(Note: This will be my last post until I return from some time off on July 2.)

“I wanted to tell an epic story in an intimate way,” Lorene Scafaria says.

So she set her romance during the final two weeks before the end of the world, then focused on an insurance salesman (Steve Carell) and his neighbor (Keira Knightley), as they try to cap off some unfinished business before everything goes dark.

The result is “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World,” which opens Friday (6/22/12). (More…)

It wasn’t supposed to be a sister.

In fact, as originally conceived by writer-director Lynn Shelton, “Your Sister’s Sister” could have been titled “Your Sister’s Mother.”

Her new film, opening in limited release Friday (6/15/12), tells the story of a lonely guy who sleeps with his best female friend’s sister without realizing the pair are related. But as Shelton was first presented it, the character was the friend’s mother.

“He met his friend’s mother and slept with her,” Shelton says with a laugh during a telephone interview. “But we thought that would be too Oedipal – to have a mother-daughter love triangle. So we changed it to sisters right away.” (More…)

Still alive? Paul Williams seems to be defying time, as it were.

He’s president of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (otherwise known as ASCAP), in which he fights “to make sure people who created the music that’s being played and streamed and everything else are compensated fairly,” he says.

He’s still a practicing songwriter, continuing work on a stage musical based on the TV show “Happy Days” with Garry Marshall (aiming for an opening in London’s West End in the next year or so).

And he’s out on the hustings doing retail film promotion for a documentary, “Paul Williams Still Alive,” that he initially regretted saying “yes” to, when he was approached by filmmaker Stephen Kessler.

“It’s a weird life,” Williams says with a chuckle, (More…)