Although Emily Blunt came close to being cast in two different Marvel superhero movies, it’s not until later this year that she gets her first action-type role in Rian Johnson’s time travel thriller Looper. But her turn as a gun-toting farm girl is just the beginning for Blunt: She’s currently in intense training to play a lethal soldier in Doug Liman’s futuristic sci-fi All You Need Is Kill, opposite Tom Cruise.
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In Tuesday evening's round up of news briefs, Emily Blunt teased she would consider the second Devil Wears Prada under one condition. Also, the Austin Film Festival added details on its October event while Outfest rounds out its upcoming edition next month. The Avengers passes a domestic high water mark and Catherine Keener is set for role opposite Mark Ruffalo.
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In the opening scene of Lynn Shelton’s fourth feature we join a conversation in progress. Or a few conversations: Voices overlap, rise and fall, fade in and out; it’s a party, small enough to sustain a few low-volume simultaneous conversations, large enough to fill the room with chatter. As in Shelton’s previous films, My Effortless Brilliance and Humpday, in Your Sister’s Sister we join the central characters at a moment of convergence, after a period of separation or crisis and before it becomes clear things can’t go on as they were before.
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Local filmmaker Lynn Shelton's latest, Your Sister's Sister starring Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt and Mark Duplass will open the Seattle International Film Festival, ushering in the 38th edition of the late spring event which will feature 273 features and 187 shorts from 75 countries. The lineup includes 24 world premieres along with 25 North American and 16 U.S. debuts. 180 of the total do not currently have U.S. distribution.
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The Five-Year Engagement begins where a lot of movies would end, with a proposal. Tom (Jason Segel), a chef, is driving to a New Year's Eve party with his girlfriend of a year, Violet (Emily Blunt), a psychology postdoc. He's so visibly nervous that she's worried he's unwell, questioning him until he pulls over to the side of the road, slams down a box containing a ring and confesses that he was going to ask her to marry him that night. He still does, and she still insists on going through with his plan of a surprise rooftop romantic dinner at the restaurant in which he works. That's because Tom and Violet are in love, and they're also nice, down-to-earth, well-intentioned people, qualities that suffuse the film as well, generally for the better but sometimes to its detriment.
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British actress Emily Blunt has traveled both the studio and indie route during her career, most recently appearing in Lasse Hallström's specialty feature Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and starring this week opposite Jason Segel in Universal's romantic comedy The Five-Year Engagement. Meanwhile, another project Blunt is promoting in New York, writer-director Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister, joined Engagement as part of this year's Tribeca Film Festival, still underway in Manhattan. The smaller of her two Tribeca titles, Sister proved something of career déjà vu for Blunt, who told an Apple Store audience that her experience working on the feature reminded her of her very first film feature role.
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Looper! The full trailer for writer-director Rian Johnson's latest is here, planting Joseph Gordon-Levitt in time-travel assassin mode — at least until his older self (Bruce Willis) is one day sent back to the past to become his own next victim. What's a smirky, brash young hit man to do? Don't let him escape, that's for... Oh, wait. There he goes.
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Although it’s set in the present, the characters in Lasse Hallström’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen seem to have been imported from a different time. The good ones behave in a courtly manner and speak in dignified tones and the rascals twinkle and flounce. Often the effect of Simon Beaufoy’s script (adapted from Paul Torday’s 2007 novel) is refreshing, due in no small part to the congenital irresistibility of the actors speaking his lines -- Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt and Kristin Scott Thomas. It’s when the adorably priggish Cary Grant type is accused of having Asperger’s by his plucky but labile future love interest and the benevolent Sheik bankrolling the duo’s wacky experiment is nearly assassinated by Yemeni jihadists that things get to feel a little pear-shaped.
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You might have heard there was a big awards show last night? And as usual, the 69th Golden Globes delivered their standard array of highlights, lowlights and headscratching curios over three hours at the Beverly Hilton. Let's revisit the ups and downs in words and pictures, shall we?
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I don't know if you can tell by its freakishly quirky title, but Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is freakishly quirky. Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt, and a suddenly super-droll Kristen Scott Thomas star in what appears to be a Middle Eastern-set romcom with kooky supporting characters. There's also a chance that it's an Eat, Pray, Love for downtrodden white men, which would be despicable. You figure it out.
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No actor has made a career of exerting determination to the extent that Matt Damon has. In the Bourne movies, he burned himself down to a central nervous system -- his focus fried away unnecessary calories. In The Informant!, the comedy comes from doughy Mark Whitacre's single minded pursuit of the life he has in his head; the weight he happily carries didn't make him earthbound. That film's examination of identity played like a Philip K. Dick adaptation; it seems to serve the purpose of making writer/director George Nolfi's simultaneously drab and florid adaptation of Dick's Adjustment Team superfluous.
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