Word: asner
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...Proposal has demonstrated that a movie doesn't need two stars to be a hit, The Hangover proved it doesn't need any. Same with the starless Up (sorry, all you Ed Asner fans), which in its fourth weekend amassed another $21.3 million, for a domestic total thus far of $224.1 million. In no time Pixar's alter-kocker comedy will pass Star Trek, yet another no-star wonder, as the year's top-grossing film - until, that is, the Transformers or Harry Potter sequels overtake it. See a trend, folks? Stars don't sell movies; brands, genres and word...
...name among the leads in the week's big movies, promoted his film on nearly every media outlet. (Helms told his tooth story on the NPR quiz show Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me.) Yet Land of the Lost was creamed by movies whose top-billed actors are Ed Asner and Bradley Cooper...
...Asner, who voiced the main character in Up, has a gruff side that can't match Bale's, at least as expressed in Bale's obscene, YouTubed rant on the set of Terminator Salvation. But he wasn't the lead in last year's top-grossing film, The Dark Knight, either. That's Pixar for you. Unlike its rival, DreamWorks, the studio doesn't sell its movies with star voices. And the films' plots? At a typical Hollywood pitch meeting, the story of a rat let loose in a French restaurant (Ratatouille, 2007) or a lonely robot trash collector (last...
...With the love of his life gone, widower Carl (Ed Asner) might as well be dead. His grief has soured into guilt, which he walls up in a castle of cantankerousness. His day is a dull routine of dressing, hobbling with his cane to sit on the front porch and keeping his home just as it was when Ellie was there. It's really a mausoleum, and he is both caretaker and corpse. We never heard Carl say a word to Ellie while she was alive, but now he talks nonstop to his absent darling. She'd understand his bitterness...
...Every Pixar production involves some 300 artists, but the actors come first; they have to, because the dialogue is recorded to guide the animators. Asner, 79, who used his slow burn brilliantly on the great Mary Tyler Moore '70s sitcom, had the gruffness and deadpan comic timing to bring Carl to vocal life. As Docter recalls, "When we first met Ed and showed him a small sculpture we'd made of Carl, he said [growling], 'I don't look anything like that.' And we thought, O.K., this is gonna be perfect." Docter and Peterson then tailored the dialogue...