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Your Sister's Sister Trailer: Emily Blunt Is in a Love Triangle

BuzzSugar — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:30:11 PDT

In Your Sister's Sister, Mark Duplass (of The League and our comedy dreams) stars as Jack, a guy coping with the recent loss of his brother. After making a scene at a memorial party, Jack goes up to his best friend Iris's (Emily Blunt) family cabin in Puget Sound. Instead of solitude, he finds Iris's sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), who is dealing with a severed relationship of her own. Their two-person drinking party ends up between the sheets, and when Iris arrives the next day, Hannah and Jack must find the best way to deal with the fallout of their drunken encounter - and Iris's secret feelings for Jack.

I love Duplass, and he has great chemistry here with Blunt and DeWitt. It's an intimate film with a small cast, but after viewing the low-key, earnest trailer, it's no wonder the flick has been earning critical praise. It's already been showcased at the Toronto Film Festival and Sundance, but Your Sister's Sister doesn't hit theaters until June 15. Until then, you can watch the trailer when you

Sundance Snapshot: Your Sister's Sister Puts the Fun in Family Dysfunction

Becky Kirsch — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 03:05:00 PST

Director Lynn Shelton made her Sundance premiere with Humpday, and she returned to the festival this year with Your Sister's Sister. The film has a tiny cast - in fact, most of the scenes are between just three actors - but this little indie is one of the most memorable films I caught at the festival. Here's why:

Who's behind it? Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Mark Duplass make up the cast. Lynn Shelton (who also directed Duplass in Humpday) is behind the camera.
What's it about? Duplass plays Jack, a guy who's on a bit of a downward spiral a year after losing his brother. Jack's still close friends with his brother's ex, Iris (Blunt), who suggests that Jack spend some time in solitude at her father's rustic lakeside cabin. When Jack arrives at the cabin, he's surprised to find Iris's sister, Hannah (DeWitt), and when Iris pops up for a visit, a very tangled web is woven between the three characters over the course of a few days.
What did I think? This is a little gem of a film; all three actors turn in nuanced performances, making the complicated relationships between the three feel incredibly authentic. Duplass gets most of the laughs as Jack bumbles to keep the peace between Iris and Hannah, but it's Blunt and DeWitt that really shine as siblings that love each other through and through, but can't help pushing each other's buttons. The Seattle cabin setting also adds extra charm, and really makes the audience feel like you're trapped in the conundrum between the characters, isolated away from the rest of the world.

John Krasinski Goes Indie For Nobody Walks

Shannon Vestal — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 08:48:48 PDT

Jim Halpert is lining up his next vacation from The Office: John Krasinski is in talks to star in Nobody Walks, an indie drama written by Lena Dunham. The film focuses on a family and young artist who disrupts their lives after her weekend stay turns permanent. Rosemarie DeWitt and Olivia Thirlby are also on board; though, there's no confirmation on who's playing whom, my guess is Krasinski and DeWitt lead the family with Thirlby as the artist.

Lately, Krasinski's movie career seems to be taking a direction toward bigger studio films, like next month's Something Borrowed, but I'm eager to see him back in an indie, since I loved him in Away We Go.

Sundance Snapshot: The Company Men

BuzzSugar — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 07:30:08 PST

One of the films I was most interested in checking out at Sundance was The Company Men. The timely tale, which focuses on three high-paid corporate executives slapped with downsizing at their company, boasts a stellar cast and is already drawing comparisons to Up in the Air. But does it have the potential to enjoy the same success?

Who's behind it? Like I said, there are some heavy hitters here: Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Maria Bello, Craig T. Nelson, and Rosemarie DeWitt star in the film, with writer and first time director John Wells at the helm.
What's it about? Affleck, Jones, and Cooper play three colleagues who excel at their jobs and have plenty to show for it - big houses, fancy cars, privileged families living in the suburbs of Boston. Their cushy lifestyles are quickly brought into jeopardy, however, when massive layoffs begin at their company; the men are forced to re-examine themselves, their careers, and their family lives as they face unemployment and potentially losing everything they've been working for all their lives.

To find out what I thought of the movie, just

What did I think? The film gives an engaging, accurate portrayal of unemployment in the current economy. The juxtaposition of the three lives, families (and even their homes) ties the story together nicely, and all of the actors give very solid performances. However, there's just something that feels insincere about watching high-paid actors pretending to really understand what it feels like to lose everything. Perhaps the movie is a little too timely, since we all still know plenty of people who continue to struggle every day. That said, I still think the film is primed and ready to go for major release - but the real question is whether or not audiences are feeling up to another film about the depressing realities of the economic downturn.

Be sure to check out all of my Sundance movie reviews!

Rosemarie DeWitt on Being an In-Demand Screen Sister

BuzzSugar — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:00:49 PST

Depending on your attitude, Rosemarie DeWitt either has great luck or terrible luck with on-screen sisters. She recently starred as Rachel opposite Anne Hathaway's Kym in Rachel Getting Married, and now she's the foil to Toni Collette's Tara in United States of Tara, which just premiered to strong ratings. At TCA, I chatted with DeWitt about her film families, how she got the Tara gig, and how much Rachel was like a real wedding. Here are highlights:

How did you get the role of Charmaine?
It was just like a straightforward, old-school audition that I had. I read the script, I thought it was fantastic, and when I auditioned for it I think the part of the sister was a guest star. So it wasn't a super high-pressure situation . . . I auditioned where Spielberg and Dreamworks is all set up, and I remember thinking, "I just want to work here."

When did you find out that you were getting the upgrade to a regular character? Did that give you a chance to get more into playing Charmaine?
It was over the Summer where they invited me back, and we spoke and they said, "We're going to change Charmaine a little bit." TV I feel like you have to play - in most ways I'm nothing like Charmaine, but you have to play it a little closer to yourself, because they do change things at the 11th hour, and if you were doing some crazy character with a hunchback and now you're running a marathon - I don't know, you just have to be able to do it, basically. So they made her a little bit more quote-unquote normal. I was happy that there was a lot more love between Tara and Charmaine. She's an outsider but it would have really been hard to be like Anne Hathaway and I are in Rachel.

It was interesting to hear Diablo Cody say that Charmaine is looking for attention.
She's got a lot of issues. It's funny, because she's really awesome, and she just, I think, doesn't like herself that much. The vitamin sales, I think, are a little bit of a self-help program in and of themselves, and she's got some body issues, and issues with men, so there's just so many places to go with her and so many women in my own life to observe and draw from.

To hear more about Charmaine and Tara's relationship and how it differs from Rachel and Kym's,

I'm assuming we'll be seeing more of those issues coming out throughout the season.
Yeah, and again, a lot of love. Annie and I would talk about Rachel and say, "They're sisters, they're not friends." But as Toni and I went through the season, we're discovering [Charmaine and Tara] are friends. I mean, they get on each other's nerves, and in ways they're nothing alike, but they can really be - they're kind of all that they had sometimes.

The show strikes a really delicate tone - it's not hilarious, for a comedy, but it's not heartbreaking all the time either. What about it appeals to you?
I am very impressed with the tone of it, because it could go a lot of different ways and I think they found a happy balance. The thing that kind of gets me about the show - besides Toni's performance as an actress, that gets me every day when I go to work - is seeing what we see through the children's eyes. Some people won't relate to this disorder, many people will, many people have someone with depression in their family. But it's just seeing that thing that kids have to go through where maybe they have to parent themselves or grow up before it's time. I think that's sort of the heartbeat of the show. With Juno as well, [Cody] can really find the truth of what kids are up against and then, in this case, also really write about marital problems and a woman in her 30s who can't find love, and write those with sophistication and grace.

Now, I have to ask about Rachel Getting Married, because I don't think I've ever seen a movie that just felt so much like a real wedding.
Oh, I felt like it might be legal in the state of Connecticut. You know, after he said our vows, I was like, "Does that mean . . . " I looked at Tunde [Adebimpe] and said, does that mean it's you and me? That's all [director] Jonathan Demme. He always says that we got to hang out and plan it, but we didn't - he just had all these crazy ideas. At one point he was like, "I think Rachel comes in on a white pony," but then he axes it, but then he comes in with some other fabulous element. We really just did it, that was the thing - we really just had a reception. Like, the rehearsal dinner scene, it was a 45-minute take, and we just did it three or four times.

That was something I was wondering - what the timing was like.
We went and lived in this house in Connecticut, and like, in the rehearsal dinner, Anne's speech was scripted, as were the best man and the maid of honor, but beyond that Jonathan just had anybody speak as they saw fit, and I'm sure there'll be some great toasts on the special features on the DVD, because everybody in that room spoke. And then he cut it down, and it was still really long and felt like you were really at a rehearsal dinner, in a good way.

Anne's character is such a strong personality. What was it like to play off of that?
It was sort of a wake-up call on the first day. We shot their first encounter in the movie and I felt like her character was taking all the oxygen out of the room. And I thought, "Wow, this is going to be a harder mountain to climb than I thought," just coming up against that sort of narcissistic personality. I think it's pretty classic addict behavior. In terms of the doing of it, Anne and I just had a really great experience on that. We didn't do a lot of sisterly bonding beforehand, I think because it was going to defuse the necessary tension. But then when we were working, there was never a nice-off. Nobody ever said, "Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, did I just spit in your eye?" We just were horrible to each other when it called for it and loving to each other when it called for it and then gave each other a hug at the end and said, "See you tomorrow."

Photos Source and courtesy of Showtime and Sony Pictures Classics

Five Essential Things to Know About United States of Tara

BuzzSugar — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:30:00 PST

United States of Tara is one of the most unusual shows to hit TV in a while - even for Showtime, home of drug-dealing moms and sympathetic serial killers. First imagined by Steven Spielberg, created by Diablo Cody, and brought to life by a cast led by Toni Collette and John Corbett, the show centers on a suburban housewife named Tara who is living with Dissociative Identity Disorder, which causes alternate personalities to emerge when she's under stress. The show premieres on Sunday, and today, the cast and producers stopped by TCA. Here are some of the essential things to know - and be sure to check out some great pics of the stars over on Pop:

It was important for Tara to be open about her condition. Cody said she's seen mental illness be destigmatized over the years, so it made sense for Tara's family not to keep her illness locked away. "Obviously there are some people who are frightened or curious," she said. "There are some people who are intrigued" - and that seemed like an appropriate, modern reaction.
Deep down, the show's about acceptance. Nobody ever says outright that Collette's character is mentally ill, or that Tara's son is gay, or that her daughter is a jerk, said Brie Larson, who plays teenage daughter Kate. "There's no labels on this show, and I think that's the most interesting part."
But not everyone's OK with Tara's personalities. One of the most tense relationships on the show is between Tara and her younger sister, Charmaine (Rosemarie DeWitt). "Charmaine always thought that Tara got more attention," Cody said. "She's always been resentful of that." Charmaine has an occasional flirtation with Max (Corbett), Tara's husband, but Cody said it's nothing with an actual romantic spark at this point - it's just a way for her to get someone to pay attention to her for once.

To see the final two essentials, just

The show doesn't fit into any box. "It was just so delicious to read and so unusual, and it was a complete dream for an actor to play so many parts," said Collette of reading the script for the first time. "It is incredibly funny, but it also is incredibly moving and incredibly real."
We might not have met all of the "alters." The show's official photo shows four personalities - Tara, Buck, T, and Alice - but "you will see new ones emerge," said producer Darryl Frank. The origin of the personalities, which have been created within Tara at different points in her life, also will be explored as the season goes on.

Photo courtesy of Showtime

Rachel Getting Married: Riveting and Painful Realism

BuzzSugar — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:30:53 PDT

I normally cry at weddings (and wedding scenes), so spending a whole wedding weekend with Rachel and her family in Rachel Getting Married was quite the teary experience. It’s not all weeping and sighing (though there's a lot of that, in both the joyful and the heart-wrenching scenes) - there is also silliness and humor. It's a movie about forgiveness, heartache and the tenderness of human frailty. So, despite the lovely main plot point (a backyard wedding overflowing with the generosity of friends and family), it's incredibly heavy.

Rachel (Rosemarie Dewitt) is indeed getting married at her father's home in Connecticut, and her recovering addict sister Kym (Anne Hathaway) is coming home from rehab to spend the weekend with her family. The duration of the movie takes place over this weekend as we watch the roots of the family's dysfunction unravel before us. There isn't a ton that happens in the story, but an awful lot is said and even more implied. The family spends the weekend in the warm company of friends and family, but while the guests are in full wedding celebration mode, the simmering emotions between the sisters, their father and their mother boil over, creating some majorly messy drama. For more of my thoughts on the film,

Anne Hathaway's performance as Kym is touching and pitiful, though in truth, every performance in this film is top-notch. This is as much a testament to director Jonathan Demme as it is to the actors. The plot lurches in fits and spurts, with banal, everyday moments buffering the appalling and intensely sad ones. Each character is portrayed in a hyper-realistic light and their relationships are sticky and exhaustingly complex, with much of the disappointment in one another coming from their expectations of what a sister/father/mother should be doing or saying. It makes you cringe, even as (or because) you find some of these arguments or judgments familiar.

The handheld shaky-cam filming style makes the whole thing feel like documentary footage, or like we're just spying on these people. In the same way you're captivated by an interesting conversation taking place one table over in a restaurant, this movie is absorbing because it seems like we're really eavesdropping, almost to the point of feeling voyeuristic. This isn't a bad thing, really, though it's not for people who like their movie drama to be pretty or sugarcoated.

In reality, I think a lot of people like to see what's going on in other peoples' lives. It's why rubbernecking happens, why people "love to see a train wreck." Not (necessarily) to ridicule the victims but to feel like all of human experience is common and shared. There are plenty of tearful fights and screaming matches and tense showdowns in Rachel Getting Married. But there are just as many moments when you feel like you actually are at someone's wedding, what with all the heartfelt toasts and the warm embracing and the sweetly shy introductions between families. It's as fascinating and painful as any real-life human journey, which is both sad and comforting at the same time.

Photos courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Movie Preview: Rachel Getting Married

BuzzSugar — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 14:00:03 PDT

Yes, that is Anne Hathaway with a choppy little haircut standing next to Rosemarie DeWitt, who played one of my favorite characters on Mad Men, Don's mistress Midge. The two women play sisters in Rachel Getting Married, a family drama focusing on Hathaway's character, Kym returning home for her sister Rachel's (DeWitt) wedding.

I like Hathaway a lot and I love watching DeWitt, but I kinda think this indie movie looks like a long string of hysterical conversations. The wacky dysfunctional family shtick can get pretty tiresome pretty quickly (see also the similarly themed Margot at the Wedding, which is a hard movie to like). I'll probably still see the movie anyway, though, to find out what these talented women do with their characters. Rachel Getting Married opens in limited release October 3. To see the trailer,

Source

Rewind: Gearing Up For Summer Movie Season

BuzzSugar — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 03:05:17 PDT

Summer movie season is almost here and we're celebrating with pictures of the hottest stars of the season.
And with Summer just around the corner, we brushed up on concerts with a guide to the various upcoming music festivals.
Behold: the Magic Mike trailer, otherwise known as the Channing Tatum and Matthew McConaughey stripper movie. And also known as the highlight of our month.
In Hunger Games news, we learned that Francis Lawrence will direct Catching Fire.
We rounded up all the character posters for On the Road after Kristen Stewart's was released.
Robert Pattinson is all kinds of sexy in the first full trailer for Cosmopolis, which has him darting around town in a limo and putting some moves on the ladies.
James Franco turned 34, so we paid homage with a gallery of his many onscreen faces.
The trailer for Your Sister's Sister hit, and we love the love triangle between Emily Blunt, Mark Duplass, and Rosemarie DeWitt.
As wedding season rages on, we thought we'd inspire some ideas with a list of father-daughter dance songs.
Television lost one of its legends this week with the passing of Dick Clark.
Paul Dano has super cute chemistry with real life love Zoe Kazan in the trailer for indie rom com Ruby Sparks.
A video of Michael Fassbender as an android in Prometheus showed up, prompting us to question what we had assumed from the original trailer.
9021-Oh my God these pictures of Naomi's wedding dress are spectacular.
The Lucky One came out this week, but why not check out these hot pics of Zac before you head to theater?

John Krasinski and Emily Blunt Reunite at Sundance

Molly Goodson — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:53:13 PST

John Krasinski and Emily Blunt came to the Sundance Film Festival with different movies, but the happily married twosome met up yesterday to support each other's projects. John is in Park City to debut Nobody Walks, and Emily snuck into the theater to watch the premiere with him on Sunday. John missed Emily's Your Sister's Sister since he was back in LA doing promotional work for Big Miracle. John's Sundance movie had him working alongside Olivia Thirlby and Rosemarie DeWitt, who is actually in both of the Blunt-Krasinski films. On the red carpet, Rosemarie joked that she usually prefers to work with the husband half of a couple first, but this time she was happy to have played Emily's sister before having to tell her she'd be making out with her husband.

Check out all of our Sundance Film Festival coverage!