At this point, talk of Goonies 2 and of a Mrs. Doubtfire sequel is just that: talk. But there’s one follow-up film about which fans can truly get excited. Pitch Perfect 2 really is happening, folks. Rebel Wilson Tweeted an adorable photo from the first day of rehearsals this week, giving fans a look at herself alongside Elizabeth Banks, Brittany Snow, Ester Dean, Kelley Jakle, Alexis Knapp and Hanna Mae Lee. All will return for the sequel to the beloved 2012 musical comedy. “1st day of PP2 rehearsals!” the Australian actress behind Fat Amy wrote as a caption. Anna Kendrick, Anna Camp and Skylar Astin are missing, but don’t worry: they are on board as well. Pitch Perfect 2 comes out on May 15, 2015 and you can go watch Pitch Perfect online via Movie Fanatic if you have somehow never seen this awesome flick.
It’s good to see Genndy Tartakovsky on the big screen. Even when he was working at Cartoon Network beginning in the 1990s, where he produced such contemporary animated classics as Dexter’s Laboratory , Powerpuff Girls and the visually stunning Samurai Jack , Tartakovsky and his team produced remarkably three-dimensional worlds — populated with fully developed characters, ageless physical humor and memorable sight gags — rendered in 2D animation. It was only a matter of time before he graduated to feature films, and on Friday, his engaging and funny directorial debut Hotel Transylvania opened in theaters in 3D. Movieline talked to Tartakovsky about the challenges of making the transition from animated TV series to feature films and his push during production to achieve a hyper-exaggerated, Mad Magazine-meet- Looney Tunes style of animation that, he says, is largely taboo among the gatekeepers of the genre. The Moscow-born Tartakovsky, whose family moved to the United States when he was 7, also talked about working with Adam Sandler, who as the voice of Dracula, gives one of his best performances in a long time, and another genius of a certain type of animation, Saturday TV Funhouse creator Robert Smigel. Finally, he talks about his influences, which aren’t limited to cartoons. Indeed, there’s more than a little The Good, The Bad And The Ugly i in Samurai Jack , which, happily, Tartakovsky says he wants to revisit via a film or miniseries. Movieline: This is your first theatrical feature. Tartakovsky : Yeah, I’ve done long-form movies for DVD, but this is my first theatrical feature. What are the challenges of making that transition from TV to feature films? One of them is the simple idea that in television, you have episode after episode, so if you mess up one, the audience usually forgives you. In features nowadays, you work all this time and put out all this effort for one weekend. If you don’t open, you’re dead. And so it’s a totally different type of pressure where you’re working so hard to tell a good story and create good characters. Usually in TV, it takes six to eight, sometimes 10 episodes, to really get going and know what the show is. There’s always that moment in TV where a show clicks. Seinfeld had it. A lot of shows go through it. But in features, you don’t have that choice. You’ve got to figure everything out. You’ve got to know what your movie is. And you’ve got to know what story you’re telling. And all of this pressure and build-up was very different for me because I was like, this is it. This is the one shot that I get at this. When it came to the monsters in Hotel Transylvania , I thought I saw and heard a lot of references to pop culture: the Universal monsters, of course, but also Count Floyd from SCTV and Young Frankenstein. Tartakovsky: Well, the main monsters are all inspired by the iconic things that we know them by. but we actually tried not to put in too many references. So, for Dracula, we tried to make him his own design, even though he probably has classic flavors of Count Chocula and other things. [Laughs] But that definitely wasn’t on purpose. If anything, we were trying to do almost a Mad Magazine type of vibe. We tried not to take ourselves too seriously. So any of the references you may have thought you saw, definitely weren’t on purpose. I first became of fan of your work watching Dexter’s Laboratory , The Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack on Cartoon Network. I’m also a fan of screenwriter Robert Smigel’s Saturday TV Funhouse for SNL. How did you get involved with Sandler and Smigel and that crew? When I came on, Adam was already signed on to do the voice of Dracula. I worked on the script to take the tone and other aspects in the direction I wanted them to go, and then I gave it to Adam. He really liked what I did. No matter what movie he does, Adam brings in his own guys to help write whatever character he’s portraying, and one of the guys he works with is Robert Smigel. He asked me if I wanted to work with Smigel, and I said, ‘Oh yeah, definitely. I love the stuff he’s done.” And that’s how he got involved. So this project didn’t originate with you? I came on board after it had been going through the grinder for few years. Judging from some of the bios I read about you, you grew up a pretty alienated kid. Did monsters help you deal with those feelings? The actuality is that I was really scared of scary movies. I think kids either get off on it or they don’t. I was one of those that didn’t. I like knowing things. I didn’t like that feeling of, what’s around the corner? I never went to haunted houses or anything like that. But at the same time, I liked the idea of Dracula and Frankenstein – definitely the older movies weren’t as scary as today’s are. So, I definitely watched those. But, for me, where I really liked the monsters were in comedy, like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein , or, of course, Young Frankenstein is one of my favorite movies. That was my introduction to the monsters, until I read some of the books and thought more in terms of the truer sense of them. Weirdly, I saw Hotel Transylvania knowing that you were involved but unaware that Sandler was the voice of Dracula. And I have to say, I his usual trademark vocal tics weren’t obvious. That’s hilarious. I am a real Adam Sandler fan, but, at the same time, when a celebrity voice overtakes the character, it can throw you out of the film. You know, you realize who’s doing the voice and you’re just, ‘Oh, it’s that actor playing that character.’ And so, I was really worried about it. That’s why I tried really hard to push Dracula’s expressions and his posing and to push for Adam not to do his voice. At first, I think he was really hesitant—you know comedians are really hard on each other and they’re hard on themselves. They want to make sure they don’t sound hacky, or whatever. And doing something [as iconic] as Dracula, you’re opening yourself up. But I loved the voice Adam did. We started looking at it, and for me, I wanted this to be a broad comedy. So I kept pressuring him to do it as cartoony as he could get and still be comfortable. So whenever he yelled and did those big ranges and different rhythms, the happier I was because then we could make some really fun, old-school animation like the old school — like Mel Blanc when he would do Bugs Bunny or Daffy. For the emotional stuff, he definitely came down and we have that kind of contrast. I loved the scene where Dracula is chasing the airplane that’s carrying his daughter’s boyfriend, Jonathan (Andy Samberg) and sees him watching some sort of Twilight -like movie with bare-chested pretty boys. And even though the sunlight is burning him up, Dracula has to make some sort of smart-ass comment about the state of vampire movies today. Was that your idea? That was an Adam and Smigel idea, I think. I thought you were successful getting most of the actors not to sound too much like themselves. How did you manage that? It all depended on the character. With Fran Drescher, for the Bride of Frankenstein, we really wanted it to be her voice, which is super cartoony to begin with. With Kevin we decided to do Frankenstein as really conversational, so he could be more of his voice. If we were successful, I think it had a lot to do with the visuals. They way we executed performances and stuff, you weren’t paying too much attention to the voices because they just kind of all fit. Tell me about what you were striving for in terms of the animation. We really tried to push the animation to be better than other movies, to have it’s own point of view. And, again, to support the broad comedy of it, we wanted to do a Tex Avery-, Warner Brothers-influenced type of animation. When I first started doing it, everybody was so hesitant because that’s the big taboo in feature animation.: you can’t have things too over-exaggerated. I always thought that was ridiculous because for me the best scene in animation is in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, where you’ve got these crazy looking dwarves and Snow White’s dead and they’re super sad. They’re as unrealistic as you get. They’re ridiculous. And then they shed a tear and the audience is rapt. They’re so involved in these characters. To me, it was always ridiculous that you can’t emote if you’re doing something cartoony and exaggerated. I always argued the opposite. The more cartoony and exaggerated you are, the more range of expression you have and it will be more believable. And so, that was the whole point. Push the expressions. Push the animation. Push the posing to a much more exaggerated level. When did that silly rule get made? Look at the movies. It’s really be around since Disney. Disney started really cartoony, and then it switched. It started going more and more realistic, and eventually that look kind of stuck. And that became the law. When you have a movie like Beauty And The Beast that’s very realistic making so much money, that starts the argument that you can only do it that way. It’s just a trend that never went away. Maybe you’re about to reverse that. I’m hoping. [Laughs] The animation is all CGI? Technically, it’s the same as any Pixar, Dreamworks or big CG feature. The only thing that’s really different is that we really pushed the drawing aspect of it. We tried to get funny expressions, funny poses and that’s what really stands out. We really broke the puppet. With CGI, you have this model of a puppet in the computer, and it can only do a limited number of things. But if you push it and stretch it and pull it and break it, it can do so much more. And that’s where the Mad Magazine theory came into play. If you pause on a frame of Dracula, you get a funny expression. And that’s a really hand-drawn 2-D animated theory, where you have a funny drawing and you laugh at it. And that’s what I wanted to get more of — that the movie is drawn, not so much just posed.
After humming along with this weekend’s a capella comedy Pitch Perfect , you’re going to want to know more about Skylar Astin, the 25-year-old Broadway alum who made his film debut in Hamlet 2 , appeared in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock , and sings his way into Anna Kendrick ‘s heart this weekend as Jesse, Beca’s adorably movie-obsessed aca-love interest and member of the Bellas’ rival team, The Treble Makers. Movieline put ten questions (more or less) to Astin for a chat about Pitch Perfect , the summer camp vibe on set, his upcoming comedy projects, and — perhaps most importantly — why the ’90s Swedish pop outfit Ace of Base deserves props. Musicals are popular in the age of Glee , and Pitch Perfect also pays homage to the spirit of John Hughes movies and the romantic comedies of the ‘80s and ‘90s, but why do you think it resonates so much? I think in so many ways it follows a formula that works in terms of big ensemble comedies, but there are elements of it that have never been done before. For one, a capella has never completely dominated a movie. There have been elements of it — I know John Michael Higgins had a moment in The Break-Up that was hilarious — but I think that there’s something unique about it that doesn’t go too far in one direction, and it’s just fun. You just enjoy it. There’s something that seems very organic about the comedy and the style. You started out very successfully on Broadway, alongside Jonathan Groff and Lea Michele in Spring Awakening . Were you looking for a project like Pitch Perfect that specifically involved music? It seemed like a healthy transition for me but it was more of a coincidence. I wasn’t only searching for these movies but it did seem to fall into place beautifully. I responded because it’s something that’s close to home but I wasn’t actively searching — but I’m not going to complain about it either. Your first film, which was also a musical, was Hamlet 2 — which featured you singing a song with the best song title. Which one? “Raped in the Face?” [Laughs] That is the most ridiculous song ever. It was quite the auspicious debut, Hamlet 2 , and now you have a few more comedies lined up after Pitch Perfect . What types of projects do you find yourself naturally drawn to? I’m at a place right now where I’m not opposed to anything. I worked on dramas before, I love sinking my teeth into something dramatic or a period piece, but there’s something so fun about doing a comedy. When you go to set and your only job is to make people laugh, there’s an unbelievable energy on set. Nobody’s tiptoeing or walking delicately around the actors. I really love doing it, and putting the puzzle together with the sole purpose of making people have fun and enjoy themselves. On the set of Pitch Perfect you had all of these great singers and performers constantly around you. Did the cast spontaneously erupt in song between takes or anything like that? We had a strict no-singing rule. No, I’m kidding. It was exactly that — I wish I could tell you something even crazier but it was like an all-star theater camp, where you had people you’d recognized from TV and film singing theater songs or pop songs on the radio. We were constantly harmonizing with each other, which got to a weird place after a couple of weeks. But when you’re in this kind of ensemble it really feels like you’re putting on a play. So there is that energy of all of us hanging out together and seeing movies together and singing, and God forbid someone pulls out a guitar — it’s just gonna get crazy. I do feel like the film is a bit unfair to one particular song. That would be Ace of Base’s “The Sign,” which becomes a running gag… Oh my god, 1994! I have the album. Were there any songs that, by the end of the shoot, you were all completely sick of hearing, that you wanted to call a moratorium on? The only song that could be in that category for the sake of pure repetition would probably be the medley that the Bellas do throughout the whole first half of the movie. They keep the same kind of routine just like they do in the movie and during rehearsals there were slight changes in each, but playback-wise it was the same thing. That was definitely the most-played song. But my mom used to work out to those songs in my basement when I was growing up; she used to blast “The Rhythm Is Going To Get You,” “Turn The Beat Around,” “The Sign” — those are songs that have been burned into my memory forever, so I don’t think I could a see them in a negative light. Good! Because “The Sign” demands and deserves a popular revival. I think Anna Camp and Brittany Snow are just the people to do it. Now, Skylar Astin is not your full birth name – what’s the story there? Skylar is my first name and Astin is my middle name, and my real last name is Lipstein. When I was 15 I think my first agent just kind of did it for me. I’m not ashamed, I’m not embarrassed, but she said it was just less specific to one thing and she kind of chopped it off. But forever to my friends I will be Skylar Lipstein. Looking to the future, you’ve got 21 and Over from the writer of The Hangover , and you also have a comedy called Cavemen . Meanwhile, your Pitch Perfect character Jesse is kind of the perfect college boy-romantic love interest. Where do you see yourself heading in, say, five years’ time? He’s definitely sweet as sugar. [Laughs] In five years I just want to be working on things that excite me. I’m open to everything. It could be a 19th century period piece or another awesome comedy with the same crew that did 21 and Over . Or it could be Pitch Perfect 4 ! Who knows? Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Cinema connoisseurs of two kinds are in luck this week: Panos Cosmatos’s acid-trip of an arthouse thriller Beyond The Black Rainbow hits shelves as Movieline’s highbrow pick of the week, while the comedy classic Airplane! gets the Blu-ray treatment. Surely you can’t resist? HIGH: Beyond the Black Rainbow (Magnolia Home Entertainment; $26.98 DVD, $29.98 Blu-Ray) Who’s Responsible: Written and directed by Panos Cosmatos; starring Michael Rogers, Eva Allan, Scott Hylands. What It’s All About: A young woman (Allan) in 1983 undergoes “therapy” at the mysterious Arboria Institute, although any outside observer would be forgiven for thinking that she’s being mentally tortured by the twitchy and nefarious Dr. Barry Nyle (Rogers). Can she escape? Will her obsessive tormentor allow her to elude his clutches? Why It’s Schmancy: The word “trippy” just scratches the surface of the gorgeous psychedelic freak-out that’s been crafted here by first-time filmmaker Cosmatos. (His father, director George Pan Cosmatos, was the man behind more decidedly mainstream fare like Rambo: First Blood , Part Two and Tombstone .) Beyond the Black Rainbow pays homage to those ’70s thrillers in which dastardly things were happening behind the seemingly sterile walls of coolly impenetrable high-tech companies ( Colossus: The Forbin Project , Parts: The Clonus Horror , Coma , et. al.) with chilly aplomb; Cosmatos gets the period exactly right, from the hypnotically droning and heavily synth-y soundtrack by Jeremy Schmidt to Dr. Nyle’s black-turtleneck-under-tweed-blazer ensemble. The pace is slow, but the wonderfully weird payoffs are worth it. Why You Should Buy It: While a director commentary from Cosmatos would no doubt be illuminating, the auteur apparently prefers to let the work speak for itself; the only extras are the theatrical trailer and some deleted special effects footage where you get to watch a head melt. (Not a bad metaphor for how many audiences will respond to the film.) LOW: Airplane! (Paramount Home Entertainment; $22.98 Blu-Ray) Who’s Responsible: Written and directed by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker; starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves. What It’s All About: This frenetic and outrageous satire of disaster movies in general (and 1957’s Zero Hour in particular) features shell-shocked war veteran Ted Striker (Hays) pursuing his stewardess girlfriend Elaine (Hagerty) on a flight from Chicago to Los Angeles; when food poisoning strikes the crew, Ted is the only hope of safely landing the plane, with a little help from a doctor (Nielsen), a jittery airport manager (Bridges) and Ted’s former commanding officer (Stack). Why It’s Fun: Many have tried but few have succeeded in copying the machine-gun-fire barrage of visual gags, puns, reference jokes and flat-out anarchic weirdness that have made this spoof one of the great American comedies of all time. It may be silly and sophomoric, but Airplane! is a miracle of pacing, with more laughs per minute than maybe any feature film ever made. Generations of new audiences unfamiliar with the 1970s disaster epics being parodied here still embrace this movie for its timelessly wacky pleasures. If nothing else, this movie may have succeeded at removing the word “surely” from serious conversation. Why You Should Buy It (Again): The extras — a feature-length commentary, pop-up trivia, and a “Long Haul” version of the film that allows viewers to click on icons to look at deleted scenes and interviews — will be familiar to anyone who purchased the previous “Don’t Call Me Shirley” edition. But Airplane! has never looked or sounded as sharp as it does on this Blu-Ray release (previously a Best Buy exclusive, now on sale everywhere). Previously: High And Low: Slapstick Savant Buster Keaton And (Surprise!) Horror Huckster William Castle Bring The Funny Follow Alonso Duralde on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
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 have at the movies this 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 . In a post-screening Q&A with Just Jared founder Jared Eng, Banks and co-producer/husband Handelman explained that they were inspired by GQ editor Mickey Rapkin’s nonfiction book Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Capella Glory . Based on the ups and downs of real a cappella college teams they developed the feature about Beca ( Anna Kendrick ), a loner college freshman and wannabe mash-up DJ who reluctantly joins the Bellas, a floundering all-girls singing group struggling to sing their way to the top. (Jason Moore, nominated for a Tony for the raunchy Broadway comedy-musical Avenue Q , directs; the script is by 30 Rock scribe Kay Cannon.) Musical numbers abound as the Bellas and their all-male rivals, the Treble Makers, compete through the a capella season and face off on campus. In addition to producing, Banks also provides comic relief in the film as a seasoned a capella competition commentator alongside John Michael Higgins. “The part was meant for Kristen Wiig,” Banks admitted. The film brings Kendrick full circle back to her musical roots; years before making her film debut in the 2003 musical Camp – after which she earned fans from Rocket Science and the Twilight movies and earned an Oscar nomination for Up in the Air — she got her start on Broadway and was nominated for a Tony at the age of 12. Skylar Astin, another Broadway-born talent best known for starring alongside Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff in the original cast of Spring Awakening , makes a big screen splash as Jesse, the classmate/rival who sings his way into Beca’s heart. Being on set was “like an all-star theater camp,” he said, before granting an audience member’s request for a song by belting the theme to The Gummi Bears . As the plus-sized foreign student who introduces herself as “Fat Amy,” Rebel Wilson ( Bridesmaids ) steals scenes left and right (“I’m the best singer in Tasmania… with teeth”). Casting the character presented a unique challenge. “In the script the character is called ‘Fat Amy,’ so it’s really hard to send it to actresses,” Banks said. “Rebel recognized what an iconic character Fat Amy would be.” Chart-topping songwriter/singer Ester Dean, who’s written for Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, and Britney Spears, shared her own unusual Pitch Perfect casting story: After lobbying for a voice part in Universal’s The Lorax , Dean was sent to audition for the role of Cynthia Rose, the tomboyish maybe-lesbian member of the Bellas with a booming voice. She got the part and wrote Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been” during the three-month shoot in Baton Rouge. (In a funny twist of fate she “covers” “S&M” in Pitch Perfect — a song she wrote herself. ) Meanwhile, co-star Brittany Snow, who tapped into her musical talents in Hairspray , plays one of two senior Bellas leaders who take a capella very seriously . Her favorite number? Singing Blackstreet in an empty pool during Pitch Perfect ‘s riff-off, though she was envious that it’s Kendrick who gets to perform the rap intro. No diggity, no doubt. Pitch Perfect opens on September 28. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
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