Kevin Scanlon

Two of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

The first time Isaac Aptaker and his partner, Elizabeth Berger, were on a professional soundstage together, everyone kept trying to take their clothes off.

"Hair and makeup kept coming up to us," Aptaker reports, "saying, 'OK, let's get you guys in your nude cover; let's get you guys in body makeup; your scene is probably coming up!' "

"They kept thinking Isaac and I were a couple," Berger interjects.

"And we had to be, like, 'No, we're not shooting a sex scene -- we're the writers,' " he says.

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Killing Them Softly

The opening credits of the Brad Pitt-starring Killing Them Softly are set to snatches of Barack Obama's 2008 Democratic Convention speech, focused on the notion of "the American promise," jarringly jump-intercut with scenes of Frank (Scoot McNairy) making his way through a tunnel onto a dismal American city street, windblown trash swirling all around, to emerge under side-by-side campaign billboards for Obama and John McCain.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

If you haven't seen New Girl -- the Fox sitcom that premiered last September to stellar ratings -- you've probably seen the billboards all over town, featuring star Zooey Deschanel in lime-green vintage, grinning alongside the slogan, "Simply Adorkable."

Its almost-cringeworthy tagline may have been the work of buzzword-happy marketers, but New Girl itself is the creation of 30-year-old Liz Meriwether, who based Deschanel's character Jess -- a gorgeous but almost pathologically quirky young woman who moves into a loft shared by three dudes -- on herself.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

Nobody does "jaded twentysomething" better than Aubrey Plaza. The 27-year-old NYU- and UCB-trained actress has mastered the art of the dry wit and judging stare.

And that's not just on the small screen.

Best known for playing human eye roll April Ludgate on NBC's Parks and Recreation, Plaza's deadpan humor has cracked up audiences in such films as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Funny People. It also has made her the poster child for Gen-Y apathy. (Although she cares, really she does -- in fact, she was nice enough not to cancel a phone interview despite being bedridden in a New York hotel room with food poisoning.)

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In Another Country

After operating at maybe 75 percent of its potential for almost its first full week, on Sunday the Cannes Film Festival kicked into full auteurist gear, with the premieres of three formally audacious new works from three contemporary international art-film stars: Michael Haneke's Amour (which we already discussed); In Another Country, from Korean master of comic romantic disaster Hong Sang-soo; and Like Someone in Love, the baffling, thrilling, Tokyo-set latest from Iranian neo-realism pioneer Abbas Kiarostami.

Thinly framed as a dramatization of a screenplay being written by a young woman in an attempt to distract herself from a family crisis too incredible to cope with ("So these things really happen," she says. "What am I doing here?"), In Another Country consists of three short stories, unrelated to one another but extremely similar, featuring the same actors playing different characters but doing more or less the same things. In each, a different French woman played by Isabelle Huppert -- a filmmaker, the cheating wife of a businessman, and a depressed recent divorcee -- spends a few days in the same unspectacular seaside tourist trap, where she has similar, quasi-romantic, sometime drunken encounters with two Korean men. In each vignette, the woman is pursued inappropriately, leading to several warnings about "that kind of Korean man."

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

You could forgive Allison Anders' neighbors on her tree-lined street in Altadena for thinking she is just like them. Her house is pleasantly messy; her garden, a work in progress. In the driveway are a Kia and a Hyundai. And there is Anders herself, a warm, funny earth mother padding around in slippers and a caftan, not one but two pairs of glasses absently propped atop her cloud of auburn hair.

But there are clues: the framed movie posters on the walls, the impressive tattoo spanning her clavicle. And the names that crop up in her conversation -- Quentin, Martin, Wim.

As in Tarantino, Scorsese, Wenders.

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Eighty-something couple George (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anna (Emmanuelle Riva), former music teachers with one adult daughter (Isabelle Huppert), are comfortably settled into their senescence together in a not-small and yet claustrophobic Paris apartment. One morning at the breakfast table, Anna goes blank -- her eyes blacken, she can't seem to see George or hear him -- and then she snaps out of it, with no apparent knowledge of what just happened. She has a surgery with a 95 percent success rate; she emerges a member of "that 5 percent," paralyzed on her right side, in need of full-time care.

Beginning with a flash-forward to the discovery of the old woman's corpse in a sealed-off bedroom, Amour, directed by Michael Haneke (who won Cannes' top prize in 2009 for The White Ribbon) is a deliberate, almost unbearably tense endurance exercise tracking what happens to George and Anna's relationship as Anna's condition deteriorates, one horrible day at a time. "There's no reason to go on living," she tells her husband, early into the ordeal. "I know it can only get worse." She is, of course, correct -- and she's foreshadowing the rest of the movie.

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As a major festival like Cannes wears on, my notebook accumulates more scrawl than I can translate into full blog posts. So, behold! The first of likely several notebook dumps, with thoughts on John Hillcoat's bootleggers-with-hearts-of-gold vs. sexually-ambiguous-evil-fed and weak-ass local lawmen Western Lawless; Xavier Dolan's tranny-coming-out epic Laurence Anyways; and Cristian Mungiu's follow-up to The Romanian Abortion Movie, Beyond the Hills.

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Matteo Garone's film Reality

Today in unexpected Cannes headline news: A convicted felon turns in one of the best performances at the festival thus far (and it's not Roman Polanski -- rimshot! -- who was the subject of a softball vanity documentary that screened here earlier in the week, and isn't really worth talking about).

After a very well-received screening of Reality -- in which Luciano (Aniello Arena), a fishmonger in contemporary Naples, auditions for the Italian version of Big Brother on a whim, and then becomes increasingly obsessed with the show and all it represents as he waits to hear back about being cast -- director Matteo Garrone (last seen at Cannes with the 2008 mafia epic Gomorrah) confirmed that Arena couldn't attend the festival ... because he's in prison. Garrone apparently tried to cast Arena, who has been part of a prison theater company for much of his two decades behind bars, in Gomorrah, but couldn't get the convict's temporary release approved for that bloody crime film. There is no violence in Reality -- which begins in the key of Capra and then becomes darker and stranger as its protagonist drifts further and further away from, ahem, "reality" -- but it would be hard not to read the film as an indictment of contemporary Italy.

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Agnes Magyari

Cloe Kromwell (as Terra), John Colella (as Miles, the Paul Giamatti role in the film), Jonathan Bray (as Jack, the Thomas Haden Church role), and Julia McIlvaine (as Maya, the Virginia Madsen role)

Rex Pickett's excitement has superseded his exhaustion during the final weeks of rehearsal for his new play Sideways, opening this weekend at Ruskin Group Theatre in Santa Monica. Having adapted the play from his own novel, Pickett is busy making final tweaks to the script and participating in post-show talkbacks, not to mention developing a pilot for HBO. "It's exhilarating, and it's maddening at the same time," Pickett says.

Sideways originated as a semi-autobiographical novel chronicling two friends -- Miles and Jack -- on an existential adventure across the Santa Ynez wine country just before Jack ties the knot. Adapted into an acclaimed film by Alexander Payne in 2004, Sideways gave the valley's tourist industry a palpable boost and increased the profile of Pinot noir across the world. "The Sideways phenomenon, or brand, or whatever you'd want to call it, is huge," Pickett explains. "With the play, it gives fans of Sideways another way to experience it."

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