all in this week's Oscar Index.
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It may be a relatively quiet Sundance year – even Pixar’s Lee Unkrich, in town for the festival, Tweeted his dismay at the “mixed bag” of movies – but films are selling. Granted, they’re mostly the ones with name actors and mostly okay-to-decent reviews (with a few exceptions), but buyers continue to be getting busy in the snow. The latest batch of pick-ups (Olsens and robots and scares, oh my!) after the jump.
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There's good news and bad news to begin this post-nomination, next-to-next-to-next-to-next-to-last installment of Oscar Index. The good news? It's kind of almost over! The bad news? Oy. Please don't make me repeat it.
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