“Sony Pictures Classics announced that on June 22 it will release Woody Allen’s latest film, the newly titled To Rome With Love . To Rome With Love was a name selected as an homage to the eternal city of Rome where the film was shot on location last summer. This will be used for its worldwide release. The film’s former title, Nero Fiddled , while an appropriate and humorous phrase in the U.S., is not a familiar expression overseas and many international territories preferred a more globally understood name.” [ SPC ]
For an independently produced comedy that mostly revolves around adults talking to each other — sometimes with child accessories — in varying degrees of inebriation, Friends with Kids is finding a modest amount of success. It’s not perfect , but somehow it manages to be funny without any accidental drug trips, grandmas shooting guns at the dinner table, or Tom Cruise rescuing Cameron Diaz from a crashing plane. Writer-director-co-star Jennifer Westfeldt has returned us a bit to the days of comedies of manners, instead of the awful dichotomy between shrill “romantic” comedy and Apatovian gross-out comedy where Hollywood seems stuck these days. In that spirit, here are four lessons future adult comedies should take from Friends with Kids . [Spoilers ahead.] 1. Skip (most of) the bathroom jokes. Bridesmaids it isn’t. While there is one major on-screen poop joke in Friends with Kids, it actually made me breathe a sigh of relief, because at least we didn’t have to see the bodily function in action. As soon as Megan Fox walked across from a baby with “explosive diarrhea” — diaper ominously absent — I started dreading seeing an explosion in her direction. Hence my gratitude, and surprise, when it never came. (This is an admittedly low bar — eventually I’d love to see Adam Scott or Kristen Wiig in a romantic comedy that ignores the bathroom altogether — but hey, small steps.) 2. Write romantic comedies about the occasional decent human being. Sure, Scott’s Jason spends most of the movie as a Barney Stinson-like asshole, but the story ultimately hinges on his growing up. I wish Westfeldt had given her Julie a little more to do, but she’s at least a relatively sensible woman who, when rejected by the person she loves, moves away and tries to move on. Even the protagonists’ respective Ms. and Mr. Wrong, played by Fox and Edward Burns, are written with a bit of sympathy. Compare that to most of the romantic comedy heroes in recent memory — Natalie Portman’s poorly characterized commitment-phobe in No Strings Attached and the all-around loathsome denizens of Something Borrowed and How Do You Know come to mind, not to mention anyone played by Katherine Heigl – and it was a pleasant change to actually understand and sympathize with the characters of Friends with Kids. 3. Sex can be funnier off-screen. For a story that revolves around adults trying to procreate while maintaining their recreational sex lives, most of Friends with Kids ’ sex was more heard about than seen. Which was great. Sure, there are ways to make sex funny on-screen, and I laughed at the awkward bedroom machinations when Jason and Julie tried to conceive their child. But my apparently universal Adam Scott crush aside, I didn’t feel cheated by the lack of nudity. That scene and other references to sex in Friends with Kids were funnier, sharper and more adult than most of the shenanigans in last year’s dueling sex-friends rom-coms, No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits . 4. All you need is a good dinner party or two. As you may have read , Friends with Kids is not the much-marketed Bridesmaids reunion, but the returning cast plays a great collective supporting role. The actors have good chemistry as a group of friends, with all the tensions and alliances therein, and some of the best parts of Friends with Kids depict their various gatherings, including a climactic, verbally-explosive dinner party during a group vacation. Westfeldt’s characters argue like real people, and the drama of those arguments powers her story – no need for rogue hot-air balloons , incompetent bounty hunters, or even spy partners fighting gun battles over Reese Witherspoon. PREVIOUSLY : What Wanderlust — and Hollywood — Just Can’t Get Right About Women Maria Aspan is a writer living in New York whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Reuters and American Banker. She Tweets and Tumbls .
Happy 69th birthday to David Cronenberg — a great Canadian and not a bad filmmaker, either. And because this has gone so well in the past , let’s celebrate by asking: What’s Cronenberg’s best feature film? His worst? And where do the rest fall in between? The answers are obvious: 19. Naked Lunch 18. Crimes of the Future 17. Fast Company 16. M. Butterfly 15. Stereo 14. They Came from Within 13. The Brood 12. A Dangerous Method 11. Rabid 10. eXistenZ 9. Crash 8. Spider 7. Eastern Promises 6. Videodrome 5. The Dead Zone 4. The Fly 3. Scanners 2. A History of Violence 1. Dead Ringers PREVIOUSLY
Who does the most accomplished canine performer in Hollywood have to lick to get some hardware around here? “He’s the toast of this year’s award season, now Uggie, the Jack Russell star of this year’s Academy Award-winning silent film The Artist , will walk the red carpet and serve as a presenter at the only major award show where animals take center stage – The Humane Society of the United States’ 26th Genesis Awards. ‘The Genesis Awards are about honoring the animal protection message, not the performance, but if we had an award for a dog who’s become a poster animal for people not giving up on their unruly companion animals, we’d give it to Uggie… now, there’s a thought!’, says Beverly Kaskey, senior director and executive producer of the annual Genesis Awards.” [ Genesis Awards ]
Detachment , the first feature from American History X director Tony Kaye to see theaters since his stunning 2006 documentary Lake of Fire , is a film about a high school substitute teacher that often comes across like the creation of a precocious student. I don’t mean that to be a damning critique, though Detachment is a mesmerizing misfire — it’s just that it has the uncomplicated earnestness and hyperbolic melodrama of teenage poetry. It’s a film that starts with a quote from Camus (“and never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world”) and has a main character named Henry Barthes, played by Adrien Brody at his most puppy-dog-eyed, who in his off hours befriends and chastely takes in a pixie of an underaged prostitute named Erica (Sami Gayle). Henry’s just started at a new school in which all of the attendees are troubled, indifferent or violent, and the embattled staff struggles to remain engaged and not give in to despair as they wage what feels like a hopeless war on behalf of a student body that simply doesn’t care. Detachment was written by Carl Lund, a former public school teacher, and compresses a lot of thoughts about “kids these days” into a concentrated dose that’s too over-the-top to be realistic but that muddles any signifiers of how heightened it’s meant to be. The individual students who emerge from the crowd represent composites of ideas, not characters — the arty chubby girl, the hyper-aggressive African-American boy, the blame-assigning mother, the chick dressed like a stripper, the budding sociopath. The instructors and administration get more personality: Ms. Madison (Christina Hendricks) is a young teacher who has still managed to hold on to some of her idealism despite a pupil’s spitting in her face in her first scene, while Mr. Charles Seaboldt (James Caan) is entertainingly jaded about everything (he asks a skimpily dressed girl if he can see her nipples, not as a request but as a confirmation of fact). Mr. Wiatt (Tim Blake Nelson) stands in the yard clutching a chain link fence while on break, convinced that he’s just as invisible at school as he is when he goes home to a wife and child who can’t be bothered to look up from their TV and computer screens. Lucy Liu is the counselor who weeps that she’s “a total burnout,” and Principal Carol Dearden (Marcia Gay Harden) is getting ousted at the end of the school year for not playing along with the politics of No Child Left Behind and private contractors. Above all this turmoil stands Henry, our martyr of the substitutes, who visits his senile grandfather, weeps while riding the bus and is haunted by the memory of his unstable, dead mother. Henry believes he’s chosen a noncommittal life free of attachments, but of course he’s anything but indifferent, as seen in his caring for Erica, in the attention he offers to the talented, unhappy Meredith (Betty Kaye, the director’s daughter), in his devotion to his only ailing relative despite what the man may have done when younger, and in the fact that he’s actually a devoted teacher. Henry’s intended numbness is brought to light in a monologue delivered to camera that the film sporadically cuts to, as the tastefully disheveled Brody sighs that “Most of the teachers here, they believed at one point they could make a difference.” The film’s amplified qualities could be looked at as an expression of Henry’s inner state of being, except that plenty of scenes take place without him around, as when Carol returns home to the husband (Bryan Cranston) she can no longer connect with or Meredith is told by her father to lose weight and “paint something cheerful.” Detachment is overwhelming and didactic, intolerably so in some moments, as when a suicide is telegraphed from far away, or a segment in which no one comes to Parents’ Night and two of the long-term teachers meet by chance in an empty classroom, reminiscing about the good old days. But there’s no ignoring the power or rawness of its emotions, which seem to warp the feverish visual style. They’re sincerely meant and clarion clear even when the film gives off a whiff of overdetermined bullshit, like its angel-faced child streetwalker or its glimpse of an oppressively fancy living room with curtains the same pattern as the wallpaper. There’s no subtext to the film: It bluntly lays its agenda in the open, and its characters are mouthpieces for a uniformly bleak vision of the public education system that’s actually summed up with a final image of the school, empty and decrepit, papers blowing everywhere. The final product has a touch of Taxi Driver to it, without the distance of knowing that this protagonist is in the midst of a breakdown — Detachment appears to fully buy into Henry’s self-crucifixion and his vision of an abandoned, uncaring generation of kids speeding down their separately chosen roads to nowhere. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Gabriel Aubry is off the legal hook. The Canadian model was in court yesterday to hear a judge give him the good news, that he would not face any legal repercussions for allegations that he’s a danger when around three-year old daughter Nahla. A dependency court case had been brought against Halley Berry’s ex after he allegedly shoved a nanny while she held his child and after an investigation revealed that Nahla is sometimes afraid of her father’s temper. Still, the battle between Aubry and Berry is far from over. The former is still not allowed to spend time with Nahla outside of an adult supervisor and the ex-couple will soon attend family court again to continue working on custody rights.
A back-and-forth fight over dueling claims of cyber-stalking landed troubled Teen Mom 2 star Jenelle Evans behind bars Monday … for the third time this year. Yes, three arrests in 2012. It’s March 6. Jenelle, 20, turned herself in to North Carolina authorities after a warrant was issued for her arrest on Friday. Evans was released after only about half an hour, and did not have to post bond, but she did have yet another smiling mug shot taken: Evans’ arrest was in connection with a cyber-stalking claim brought by her former boss James Duffy … just weeks after Evans accused Duffy of the same crime. Jenelle filed cyber-stalking charges in January against Duffy, who allegedly posted party photos of Evans online, along with her address and cell phone number. Then Evans’ ex-roommate, who was living with Duffy, had her arrested in connection with making harassing and threatening phone calls against them both. Only six days later, Evans was arrested again for violating a domestic violence restraining order … everybody got all that? Which brings us to yesterday: Jenelle’s latest arrest on Monday comes more than a month after the January arrests, and her lawyer claims the charges are entirely motivated by spite. “These are the first allegations by Duffy against her, and these charges are completely retaliatory in nature,” Evans’ attorney told Us Weekly afterward. Cyber-stalking is a type of harassment claim. In general, a victim must show a compelling pattern of harassment via the Internet, email, text messages, or other means of electronic communication. A cyberstalking conviction can result in a restraining order, probation, or even criminal penalties against the assailant, though proving it is often difficult. Evans remains on probation for her role in a separate 2011 assault in which she beat the ever-loving crap out Britany Truett in a fight over Kieffer Delp. She now faces a March 23 court date for the cyberstalking charge.
The Showgirl will soon be showing. Former Saved by the Bell star Elizabeth Berkley announced to People this week that she and husband Greg Lauren are expecting their first child. “In life there are moments you cherish forever and this is one of them,” Berkley told the magazine . “Greg and I are so excited to be expecting our first child this summer. We couldn’t be more grateful and overjoyed.” Berkley will forever be known as Jessie Spano to a generation of Saved by the Bell fans, but has also penned a book titled “Ask Elizabeth” and appeared on episodes of CSI: Miami and The L Word . We wish her child health, happiness and a lack of caffeine pill addictions.
Whatever beyotch, these Romney characters are worth at least $250 Million, and this heffa is talking about she ain’t wealthy: Apparently “Romneying” — defined as “accidentally bragging about your place high up in the economic stratosphere” — runs in the family. His wife, Ann Romney, inexplicably talked about her wealth this afternoon during an interview on Fox News. “We can be poor in spirit, and I don’t even consider myself wealthy, which is an interesting thing, it can be here today and gone tomorrow,” she said. The couple made $20.9 million last year, making more in a day than an average American makes in a year, and are worth about $250 million overall. From discussing his NASCAR team-owning friends, to saying he likes firing people, to bragging about Ann’s two Cadillacs, Mitt also has a problem with accidentally and inappropriately touting his enourmous wealth. And… She added: “How I measure riches is by the friends I have and the loved ones I have and the people that I care about in my life, and that’s where my values are and that’s where my riches are.” A Romney spokeswoman said the full interview showed what Mrs. Romney meant by her remarks. Mitt Romney has drawn criticism for offhand remarks that point to the wide economic divide separating him and nearly all other Americans. His 2010 tax returns show he earned about $21.7 million from his investments and, after charitable donations, paid about 14 percent in federal income taxes. While campaigning in Michigan, Romney referred to his wife driving “a couple of Cadillacs” as he pointed to his longstanding support of American automakers. At other times during his campaign for the Republican nomination, Romney has referred to the $373,000 he earned in speaking fees over two years as “not very much” and once bet a Republican rival $10,000 to make a point. Romney has also said he was “not concerned about the very poor” and, while referring to insurance companies, remarked, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” Do you believe this broad??? Source 1 , Source 2 More On Bossip! EXCLUSIVE: Mike Epps’ Daughter Bria Monae Speaks To Bossip About Her Father’s Threats, Drug Use, Deadbeat Steez, And His OTHER Secret Love Child!!! Exhibitionists PT 2: The Most Revealing Celebrity Twitpics Of All Time Stop The Violence: Ex G-UNIT Member Young Buck Shot At 11 Times In Homicidal Drive-By Bling Bling For Love: 10 Huge And Unforgettable Celebrity Engagement Rings
Sad to say, but are we really surprised? Tila Tequila was hospitalized for a week due to a brain aneurysm that nearly caused the petite star to die, RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned. Tila, 30, was released from the hospital on Monday and according to a source close to her, the 4’11″ reality TV personality dropped from just 100 pounds to a frail 78 pounds. “It was terrifying for Tila and death was knocking at her door,” the source exclusively told RadarOnline.com. “She was in two hospitals for the span of a week and is still not in perfect health, so she’s going to check into an outpatient program.” According to the source, Tila suffered a brain aneurysm in the middle of the night, which caused her to think irrationally. Due to the pain, she took two bottles of unspecified heavy prescription drugs. “Tila threw up all over her bed after overdosing and felt like she was dying. She was screaming for help, and in desperation, broke her bedroom window and attempted to jump out,” the source said. “Finally a friend came over after getting a strange text from her and found her convulsing on the bed. He called an ambulance and she was taken to the hospital.” Tila was hospitalized just in time to stabilize her and she was under intensive care all week. “It’s sad to think she may have some permanent brain damage,” the source said. “She still can’t fully speak properly.” Get well Tila. via RadarOnline More On Bossip! EXCLUSIVE: Mike Epps’ Daughter Bria Monae Speaks To Bossip About Her Father’s Threats, Drug Use, Deadbeat Steez, And His OTHER Secret Love Child!!! Exhibitionists PT 2: The Most Revealing Celebrity Twitpics Of All Time Stop The Violence: Ex G-UNIT Member Young Buck Shot At 11 Times In Homicidal Drive-By Bling Bling For Love: 10 Huge And Unforgettable Celebrity Engagement Rings
