Cari

Excuse me, missy, but I don't see your name on the Topher Grace Board request

Hop to it!

Kidding

Good_Day

Well we just have to hope the F4F gods will approve a Topher forum this time.

Carol

ComeAwayWithMe

I hope so too!

DJDonkeyGirl sign the Topher Board Request! JK

Good_Day

Courtesy of Nordiqueboy:

Photo from the article. I already had photobuckted from Yahoo movies. Enjoy, some interesting things about interesting scenes inside.~Carol


http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_0...4/film/ps.html

Eye Weekly

Love Letters

P.S. features Laura Linney in her prime

P.S. seems to have gotten four stars but the images aren't coming up.

Starring Laura Linney, **Topher Grace**. Written by Helen Schulman, Dylan Kidd. Directed by Dylan Kidd. 97 min. Sep 13, 9:30pm, Elgin; Sep 15, 3pm, Paramount.

BY JASON ANDERSON

"Your late thirties are a really interesting time," says Laura Linney. "You have a history, a real history. You can talk about something that happened 20 years ago." She laughs incredulously at the thought before exclaiming, "That's a freaker for anybody! You just can't believe it!"

Speaking by phone from her home in Connecticut last week, Linney -- who herself turned 40 this year -- is giving her take on the crisis that strikes her character in P.S., which makes its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this week. (It opens wide in October.) Her character, Louise Harrington, works as the director of admissions at Columbia University in New York. Divorced but still very close to her ex, Peter (Gabriel Byrne), Louise has an orderly existence that's low on excitement. Then she gets an application from an art student who bears the name of her high school boyfriend, killed in a car accident two decades before. When she calls him in for an interview, she discovers that Scott (**Topher Grace**) looks like him, too. Louise responds with uncharacteristic force. As Linney says, "All of a sudden the dam breaks... and she'd built a really strong dam."

While the premise may sound like the stuff of frothy chick-lit -- indeed, it's based on a novel by Helen Schulman, who co-wrote the script with director Dylan Kidd -- P.S. is much more than that. It's a wry, funny and sexy movie about a woman forced to reassess everything (and everyone) she's taken for granted in her life. Besides possessing the same liveliness and acerbic humour that distinguished Kidd's debut, Roger Dodger, it features Linney's richest and boldest performance since You Can Count on Me.

The perpetually busy Linney also appears at TIFF opposite Liam Neeson in Bill Condon's biopic, Kinsey. This summer, the native New Yorker completed work on Noah Baumbach'sThe Squid and the Whale and starred in the Broadway production of Sight Unseen. Though Linney is amused to be spending the next few months touring film festivals "like a rock star" in support of P.S. and Kinsey, she's happy with how both movies turned out. "You never know," she says. "That's one of the fun things about film. In theatre, you get a better sense of things because you do it every day. You do it eight times a week and the piece itself becomes a living creature that you have a relationship with on a daily basis. With a film, you do all of this work and you throw it out there and hope to god that it fits together. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't."

She's particularly pleased with P.S. because it portrays this volatile period of change in someone's life with such skill and sensitivity. "I think Dylan did a really good job," she says. "You've got to hit a certain tone with a film like this. It deals so much with someone's journey and what they're going through and why they're going through it. When you hit that life panic in your late thirties, it makes you reach for the past and for the future and it involves so much humour, perseverance, frustration and anger. It's like hitting a second adolescence. People find themselves as adults and their identity is not what they thought it was going to be. It's a very powerful time and causes people to do all kinds of wild stuff."

For Louise, the wild stuff includes a cute art student many years her junior (**Grace** plays Scott with exactly the right blend of charm, confusion and fragile self-assurance). But unlike most films that get tagged as romantic, the steamy affair between Louise and Scott is not the whole point of P.S. "The romance is a symptom of events," says Linney. "One aspect I was particularly interested in -- and is in many ways the tentpole of the movie -- is that this romance between **Topher** and I has to come from something else. And that something else is the foundation of the movie. It's that undertow, that shifting of identity and self, which is the real basis. A lot of times in movies, they just forget about that part, but what makes it interesting is the stuff underneath."

All of this comes into play in the first big love scene, which is rendered in something close to real time and perfectly captures both characters' feelings of awkwardness, confusion and flat-out lust. "That was a long scene," says Linney before erupting in laughter. "Oh my god, that was a long scene -- oh boy! It was funny because Dylan had never shot a scene like that and **Topher** had never done a scene like that, and here I was, this veteran of love scenes. Those things are very hard for anybody to do, but they were both terrified." She laughs even harder. "All of a sudden I'm the most experienced person on-set and everyone else was a nervous wreck! I hope I made it easier for both of them. It really was a lot of fun and I'm very proud to be the one to deflower Topher onscreen. There'll be many more scenes like that for him I'm sure, but I'm happy he lost his film virginity to me."

© 1991-2004 eye

ComeAwayWithMe

Great article!

Good_Day

& both TV and film deflowerings were from actress named Laura...Prepon and Linney. Pretty cool, huh?

Carol

DiscoLady_81

I love the last paragraph of that review! I liked how it really got into how one of the main actors feels about the film. It also helps to add credibility to it in a way as well. Now if they could just do an interview similar to this with Topher, that would be wonderful.

I'm sure there will be more love scenes for Topher in his film career, or at least I hope so Heck, he has a ways to go before he retires from the whole Hollywood scene...it's hard to say what's coming next for him since he's so versitile.

~Sara

pinch990

That's a good article Nice to see Topher getting his well-deserved praise. I cannot WAIT to see how they incorperated p. 76
Laura Linney also seems really cool, too.

Good_Day

Hi Sara,

Me too! And at least compared to that Scarlett Johannson bru-ha-ha last week, it's nice to see in print that this leading lady likes Topher as a person.

I'm sure he'll be doing some press for the film.

Synergy might have a bedroom scene. Remember the "black eye" photo of Topher as "Tom Duryea"? I can't wait to see Dennis Quaid and Topher fight.

Did anyone else notice when the article said P.S. is opening wide in October? This contradicts the release date information that I have from ComingSoon.net. I know that movie dates are always subject to change. Which is why I wish that Newmarket would update their P.S. page so that we'd have some official word on the playdates.

& My kingdom for a breakfast scene cap.

Carol

Good_Day

Yes, yes. Some reviewers gave the film mixed reviews, but there was never any negative praise about Topher's performance. [knock wood for future reviews.]

You and me both, Jilly. I want to see those fake tats.

ding in advance.

Yeah. I was this close to seeing Love Actually in the theatre, but didn't go.

Carol

ComeAwayWithMe

Cool. Topher has a way with Lauras. And what's my name? JK

wanderer78

Thanks so much for the article Carol. I love LL so it's always great to hear about her.

We're stalled at 84 votes unfortunately. That will change hopefully.

~carissima~, I answered your Superman questions at the Liv Tyler board. Also you can always visit the Comics FAQ thread [/shamelessly plugging board]

ComeAwayWithMe

I love LL too. It's great having two of your favorite actors working together!

I hate when requests get stalled. I always get so bored. lol

Good_Day

You're welcome, Pia.

Yes, yes...we want our board darn it.

Carol

pinch990

I hear ya.
How many votes do we have?