Columbia Pictures will release the comedy Bad Teacher on June 17, 2011, as school gets out for the summer moviegoing season, it was announced today by Jeff Blake, chairman, Worldwide Marketing and Distribution for Sony Pictures.

The comedy, which centers on a hilariously foul-mouthed, bitter, and irreverent middle school teacher, stars Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, Lucy Punch, John Michael Higgins, and Jason Segel, and is directed by Jake Kasdan, written by Gene Stupnitsky & Lee Eisenberg, and produced by Mosaic’s Jimmy Miller and David Householter.

Commenting on the announcement, Blake said, “We love how this movie is shaping up, and our early test screenings confirm our confidence. We have had tremendous results with summer comedies in the past several years, from ‘Superbad’ and ‘Step Brothers’ to ‘Grown Ups’ and ‘The Other Guys.’ Summer audiences want movies that will make them laugh out loud and we think ‘Bad Teacher’ is the perfect choice for older teens and adults who are looking for a film that will make them look at the high school experience and do just that.”

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I’ve updated the gallery with a movie poster from the upcoming “Green Hornet” film, starring Seth Rogen, Cameron Diaz, Jay Chou, and Christoph Waltz. The film is scheduled for release in Jan., 2011! Click the image to view in the gallery!

Cameron Diaz couldn’t take Tom Cruise seriously when they were shooting new movie Knight and Day.

The pair play June Havens and Roy Miller in the action comedy. Roy is a secret agent, and June becomes caught up in his life after he realises he isn’t supposed to make it through his latest mission.

Cameron loved working with Tom, but found shooting action sequences hard. Although the scenes were supposed to be serious she couldn’t help giggling as she found them so surreal.

“Every day we would come to work and laugh consistently – you know that belly laugh. I mean, I do tend to laugh a lot but when you’re driving a car and you look out the window and there is Tom Cruise on the hood with a gun, that’s pretty funny,” she said. “It was funny for me anyway.”

Cameron has previously praised Tom’s dedication to shooting stunts, explaining he inspired her. She has vowed to be more like him, and take part in dangerous scenes even if they scare her.

“I watched him jumping on top of cars and hanging on to the roof as I’m screaming behind the wheel and all I can think is, ‘How does he do that? I want to do that! I want to fly through the air. I want to fight. Give me some action scenes!” she explained.

SEVILLE, Spain — Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz were serious about getting the word out about what they do in their movie “Knight and Day.” Instead of just interviews in front of a movie poster in the U.S., the movie studio invited a small group to experience some of the places where the film’s stunts were shot.

Last week I was the guest of 20th Century Fox, ascending some of the rooftops of Salzburg, Austria, where Cruise jumps from building to building. Then, we jetted off to Seville to be part of a high-speed car chase with Cameron Diaz and some of the best stunt drivers in the world.

Q: Why would you both put yourself in such danger when there are perfectly good stunt people available?

Tom Cruise: We just wanted to entertain the audience. You just had to give it your all to get those shots. You really had to be in it full tilt.

Q: Is there a moment when you’re doing the stunts that you ask yourself, “What am I doing?”

TC: Never, but you do feel very much in present time. Everything comes into focus.

Cameron Diaz: It’s so addictive because there are only a few things in life that really bring you into a moment like that, especially in our society. You learn to trust yourself. You learn to trust the people that you’re working with.

TC: And I felt so confident with her. We had loaded guns full of flash blanks, but as she’s going around shooting them, these flash blanks are coming past me, I really just let go and trusted how capable she is.

Q: What’s the feeling afterwards? Do you feel like fainting or is it exhilarating?

TC: No, we were (fist bumps with Diaz), “We did it.”

CD: All day long on set we look at each other and say, “Are you kidding me … look at where we are, look at what we’re doing.” We both have the appreciation and gratitude for what we do every day getting to make movies like this.

Q: Are you taking fewer risks now that you’re a married man with a young child? Does your wife, Katie (Holmes), have veto power in the dangerous things that you do?

TC: Kate is very adventurous. She knows who I am. And it’s not a matter of risk. I’m very calculated. It’s part of who I am and I want my kids to have that kind of spirit. When I was a kid, I would jump on a motorcycle before I really knew how to ride it and do things like that. Now, you just kind of learn from professionals and take your time. You build your skill level and your competency, and that’s the fun of it. I’m always learning a new skill.

Q: This movie will remind people of (Tom’s) “Mission Impossible” or even (Cameron’s) “Charlie’s Angels.” How do you compare this with those?

CD: It was something that we were walking the line with constantly. We wanted it to be funny but we didn’t want it to be slapstick. There were lots of opportunities for more comedy in the movie but rather than going overboard, we kept a balanced tone so you felt these people really were in peril.

TC: And “Mission Impossible” movies are very much about their mission. This is more about the characters. It’s a two hander in the classy vein of a “North by Northwest.” He’s from his world and she’s from her world. The worlds intersect into action and international intrigue.

Q: Who would’ve thought that Tom’s Les Grossman character from “Tropic Thunder” would have taken off the way that he has? From that first cameo, then the MTV movie awards a couple of weeks ago and now a full feature movie that’ll be made about him.

CD: It’s so great because Tom is the nicest man who couldn’t be more communicative and thoughtful about the words that he says to the people that he’s working with. Les is the opposite. He’s like a machete just hacking through people.

Q: Do studio executives ask if the character is based on them?

CD: Oh, they know who they are.

TC: No, everyone goes, “Is he me?… Please say he’s me.”

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Roy Miller is, in his own words, good at what he does.

He isn’t bragging. If anything, the secret agent played by Tom Cruise in the utterly delightful action film/rom-com “Knight and Day” is probably selling himself short. A master of hand-to-hand combat who can put a bullet exactly where he wants it — shooting someone in the leg to immobilize him while avoiding the femoral artery so as not to kill him — he’s also unfailingly polite when, on the rare occasion, he goes too far.

“Sorry,” he tells an innocent bystander he has just decked, with the lightning-quick reflexes of a ninja. “I thought you were making a move.”

It’s no wonder June Havens (Cameron Diaz) falls for him when they meet on her flight from Wichita to Boston. He’s cute, charming, smart, funny and almost freakishly competent. Too bad that trouble, in the form of gun-toting government agents and an arms dealer’s ruthless henchmen, are following him — and now her — all over the globe as Roy tries to protect a nebbishy inventor (Paul Dano), and keep his top-secret invention out of the wrong hands.

But exactly whose are the wrong hands?

According to the feds who are chasing him (led by Peter Sarsgaard and Viola Davis), it’s Roy who’s the bad guy: an unstable, untrustworthy rogue agent. While Cruise was born to play the part — a modern-day MacGyver who, by his own admission, has been trained to dismantle a bomb in the dark “with nothing but a safety pin and some Junior Mints” — it also seems just possible that the guy might be ever so slightly deranged. The actor’s couch-jumping, Scientology-pumping past actually helps here, add a layer of unpredictability to a character who, in almost every other aspect, is a kind of Superman.

Forget Roy’s martial arts expertise. Nobody, particularly at 47, should have abs that look that good when he takes his shirt off (which is often).

But this isn’t just “The Tom Cruise Show.” As an ordinary woman inadvertently caught up in a world of jet-setting espionage, Diaz makes a delicious comedic and romantic foil to Cruise’s Roy. Yes, at first she’s a little freaked out by the number of people who are dropping like flies all around him — Roy’s aim is deadly when he wants it to be — but she soon shows herself to be a capable partner. “You’ve got skills, June,” Roy tells her, admiringly, after she shoots out the tires of a pursuing car.

Compare her performance to that of Katherine Heigl’s ditz in the similarly themed “Killers.” Diaz is no damsel in distress here. And her gumption lends fizz to an already effervescent production.

It helps that the script by Patrick O’Neill is as lively as the action. Roy’s schmoozing patter is a mix of cheesy small talk and spy-movie cliches: “Open the door, June,” he shouts, while clinging to the windshield of the speeding car she’s driving. “Beautiful dress, by the way,” he adds.

Roy’s unflappability is a thing of wonder, but it’s also the source of much of the film’s humor. “Knight and Day,” you see, isn’t just another “romaction” hybrid. It’s both straight-faced spy film and sly spy spoof. That’s a difficult balancing act, but director James Mangold (“3:10 to Yuma”) gets it exactly right. He lets us in on the joke, even as he lets us enjoy every thrill-packed minute of the ride.

Review by: Michael O’Sullivan @ washingtonpost.com

The trailer for the upcoming Tom Cruise / Cameron Diaz summer flick ‘Knight and Day’ features the song ‘Uprising,’ by British progressive rockers Muse. The song comes from their 2009 album ‘The Resistance.’

As Cruise and Diaz jump from one death-defying stunt to another, the stomping beat and distorted keyboards of ‘Uprising’ surge along in the background. Lead singer Matthew Bellamy uses his booming voice and sense of dramatic flair to rally his listeners against some unnamed aggressor: “They will not force us / They will stop degrading us / They will not control us / We will be victorious!”

‘The Resistance,’ Muse’s fifth album, has helped the band’s stateside popularity rise significantly, with the group recently headlining sold-out arena dates with their energetic and highly theatrical stage shows. Muse will spend the summer touring in Europe before returning to our shores for more American dates beginning Sept. 22.

‘Knight and Day’ opens in theaters across the country on June 23. You can check out the commercial below!

In the battle of the sexes at the box office over Memorial Day weekend, both lost out to a big green ogre.

“Sex and the City 2,” which had been expected to draw big crowds of women this weekend, ended up grossing less in five days than the first “Sex and the City” film did in its first three, while male-skewing video-game adaptation “Prince of Persia” landed with a thud as the biggest flop of the summer so far.

“Shrek Forever After” easily topped the box office chart, dropping a relatively modest 39% on its second weekend as it sold a studio-estimated $55.7 million in tickets from Friday through Monday in the U.S. and Canada. That’s significantly better than the 56% drop for “Shrek the Third” on Memorial Day weekend in 2007. However, after the new film’s disappointing $70-million start, it’s still well behind its predecessor, which had collected $217.3 million by Memorial Day. DreamWorks Animation’s “Shrek Forever After,” distributed by Paramount Pictures, has taken in $145.5 million domestically so far.

“Sex and the City 2″ had been poised to win the weekend based on pre-release polling. Perhaps hurt by uniformly awful reviews, however, it came in lower than expected, grossing $37.1 million for the four-day holiday weekend and $51.4 million including its opening Thursday. That’s not bad given its production budget of about $95 million, co-financed by Warner Bros.’ New Line Cinema unit and Village Roadshow Pictures. However, it’s less than the $57 million that the first movie based on the long-running HBO series starring Sarah Jessica Parker made on its opening three-day weekend in 2008.

Walt Disney Studios’ big-budget “Prince of Persia,” which starred Jake Gyllenhaal, opened to $37.8 million from Friday through Monday, a dismal start given its huge budget of $200 million.

“Persia,” which was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, did better internationally, though it was far from a huge hit. After opening to $18 million in 19 foreign countries the previous weekend, the action-adventure played in every major foreign country this weekend and took in a solid $59 million through Sunday.

“Sex and the City 2″ played in 17 foreign countries, including Great Britain and Germany, and matched or exceeded its predecessor in most of them, grossing $27.6 million through Sunday.

“Shrek Forever After” is playing in only 15 foreign markets, with most set to open in late June or July after the World Cup. It collected $18.5 million this weekend, with particularly strong results in Russia, increasing its international total to $53.5 million.

source: latimesblogs.latimes.com