Last year we got Single and Serious men, while the Solitary one got lost in the shuffle after it’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere. Five months later, Anchor Bay has picked up the Knockaround Guys Brian Koppelman and David Levien’s Solitary Man. The film stars Michael Douglas, Jesse Eisenberg, Susan Sarandon, Mary-Louise Parker, Danny DeVito, and Jenna Fischer. It is also scored by the great Clint Mansell (The Fountain, Moon) and Michael Penn. Koppelman wrote the script as well, about a car magnate whose personal and professional life cracks up because of his business and romantic indiscretions. He also wrote Walking Tall, Oceans 13 and The Girlfriend Experience.

With everyone involved I definitely want to check it out, but the fact that it didn’t get picked up right away is a little disconcerting. If it’s half as great as A Single Man or A Serious Man, I’ll be happy.

Solitary Man will get a theatrical release, date unknown for now.

Does A Solitary Man sound interesting to you?

New set pictures have popped up over at Coming Soon for David Fincher’s “Facebook movie” The Social Network. The pictures show Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckenberg and Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook. The pictures aren’t official releases, being snapped on set. Click the image below to see the full-res versions over at Coming Soon. Read the full story

Recognizing five international and local actors and actresses that have inspired popular acclaim from the British public, the BAFTA Orange Rising Star Award has been running for five consecutive years. This year Carey Mulligan, Kristen Stewart, Tahar Rahim, Jesse Eisenberg and Nicholas Hoult were named as the nominees for 2010.

The nominees must have featured in a film between the 1st of January to 31st December 2009 or within the extension period from the 1st of January to the 19th of February 2010.

Mulligan is the talented star of An Education, Hoult appears alongside Colin Firth in A Single Man, Rahim is the star of A Prophet, while Stewart starred in the Twilight Saga: New Moon and Adventureland for which her co-star Jesse Eisenberg was nominated.

The list has strong contention and it is hard to decide who has the greater chance of winning. If Mulligan does not win in the Best Actresss category she will most certainly take this award for Rising Star. The category description however, seems to indicate that popularity is worth more than talent, giving Kristen Stewart’s chances a great boost in the wake of Twilight fever.

The winner will be announced at the BAFTA ceremony on Sunday 21 February at London’s Royal Opera House.

David Fincher’s The Social Network is currently shooting, but Variety reports they have just added another cast member. The star from I Love You, Man and Parks and Recreation, Rashida Jones will be joining Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, and Andrew Garfield in Fincher’s latest. Coming Soon has also learned the $47 million budget film will be released October 15th, 2010. The film is based on Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal which you can find a synopsis of below:

Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends–outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women. Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance–and sexual success–was getting invited to join one of the university’s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order. Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university’s computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus–and subsequently crashing the university’s servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.

What followed–a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers–makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo’s and Mark’s different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart. The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost–and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.

The Social Network hits theaters October 15th, 2010.

What do you think of Jones joining the cast? Looking forward to the film?

Sundance has announced it’s 112 films that are entering in U.S. and World Cinema Documentary and Dramatic film competitions. The films represent “38 countries by 43 first-time filmmakers, including 24 in competition. These films were selected from 3,724 feature-length film submissions composed of 1,920 U.S. and 1,804 international feature-length films. 79 films at the Festival will be world premieres.” The festival takes place between Jan 21st and 31st at Park City Utah. Some interesting films to note are Mark Ruffalo’s directorial debut, a new documentary by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud) and films starring Jesse Eisenberg, Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Natalie Portman, James Franco, John Hamm, Melissa Leo, Laura Linney, Orlando Bloom, and more.  Check out the full list below. Read the full story

The UK’s Daily Mail has the very first look at Justin Timberlake on the Los Angeles set of David Fincher’s The Social Network, which chronicles the rise of Facebook. Timberlake plays entrepreneur Sean Parker (pictured left), the co-founder of Napster who had a part in starting up Facebook. I’m surprised how much he looks like him. The film also stars Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland, Zombieland) as CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Garfield (Boy A, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) as Eduardo Saverin, the Harvard business grad that co-created Facebook with Zuckerberg. Check out the picture below and a set visit report we received. Read the full story

by Merrill Barr and Dan Mecca

So what happens when you take guns, Woody Harrelson doing what he does best and Emma Stone with a shotgun? You get a little thing called Zombieland. Everything about this film is near perfect: the script, the story, the dialogue, the cinematography and the editing all a quintessential example of a take-no-prisoners horror/comedy and a better one than Edgar Wright’s comparable Shaun of the Dead.

One thing that really pushes this film is some solid, well-timed voice-over narration by Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland), who plays the film’s hero Columbus, as well as some really clever super-imposed titles throughout the film that help add color to the narration.

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Zombieland is a consistently hilarious zombie-filled comedy. This isn’t a horror film and it also really isn’t a survival film. The film does of course deliver on a good amount of carnage with gloriously executed zombie kills, but there’s no real scares. It isn’t meant as a slant since the film works stupendously as comedy that simply uses the zombie world as a backdrop.

The story mainly focuses on Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) who’s somewhat of a loner and a nervous wreck. He’s all alone and travels with a large pack of rules that he lives by to survive. One day he comes across Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), an over-the-top southerner who loves nothing more than killing zombies. They decide to team up since they’re both heading in the same direction. Soon they meet two sisters named Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), two young girls that have always made their living wheeling and dealing. After a few run ins they ultimately decide it would be best if they all banded together to get to California.

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The cast of David Fincher’s next film, The Social Network, which chronicles the rise of Facebook has been confirmed by Variety. Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland, Zombieland) will play CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Justin Timberlake (Alpha Dog, Southland Tales) will play entrepreneur Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster who had a part in starting up Facebook and Andrew Garfield (Boy A, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) will play Eduardo Saverin, the Harvard business grad that co-created Facebook with Zuckerberg.

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Myspace has unveiled a restricted trailer for the Ruben Fleischer horror-comedy Zombieland. It also stars Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin. Check it out below.

Holy shit, that was awesome.

Zombieland hits theaters October 9th, 2009.

What do you think of the trailer?