Now THIS is how you announce you’re pregnant. If you happen to be hanging out in the same place as Paul Rudd, that is. One lucky couple recently found themselves in this situation and took full advantage of it, asking the actor to give them a hand in revealing their very big news to family and friends. Seriously, does it get any more awesome than Paul Rudd?!? Of course, not everyone has a comedic actor around to help out in such a funny manner. So how have other couples coped? How have they told the world that they’re having a baby? Via fake movie posters and the creative use of their pets, for starters. Toggle through some impressive pregnancy announcement now: 12 Creative Pregnancy Announcements 1. We’re Pregnant! This guy seems a little more excited about his impending baby than his wife does. We wonder why.
A crew team rowing in New York’s Hudson River rowed by a strange object that turned out to be a very large head … and left them scratching theirs. Out on the river Monday morning, Marist College crew coach Matt Lavin was the first to spot the mysterious 7-foot-high, fiberglass-covered dome. This thing is 4-5, as you can see in the video below: Giant Head Floating in Hudson River The ominous sighting gave the coach pause. “[Lavin] was in a small motor boat beside the team,” Greg Cannon, director of public affairs for the Poughkeepsie school, told ABC News this week . “He didn’t know what it was at first, but saw it was an obstruction that would have been in the way of the shipping channel. So he went out to investigate.” Once he realized he wasn’t in an apocalypse movie and that it wouldn’t be terribly heavy, he wrapped a line around the foam and fiberglass head. The crew team eventually towed it to shore and pulled it out. “They pulled it in and it’s some kind of Styrofoam core with a fiberglass shell over it,” Cannon said. “Enough of the foam was exposed that it got water logged.” “Members of the team helped drag it up onto the dock.” As for where the head came from, that’s still a mystery, but those who love conspiracies could have a field day. Cannon said he’s open to any theories. His favorite so far? The head is from a Mardi Gras float, was washed away by Hurricane Katrina and, eight years later, somehow ended up in the Hudson. There was also that more recent, and local, hurricane. “It could have been washed away by Sandy,” he said.
Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green has a new indie comedy on the way called Prince Avalanche . The film stars Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch. Check out the first Prince Avalanche trailer below: Prince Avalanche Trailer Rudd plays Alvin, a man who takes a summer job repainting the lines on a country road in order to enjoy some solitude. His oddball brother-in-law Lance, played by Emile Hirsch, joins him, and the two form an unlikely friendship. Prince Avalanche will be available in theaters and On Demand August 9.
Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green has a new indie comedy on the way called Prince Avalanche . The film stars Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch. Check out the first Prince Avalanche trailer below: Prince Avalanche Trailer Rudd plays Alvin, a man who takes a summer job repainting the lines on a country road in order to enjoy some solitude. His oddball brother-in-law Lance, played by Emile Hirsch, joins him, and the two form an unlikely friendship. Prince Avalanche will be available in theaters and On Demand August 9.
Director Paul Weitz wanted Tina Fey so badly for his new movie Admission that he was willing to keep her clothed. “Originally the movie was closer to the book in that it had a couple of legitimate sex scenes in it and I was like ‘Urk!'” Fey tells me. “So they were kind enough to accommodate that.” That doesn’t mean though that she and co-star Paul Rudd didn’t enjoy good chemistry. Rudd says he was “predisposed to liking her anyway” as they share many of the same friends. As for the film’s Princeton setting, the actor admitted that making Admission was the only way he could ever get on the campus as his “GPA was very middling”. Is Weitz worried that colleges will hold Admission — which is also very candid about the college admissions process — against his kids when they apply to college later down the line? Turns out he already has a plan! “I’m going to change their names!” But Princeton won’t hold a grudge, as Weitz says they agreed to let him film on campus because “they liked the idea of having Tina Fey around for a little bit”. However, he adds, the actual Princeton admissions office does not appear in the film because it remains “super-duper top secret”! Check out my full interviews below: Follow Grace Randolph on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
This is 40 ends with a title card saying that it’s “Based on characters created by Judd Apatow .” While this is true — the film’s about Debbie ( Leslie Mann ) and Pete ( Paul Rudd ), who were supporting figures in Apatow’s 2007 hit Knocked Up — it also feels like it might be more accurate for it to declare “Based on Judd Apatow.” It doesn’t just star his wife Mann, it features their daughters Maude and Iris as her children, and it’s not hard to read Rudd’s character as an Apatow proxy who’s struggling through the world of music instead of, these days, riding high in comedy. It’s shot on the same block on which director/writer/producer lives with his family, and includes what are clearly many of his thoughts and experiences on relationships, parenting and getting older. It’s Apatow’s most personal film yet, even more so than Funny People , and it benefits from the closeness of this material to its creator as much as it suffers for it, though its weakest points are when the film strives for the angle indicated in its tile — This is 40 — and tries too hard to be about the universal (“This is everyone’s story,” the trailer boldly declared). Its more general observations on aging and marriage aren’t just familiar, they can take on the well-meaning but blithely entitled sensibility of a college sophomore who’s finally lost his or her virginity and now feels qualified to hold forth about sex with the authority of Dr. Ruth. When Debbie forgets which year she’s lied about being born in to avoid dealing with the big four-O and yells at Pete for needing a Viagra for their morning birthday hookup, or when we watch a montage of the pair getting different orifices checked out by the doctor during a physical, the film feels like a recycled Erma Bombeck column with some added iPad etiquette discussions to modernize jokes about bodies no longer working and looking like they used to. This thing is, Debbie and Pete aren’t like everyone — they’re leading lives of comparable privilege and glamour, existing in an upper middle class world of gluten-free diets and spandex-clad road bike riding groups, of getting hit on by professional hockey players at a nightclub and throwing a concert to which Billie Joe Armstrong comes. They aren’t an everycouple, which is fine — it’s actually the specifics of their marriage and careers that, as the film unfolds at an overlong 134 minutes, make it compelling if more rooted in drama than domestic comedy. There’s an underlying terror guiding their lives, one not just related to getting older but to the possibility of failing to hold on to their economic rung and their concept of a happy, healthy family. Debbie and Pete smile so hard, like they can will away their unhappinesses, which surface instead in bickering. There’s a lot of bickering in This is 40 . Debbie badgers Pete and feels unappreciated by him while he sneaks cupcakes, loans money to his dad Larry (Albert Brooks) and hides the growing financial difficulties his retro record label is facing. An always perplexing aspect of Mann’s place as Apatow’s on-screen muse as well as his real-life partner is that the characters she’s played in his films, particularly Debbie, tend to be so shrill you wonder if there’s some concealed antagonism coming through. That’s a tendency that This is 40 directly addresses, with both Debbie and Pete having joking conversations about the fantasies they’ve had about murdering one another. The openness of that discussion of how you can genuinely if temporarily hate the one you love, and how it’s balanced by the easy unity Debbie and Pete have when defending themselves from another parent (Melissa McCarthy) at a school conference (the film’s funniest scene), is a minor but welcome improvement from the director’s past tendency to paint female characters as martyred nags impatiently dragging their men toward adulthood. This is 40 is notably messy, with narrative threads about which of the two employees (played by Megan Fox and Charlyne Yi) at Debbie’s store has been stealing and about Pete’s not very successful attempt to release a new album by Graham Parker and the Rumour drifting away rather than arriving at an end point. Sometimes that untidiness works for the film — both Pete’s relationship with Larry and Debbie’s with her largely absentee dad Oliver (John Lithgow) suggest lifetimes of complications that can’t be resolved in a side plot — but the questions about artistic integrity and business that are raised in the collapsing of Pete’s label are interesting and half-formed and could do with more exploration. Other elements, including older daughter Sadie’s (Maude Apatow) constant burrowing into her phone and tablet, the revelation of a character’s pill addiction and Jason Segel’s presence as a self-congratulating personal trailer, don’t really fit into any larger scheme. Apatow’s film comes across as overstuffed and understructured, a collection of elements that hasn’t really been assembled into a story and could do with the backbone. Rather than set out to make a feature about middle age and marriage and family, it feels like Apatow would have been better served to focus on making a film about Debbie and Pete and their journey, one that would naturally touch on all those themes. When they have a very funny fight about their relationship in terms of who’s Simon and who’s Garfunkel, the potential of this material is clear, but the end product feels like a step forward in terms of maturity of subject matter and a step back in terms of filmmaking. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Celeste and Jesse Forever star Rashida Jones and director Lee Toland Krieger at the after-party for their film Wednesday night in NYC. Photo by Amanda Schwab/Starpix . Indie pic Celeste and Jesse Forever played Sundance back in January and achieved that much sought-after hallmark of success: an acquisition deal with a big-name distributor – in this case the venerable Sony Pictures Classics. But the movie that had some false starts before shooting began did make it to the screen and if a gala screening of the film last night in New York is any measure, it should see more success. In addition to cast members Rashida Jones (who also co-wrote the film) and Rebecca Dayan as well as writer Will McCormack and director Lee Toland Krieger, Anne Hathaway , Paul Rudd , David Schwimmer , Amy Poehler , Aziz Ansari , Andy Cohen and Max Greenfield turned out for the event, hosted by The Peggy Siegal Company and the International Rescue Committee. A second-floor bar with a view of the Williamsburg Bridge at the Hotel Chantelle in Manhattan’s Lower East Side played hotspot for the after-party where Hathaway and others mingled with cast and invitees. Krieger told Movieline that producer Jennifer Todd approached him with the Celeste and Jesse Forever script back in 2010. “I thought I’d just read it, but then I fell in love with it,” he said. “I am a big Woody Allen fan and especially love Husbands and Wives . Both movies are full of comedy, but they’re about heartbreak.” Earlier at the screening, Sony Classics co-president Michael Barker praised Krieger and the cast. “We came to realize they’re major talents,” said Barker. “We think with this movie, you’re in the hands of a major American independent filmmaker.” Also in the crowd were Brady Corbet ( Simon Killer ), Olivia Culpo (Miss USA), Nadia Dajani ( Delocated ), Abby Elliott ( SNL ), Alex Karpovsky ( Girls ), Matthew Settle ( Gossip Girl ), Joey Slotnick ( Too Big to Fail ), Tennessee Thomas, ( Scott Pilgrim vs the World ), Mike Nichols & Diane Sawyer. Sony Classics will open Celeste and Jesse Forever in New York and Los Angeles beginning this Friday; stay tuned for our Movieline chat with Rashida Jones. Plot: Celeste (Rashida Jones) and Jesse (Andy Samberg) met in high school, married young and are growing apart. Now thirty, Celeste is the driven owner of her own media consulting firm, Jesse is once again unemployed and in no particular rush to do anything with his life. Celeste is convinced that divorcing Jesse is the right thing to do, and if they do it now instead of later, they can remain supportive friends. While navigating the turbulent changes in their lives and in their hearts, these two learn that in order to truly love someone, you may have to let them go. View the trailer on YouTube .
Also in Wednesday afternoon’s quick news roundup, The Hobbit is set to premiere in Down Under later this year, Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch complete a “secret” indie and Captain America 2 appears to have found its directors. Also up is news on a network starring Asian Americans and Universal chief Ron Meyer heads to UCLA festivities. IFC Midnight Takes Rights to Antiviral U.S. rights to Brandon Cronenberg’s Cannes debut Antiviral have been picked up by IFC Midnight. The film, also with a screenplay by Cronenberg, stars Caleb Landry Jones, Sarah Gadon, Douglas Smith and Malcolm McDowell. The film follows “Syd March, an employee at a clinic that sells injections of live viruses harvested from sick celebrities to rabid fans. Syd supplements his income by selling illegal samples of these viruses on the black market,smuggling them out of the clinic in his own body. When he becomes infected with the disease that kills superstar Hannah Geist, Syd becomes a target for collectors and obsessed fans. Arianna Bocco, Senior Vice President of Acquisitions & Productions of Sundance Selects/IFC Films negotiated the deal with Gregory Chambet of TF1 International. Asian Americans Take Spotlight in Network’s Film Fest Mnet , the first national, 24/7 English-language television network in the U.S. for all things Asian, kicks off the third season of Short Notice with a film festival that allows fans to select their favorite short film created by and starring Asian Americans . As one of Mnet’s original programming series, the show premieres on Wednesday, June 13 at 8 p.m. ET/PT with new host George Wang. Universal Chief Ron Meyer to Deliver UCLA Commencement Ron Meyer, Universal Studios President and COO, will be the 2012 Commencement Speaker for this year’s UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television’s (TFT) commencement ceremony. Recipients of TFT’s 2012 Distinguished Alumni Awards are director and screenwriter Penelope Spheeris for Film and Shirley Jo Finney, the award-winning international director/actor, for Theater, both of whom will receive their awards at the ceremony. UCLA Names New Chair of Dept. of Film, Television, and Digital Media William McDonald, award-winning cinematographer and professor, has been appointed the new Chair of the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media (FTVDM) at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (TFT) and will assume his new position on July 1st. GKids Takes Rights to Japan’s From up on Poppy Hill GKIDS is handling theatrical, home video, television and VOD rights and will qualify the film for the Academy Awards in the Best Animated Feature category. Directed by Goro Miyazaki, the film is set in Yokohama in 1963, about a high school couple’s innocent love and the secrets surrounding their births. The story takes place in a Japan that is picking itself up from the devastation of World War II and preparing to host the 1964 Olympics. GKids plans a March 2013 release. Around the ‘net… Elvis will Appear in Film and TV – Virtually CORE Media Group, which owns the Elvis Presley brand, has signed a deal with digital production company Digital Domain Media Group to develop, produce a series of “virtual” Elvis Presley apparitions for film and TV projects, Deadline reports . The Hobbit to Debut November in New Zealand The screening at Wellington’s Embassy Theatre will take place two weeks ahead of the film’s release on 14 December. Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson said it was fitting to hold the premiere “where the journey began.” Based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit is set 60 years before the Lord Of The Rings trilogy of films, BBC reports . Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch Complete ‘Top Secret’ Indie The actors worked on Prince Avalanche by writer-director David Gordon Green, based on Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurosson’s Icelandic comedy Either Way . The film revolves around two men whose lives intersect while working on a road striping crew together. Green and his longtime collaborators Lisa Muskat and Craig Zobel produced the film with James Belfer and Derrick Tseng, Variety reports . Russo Bros. Appear to be Headed to Captain America 2 Anthony and Joe Russo are close to signing on to direct the Captain America sequel for Marvel. The Russo’s credits include You, Me & Dupree and NBC’s comedy Community , THR reports .
Every once in a while it’s nice to see a “red band trailer” that could possibly disturb somebody. Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie does just that, as well as build nicely upon Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s Adult Swim series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! , which ran for five seasons. In the trailer for the new movie, which will premiere at Sundance , we watch as Tim and Eric don fetching khakis, sever a finger, astound Zach Galifiankis, reveal a staggering sex toy and “honor their love” for each other. Disgusting and undeniably funny.
Red band trailers are the Movieline reader’s one-stop shop for swear words, PG nudity, and otherwise offensive dialogue. They’re the Costco of cusses. In the new red band trailer for the pleasant-seeming Our Idiot Brother (read the Movieline review here), Paul Rudd befuddles his parole officer, interrupts some schtupping, and survives the cutting commentary of his sister Elizabeth Banks. It’s all very red , you know?
