May-December romances “can be creepy” says Richard Jenkins , who’s part of the cast of Josh Radnor’s Liberal Arts , a movie about what might more appropriately might be termed a May-October romance on a college campus. In this particular case, Jenkins adds, “it isn’t.” The carefully groomed Radnor, who you may recognize from the TV sitcom How I Met Your Mother plays a guy in his 30s who goes back to his alma mater — the movie is set at Kenyon College in Ohio which Radnor actually attended — for a professor’s retirement party and ends up falling for a much younger student there played by Elizabeth Olsen . Movieline pal Grace Randolph talked to Radnor, Olsen and the always excellent Jensen about the fundamental of love at the Quintessentially-sponsored New York premiere of the film on Monday. Check out her report below. After the screening, premiere goers headed to Sons of Essex on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to engage in some college style drinking. Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Elizabeth Olsen has given her two cents and two thumbs up to Fifty Shades of Grey , the best-selling erotic drama by E.L. James that has been the subject of a flurry of Twitter and blog posts over the summer over who will (or should) be cast in the lead roles. But the Martha Marcy May Marlene star who is currently filming Very Good Girls and has a couple of other projects in post-production said that the novel is “kind of great” for helping its female base to embrace fantasies and to openly discuss their sexuality. “It’s had a huge impact on society. Apparently rope sales have skyrocketed because women who’ve read the book are really getting into bondage, which is kind of great. It’s such a taboo for women to actually discuss sexuality without the help of Cosmopolitan ,” she told Bullett . Continuing she added: “All of a sudden, this book has become a sensation because the women reading it haven’t had access to this kind of thing before. I was talking to a guy who was making a joke about it, saying, ‘Clearly these women just need to watch porn.’ In a way, he’s right.” Olsen had been rumored to play the Anastasia Steele in the already anticipated screen version of the movie. Rumors have also been flying about Kristen Stewart, Emma Watson (who told EW the answer is no), Shailene Woodley, Amanda Seyfriend, Dakota Fanning and Lindsay Lohan. And for Olsen, the answer is a bonafide no. In fact a, “No, no, no.” Amazon.com plot description of Fifty Shades of Grey : Romantic, liberating and totally addictive, “Fifty Shades of Grey” is a novel that will obsess you, possess you, and stay with you forever. When literature student Anastasia Steele interviews successful entrepreneur Christian Grey, she finds him very attractive and deeply intimidating. Convinced that their meeting went badly, she tries to put him out of her mind – until he turns up at the store where she works part-time, and invites her out. Unworldly and innocent, Ana is shocked to find she wants this man. And, when he warns her to keep her distance, it only makes her want him more. But Grey is tormented by inner demons, and consumed by the need to control. As they embark on a passionate love affair, Ana discovers more about her own desires, as well as the dark secrets Grey keeps hidden away from public view… [Source: Bullet , SF Gate , Amazon ]
I love how the Olsen twins’ younger sister has all of a sudden become so much more popular than they are. That’s got to suck. Here’s Elizabeth Olsen walking around town in some sexy little short shorts. See this is more like it, nobody wants to see some twins dressed up in weird fashion forward freaky outfits. A pair of short shorts and some long ass legs do the trick every time. Well done.
Jane Fonda shows up so infrequently in movies these days that it doesn’t matter if they look potentially good or dismal: Even when the performances (not to mention the movies around them) don’t quite work, Fonda always gives you something to watch. That’s certainly true in Bruce Beresford’s Peace, Love & Misunderstanding , an aimless if good-natured picture that casts Fonda in the role of a Woodstock-dwelling, ugly-art-making hippie-dippie mom who welcomes her estranged and very uptight daughter – played by Catherine Keener – back into her mother-earth arms. Her goal: To get her offspring, and her offspring’s offspring, to loosen up and start getting it on. What’s that you’re saying? You really don’t want to see Jane Fonda in twirly Grateful Dead skirts and dreadful ethnic earrings, urging the younger folk to get in touch with their inner Alex Comfort? Neither did I. But the more I think about Peace, Love & Misunderstanding , the more I marvel that anyone would even cast Fonda, the most iron-willed of actresses, in this sort of role. None of it quite works, but it seems Beresford did his damnedest to try to pull it off. As the movie opens, the marriage between rich city people Diane (Keener) and Mark (Kyle MacLachlan) is clearly on the skids. Mark is the kind of guy who proclaims at a dinner party that all of Eugene O’Neill’s plays could easily be cut in half. How anyone could share a bed with this boob, let alone not murder him in his sleep, is beyond me, but Diane is crestfallen when Mark asks her for a divorce. She packs up the couple’s two teenage kids, awkward adolescent Jake (Nat Wolff) and luminous alien child Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen), and heads to her mother’s house upstate – even though, we soon learn, she can’t stand the woman who raised her, a free spirit named Grace (Fonda) who lives on a ramshackle but very expensive bit of hippie real estate adorned with hideous sculptures (which she makes herself, natch) and roaming chickens. Diane is a high-strung lawyer type who resents her mother for not having given her enough structure, guidance and security while growing up; Grace – who also, incidentally, sells pot on the side – just wants her daughter to chill out. She also doesn’t think it would be a bad idea if Diane got together with the local hottie, a woodworker – yes, ladies, a man who works with his hands! – played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. But that’s not all: Grace also wants her grandchildren to enjoy the pleasure and freedom of human sexuality, and there are several mildly embarrassing scenes in which she counsels the young ’uns on how to get things cooking with their respective crushes (played by Marissa O’Donnell and the unnervingly good-looking Chace Crawford). If the van’s a rocking’, don’t come knockin’. Grace is the kind of woman who not only keeps chickens, but allows them to wander into the house. It must be said, though, that these are very clean, pretty chickens, and next to Fonda, they were my favorite part of Peace, Love & Misunderstanding . To watch Jane Fonda cradle a speckled puff of tawny feathers, all the while radiating a sort of businesslike affection – well, that’s something to see. But the rest of Peace, Love & Misunderstanding doesn’t go down so easy. The script, by Joseph Muszynski and Christina Mengert, wanders along very familiar trails, and even though Beresford tries to keep things clicking at a reasonable clip, the thing moves like a pair of too-long bell-bottoms dragging in the mud. Keener, an actress who’s usually great fun to watch, can’t seem to muster much enthusiasm for her extremely constrained character, and can you blame her? But again, at least there’s Fonda. Fonda’s last two movies, Garry Marshall’s 2007 Georgia Rule and Robert Luketic’s 2005 Monster-in-Law, were ridiculous little things, though there’s some faint hope looming ahead in the form of Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming show The Newsroom . Meanwhile, in Peace, Love & Misunderstanding , we need to reckon with the idea of Fonda as a woman who lets it all hang loose – which, as brilliant an actress as Fonda may be (and her radical politics aside), is a pretty big stretch. Still, this stroke of miscasting is fascinating to watch by itself. Fonda isn’t soft enough to play this kind of character, but she wraps herself around the task like an anaconda. When it comes to letting her freak flag fly, she’s damn serious.
Elizabeth Olsen looks modestly dressed in her Victorian-era full-length dresses and hats for her role in the erotic thriller Therese Raquin , which she is currently filming in Budapest, Hungary. Olsen plays the title character Therese Raquin in this project, directed by Charlie Stratton and also starring Harry Potter ‘s Tom Felton and Jessica Lange. Her character is apparently forced into a loveless marriage with her sickly cousin Camille, played by Fenton. Young, beautiful and sexually repressed, Therese casts off innocence for a sizzling affair with her husband’s best friend Laurent, played by Drive actor Oscar Isaac. Needless to say, her dress gets ripped off on numerous occasions, according to The Daily Mail , which featured a number of photos of Olsen on set. Lange plays Therese’s controlling aunt, Madame Raquin, and the story crescendos as Therese’s dalliances with Laurent produces disastrous outcomes. “Some of the film’s themes will include the subjects of imprisonment and punishment, temperament and the human animal,” noted The Daily Mail. Olsen, 23, won praise last year for her starring role in Sundance indie Martha Marcy May Marlene and she will be seen this week in the Jane Fonda and Catherine Keener starrer Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding , which opens Friday. [via Daily Mail ] [Photo credit: WENN.com]
One good ammo-riddled torrent of multiplex marketing deserves another, right? Never mind. Ready or not, and on the heels of this afternoon’s wild End of Watch spot , behold a new trailer for The Expendables 2 . It’s got more bullets than brain cells, and someone literally died in one of these explosions (or at least one like them), but who can argue with Arnold Schwarzengger quipping, “I’m back!” or Jason Statham issuing a smirking pronouncement of “man and knife”? I’m pretty sure this is the first trailer to ever give viewers PTSD — and that’s just after Sylvester Stallone’s intro. [ IGN ]
While talking up this month’s Men in Black III – in which he does an uncanny Tommy Lee Jones impersonation playing Jones’ ‘60s-era younger self – Josh Brolin took a moment to discuss the upcoming project that makes him nervous just to think about: Spike Lee ’s Oldboy , the remake of Park Chan-wook’s ultraviolent 2003 film, for which Brolin says he sought Park’s blessing before taking on the Hollywood remake. “I love Oldboy and I’m close with Chan-wook Park and I emailed him a couple months ago just asking for his blessing to do this movie,” said Brolin, “because if he had said no I wouldn’t have done it. I really respect his movie and we’ll make a little different movie, and this whole idea of a more Hollywood version of it, whatever – we’re just going to do a different version and have respect for the initial story and premise.” “I’m talking about it nervously because it makes me nervous.” Brolin will be joined in the cast by rising ingénue Elizabeth Olsen and District 9 ’s Sharlto Copley , the latter of whom sent his own message to Brolin when he joined the cast. “He just wrote me an email and was like, ‘Look, I’ve got to get this out of the way – Goonies was my favorite film! Now I’m going to make 20 years of your life miserable,’” Brolin said. The details of just how much Lee’s remake will stay true to the original film remain a mystery, though Brolin did confirm that their version will keep the infamous hammer fight scene. “Yes, by the way,” he said. “Yes. It’s a hammer, a knife, and all that stuff. Will we keep the octopus and the other stuff? You know, there are some changes and all that. But I think it’s really good. It still makes me throw down the script halfway through.” Filming begins in October on the anticipated project, and while Brolin seems confident that the remake will remain true to the source material while carving its own path, he knows a thing or two about woulda-coulda-shoulda thinking. Elsewhere in the conversation, Brolin brought up the specter of his 2010 bomb Jonah Hex unprompted. “I think that was a snowball effect,” he said, citing the film’s meteoric plunge in the media. “It got so much negative press, because we did so many reshoots, we did a ton of reshoots, man. I’m going to stand behind any movie that I do, and I do like the character. If I go back and see it now, I go, ‘That’s an interesting character.’ It’s not the movie I would have made. My intention was to make an Eastwood/Leone-esque really gritty $5-7 million film that I think would have been massively profitable, but you don’t have control over these things all the time.” Despite all that, Brolin learned a long time ago to embrace the serendipity of perceived failure – like when he lost the lead in 21 Jump Street to Johnny Depp . “ 21 Jump Street was between Johnny Depp and I,” he recalled. “Johnny got it, but we were in his apartment waiting to find out which one was going to actually leave on a plane that night.” Asked how he dealt with the disappointment of losing that gig, he laughed. “I love that you think 21 Jump Street was a huge disappointment! Johnny called me a year later and said, ‘Dude, this is awful!’” Stay tuned for more from Brolin, Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, and Barry Sonnenfeld on Men in Black III . Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
While talking up this month’s Men in Black III – in which he does an uncanny Tommy Lee Jones impersonation playing Jones’ ‘60s-era younger self – Josh Brolin took a moment to discuss the upcoming project that makes him nervous just to think about: Spike Lee ’s Oldboy , the remake of Park Chan-wook’s ultraviolent 2003 film, for which Brolin says he sought Park’s blessing before taking on the Hollywood remake. “I love Oldboy and I’m close with Chan-wook Park and I emailed him a couple months ago just asking for his blessing to do this movie,” said Brolin, “because if he had said no I wouldn’t have done it. I really respect his movie and we’ll make a little different movie, and this whole idea of a more Hollywood version of it, whatever – we’re just going to do a different version and have respect for the initial story and premise.” “I’m talking about it nervously because it makes me nervous.” Brolin will be joined in the cast by rising ingénue Elizabeth Olsen and District 9 ’s Sharlto Copley , the latter of whom sent his own message to Brolin when he joined the cast. “He just wrote me an email and was like, ‘Look, I’ve got to get this out of the way – Goonies was my favorite film! Now I’m going to make 20 years of your life miserable,’” Brolin said. The details of just how much Lee’s remake will stay true to the original film remain a mystery, though Brolin did confirm that their version will keep the infamous hammer fight scene. “Yes, by the way,” he said. “Yes. It’s a hammer, a knife, and all that stuff. Will we keep the octopus and the other stuff? You know, there are some changes and all that. But I think it’s really good. It still makes me throw down the script halfway through.” Filming begins in October on the anticipated project, and while Brolin seems confident that the remake will remain true to the source material while carving its own path, he knows a thing or two about woulda-coulda-shoulda thinking. Elsewhere in the conversation, Brolin brought up the specter of his 2010 bomb Jonah Hex unprompted. “I think that was a snowball effect,” he said, citing the film’s meteoric plunge in the media. “It got so much negative press, because we did so many reshoots, we did a ton of reshoots, man. I’m going to stand behind any movie that I do, and I do like the character. If I go back and see it now, I go, ‘That’s an interesting character.’ It’s not the movie I would have made. My intention was to make an Eastwood/Leone-esque really gritty $5-7 million film that I think would have been massively profitable, but you don’t have control over these things all the time.” Despite all that, Brolin learned a long time ago to embrace the serendipity of perceived failure – like when he lost the lead in 21 Jump Street to Johnny Depp . “ 21 Jump Street was between Johnny Depp and I,” he recalled. “Johnny got it, but we were in his apartment waiting to find out which one was going to actually leave on a plane that night.” Asked how he dealt with the disappointment of losing that gig, he laughed. “I love that you think 21 Jump Street was a huge disappointment! Johnny called me a year later and said, ‘Dude, this is awful!’” Stay tuned for more from Brolin, Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, and Barry Sonnenfeld on Men in Black III . Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Catherine Keener and Jane Fonda play alienated daughter and mother in this comedy directed by Bruce Beresford in which uptight Manhattan lawyer Diane (Keener) drives her teenage son (Nat Wolff) and adult daughter (Elizabeth Olsen) to meet their grandmother for the first time. Written by Christina Mengert and Joseph Muszynski, Peace, Love & Misunderstanding also features Chace Crawford, Jeffrey Dean… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Deadline | Hollywood Discovery Date : 28/04/2012 00:43 Number of articles : 2
‘I still want so much more, and there’s so much more to get,’ he tells Mixtape Daily of Savage Journey to the American Dream. By Rob Markman, with reporting by Ade Mangum Stalley Photo: Getty Images Main Pick Headliners : Stalley Representing : Massillon, Ohio Mixtape : Savage Journey to the American Dream Real Spit : The road to the riches is no doubt a bumpy one, but now that Massillon, Ohio, MC Stalley is riding with the Maybach Music Group, his trip should be a bit smoother — or so you’d think. On March 30, the bearded Maybach spitter dropped Savage Journey to the American Dream. “I named it Savage Journey to the American Dream because that’s just what I’ve been through,” Stalley told Mixtape Daily. “I’ve been searching for that American dream, and I’ve been on a savage hunt for it for the past year.” Stalley first began making a name for himself in 2009 when he dropped MadStalley: The Autobiography, a mixtape he released with Mickey Factz’s GFC camp, on which he rhymed over classic Madlib productions. It was a subtle yet effective shot that would help Stalley make a name for himself in quite a few influential rap circles. After linking with Damon Dash’s DD172 outfit and recording alongside guys like Mos Def and Curren$y, the Ohio native found his lane and released Lincoln Way Nights in 2011. It was his most notable release and helped him get noticed by Rick Ross . “One of my goals was to be a signed artist, and now I’m with MMG and Warner Bros.,” he said. “I thought that things would calm down and I would kinda be satisfied with that, but I still want so much more and there’s so much more to get.” On Savage Journey, Stalley navigates through the pitfalls that await young rappers. “Lane to lane switchin’, keep these lames and dames at distance/ Eight-cylinder pistons, it’s money talkin’, listen/ And it’s tellin’ me go get it, and I’ve been on my way,” he spits on the moody “Route 21.” Curren$y shows up on the car-themed “Hammers & Vogues,” and on “Lover’s Lane,” Stalley makes a pit stop after getting sidetracked by some overzealous females. Stalley gets props, holding down most of the mixtape by himself, but he of course gets help from his MMG family. Rozay and Meek Mill show up for the Block Beattaz-produced “BCGMMG,” and Wale lends a helping hand on “Home to You.” Whether Stalley will ultimately see his dream fulfilled remains to be seen, but with his underground rep already solidified, there’s nowhere to go but up. Joints to Check For
