Pages tagged “rainn wilson”

Many of the actors on beloved hit show The Office can credit its success for helping them launch fledgling film careers. Steve Carell, for one, has catapulted into one of today's biggest movie stars, with big hits (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Get Smart) and successful smaller-scale flicks (Dan in Real Life, Little Miss Sunshine).

20 Best TV Characters of the Past 20 Years

Today, we present the final four characters. Click here for #20-#17, here for #16-#13, here for #12-#9 and here for #8-#5.

The veteran actor—best known for playing geeky megalomaniac Dwight Schrute on NBC’s The 
Office—moves out of his perennial supporting-actor niche with new big-screen comedy 
The Rocker. It’s his first starring role, a natural 
opportunity to inquire about some of his other firsts.

Release Date: Aug. 22
Director: Peter Cattaneo
Writers: Wallace Wolodarsky and Maya Forbes (screenplay), Ryan Jaffe (story)
Cinematographer: Anthony B. Richmond
Starring: Rainn Wilson, Christina Applegate, Emma Stone, Josh Gad
Studio/Run Time: Twentieth Century-Fox, 102 mins.

If the premise of The Rocker sounds unfamiliar, you must have been living under a rock for the past couple of years. Robert “Fish” Fishman (Rainn Wilson) is kicked out of his band and driven into a depression until a rag-tag group of kids gets him playing again. If you replace Fishman with Dewey Finn, you end up with an equally fitting one-sentence summary of School of Rock. But The Rocker only takes this as an initial premise, and instead of working within the one-gig-can-change-the-world theme of its predecessor, it follows a band that becomes successful and is then required to tour with its middle-aged companion.

In preparation for his upcoming flick The Rocker, The Office laureate Rainn Wilson will be appearing on Philadelphia's WXPN radio this Friday at 8 p.m. for the station's Y-Rock program. DJ Schrute will be spinning "his favorite alternative and indie rock tunes" on a show aptly titled the Rainn Wilson Radio Takeover. XPN is 88.5 on the FM band in Philly, and those of us not fortunate enough to hail from the city of brotherly love can tune in online at the Y-Rock website.

[L-R] Rainn Wilson and Dennis Hopper. Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for CineVegas.

The 10th annual Cinevegas Film Festival kicked off on Thursday with a screening of The Rocker starring Rainn Wilson and directed by Oscar-nominee Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty).  The director and star, along with costars Jane Lynch, Fred Armisen, Emma Stone, and Lonny Ross (30 Rock), were in attendance, as was Dennis Hopper (who serves as chairman of the festival's creative advisory board).

It was a busy week at Paste. Several Paste staffers returned from Sasquatch, we welcomed Ben Sollee by the office for a performance, celebrated two upcoming arrivals into the Paste family with a double shower, said hello to a brand new crop of interns, and oh yeah, I started a blog. Here's a little round-up of what was going on at PasteMagazine.com this week:

Rainn Wilson video from Sasquatch
Rainn Wilson goes toe-to-toe (at least that's how I hope it was) with our own Jason Killingsworth, complaining that his favorite band The National has gotten all uppity since their album landed #1 on Paste's Best of 2007 list.

New CD Releases
Reviews of new album from Fleet Foxes, Sam Phillips and Martha Wainwright.

Film of the week - Kung Fu Panda
Continuing my kids' theme this week, I took my young 'uns to a screening of Kung Fu Panda. Read the review here.

The Hold Steady Production Diary
In the lead up to one of our most anticipated albums of the year, Hold Steady producer John Agnello (Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Jay Farrar) shares with us the making of Stay Positive.

If you were at the Sasquatch! festival over Memorial Day weekend, you probably saw actor Rainn Wilson introduce a band. Or you bumped into him as you were wandering from the Wookie! Stage to the Yeti! Stage. Or maybe you saw him get into a tumble-on-the-ground fist fight with the dude selling 24 oz. cans of Coors Light for $12.

Click above to watch what happened when Paste ran into Rainn Wilson at the 2008 Sasquatch Music Festival.

Also, be sure to click over to Paste's blog coverage of all three days and check back in for more videos straight from The Gorge.

Related Links:
News: Remedy Office withdrawal with Rainn Wilson news
News: Trailer out for Rainn Wilson's The Rocker
News: Rainn Wilson reveals audition tapes for Juno, I'm Not There

UPDATE: Our Rainn Wilson video is now live.

[Above: Rainn Wilson in his upcoming film, The Rocker]

Experiencing headaches, anxiety, nausea or tipsy Thursday-night Freecell binges? With The Office off the air, we've been twitching any time we see a deck of cards, too. But we've got some news that'll trigger enough Office neurons to silence the queasiness until the fifth season.

UPDATE: Watch our exclusive video of Rainn Wilson at Sasquatch here.

Kicked out of his band, a middle-age rock musician unites with a ragtag group of kids to form a successful group. No, we're not talking about School of Rock, but rather the upcoming The Rocker—quite a different film. How different? While the earlier film starred Jack Black playing guitar, this one instead has Rainn Wilson playing drums.

Hmm... perhaps a better way to distinguish between the films is to check out the new trailer:

See? Clearly there are quite a few things to distinguish The Rocker. Aside from the trailer, another positive sign for the film is that it was co-written by Wallace Wolodorsky, an ex-Simpsons writer from the halcyon years of that particular cartoon family.

Wilson's first starring role, The Rocker, hits theaters August 1.

Related links:
News: Rainn Wilson reveals audition tapes for Juno, I'm Not There
Ctrl-V: Oscars 2008 Live Blog
Feature: Diablo Cody, Jason Reitman and the birth of Juno

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

UPDATE: Watch our exclusive video of Rainn Wilson at Sasquatch here.

Where have The Office's cast members been lurking since television shows crawled off the air during the WGA strike? Angela Kinsey's been avoiding microwaves and red M&M's while pregnant, and B.J. Novak made a round through the college stand-up comedy circuit.

Meanwhile, Film Independent's Spirit Awards just nabbed Rainn Wilson to host the annual event, which took place a night before the Oscars. And while he wasn't nominated for his Juno cameo, Wilson's "audition" tapes for the Best Feature nominees recently surfaced on /Film.

Watch Wilson get into characters from Oscar-overlooked independent films like Paranoid Park, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and A Mighty Heart here.

And lest we forget I'm Not There director Todd Haynes destroying Wilson's guitar post-Dylan impression...

Related links:
FilmIndependent.org
Paste: Ctrl-V: Oscars 2008 Live Blog
Paste: Diablo Cody, Jason Reitman and the birth of Juno

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.