Kaira Pitt in 'Moneyball:' Exactly what the Experts Say

Kaira Pitt stars as Concord As manager Billy Beane in baseball drama Moneyball, which opens in theaters Friday.our editor recommends'Moneyball''Moneyball' finds actor to experience David Justice What exactly are experts saying concerning the movie, that was directed by Bennett Burns and compiled by Steven Zaillian and also the Social Networking's Aaron Sorkin? VIDEO: Kaira Pitt Learned a Lesson From Jennifer Aniston Comments "With Kaira Pitt playing Billy and Jonah Hill like a Yale financial aspects grad whose analysis of gamers helps that small-market team achieve the 2010 nfl playoffs when everybody else creates them off for dead, Columbia Pictures looks good possibly not for any homer and surely a lengthy double as well as a thrilling scoot round the bases for any mind-first triple," creates The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. STORY: Box Office Preview: Kaira Pitt's 'Moneyball' Looks to Out-Run Rachelle Lefervre's 'Abduction' "The moments between Pitt and Hill are delights because they struggle to locate a working language after which a way to impose their newly found will around the most tradition-minded of sports. It is a great comedy act, with Pitt insisting that Hill complete his ideas or amplify their concepts towards the slack-jawed baseball scouts," he adds. The La Occasions' Kenneth Turan states, "Starring Kaira Pitt in top superstar form, it's a movie that's impressive and surprising." VIDEO: Kaira Pitt Seems on 'Ellen DeGeneres Show' for brand spanking new He states Beane is "charmingly performed by Pitt, the provocative gm from the Concord Athletics whose unconventional ideas by what an organization with limited assets could caused by contend with profligate powerhouses such as the NY Yankees still infuriate the activity's traditionalists." PHOTOS: 'Moneyball' Premiere in Concord "Chief among these is Pitt, who miracles having a role of the good guy inside a tough space, a guy who combines the confidence and charisma from the former professional athlete Beane is by using an unpredicted questioning character. This really is low-key star energy at its best," he adds. STORY: New Movie Reviews: 'Moneyball,' 'Abduction,' 'Machine Gun Preacher' Striking Theaters But younger crowd credits Philip Seymour Hoffman and Hall for that movie's success. "Pitt, obviously, doesn't get it done alone," creates Turan. "Apart from Hoffman, he's a perfect foil within an suddenly dramatic Jonah Hill, who helps make the perfect odd couple complement to Pitt's Beane because the awkward, chubby Peter Brand, some type of computer geek who analyzed financial aspects at Yale but eats baseball statistics in the morning and eventually ends up as Concord's assistant gm." Within The NY Occasions, Manohla Dargis creates, "The hungry heart of Moneyball, a film about baseball within the digital age, is really a beautiful hard situation named Billy Beane. Coiled yet awesome, Billy has got the liquid physical sophistication and vibrant eyes of the predator. He was created to win. Even his title, using its short syllabic bursts, sounds ready for ESPN exultations. That he's performed by Kaira Pitt giving the essential Kaira Pitt performance just closes the offer.Inch Dargis calls Pitt's performance, "fully lived on, appealingly barbed," and adds, "It's difficult to assume anybody but Mr. Pitt within the role. He's relaxed yet edgy and often unsettling, as with his testy trades, bristling with tamped-lower fury, using the A's manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman, putting on a mind of peach fuzz along with a scowl). Though [the director] Burns keeps the romance of baseball that [mentor Bill] James yet others assisted remove (this really is, in the end, an account of those who win and nonwinners), Billy does not really change: he just becomes his perfect self." Related Subjects Kaira Pitt

'The Voice' Winner Javier Colon to Play Ray Charles in 'The Playboy Club'

Add the winner of NBC's The Voice to the list of contemporary musical acts portraying stars of the late 1950s and early '60s on NBC's The Playboy Club. Javier Colon will portray Ray Charles in an upcoming episode of The Playboy Club, singing "Let the Good Times Roll." His appearance will follow Raphael Saadiq's portrayalof Sam Cooke singing "We're Having a Party" and Colbie Caillat playing Lesley Gore performing "It's My Party." The show, set in 1963 in Chicago, is working on finding singers to portray James Brown and Roy Orbison in upcoming episodes; Frank Sinatra is another future target. "They're trying to stunt cast every episode and have fun with it," says Geoff Bywater, senior VP of music for Twentieth Television, the unit of Fox that produces the show for NBC. "We have our eyes on stars who would be fun to cast." In the pilot, which airs Sept. 19, Karen Le Blanc portrays Tina Turner as she, Ike and the Ikettes tear through "Shake a Tail Feather" and "Tina's Wish." The Los Angeles-based production team the Transcenders is producing the tracks for the show while singer Richard Marx is working as a vocal producer in Chicago where the show is shot. In the near future, songs recorded for the show will be posted for sale on iTunes on Fridays prior to the Monday broadcast. Playboy Club stars Laura Benanti, Leah Renee and Naturi Naughton who sing on the show and their songs will also be made available for download. "One of the things we learned from Glee is that if you don't make the music available immediately the consumer gets frustrated -- or looks for it for free," Bywater said. "Once the show gains traction, we'll be looking at a Playboy Club soundtrack. That will be down the road." Related Topics The Voice The Playboy Club

The Entire Meets the 'Real' Shakespeare in New 'Anonymous' Clip (VIDEO)

What should you have written most likely probably the most brilliant works ever, only for someone else to think about all the credit? This is actually the dilemma director Roland Emmerich explores in 'Anonymous,' a film of a guy who written plays that have been eventually credited to William Shakespeare. (Really, the film poster for your film asks the conspiracy theorist question, "Was Shakespeare a Fraud?"). In this new clip within the film, Princess Elizabeth (Joely Richardson) meets a young Edward p Vere, the supposed "anonymous" author the film is called after -- and requires a significant liking to him. 'Anonymous' -- which premieres within the Toronto Worldwide Film Festival -- hits theaters on March. 28.

'Contagion' Makes Pandemic Feel Real

LOS ANGELES (AP) The Hollywood disaster movie typically comes with quakes, asteroids, tornadoes or aliens ripping the planet to shreds and manly heroes tossing around wisecracks as they carry out impossible deeds to save the world.Yet Steven Soderbergh figured the more authentic a potential apocalypse feels, the scarier it becomes.Opening Friday at U.S. theaters, Soderbergh's "Contagion" lays out a terrifying scenario the swift spread of a deadly new virus around the globe with a mix of personal drama and merciless realism that makes it both riveting and foreboding.From the start, director Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns aimed for an ultra-realistic tale of a pandemic so genuine and lacking in Hollywood egotism that spoiler alert the character played by one of the top names among its A-list cast, Gwyneth Paltrow, dies horribly in the opening minutes."The key phrase was 'ultra-realistic.' At the end of the day, to have everything in the film either be scientifically accurate or emotionally and practically plausible would make it scarier," Soderbergh said. "We wanted to remove this barrier between the audience and the story in which you could write it off as sort of movie (bull)."Like 2000's "Traffic," the drug-war saga that earned Soderbergh an Academy Award for best director, "Contagion" follows a huge cast and weaves together divergent plot lines into a tight, feverishly paced narrative.Paltrow plays an adulterous Minnesota woman whose business trip to Asia puts her at the center of a fluke series of events in which she's infected by a virus that jumps species, from bats to pigs to humans.With the human immune system baffled by a virus it's never before encountered, the flu-like disease races around the world, killing people and causing panic in the United States, Great Britain, Japan, China and many other countries.Frequent Soderbergh collaborator Matt Damon ("The Informant!," the "Ocean's Eleven" flicks) is the emotional focus of "Contagion" as Paltrow's husband, a man in denial over his wife's death and misdeeds whose sole aim is to protect his daughter through the crisis.Unlike Damon's super-agent Jason Bourne, his "Contagion" character is an everyman at the mercy of fate like the rest of the world, keeping his head down and trying to ride out the horror of mass graves, looting, makeshift hospitals, quarantine zones and the virtual breakdown of normal society."There's no vanity in any of the performances," Damon said. "The characters are flawed. They feel very real. It feels like the world that we all live in and that this could happen, because it could. The science is really accurate. They went into painstaking detail to make sure of that."The story hurtles from place to place, following Kate Winslet as a Centers for Disease Control researcher risking her life in the field; Laurence Fishburne and Jennifer Ehle as virologists racing to crack the code of the disease; Jude Law as a blogger who adds to the panic with conspiracy theories that the government might be withholding a cure; and Marion Cotillard as a World Health Organization official trying to track how a virus normally confined to bats could infect humans."We want a strong immune system, so you have to be exposed to germs," Ehle said. "The scary thing is the idea of something coming that no human being has any immunity to because it has jumped species. And no amount of washing hands will protect against that."To develop a realistic story, screenwriter Burns worked with top virologists to determine what truly could happen.The scenario he and Soderbergh settled on an epidemic from a virus jumping species is one the scientists say is likely someday as human expansion continues, Burns said."Everything I learned says that we are overdue, and that it is inevitable as we go into these ecotones and encroach into the wild spaces," Burns said. "We're going to put bats closer to pigs and dogs, and we're going to shake things out of the treetops that we haven't seen before.""Contagion" also touches on another sort of infection, the spread of information and misinformation and the fright that can follow.Law's character is a lone blogger with his own agenda for fanning public distrust and alarm. Damon worries that traditional newspapers and TV networks also might stoke people's anxiety."In times of peace and quiet, they sell fear, but I wonder if in a time of genuine fear, if they'd have the restraint to actually push out good information to kind of keep people calm," Damon said."Because a lot would depend on how the media behaved. If people are almost panicked, you can get them to cross the line very easily. It doesn't take a lot, but I wonder if the decision would be made in the board rooms that too much panic would actually get people to turn the TV off, and then the ad revenue wouldn't be as good. So it might be, 'Wait a minute, let's sell a little reason here.' Hopefully, that would be the decision that was reached."Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. By David Germain September 6, 2011 Gwyneth Paltrow and Matt Damon arrive at the Venice Film Festival. PHOTO CREDIT AP Photo/Andrew Medichini LOS ANGELES (AP) The Hollywood disaster movie typically comes with quakes, asteroids, tornadoes or aliens ripping the planet to shreds and manly heroes tossing around wisecracks as they carry out impossible deeds to save the world.Yet Steven Soderbergh figured the more authentic a potential apocalypse feels, the scarier it becomes.Opening Friday at U.S. theaters, Soderbergh's "Contagion" lays out a terrifying scenario the swift spread of a deadly new virus around the globe with a mix of personal drama and merciless realism that makes it both riveting and foreboding.From the start, director Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns aimed for an ultra-realistic tale of a pandemic so genuine and lacking in Hollywood egotism that spoiler alert the character played by one of the top names among its A-list cast, Gwyneth Paltrow, dies horribly in the opening minutes."The key phrase was 'ultra-realistic.' At the end of the day, to have everything in the film either be scientifically accurate or emotionally and practically plausible would make it scarier," Soderbergh said. "We wanted to remove this barrier between the audience and the story in which you could write it off as sort of movie (bull)."Like 2000's "Traffic," the drug-war saga that earned Soderbergh an Academy Award for best director, "Contagion" follows a huge cast and weaves together divergent plot lines into a tight, feverishly paced narrative.Paltrow plays an adulterous Minnesota woman whose business trip to Asia puts her at the center of a fluke series of events in which she's infected by a virus that jumps species, from bats to pigs to humans.With the human immune system baffled by a virus it's never before encountered, the flu-like disease races around the world, killing people and causing panic in the United States, Great Britain, Japan, China and many other countries.Frequent Soderbergh collaborator Matt Damon ("The Informant!," the "Ocean's Eleven" flicks) is the emotional focus of "Contagion" as Paltrow's husband, a man in denial over his wife's death and misdeeds whose sole aim is to protect his daughter through the crisis.Unlike Damon's super-agent Jason Bourne, his "Contagion" character is an everyman at the mercy of fate like the rest of the world, keeping his head down and trying to ride out the horror of mass graves, looting, makeshift hospitals, quarantine zones and the virtual breakdown of normal society."There's no vanity in any of the performances," Damon said. "The characters are flawed. They feel very real. It feels like the world that we all live in and that this could happen, because it could. The science is really accurate. They went into painstaking detail to make sure of that."The story hurtles from place to place, following Kate Winslet as a Centers for Disease Control researcher risking her life in the field; Laurence Fishburne and Jennifer Ehle as virologists racing to crack the code of the disease; Jude Law as a blogger who adds to the panic with conspiracy theories that the government might be withholding a cure; and Marion Cotillard as a World Health Organization official trying to track how a virus normally confined to bats could infect humans."We want a strong immune system, so you have to be exposed to germs," Ehle said. "The scary thing is the idea of something coming that no human being has any immunity to because it has jumped species. And no amount of washing hands will protect against that."To develop a realistic story, screenwriter Burns worked with top virologists to determine what truly could happen.The scenario he and Soderbergh settled on an epidemic from a virus jumping species is one the scientists say is likely someday as human expansion continues, Burns said."Everything I learned says that we are overdue, and that it is inevitable as we go into these ecotones and encroach into the wild spaces," Burns said. "We're going to put bats closer to pigs and dogs, and we're going to shake things out of the treetops that we haven't seen before.""Contagion" also touches on another sort of infection, the spread of information and misinformation and the fright that can follow.Law's character is a lone blogger with his own agenda for fanning public distrust and alarm. Damon worries that traditional newspapers and TV networks also might stoke people's anxiety."In times of peace and quiet, they sell fear, but I wonder if in a time of genuine fear, if they'd have the restraint to actually push out good information to kind of keep people calm," Damon said."Because a lot would depend on how the media behaved. If people are almost panicked, you can get them to cross the line very easily. It doesn't take a lot, but I wonder if the decision would be made in the board rooms that too much panic would actually get people to turn the TV off, and then the ad revenue wouldn't be as good. So it might be, 'Wait a minute, let's sell a little reason here.' Hopefully, that would be the decision that was reached."Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

EXCLUSIVE 'Hick' Clip: Chloe Moretz And Blake Lively On The Run

Having already demonstrated her ability to "Kick-Ass" as Hit-Girl, Chloe Grace Moretz is out to show a different side of herself in "Hick." "Hick," directed by Derick Martini, makes its grand debut at the Toronto International Film Festival this coming weekend, offering movie lovers a very different (but no less talented) side of Moretz than you've seen before. If you won't be at Toronto, never fear we've got an EXCLUSIVE first look at the movie in the video below. Moretz stars in "Hick" as Luli, a thirteen-year-old Nebraska native living with a particularly shady pair of parents who get drunk and fight like clockwork. The sour dynamic gets particularly rotten when Luli's parents throw down in the middle of her birthday party. What happens next sends Luli on a journey of self-discovery that brings her out to Las Vegas, along with her new birthday present: a Smith & Wesson .45. From TIFF.net: Dressed like a girl twice her age, shes immediately picked up by a wannabe cowboy named Eddie (Eddie Redmayne, a sensational actor on the rise), who walks with a limp and acts a little too crazy for comfort. The two fail to hit it off and Luli is ejected from the car. Luckily, she soon meets Glenda (Blake Lively), a grifter who acts as Lulis big sister albeit one who offers her drugs and uses her as an accessory to a robbery. Just as things seem to be going moderately well for Luli, Eddie makes an unwelcome return and becomes increasingly difficult to evade. In the exclusive clip, you'll get your first look at Chloe, Blake and Eddie in action. The movie's impressive cast list also includes Alec Baldwin, Rory Culkin and Juliette Lewis. "Hick" will be playing at Toronto this Saturday (September 10) and Sunday (September 11), as well as next Friday (September 16). Tell us what you think of the clip in the comments section and on Twitter!

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Producers Guild Certification Plan Removed By Justice Department

The Department of Justice stated today the Producers Guild of America’s certification system to tell apart full-on film producers from “financiers, stars, lawyers varieties within the entertainment industry who may bargain for any generic producer credit in exchange for his or her services” may likely not reduce competition among producers or galleries and really should help the industry by supplying transparency. The review ruling provides the guild the all-obvious regarding its system — that is voluntary — getting anticompetitive effects. Here’s the DOJ release: WASHINGTON The Department of Justice introduced today that it'll not challenge the Producers Guild of Americas suggested utilization of a voluntary certification system for film producers. In line with the representations produced by the Guild, the department stated the suggested voluntary certification product is unlikely to lessen competition among producers or film galleries for producer services and may provide clearness towards the film industry and also the public. The Department of Justices position was mentioned in business review letter to counsel for that Guild from Sharis A. Pozen, Acting Assistant Attorney General responsible for the Department of Justices Antitrust Division. With this particular certification, the Guild aims to tell apart individuals who perform what it really views to become the entire selection of producers responsibilities on the film from individuals bankers, stars, lawyers varieties within the entertainment industry who may bargain for any generic producer credit in exchange for his or her services. The Guild proposes while using certification p.g.a. following a persons title within the works credits to clarify who carried out the creating functions on the film as based on the Guilds specifications. Based on the Guild, a producer who makes the p.g.a. certification may have been involved in most phases of growth and development of a piece, from the conceptual stage completely through publish-production and marketing. The Producers Guilds certification program will benefit the film industry and also the public by supplying a method to discern who carried out the entire selection of producer functions on the film, stated Acting Assistant Attorney General Pozen. The Guilds certification program could make it simpler to recognize a few of the key professionals in getting a movie to theaters. In line with the representations and knowledge supplied by the Guild, the department determined the Guilds proposal isn't likely to harm competition within the provision of producer services. Participation within the certification program is voluntary for producers and movie galleries, and also the certification program doesn't restrain by any means ale galleries to employ producers without p.g.a certification or of producers without certification to operate within the film industry. Underneath the departments business review procedure, a business may submit a suggested action towards the Antitrust Division and get a statement whether the division presently expects to challenge the experience underneath the antitrust laws and regulations in line with the information provided. The department reserves its to challenge the suggested action underneath the antitrust laws and regulations whether it produces anticompetitive effects. Personal files that contains the company review request and also the departments response might be examined within the Antitrust Divisions Antitrust Documents Group, U.S. Department of Justice, 450 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 1010, Washington, D.C. 20530. Following a 30-day waiting period, the documents supporting the company review will be included to the file, unless of course a grounds for their exclusion for reasons of discretion continues to be established underneath the Business Review Procedure.

First Look: Carol Burnett Returns to All My Children

Carol Burnett Here comes trouble! Queen of comedy Carol Burnett is back on her fave soap, ABC's All My Children, for her fifth stint (airing September 6 and 7) - and she's just in time for the Pine Valley High School reunion! Burnett's much-loved character, conniver Verla Grubbs (last seen in 2005), is intent on getting her hooks into old flame Sam Brady (Jason Kincaid) and wants to make sure her rival Opal (Jill Larson) doesn't land him first. Not even the mighty Erica Kane (Susan Lucci) can stop her!Subscribe to TV Guide Magazine now!