 I know we have some big Broadway afficianados like myself who are longing for more movie musicals, preferably cast with people who can sing. Luckily the producers of The Last 5 Years understand this and have cast rising star Jeremy Jordan to sing alongside Anna Kendrick in the adaptation of the musical. Jordan will play a rising novelist in the tale of a five year relationship with a struggling actress (Kendrick). The musical is unique in that the stories are told in different orders, with Cathy’s story beginning at the end of the marriage and Jamie’s starting with when the couple first met.
Read more on Jeremy Jordan to relive ‘The Last 5 Years’ with Anna Kendrick…
 Every once in a while, a film sneaks up on you and absolutely knocks your socks off. It’s hardly a rare occurrence these days, especially for me, but it’s happened again with ‘End of Watch’, a cop movie that I believe will go down as filmmaker David Ayer’s masterpiece. Now, I should mention that I have a very personal connection to this film. You see, I spent a very brief period as a New York City Police Officer. It turned out not to be a job that I wanted to keep and I resigned from the department, but I actually took the oath and was in the Academy. That gives me a bit of an inside baseball look at a movie of this ilk, and wow did Ayer get it right. Flawlessly made, tremendously acted by his cast, including stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena, intense and funny in all the right ways, and emotionally gut wrenching, ‘End of Watch’ is perhaps the best film that I’ve seen in 2012 so far, and a uniquely made one at that. A character study as much as an action flick, there’s not one piece of this movie that I didn’t love. All of the choices pay off and I was literally brought to tears.
Read more on End of Watch (****)…
Categories: Film Reviews Tags: america ferrera, Anna Kendrick, Cody Horn, David Ayer, David Harbour, End of Watch, Entertainment/Culture, Frank Grillo, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Pena, Natalie Martinez, Training Day
 KON TIKI (***)…When I was 12 my grandparents gave me the book about Thor Heyerdahl, a 20th century photographer and ethnographer who in 1947 set out on an extraordinary adventure that everyone told him was impossible. Heyerdahl set out on the 8,000 mile voyage across the Pacific Ocean on a raft built of balsa wood, manned by an under experienced crew. Heyerdahl believed that man early settlers from South America populated Polynesia and their only method of crossing would have been in a manner such as this. The danger of such a crossing is obvious, the madness behind it, perhaps not so clear, but the adventure was right out of the movies. Consider the madness of the lead character in Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1978), a half-crazed visionary seeking to do the impossible, and you see that Heyerdahl’s quest is not so terribly different. Read more on TIFF: Pleasant “Tiki,” Sarandon steals “Company,” and Watts isn’t enough for “Impossible”…
Categories: Article Tags: Anna Kendrick, Chris Cooper, Entertainment/Culture, Ewan McGregor, Film, Juan Antonio Bayona, Kon-Tiki, naomi watts, Oscar, Robert Redford, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, Terence Howard, the Academy Award, The Company You Keep, The Impossible, TIFF, TIFF 2012
 Masterfully made and beautifully constructed, ParaNorman is technically speaking, one extraordinary motion picture. It is next to impossible to not be drawn in to the painstakingly vivid and stunning world that the LAIKA Entertainment animators have designed once again for this follow up to their Oscar-nominated Coraline and Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride.
As intricate and intense as elements of Coraline turned out to be, ParaNorman is by its very nature equally unsettling, intriguing, and surprisingly funny. Writer and co-director Chris Butler, making his feature-length film debut in those roles, has a pulse on every beat present within his film. His screenplay, while admittedly thin at times, is buoyed by the visual landscape his animators have assembled. The performances Butler draws out of his vocal ensemble, along with his keen sense of timing and almost intuitive delivery of jokes, one-liners, and chills and scares is engagingly manipulative.
Read more on ParaNorman (***½)…
Categories: Film Reviews Tags: Animation, Anna Kendrick, Chris Butler, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jeff Garlin, John Goodman, Kodi Smit-McPhee, LAIKA, Leslie Mann, ParaNorman, Sam Fell
 Directed by: Chris Butler and Sam Fell
Written by: Chris Butler.
Cast (Voices of): Kodi Smit-McPhee, Anna Kendrick, Tucker Albrizzi, Casey Affleck, John Goodman, Leslie Mann, Jeff Garlin, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Elaine Stritch, Tempestt Bledsoe, Hannah Noyes.
Read more on Awards Profile: ParaNorman…
Categories: Award Profile Tags: Anna Kendrick, Awards Profile, Best Animated Feature, Casey Affleck, Chris Butler, Focus, John Goodman, Jon Brion, Kodi Smit-McPhee, LAIKA, Oscar hopefuls, ParaNorman, Sam Fell
 Cop movies have been rather hit or miss of late, and considering how they now hit close to home for me (for those who don’t know, I was once on pace to become a New York City Police Officer and actually spent some time in the Police Academy as a Cadet), it’s going to take a lot to impress in the genre. I have no idea if ‘End of Watch’ will do that, but the cast and filmmaker have potential. There’s an interesting choice of cinematography on hand here too, so that might be something. After the jump you can see the Trailer for the flick, and decide for yourself…
Read more on Here’s the Trailer for ‘End of Watch’…
"50/50" (Summit Entertainment)
Stricken with a shocking, confounding, and life-threatening cancer diagnosis, 27-year old Adam Lerner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is forced to deal with realities he never could have anticipated in the brilliant “50/50″, a comedy/drama that takes a considerable amount of risk in conveying a story of this subject matter with a liberal mix of humor and drama. Adapted from screenwriter Will Reiser’s real life experiences in battling a dangerous and rare form of cancer, “50/50″ is a film of subtle power and effectiveness, one of the more dynamic surprises I have encountered in a long, long time.
Read more on 50/50 (****)…
50/50 really spoke to me on a personal level…
There is cancer in my house, the bad kind: brain cancer. It is incurable. This cancer just sits, ever growing, hiding in the recesses of the brain too far down for the surgeons to cut out, waiting for the chance to erupt once again. This one is one of the least-understood forms of cancer, so the doctors know little about it. My wife has struggled through radiation and is now struggling through aggressive chemotherapy to treat what we have been told is a very malignant form of cancer in her brain. We figure we could sit around and cry about our plight, but instead we choose to laugh, or, as Renton suggests in Trainspotting (1996), choose life. What alternative is there, really?
50/50 (***) hit home with me in a very powerful way. Admittedly, I was concerned about seeing the film. When you are living the experience portrayed in the film, one tends to judge it in comparison to their lives. That might be an unfair standard to place on the film, but that’s the way it is with such subject matter. Thankfully, director Jonathan Levine and screenwriter Will Reiser have made an excellent, powerful and deeply moving film that permeates with the one thing we feel each and every day when all seems lost…hope. Read more on John’s TIFF Diary: Day Six…
Categories: Article Tags: Anna Kendrick, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Elizabeth Olsen, John H. Foote, John Hawkes, Jonathan Levine, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Oscar contenders, Sean Durkin, Seth Rogen, Toronto International Film Festival, Will Reiser
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