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.

Source: BuzzSugar.com

The Seattle International Film Festival, the nation’s largest, has announced it will open with Your Sister’s Sister at a May 17. Pic marks the first locally-produced and shot film to open the fest in its 38-year history. Directed by Lynn Shelton, one of Variety’s 10 directors to watch, “Your Sister’s Sister” revolves around three young people after a drunken night at a remote cabin in the Pacific Northwest. IFC Films acquired the pic after its Toronto premiere. “Lynn Shelton has made a pitch-perfect comedy of errors, infused with the right balance of humor and pathos that I absolutely love,” said SIFF artistic director Carl Spence.

Source: Variety.com

John Krasinski and Emily Blunt make their way through LAX airport on Tuesday (December 27) in Los Angeles. The happy couple were joined by their friend and neighbor Jimmy Kimmel and his new girlfriend, Molly McNearney.

Source: JustJared.com

Emily Blunt agreed to become the face and ambassadress for Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium fragrance because fragrances “evoke” so many memories for people. The Devil Wears Prada actress will star in the new TV and print campaigns for the “evocative” scent – which was created by perfumer Jean-Louis Sieuzac in 1977 – and Emily revealed she loves fragrances because scent is so important to her. She explained to People: “I think really that’s what I love most about it – it evokes so much for people. Everyone always says they’ve smelled something, and remember this beautiful memory they experienced maybe many years ago. There’s something very powerful about it.” Emily’s new advertising campaign for the brand – where she plays a woman on the hunt for the Opium fragrance – will air in December and Emily revealed she was thrilled to play a role rather than simply pose with the product. She said: “It was thrilling. I was given a story to play, and for me as an actress that’s very exciting. I’m not just posing or just trying to sell something.” Speaking about the perfume previously she said: “”It is a really exciting experience to embody this legendary fragrance, which has stood the test of time without its allure ever being diminished. Being a part of this new campaign and being able to tell the story of this very evocative fragrance is a real thrill.” Renaud de Lesquen, president of YSL & Designer Brands, explained the new campaign will portray “a fiery, almost reckless woman with magnetic seduction, that nobody or nothing can resist”. He added: “Opium embraces the whole history and values of our house.”

Source: Contactmusic.com

Emily Blunt thinks Yves Saint Laurent “made a mistake” hiring her to front an advertising campaign.The Muppets actress can’t understand why the fashion house asked her to star in a campaign for their Opium fragrance – which saw her dodging a leopard while wearing towering high-heeled shoes – because she looks “so un-French”. She said: “Go d, I’m so un-French in that trailer.” Asked why she was invited to front the campaign, she added: “I don’t know. I’ve no idea. Perhaps there was no one else? “They made a mistake, a terrible mistake.” Despite her reservations, Emily admitted she finally said yes to the campaign after years of turning down beauty advertisement offers because she liked the “aura of scandal”. She said: “I think that I’ve been wanting to make sure that when I did it would be the right thing. There’s such an aura of scandal around this perfume that I was quite attached to the idea of doing it from the word go. I’d been asked to do a couple of things but none were as classy as this. And I got to work with a leopard.?” The Devil Wears Prada star also revealed she wanted to wear a flowing gown instead of a tuxedo in the advert, but was advised it would send the leopard “crazy”. She told the Daily Telegraph newspaper: “I got word back that the leopard trainer says, ‘If you have flowing fabric around the leopard the leopard will go crazy .’ So I said yes to the tux.”

Source: Contactmusic.com

Emily Blunt claims female actresses are like “savages” when they see an opportunity to play a “great” role. The British actress rose to prominence after playing senior assistant Emily Charlton in The Devil Wears Prada. She has since gone on to star in The Young Victoria and The Adjustment Bureau. Although she has landed some impressive Hollywood film parts, Blunt doesn’t get complacent when it comes to casting. “Oh, God, yes,” she exclaimed when asked if she still has to fight for film parts. “Yes, absolutely. Because the good stuff – everyone wants the good stuff. We’re like savages. There’s not much meat on the bones in this industry so all the women go crazy when there’s a great role.” Blunt is still picky about the parts she takes on however. The 28-year-old likes to play dynamic characters. “If I open a script and the description reads ‘nice, normal girl’, I slam it shut,” she smiled in an interview with British newspaper The Telegraph. Despite her roles in mainstream blockbusters, Blunt appreciates independent cinema. Although the budgets are smaller, the brunette beauty usually finds the scripts more interesting. “They’re the best parts and the best scripts, usually. Sometimes the bigger-budget films are made for teenage boys, so the girl parts are one-dimensional or rather idealistic and I don’t know how to play The Girlfriend part – there’s nothing there for me to do,” she explained. “There are fantastic roles out there for women, you just have to sift through all the crap to find them.” Blunt has a lot of respect for female comediennes. She is a big fan of hit comedy Bridesmaids and says the 2011 film has paved the way for other female comic stars. “I think there’s a tendency to think women can’t be funny,” she said. “But you look at someone like Kristen Wiig [the lead in Bridesmaids], I think people like her are real trailblazers for girls in the comedy world. If you love it or hate it you can’t deny that Bridesmaids is such a big film for women. It was a really important film to happen.”

Source: NZHerald.co.nz

Emily Blunt still stutters around her family. The Devil Wears Prada star – who developed the speech impediment at the age of seven – rarely struggles to speak in front of strangers but admitted she sometimes has problems getting her words out in front of family and friends. Emily – who is married to The Office star John Krasinski – said: “Weirdly enough, I stutter less with a person I’m unfamiliar with. And then with my family or my husband it’ll come out more which is strange.” Although her episodes of struggling to speak are now rare, Emily admitted she had a tough time with her stutter when she was growing up. She told Stella magazine: “As a child and early teen I didn’t speak as much – because I couldn’t. Maybe that was a good thing because I soaked it all up like a sponge. But I don’t remember it as a conscious thing. I think I just wanted not to talk. Too embarrassing.”

Source: Contactmusic.com

American actress Alison Brie relied on London-born Emily Blunt to be her “unofficial vocal coach” while filming The Five-year Engagement – because she wanted to sound exactly like the Brit. The Community star struggled to play an English woman while starring as Blunt’s sister in the upcoming romantic comedy, so she repeatedly turned to her onscreen sibling for accent advice. She tells The Insider, “I think it went well, I’m nervous to see it. I had a great vocal coach here in L.A. for a few weeks but when I got out there, Emily became my unofficial vocal coach. It was more important that we sound alike than me studying a super proper British accent. “The hardest part was that there was so much improv (improvisation) in the movie that the biggest challenge became thinking of an idea and process (sic) it through the accent quickly.”

Source: Contactmusic.com

Stanley Tucci, the Italian-American actor best known for his roles in The Terminal and The Lovely Bones, has announcing he is to marry his partner Felicity, the sister of British actress Emily Blunt, according to US Weekly Magazine.
Stanley was introduced to the London literary agent by sister Emily, while the acting duo worked on The Devil Wears Prada. Since then, Tucci has made regular visits to London to visit Felicity and recently popped the question. It will be the second marriage for the actor, who sadly lost his first wife Kate to cancer in April 2009 having had three children together. On the engagement, a source said, “Stanley is very happy with her. Emily loved Stanley on the set of Devil, and just thought they would hit it off, so she set them up”.

Source: Deadline.com