Buzz News Roundup, 5/30

BuzzSugar — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:45:01 -0700

According to the AP, Melissa Gilbert will once again star in Little House on the Prairie - but this time as "Ma" Ingalls in a stage musical version of the show.
Harvey Korman, the Emmy-winning actor from The Carol Burnett Show has died at age 81, Zap2It reports.
Billboard has the news that Toni Braxton has canceled all her scheduled shows in order to concentrate on her health.
The memoir of Elissa Wall, Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs, will be adapted for the big screen, Variety reports. The book is also one of CitzenSugar's suggested reads right now.

According to Disney execs, their latest Narnia movie, Prince Caspian is not doing well at the box office simply because of the timing of the movie's release, writes ComingSoon.
According to Zap2It, Ray Winstone has joined the cast of HBO's police drama pilot Last of the Ninth.
UK band James will release their first album in seven years this September, Billboard reports.

Easy Virtue: Sparkling Cast Can't Help the Center Star

BuzzSugar — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:30:30 -0700

Easy Virtue, a film adaptation of Noel Coward's jazzy 1920s-set play, pits the old traditions of Europe's landowning gentry against the brash modernity that America had come to symbolize. The old guard is represented by a wealthy British family led by the brittle matriarch Mrs. Whittaker (Kristin Scott Thomas). When her son, John Whittaker (Ben Barnes), marries a sexy race car driver named Larita (Jessica Biel) several years his elder, the entire family is thrown into a tizzy.

Once Biel's character arrives at the Whittaker home she's meant to represent a vibrant and mesmerizing new way of doing things that is utterly offensive to this family so steeped in tradition. But alas, Ms. Biel doesn't quite have what it takes to hold down the center of a film like this and the whole endeavor suffers. To see why, read more.

The cast includes the kind of immensely talented actors who can take on the old-fashioned, quick and witty dialogue with one hand tied behind their backs. Biel tries to keep up and at times she succeeds, but most of the time she simply appears to be swimming upstream. As you might expect, Kristin Scott Thomas deliciously inhabits her icy character with ease and delivers each line as a stinging backhanded compliment. Colin Firth plays her long-suffering husband still hurting from memories of war, and delivers an incredibly funny yet soulful performance. Even Ben Barnes, who is handsome but stiff in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, displays pizzazz as the prodigal son returning home.

As the movie clicks along, though, more and more is asked of Biel as she navigates the cruel and ruthless landmines set out for her by her new mother-in-law and sisters-in-law, and she's not quite able to rise to the occasion. As the tone shifts in the final act from a comedy of manners to a darker drama, the talented ensemble cast does all it can to prop the movie up, but the center can't hold in the end.

Photos courtesy of Sony Picture Classics