Anne Pick

When did Zac Efron become such a hottie? It wasn't too long ago that Efron was a kid starring in the Disney Channel's High School Musical series, waiting for his voice to change. Suddenly, my girlfriends and I realized that Efron is a handsome dude. His piercing blue eyes and washboard abs contribute to grown women drooling over the 22-year-old hunk and we feel less pervy about it than when we ogle 18-year-old Taylor Lautner from the Twilight series. Now, if only he wouldn't use his leading-man looks to star in movies like Charlie St. Cloud.
Efron plays the title character in the odd melodrama based on the novel The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud by Ben Sherwood. The backdrop for the story is a sibling death. Efron's Charlie is at the wheel of a car during an accident that takes the life of his brother, Sam. The film skips forward five years and we find Charlie as the caretaker at the cemetery where Sam is buried, having deferred a sailing scholarship to Stanford – seriously. It's not just grief that keeps Charlie's vigil alive. He somehow plays catch with his dead brother every night. Not surprisingly the whole town thinks he's crazy.

Hundreds of pre-teen and teenage girls, moms, a few boyfriends (who were dragged kicking and screaming, no doubt) and a plethora of twenty-something's who know better than to love Twilight, but do anyway, stood in line outside of Old Mill 16 on Tuesday night for the midnight premier of The Twilight Sage: Eclipse. The weather gods decided to give us a taste of what Bella goes through while camping in the film with a chill. Not to that extreme, of course, but it is officially summer and I'm pretty sure it was warmer during the November 2009 debut of New Moon. But whatever, it was worth the wait and besides, as the Source Weekly's senior Twilight correspondent, it was my duty to be there.

When a wildly popular novel is adapted for the big screen, there are a few questions guaranteed to come up. For fans of the novel, they first want to know if the movie stays true to the story. Secondly, they are eager to know if the characters are as they imagined while reading the book. Unfortunately, I have not read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, so I cannot answer those questions.
The basis of the film is that 40 years ago, Henrik Vanger's (Sven-Bertil Taube) niece, Harriet, went missing. Henrik believes she was murdered, and by someone in their unpleasant-yet-tight-for-business-purposes family. Investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) comes onto the case per Henrik's request before he fulfills a three-month jail sentence after losing a libel case. Throughout his trial and investigation, Mikael had been tracked by a computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander.

When going to see a movie like When in Rome, the best plan of attack is to go in with low expectations, which is exactly what I did. Perhaps the most advantageous thing about seeing a movie when you're not expecting much is that if it's not as bad as you thought, then it could be considered a success. In the end, When in Rome wasn't as bad as I thought it would be and I did get in a few good laughs.
Kristen Bell, whose last foray into the rom-com genre was in Couples Retreat, plays Beth, a curator at the Guggenheim who's admittedly looking for “the one,” meaning the one person she can love more than her job. Nine days before her make-or-break gala opening, she finds out she has to make a 48-hour trip to Rome to attend her little sister's wedding. Unbelievable enough, her sister Joan (Alexis Dziena), who you may remember as the snotty ex-girlfriend in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, decides to marry her Italian beau after knowing him two whole weeks. More unbelievable, they are tying the knot in a grand, traditional Italian ceremony a mere two days after Joan tells her sister of her engagement.