Safety Not Guaranteed starts out with a simple premise: Three employees from a Seattle weekly magazine are assigned to go on a trip to find and interview a guy who placed a mysterious classified ad seeking a companion for time travel. (The ad is seen above).
Was it a joke? Or is the guy crazy? Intern Darius Britt (Aubrey Plaza) is sent in to try to uncover the true story. Darius joins Kenneth Calloway’s (Mark Duplass) time travel mission and forms a friendship with this seemingly delusional man. With Government-style suited men in hot pursuit, Darius is unsure if she has been implicated in something illegal or if Kenneth is actually telling the truth. And Darius has gotten too close to Kenneth to betray him or know for sure.
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Posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2012 by Angie Han
On paper, Lawrence Kasdan‘s Darling Companion sounds promising. Kasdan, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and filmmaker, directed the drama from a script he co-wrote with his wife Meg Kasdan, also an Oscar nominee. The star-studded cast, as the trailer is happy to remind you, includes two Academy Award nominees (Richard Jenkins and Sam Shepard) and three Academy Award winners (Diane Keaton, Dianne Wiest, and Kevin Kline), as well as promising younger actors like Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass. But at the end of the day, no number of collective accolades can guarantee an interesting picture, and unfortunately, the trailer for Darling Companion looks pretty cringeworthy.
The Kasdans’ screenplay revolves around a dissatisfied older woman named Beth (Keaton) who adopts an abandoned dog she finds on the side of the road and finds contentment in her bond with him. But when Beth’s self-absorbed husband (Kline) loses the dog, the couple pull together a search party to find him and everyone finds that they’re affected by the experience in unexpected ways. Watch the video after the jump.
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Kevin Smith made big waves at Sundance last year when he showed up at the fest with his horror film Red State, the distribution rights to which he said he’d sell at auction. But the auction was mostly an act, and Smith sold the Red State distro rights to himself. That left a lot of people angry, but the move turned out well for Smith: he took Red State on the road and recouped his costs on the film. Red State had a small ‘traditional’ theatrical run and a good VOD and digital release thanks in part to a deal with Lionsgate.
Smith said that he wanted to apply the same sort of roadshow distribution model to other indie films, and today, on the one-year anniversary of his Red State debut, he has announced a new deal for his label SModcast Pictures. The label which will work with Phase 4, which released Red State in Canada, to distribute up to twelve films a year in the US and Canada, with up to four of those films getting the roadshow treatment used for Red State.
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Filmmaker James Ponsoldt‘s feature debut Off The Black premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006. It was met with a lackluster response, but everyone seemed to praise the performances despite the troubled screenplay. After seeing last year’s heavily buzzed-about film Like Crazy, Mary Elizabeth Winstead contacted producer Jonathan Schwartz and Andrea Sperling because she wanted to be in a film like the one they produced. This year, Ponsoldt, Schwartz and Sperling returned to Park City Utah with Smashed, which features a must-see tour de force performance from Winstead.
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There’s a scene in Josh Radnor’s sophomore effort, Liberal Arts, where a 35-year-old admissions officer is mathematically analyzing what it means to date a 19-year-old. No words are uttered, it’s all simple math written on screen, yet it’s filled with more humor, poise and philosophy in two minutes than some movies have in two hours. The scene spawned a round of applause mid-movie. Not bad for a writer/director who most people know as a sitcom star.
With Liberal Arts, Radnor positions himself as a mini-Cameron Crowe, mixing joy, life lessons and a love of culture into a perfect, crowd pleasing film. Co-starring Elizabeth Olsen, Richard Jenkins, Allison Janney and Zac Efron, Liberal Arts had its world premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and recieved a well-deserved standing ovation. Read more after the jump. Read More »
Frank Darabont, ousted from The Walking Dead, did not waste any time setting up a new television project. He is spearheading a TNT show called L.A. Noir that sounds as if it will tread much the same ground as Warner Bros. upcoming film Gangster Squad, as it follows the extended face-off between Mickey Cohen and the LA mob and the LAPD.
Until today all we knew of the show was that Darabont would write and direct the ’40s-set pilot, and produce the show that follows. Now we know that Darabont has his eye on one actor from The Walking Dead to star in the show. But that means possible spoilers for The Walking Dead, so the info follows below. Read More »
Posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2012 by Angie Han
Normally, if a Hollywood screenwriter named a porn star as his top choice to lead a mainstream film, it would come as a bit of a surprise, but when the scribe in question is Bret Easton Ellis, it just makes so much sense. The controversial writer has tweeted that he’s currently working on a “L.A. noir microbudget” movie for director Paul Schrader, and that he hopes adult film sensation James Deen will topline the cast. More details after the jump.
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V/H/S is the return of the horror anthology film. The subgenre used to be a very regular thing during the 1970′s and 1980′s thanks to films like Tales from the Darkside, Creepshow and Dead of Night, but has dropped out of the mainstream in recent years. (Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat being the latest anthology of note.) BloodyDisgusting head Brad Miska came up with a novel way to bring back the anthology concept — mashing it with the found footage subgenre. (Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, etc.)
This might sound questionable on paper, but the result is genius.
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