Editor | Peter Bowen

In his blog "The Verge", Movieline's Kyle Buchanan spoke with Keir Gilchrist, one of the stars of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's It's Kind of a Funny Story. 

The occassion of the interview is the film's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend, an event that is particulaly dear for Gilchrist, since Toronto is his hometown. But Gilchrist goes on to talk about the film, working with a directing couple, and his co-star Zach Galifianakis.

There was a considerable deal of improv on the set. Obviously, when you have Zach there, it’s pretty unavoidable, because he loves improv. They gave me a big say in a lot of the scenes, actually. I always had the option to rework lines or rework scenes and the script was constantly changing. They’re very open to whatever will make the film better. They don’t think their words are too important to lose.

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Teen Vogue just came out with a portfolio (slide show on the web) of the entering class of “young Hollywood 2010.” We’re happy to see Keir Gilcrhist, the star of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s comedy It’s Kind of a Funny Story (along with Zach Galifianakis and Emma Roberts), is part of the pack.

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Congratulations to all. Anton Corbijn’s thriller The American with George Clooney was number one at the box office over the Labor Day weekend, but even more, according to Box Office Mojo (the know-all site on the subject), The American “had the fourth-highest grossing Labor Day launch ever.”

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Sofia Coppola’s new feature Somewhere (out this December from Focus Features) just debuted at the Venice Film Festival. And critics have found it a winner. Here is a paragraph from Justin Chang’s review in Variety.

The rewarding cumulative effect of this approach is the sense that we've gotten to know the character intimately, a considerable credit to the actor behind the actor. Present in every scene of the pic's 96-minute running time, Dorff riffs slyly on his own B-actor persona, even as he confirms the talent that's always been apparent over the course of his uneven career. It's a performance light on dialogue but rich in slouching, slackerish body language, and while Dorff spends roughly half the movie shirtless, what comes through is a sense of vulnerability rather than vanity. Fanning matches him nuance for nuance, rendering their onscreen relationship effortlessly convincing.

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News––that means new images and clips––of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s comedy It’s Kind of Funny Story with Keir Gilchrist, Zach Galifianakis, and Emma Roberts are popping up all over the place. To help you find them, here are some directions. For exclusive new photos go to MTV's Fall Movie 2010 Preview Week: Exclusive Photos and for a new clip, check out Yahoo movies.

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Our Africa First program just got another first, as alumni Wanuri Kahiu (shown her directing Pumzi) will be at the Venice Film Festival for a screening on September 11 of her Africa First short Pumzi, as well as her film From a Whisper. The reason for this special screening is her being awarded the Prize City of Venice This prize goes "to an artist who with his work makes the cinema of his country appreciated and who is thus capable of stimulating its development. A filmmaker who, by prompting the artistic, social and ethical involvement of other filmmakers, makes cinema a mirror of life and of the reality of which it is an expression." We couldn't agree more.

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Anton Corbijn's stylish thriller The American (with George Clooney rocking the title role) hits screens tomorrow, which means film reveiws hit the newstands (virtual and analog alike) tonight. We are thrilled to see that one of our favorite critics, Roger Ebert, gave the film four stars. Read the review, but here is a taste from the first paragraph:

The American allows George Clooney to play a man as starkly defined as a samurai. His fatal flaw, as it must be for any samurai, is love. Other than that, the American is perfect: Sealed, impervious and expert, with a focus so narrow it is defined only by his skills and his master. Here is a gripping film with the focus of a Japanese drama, an impenetrable character to equal Alain Delon's in Le Samourai by Jean-Pierre Melville.

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HollywoodNews.com is getting ready for the upcoming Toronto Film Festival by profiling a few titles of note.  Sean O'Connell recently took at look at Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's It's Kind of a Funny Story with Keir Gilchrist, Zach Galifianakis, and Emma Roberts. At the end, they looked forward to the next awards season.

Awards Potential: The Academy could respond favorably to Galifianakis playing against type (his role, based on trailers, seems more serious that, say, Alan Garner from “Hangover”). We’ll know more about Roberts and Gilchrist’s chances at breaking into the supporting categories once we’ve seen the film. Of course, with a very strong performance, Funny Story could easily slip into the Adapted Screenplay (it’s based on Ned Vizzini’s novel of the same name) and/or the Best Director categories.

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As reported in the Wall Street Journal blog "SpeakEasy," the novel on which the new George Clooney film The American is based is being reissued.  Originally published in 1990, Martin Booth's novel A Very Private Gentelman became the basis for the film which is coming out at the start of September. The novel, retitled The American, is being reissued and is out from Picador press. SpeakEasy also has an excerpt here from the novel for your reading pleasure.

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It's Kind of a Funny Story star Zach Galifianakis got to read some funny stories the other day when he showed up at Wilkes Country Public Library in North Carolina, whcih is close to his home town, to read children's books. Of course, Galifianakis isn't just for kids. According to Winston-Salem Journal, "word quickly spread in the days leading up to the reading, and the crowd included a lot of people with driver's licenses, jobs and mortgages."  Although Galifinakis threaten to narrate a little story called "The Hangover," in the end he read three books: Who is the Beast, The Snowy Day, and Don't Forget the Bacon--the last one, the bacon book, was actually written by his father, Harry Galifianakis.  Dad was there with his wife (and Zach's mom) Mary Frances. His twin brohter Seth was no where to be seen.

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In the blog The Philly Post from Philadelphia Magazine, mom/writer Gail Shister recounts having seen Lisa Cholodenko's comedy The Kids Are All Right with her daugher. The daughter, as Shister tells us, "has two lesbian moms. She was conceived through artificial insemination by an anonymous donor"  But the big isues for the mom was how the daugher saw the film:

After the movie, we headed to her apartment nearby. I asked her if she liked the film. She said yes, as did I. “The family with lesbian moms was just a regular family,” she said. “And they didn’t kill off the lesbians or give them some horrible disease.”

I hesitated before asking her the most important (to me) question.

“Did it make you want to find your donor dad?”

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In Lisa Cholodenko's comedy The Kids Are All Right, Josh Hutcherson plays Laser, a LA teen more into skateboarding and goofing off than reading. Or so it would seem. Hutcherson, whose been acting since he was 9, brings that rare mix of smarts and style to his character. The New York Post asked him in their "In My Library: Josh Hutcherson," what his favorite books are. The list extends from Stephen Hawkings to Holden Caulfield, that later being, of  course, from J.D. Salinger's iconic novel Catcher in the Rye, a book that Hutcherson would love help bring to the screen.

Holden Caulfield is the best character in literature, period. I want to play him so badly! I know Salinger didn’t want to make it into a movie unless he played Holden — that’s what I’ve been told. I was gonna put myself on tape playing Holden and try to get Salinger behind it – it was kind of ambitious and crazy, I know, but I love it so much!

Now that Salinger is dead, Josh may have a better shot.

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New York Magazine's Culture Vulture looked backed on the confusing weekend film business with a glowing report about Lisa Cholodenko's comedy THe Kids Are All Right:

Elsewhere, The Kids Are All Right proved it was ready for a big-boy bed: Strong reviews and word-of-mouth translated to $3.5 million on just 847 screens; that's an impressive feat considering studio comedy Ramona and Beezus could only do $3.6 million in 2,700 theaters.

Right on!

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The success of The Kids are All Right is putting a spotlight on all the talented people who made it work, including  Josh Hutcherson, the 18-year-old actor who plays Laser. To many observers, this is the breakthrough role for the child actor (turned teenager). Lauren Bishop at Cinncinati.com spoke with the young actor, whom she dubbed “Mr. Sought-After Young Hollywood Actor, about his role and his success. He acknowledged that Kids might be a new step for him: I’m doing a sequel to Journey to the Center of the Earth later this year and that’s more a family-oriented film. I think I’m just sort of jumping all over the place. I think this is sort of a transition into more adult, grown-up roles."

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Jeff Jensen on Entertainment Weekly’s Pop Watch blog spoke with Mark Ruffalo about his recent ascension to being the new hulk and his recent approbation for his role in The Kids Are All Right. In addition to remarking about the fan-boy frenzy his recent appearance at Comic-Con created, Ruffalo talked about the frenzy around The Kids Are All Right.

What do you think audiences are responding to in the film?

I think what they’re responding to is seeing themselves in it. It’s above all else a really, really funny, frank and honest portrait of a family that’s dealing with teens in the home. Anyone who sees it who’s been in a long relationship, as far as the adults who see it, I don’t think they can help but see themselves in it. I think it’s really honest about marriage, and how difficult it is, and how hard you have to work in it and what it costs and what, ultimately, the beauty of it is.

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Jeffrey Brown, of the PBS culture blog “Art Beat,” caught up with Lisa Cholodenko for a great interview. You can connect to here and either listen or download it to listen to later at the gym.

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As Roland Barthes once did with Greta Garbo’s face, Lee Siegel over at The New York Observer does with Annette Bening as he registers the cultural and social meaning of her visage. In “Oh, Oh, Annette! Why I Get a Bang Out of Bening,” Siegel narrows his focus to her face: "Seeing Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right—seeing her face register a spectrum of feeling as if it were the evening news—I was more than ever convinced that she is one of the greatest ever American film actors. And it's all in that magnificent face, which is arguably the face of our moment.”

Moving from film to film, Siegel traces out a history of an actress who physically expresses  questions central to our culture’s identity. From Bugsy to Mrs. Harris to Mother and Child to The Kids are All Right, Bening, according to Siegel, continually mirrors back to us our own sense of ambiguity and yearning. He defines her singular look as that of “unforgettable indistinctness,” a face that is always somewhere between states: “the nose is too strong to be demure, and too delicate to be large; the chin stops just short of being either rounded or dramatic…” All of these comes together perfectly in her portrayal of Nic in The Kids Are All Right:

Crazy, mobile, ever-shifting American truth now resides in Ms. Bening's 52-year-old face. Her age is significant, just as the fact that she seems not to have done any cover-up work on her face is significant. The Kids Are All Right is like a defiant gesture to an industry that discards actresses at the age of 40, as well as to a culture that has every woman, young and old, walking around tormented and stuck inside the burqa of a commercialized ideal of feminine beauty. To top it all off, Ms. Bening's postmodern simultaneity reaches the pitch of perfection in this film: She is the masculine-feminine harmony that, in Aristophanes' old parable, got tragically split into the two sexes. Yet her character is essentially, timelessly conservative. She is a lesbian Father Knows Best.

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Out Magazine hosts a short profile of Lisa Cholodenko, the director/co-writer of The Kids Are All Right on their website: Barry Walters’ “Lisa Cholodenko: Hope Springs Maternal.” Walters speaks to the filmmaker about herself being a mother and the limitation of earlier lesbian/gay film, as well as where she gets her cinematic sense of humor:

Stuart [Blumberg, the film’s cowriter] and I love those films by Hal Ashby and Billy Wilder that had real humanity and truth to them,” Cholodenko says of inspirations like Harold and Maude and The Apartment. “They could illuminate something about the human experience but were absurd and accentuated, and so they left you in this unstable place where you’re kept engaged.”

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In a recent post on L.A. at Home, the design blog for The Los Angeles Times, David A. Keeps did an in-depth profile with “Set Pieces: The L.A. look in The Kids Are All Right.” Actually as Keeps points out the film doesn’t offer one look, but “contrasting design styles of two sides of Los Angeles.” In the piece, production designer Julia Berghoff defines how in designing both the home of Nic (Bening) and Jules (Moore) and Paul’s (Mark Ruffalo) Echo Park pad, she was defining two different LA lifestyles. The lesbian moms and their kids live in a comfortable bungalow “decorated with pages-from-a-catalog furniture and just a touch of earth-loving bohemianism.” Paul, however, lives in hip mish-mash. As Berghoff says, “It's like he did a lot of shopping at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, which is exactly what we did.”

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Over at SpeakEasy, the Wall Street Journal film biz blog, Anthony Kaufmann looked at the continued success of Lisa Cholodenko’s family comedy The Kids Are All Right in a post entitled “How The Kids Are All Right is Winning Over Summer Moviegoers.” As Kaufman points out, Kids is “is quickly becoming the indie hit of the summer,” winning over audiences slowly through a platform release and amazing word of mouth. Proof of this can be seen in the weekend rise of business. As Kaufman points out, “sales over the weekend increased significantly from Friday to Saturday by a sizeable 57%. (As comparison, the new Angelina Jolie action vehicle Salt increased just 6%.)” And while some of had try to make the film’s lesbian family into a controversy, nobody seems to notice. As Focus CEO James Schamus put it, “What’s controversial about a family struggling with kids going to college?”

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