It is hard enough to be a single father, but when you are trying to juggle those responsibilities along with pursuing your dream of being an actor, things are made all the more complicated. The End of Love opens with Mark (Mark Webber) and his son, Isaac (played by Webber’s real-life son), waking up. The camera focuses in on Isaac and sets up the focus of the film on the little boy in the first few frames. As Mark and Isaac start their day, the absence of a mother (or a partner) in Mark’s life becomes clear, with Mark having to take Isaac with him on a big audition. While the casting director seems understanding about Isaac’s presence in the room, the actress Mark is reading against, Amanda Seyfried (playing herself), seems less than pleased and it quickly becomes clear that Mark’s dreams of becoming an actor may be over. Losing roles no longer just means Mark may not get a good part, it means he is losing money to support himself and Isaac. Although Mark lives with two roommates (who seem more than understanding about living with a two-year-old), he is not pulling his weight in rent, which sends Mark asking one of his friends (yet another “cameo” by Jason Ritter) for help.

A man places an ad in a local paper looking for a partner to go on a journey with him – but this particular man is not looking to make a love connection, he is in need of a companion to travel through time with him. He’s done it once before, but you’ll have to bring to your own weapons because, as he tells it, “safety not guaranteed.” From this seed of an idea, director Colin Trevorrow and screenwriter Derek Connolly have crafted Safety Not Guaranteed, a low-fi romance that benefits both from charismatic performances and the intriguing background that the time travel element provides. The film is loosely based on a true story – an ad did appear in a Seattle paper, exactly as it appears in the film, but Connolly and Trevorrow have taken their film in a different direction – stuff mentioned in the ad (payment, that it’s been done before) never comes up after its first read, and no one ever says anything else about it. Instead, the film focuses on a trio of intrepid reporters (really just one mild douchebags and two interns who don’t have a choice in the matter) who decide to craft a piece about the man who has placed the ad. A fluff piece, something silly. Of course, they find much more than they bargained for once their investigation commence.

After getting fired from his awful hit TV show Two and a Half Men Charlie Sheen had a very public meltdown that took public meltdowns to a new level by even including a public meltdown world tour. Though Sheen’s stage show was largely met with panning and boos, it still sold a lot of tickets. This country loves it when public figures fall off their pedestal. But we also love a good comeback story, and it seems like we’ve already reached that point in the Sheen narrative. These celebrity rise and fall stories are getting shorter and shorter every time they happen. I blame VH1’s Behind the Music for hammering the formula into everyone’s heads. Someone goes nuts from addiction and we can just go on auto-pilot in our response.

It’s been a few months since we’ve heard anything about the upcoming Aubrey Plaza starring comedy The Hand Job. The film, written and will be directed by Maggie Carey, is about a virginal and studious high school girl (Plaza) who decides that before she goes away to college she needs to run down a checklist of sexual acts she has yet to accomplish. Joining Plaza in all of the fun are some big comedic names like Alia Shawkat, Andy Samberg, Bill Hader, and Donald Glover. Needless to say, everyone who hears about this project is pretty enthused. But what’s up with the production lately? Two things, actually. First, somebody has finally seemed to recognize the fact that they’re not actually going to get away with widely releasing a film called The Hand Job, so the title has now been downgraded to the much lamer and more generic The To Do List. The change is disappointing, but inevitable. The second bit of news is less depressing. Clark Gregg and Rachel Bilson have been added to an already bursting cast. Gregg is best known for playing SHIELD Agent Coulson in Marvel’s recent string of super hero movies. Bilson is best known for being the girl that I have a pathetic, schoolboy crush on. Both of their presences are very welcome, as far as I’m concerned, and I leave this article looking even more forward to eventually checking out this film. Even if it does now sound like it should be a crappy [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

The comedy talent for The Handjob is swelling with Alia Shawkat, Mae Whitman, Donald Glover, Connie Britton, Andy Samberg, Bill Hader, and Johnny Simmons. The film is being written and directed by Bill Hader’s comedian wife Maggie Carey. That’s not to say that he has a drama wife, too. It’s meant to show that she’s also professionally funny. The modifier placement is just weird. Regardless, Hader expounded on the plot to The Playlist recently, saying “It’s about her playing an type-A, studious girl who graduates high school and hasn’t done anything with a guy. The summer before college she decides that she has to find out how to do everything in order to be properly prepared, so she makes a very serious bullet list of everything, like… hand-job, titty-fuck, blow-job, fingering, and just kinda checks one off every time she does it. She’s being the aggressor and is very straight-forward about it, like ‘Okay, so I’m going to give you a hand-job now.’ And the guys are very taken aback about it, especially her straight-laced friends.” Sold.

What is Movie News After Dark? This is a question that I am almost never asked, but I will answer it for you anyway. Movie News After Dark is FSR’s newest late-night secretion, a column dedicated to all of the news stories that slip past our daytime editorial staff and make it into my curiously chubby RSS ‘flagged’ box. It will (but is not guaranteed to) include relevant movie news, links to insightful commentary and other film-related shenanigans. I may also throw in a link to something TV-related here or there. It will also serve as my place of record for being both charming and sharp-witted, but most likely I will be neither of the two. I write this stuff late at night, what do you expect?

Aubrey Plaza is someone on the rise, but she’s also someone that’s been turning out solid work for a few years now. She’s done plenty of excellent short films and is also pretty well known for her stand-up. With Parks and Recreation and Funny People, she’s starting to get more attention. Being a scene-stealer in the fantastic Scott Pilgrim vs. the World will also surely help shed a bit more light. In the wonderful Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Plaza plays Julie Powers. Some will see her as a bitch, but she isn’t. She treats Scott like crap, and deservedly so. At the beginning of the film, Scott couldn’t be more selfish and Julie is one of the few that calls him out. Julie Powers is definitely similar to some of Plaza’s other roles when it comes to playing someone that couldn’t be more annoyed and expressive about it, but it’s different. Plaza acknowledges that she’s currently known for a specific type of character – a character that she couldn’t be more different from in real life – and she’s fine with that. Plaza is great at doing it and she always brings a different twist to it each time around. The sympathetic and outspoken Julie Powers is no different.

As I mentioned to my beloved followers on Twitter late last week, I exited my own screening of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World convinced that director Edgar Wright’s style was perfectly matched with my own tastes. Wright’s films — everything from his work on Spaced to Shaun of the Dead to my very favorite buddy cop comedy Hot Fuzz — have all the right pieces to play perfectly to my own moviegoing disposition. His films have undeniable energy. This is oft referred to by people who don’t know any better as his ability to “play to the ADD generation,” but is more in line with Hitchcock’s knack for suspense. It’s just always there. Wright’s films are brisk and consistent because he doesn’t allow much room for downtime. The jokes are meticulously strung together to create not beats, but a constant stream of style and tone. I adore this in his films. I also love the way he casts the things. So to say that Scott Pilgrim — based on a series of books filled with wry observations about culture as I’ve experienced it in my 26 years on the planet — is built for someone like me is an understatement. To me, it’s the perfect marriage of filmmaking style (Wright) and razor-sharp writing without the loss of character depth (comic creator Bryan Lee O’Malley). This may be the case for many of you. But what does it offer to the rest — the millions of folks not familiar with the [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Our man on the scene Kevin Kelly reports in with his Funny People junket report, including interviews with Judd Apatow, Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen and more.

We might as well just start a daily column and call it ‘Pilgrim Watch’ — oh wait, we just did. This is great, as it will allow us to follow along with the shenanigans that director Edgar Wright is pulling over on his MySpace Blog.