MTV News spots a red velvet wall on the set that reminds us of the erotic trilogy — a sign of things to come on Sunday? By Terri Schwartz, with reporting by Jim Cantiello “Fifty Shades of Grey” Photo: The Writer’s Coffee Shop UNIVERSAL CITY, California — Something strange is happening on the MTV Movie Awards set. While scoping out what was supposed to be a rehearsal for Fun., we saw some workers rolling in … giant red plush walls? It looks a bit suspicious, if you ask us. Maybe it’s just because we have “Fifty Shades of Grey” on the mind, but our first thought when we saw the set piece was that it was a wall from a giant velvet sex room. And considering the Movie Awards’ track record of crazy epic stunts, we wouldn’t put it past anyone here. Of course, it could just be part of a normal set. With everyone from Fun. and Wiz Khalifa to the Black Keys performing at this year’s awards show, we wouldn’t be surprised if one of them was a closet “Fifty Shades” fan. Maybe we should do some digging and see if we can get some deals signed for the upcoming “Fifty Shades of Grey” movie . “Howlin’ for You” would be an appropriate first track on the album, right? “Fifty Shades” has been on many celebs’ minds recently, with everyone from Kristen Stewart and Sam Claflin to Stephenie Meyer , Selena Gomez and Brooklyn Decker talking about it. And we’d be lying if we said we weren’t enablers. We even did an “After Hours” with the “Snow White and the Huntsman” cast where we had them read certain erotic sections of the book. Trust us when we say that you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Charlize Theron read the words “oh-so-happy trail.” Head over to MovieAwards.MTV.com to vote for your favorite flicks now! The 21st annual MTV Movie Awards air live this Sunday, June 3, at 9 p.m. ET. Related Videos Behind The Scenes At The 2012 MTV Movie Awards Related Photos Books You Can Read Instead Of ’50 Shades Of Grey’
‘We made a great movie and you guys were awesome the whole time,’ Leven Rambin says ahead of Sunday’s show. By Jocelyn Vena, with reporting by Eric Ditzian Leven Rambin Photo: MTV News UNIVERSAL CITY, California — “The Hunger Games” star Leven Rambin is beyond appreciative of all the love fans have shown the movie since it dropped in March. But, she still has one request of you tributes: get out and vote for the flick at the 2012 MTV Movie Awards going down this Sunday! “All the fans that saw the ‘Hunger Games’ — they came out to all the events, they came out to the malls and the premiere and they camped [out],” Rambin told MTV News. “This was the first movie in our franchise and you guys showed so much love and hard-core dedication, so please give our little movie some votes this year.” The film is vying for a Golden Popcorn against the likes of “Breaking Dawn – Part 1” and the last “Harry Potter” flick, so Rambin knows the competition is stiff. “We know we’re the underdog and we’re the new kids and we really pushed through,” she said. “We made a great movie and you guys were awesome the whole time. So vote for ‘Hunger Games’ [for] Best Cast and I’m sure we’ll be there to receive our honors. Thank you for your support.” In addition to Best Cast , the film is also up for Movie of the Year, Best Male Performance, Best Female Performance, Best Hero, Breakthrough Performance, Best On-Screen Transformation , Best Fight and Best Kiss. Want to know if “Hunger Games” will sweep the awards on Sunday? You’ll tune have to tune in to the MTV Movie Awards, hosted by Russell Brand and featuring performances from Fun. , The Black Keys, Martin Solveig and Wiz Khalifa . It all goes down at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City, California, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Sunday, June 3. Head over to MovieAwards.MTV.com to vote for your favorite flicks now! The 21st annual MTV Movie Awards air live this Sunday, June 3, at 9 p.m. ET. Related Videos Behind The Scenes At The 2012 MTV Movie Awards Related Photos Sneak Peek Week At The 2012 Movie Awards
If you could distill essence de chat into a few well-chosen pen strokes, you’d end up with something like Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol’s superb animated adventure A Cat in Paris , a picture whose modest demeanor only underscores how expressive and imaginative it is. This isn’t the kind of big-budget animation we get from the major studios: It’s richness of another sort, a feat of hand-drawn animation that relies on spare but succinct character design and a dazzling sense of perspective — rather than a volley of cultural in-jokes — to tell its story. The picture sparkles, but in the nighttime way — its charms have a noirish gleam. Most of the picture does, in fact, take place at night, beginning and ending with the nocturnal Parisian perambulations of a wily striped cat named Dino. Dino “belongs” to a little girl named Zoe. He pledges his devotion by bringing her little gifts from his nighttime hunting jaunts. Actually, he keeps bringing her the same gift: One dangly, limp dead lizard after another, but Zoe is delighted by them and saves them all in a little box, much to the annoyance of her new nanny. What almost no one knows is that Dino doesn’t go out at night just for fun, or simply out of a feline sense of duty. He’s also a cat burglar, assisting a sneaky but noble local jewel thief, Nico, on his midnight rounds. The plot becomes more complicated — to the extent that it’s complicated at all — by the fact that Zoe’s mother, Jeanne, is a detective with the Paris police. She’s consumed with concern for Zoe, who hasn’t spoken since her father was killed by a square-shouldered, square-headed thug named Victor Costa. She’s also riven with grief, and she’s determined to avenge her husband’s death by catching Costa, who, it turns out, has a new scheme: He plans to steal a precious, valuable and huge antiquity, the Colossus of Nairobi, a hulking totem that’s being brought to the city for an exhibit. Meanwhile, though, Jeanne has peskier problems: Jewels keep disappearing from various households in the city, thanks to Nico and an accomplice with four silent, velvet paws. A Cat in Paris is being released in the states in two versions, an English-language one (in which Marcia Gay Harden, Anjelica Huston and Matthew Modine provide some of the key voices) and a subtitled French one (which features, in the role of the nanny, the voice of actress Bernadette Lafont, who, for those who keep track of such things, played Marie in The Mother and the Whore ). If you’re bringing children and are lucky enough to have bilingual ones, I recommend the French version, since it is simply more French; to hear the English language pouring forth from these characters’ mouths feels just a little wrong. But the visuals of A Cat in Paris resonate in any language, and it doesn’t hurt that the picture features a stunning, stealthy Bernard Hermann-style orchestral score by Serge Bessett. (The music in A Cat in Paris is finer and more resonant than that of any live-action picture I’ve seen this year.) This is Felicioli and Gagnol’s first full-length feature — it was a 2012 Academy Award nominee — and it clocks in at a very trim but visually rich 70 minutes. The filmmakers’ drawings are both meticulous and highly stylized: They render the rooftops of Paris (what is it about city rooftops in general, and Paris rooftops in particular?) as a dusky, velvety patchwork, an invitation to adventure — they take great delight in the city’s highs and lows, in the contrast between tall and short. Their palette features an array of oranges, from muted citrus tones to deep sienna, and lots of deep, nighttime turquoise. And they dot the picture with small but inventive visual touches: When a character dons night goggles, the figures around him are rendered as stark white lines on a flat black surface. And the gargoyles of Notre Dame feature in the climactic chase sequence, a bit of travelogue whimsy that’s nonetheless dramatically gripping, perhaps even a little dizzying for those who are hinky about heights — it doesn’t matter that you can’t really fall off a cartoon building. And then there’s Dino, an utterly bewitching arrangement of orange and chocolate triangles (with a pink one for a nose). Dino isn’t a cute cartoon cat — there’s an element of mystery and devilishness about him, suggesting that Felicioli and Gagnol understand true feline spirit. They also understand feline loyalty, which is a contradiction in terms only to those who don’t understand (to the extent that understanding is possible) these elusive, magnetic creatures. Dino comforts the distressed Zoe by visiting her in bed, sliding under her arms as if he could pretend she’d never notice. And in a way, she doesn’t notice — somehow, suddenly, Dino is simply there , a presence who changes, only ever so slightly, the nature of the room around him. That’s the quiet province of cats everywhere — not just those who are lucky enough to live in the animated city of Paris. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
If you could distill essence de chat into a few well-chosen pen strokes, you’d end up with something like Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol’s superb animated adventure A Cat in Paris , a picture whose modest demeanor only underscores how expressive and imaginative it is. This isn’t the kind of big-budget animation we get from the major studios: It’s richness of another sort, a feat of hand-drawn animation that relies on spare but succinct character design and a dazzling sense of perspective — rather than a volley of cultural in-jokes — to tell its story. The picture sparkles, but in the nighttime way — its charms have a noirish gleam. Most of the picture does, in fact, take place at night, beginning and ending with the nocturnal Parisian perambulations of a wily striped cat named Dino. Dino “belongs” to a little girl named Zoe. He pledges his devotion by bringing her little gifts from his nighttime hunting jaunts. Actually, he keeps bringing her the same gift: One dangly, limp dead lizard after another, but Zoe is delighted by them and saves them all in a little box, much to the annoyance of her new nanny. What almost no one knows is that Dino doesn’t go out at night just for fun, or simply out of a feline sense of duty. He’s also a cat burglar, assisting a sneaky but noble local jewel thief, Nico, on his midnight rounds. The plot becomes more complicated — to the extent that it’s complicated at all — by the fact that Zoe’s mother, Jeanne, is a detective with the Paris police. She’s consumed with concern for Zoe, who hasn’t spoken since her father was killed by a square-shouldered, square-headed thug named Victor Costa. She’s also riven with grief, and she’s determined to avenge her husband’s death by catching Costa, who, it turns out, has a new scheme: He plans to steal a precious, valuable and huge antiquity, the Colossus of Nairobi, a hulking totem that’s being brought to the city for an exhibit. Meanwhile, though, Jeanne has peskier problems: Jewels keep disappearing from various households in the city, thanks to Nico and an accomplice with four silent, velvet paws. A Cat in Paris is being released in the states in two versions, an English-language one (in which Marcia Gay Harden, Anjelica Huston and Matthew Modine provide some of the key voices) and a subtitled French one (which features, in the role of the nanny, the voice of actress Bernadette Lafont, who, for those who keep track of such things, played Marie in The Mother and the Whore ). If you’re bringing children and are lucky enough to have bilingual ones, I recommend the French version, since it is simply more French; to hear the English language pouring forth from these characters’ mouths feels just a little wrong. But the visuals of A Cat in Paris resonate in any language, and it doesn’t hurt that the picture features a stunning, stealthy Bernard Hermann-style orchestral score by Serge Bessett. (The music in A Cat in Paris is finer and more resonant than that of any live-action picture I’ve seen this year.) This is Felicioli and Gagnol’s first full-length feature — it was a 2012 Academy Award nominee — and it clocks in at a very trim but visually rich 70 minutes. The filmmakers’ drawings are both meticulous and highly stylized: They render the rooftops of Paris (what is it about city rooftops in general, and Paris rooftops in particular?) as a dusky, velvety patchwork, an invitation to adventure — they take great delight in the city’s highs and lows, in the contrast between tall and short. Their palette features an array of oranges, from muted citrus tones to deep sienna, and lots of deep, nighttime turquoise. And they dot the picture with small but inventive visual touches: When a character dons night goggles, the figures around him are rendered as stark white lines on a flat black surface. And the gargoyles of Notre Dame feature in the climactic chase sequence, a bit of travelogue whimsy that’s nonetheless dramatically gripping, perhaps even a little dizzying for those who are hinky about heights — it doesn’t matter that you can’t really fall off a cartoon building. And then there’s Dino, an utterly bewitching arrangement of orange and chocolate triangles (with a pink one for a nose). Dino isn’t a cute cartoon cat — there’s an element of mystery and devilishness about him, suggesting that Felicioli and Gagnol understand true feline spirit. They also understand feline loyalty, which is a contradiction in terms only to those who don’t understand (to the extent that understanding is possible) these elusive, magnetic creatures. Dino comforts the distressed Zoe by visiting her in bed, sliding under her arms as if he could pretend she’d never notice. And in a way, she doesn’t notice — somehow, suddenly, Dino is simply there , a presence who changes, only ever so slightly, the nature of the room around him. That’s the quiet province of cats everywhere — not just those who are lucky enough to live in the animated city of Paris. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Wheatley Hall is a coming to age film about a select group of college students all connected to Sydney and Brian .Wheatley Hall in the feature length will be a modern day SCHOOL DAZE with a musical twist! Sydney who is a 18 year old girl who chooses to travel to the east coast to pursue her dream of dance. In the trailer she gets in a agrument with her father about her deciding not to go to a community college. She narrates the trailer to show the viewers the world through her eyes. Brian is a FRAT boy who has the school in the palm of his hand. Not only does faculty and staff praise him but so does the rest of the city. The trailer will show how Sydney and Brian’s world meet. It also shows how Claudia deals with finding out she is expecting and learning Brian is expecting her to have a abortion.
Wheatley Hall is a coming to age film about a select group of college students all connected to Sydney and Brian .Wheatley Hall in the feature length will be a modern day SCHOOL DAZE with a musical twist! Sydney who is a 18 year old girl who chooses to travel to the east coast to pursue her dream of dance. In the trailer she gets in a agrument with her father about her deciding not to go to a community college. She narrates the trailer to show the viewers the world through her eyes. Brian is a FRAT boy who has the school in the palm of his hand. Not only does faculty and staff praise him but so does the rest of the city. The trailer will show how Sydney and Brian’s world meet. It also shows how Claudia deals with finding out she is expecting and learning Brian is expecting her to have a abortion.
‘The numbers were eye-popping. You’d think Iron Man was in the film,’ one box-office expert tells MTV News of new Wes Anderson film. By Fallon Prinzivalli Ed Norton in “Moonrise Kingdom” Photo: Focus Features As “Men in Black 3” knocked “Marvel’s The Avengers” off its record-breaking throne and nabbed the title of #1 film in America over Memorial Day weekend, Focus Features’ “Moonrise Kingdom” broke its own box-office records. The Wes Anderson -directed film, which opened in two theaters in New York and two in Los Angeles, grossed more than $669,000 this weekend. It raked in an average of $130,752 per location, setting a new record previously held by 2006’s “Dreamgirls.” “Wes Anderson films always open in limited release with very high averages as his fanbase is very loyal,” says Box Office Guru editor Gitesh Pandya , “but the ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ numbers were eye-popping. You’d think Iron Man was in the film.” Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Relations also attributes the success to Anderson’s “ardent” fanbase. “[His fans] have seen him produce just a handful of films over the course of his entire career, which began with 1996’s ‘Bottle Rocket.’ Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ is Anderson’s first live-action film in five years, so there was no doubt a burning desire to see his latest whimsical dramedy,” he says. “Filmmakers with unique and authentic voices are far and few between, and Anderson is something of a national treasure for the hipster collective.” “Moonrise Kingdom” takes place in the summer of 1965 and follows the search for two 12-year-olds who flee their hometown in New England for a wilderness adventure. The film’s success follows its debut in Cannes, France , where it opened the city’s famous film festival. Bock believes its premiere at such a large venue contributed to the buzz, keeping it in the mind of audiences — despite an influx of blockbusters hitting cinemas around the globe. “There is always room for a small, original tale amongst the blockbuster giants of summer, and ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ may just be this summer’s ‘Midnight in Paris,’ ” he said, referencing the Woody Allen film that won him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. “The big test for [‘Moonrise’] will be when it debuts in moderate wide release (400-plus theaters), reaching smaller markets that probably haven’t seen a film of his since his biggest hit, 2001’s ‘The Royal Tenenbaums,’ which grossed $52 million. While Anderson’s films are revered by critics and cinephiles, wide audiences haven’t exactly embraced the kooky sensibilities and eccentric outlook he emotes in his films.” But Phil Contrino of BoxOffice.com believes an A-list cast including Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Edward Norton and Tilda Swinton will help bring the film to a broader audience — though he does think widespread popularity may be limited. “If you don’t like Wes by now, this movie won’t change your mind,” Contrino said. “He’s burrowed very deep into his own style eccentricities.” “Moonrise Kingdom” was too late to earn any Movie Awards nominations at this year’s show, but tune in this Sunday at 9 p.m. ET to celebrate your other favorite films, including “Hunger Games,” “Bridesmaids” and the final “Harry Potter” film. Head over to MovieAwards.MTV.com to vote for your favorite flicks now! The 21st annual MTV Movie Awards air live this Sunday, June 3, at 9 p.m. ET.
No. Effin. Way. Right?!? According to a new report, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore may get back together, following a birthday party scene in which the actor grew very emotional and the former couple shared a few intimate moments. It all took place at a celebration in honor of the man who officiated Kutcher and Moore’s wedding over six years ago. Witnesses tell The Daily Mirror that the two were locked in a minute-long embrace at one point, with Kutcher making a tearful speech that included the words: “I’ve made all these horrendous mistakes in the last year.” Ashton reportedly received applause when he was finished, while a source says Demi looked “frozen” in response. “They are still desperately in love and could be on for a reconciliation,” an insider tells the newspaper. “The divorce isn’t being processed right now.” Another hint that hope actually remains for Ashton and Demi? The latter – who recently updated her Twitter handle to reflect her single status – Favorited a Tweet by Wiz Khalifa that reads: “We all make mistakes. Don’t let that be the reason you give up on somebody.” Should Demi and Ashton get back together?
Jenny McCarthy and Brian Urlacher, star of the NFL’s Chicago Bears, are totally a couple , according to reports. Reports she confirmed this weekend. The football great joined McCarthy Thursday night at Rockit Bar & Grill for the “Rescue Our Angels” event, benefiting Jenny’s autism charity. Asked about Urlacher at The Generation Rescue Foundation event by WMAQ-Channel 5, Jenny McCarthy said, “Yes, it’s true, we are dating.” Despite attempting to hit out-of-the-way meeting places, the couple hadn’t been able to hide their budding romance, try as they might. “Let’s face it, it was really already out there, everybody knew it,” she said. Also, the relationship apparently has reached a point where McCarthy feels it’s “the real deal and will last,” added a source close to her. McCarthy clearly was not hiding anywhere or anything Friday. She joined about 30 close Urlacher friends to toast his 34th birthday. Jenny, 39, recently announced that she’ll be posing in Playboy again nearly two decades after it put her on the map. [Photos: WENN.com]
