BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Anne Hathaway knows that she might not have been first choice among devoted fans of David Nicholls’ international best-selling novel “One Day” to play the screen role of Emma Morley, the quirky, waifish Yorkshire gal who endures an on-and-off, two-decades friendship cum love affair with the posh, upper-crust rascal Dexter Mayhew.

Anne Hathaway

Much as the choice of Yank actress Rene Zellwegger to play the thoroughly British Bridget Jones (another working-class Yorkshire lass) in the film adaptations of Helen Fielding’s comic novels set off an irate buzz among dedicated readers, so too did the American Hathaway’s casting irk certain bookish anglophiles (not to mention a legion of English actresses).

But during press interviews for the film at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel hosted by Focus Features, the chipper Hathaway proved herself thoroughly unperturbed by the online kerfuffle over her casting.

She said she simply went about researching and building the role with the precision and enthusiasm of the veteran actor and Oscar nominee (for “Rachel Getting Married”) that she is.

“Getting into the accent was the first challenge,” said Hathaway, a Brooklyn native without a whit of Brooklyn patois. “The accent was key, and it informs so much about Emma and Dexter’s relationship that we don’t necessarily address in the movie. But a huge part of the book is the class difference between them, and how that’s actually one of the things that keeps them from getting together early on. I think it’s one of the things that keeps Emma from feeling totally comfortable and confident in this life that she’s trying to establish for herself.”

“One Day” tracks 20 years in the lives of gangly Emma and handsome Dexter from the day they graduate college in 1988 and attempt an awkward, bungled one-night stand. It revisits the two each St. Swithin’s Day, July 15th, as they suffer the ups and downs of careers and personal lives and as their relationship converges and diverges through the turmoil of the years.

Hathaway, who is no stranger to things British since she portrayed that most iconic of English literary lights, Jane Austen, in 2007’s “Becoming Jane” (for which she received a British Independent Film Awards nomination), said she nonetheless immersed herself in research for the new role.

“Understanding Emma’s education was pretty key,” she said. “One of the things I did was I tried to read as many books that David Nicholls mentions by name in the novel. But Emma was a really, really good reader, and the books were a little arduous. I much prefer Dexter’s tastes. He was always reading The Face magazine, and I was like, ‘can’t I do that?’”

Hathaway also said she spend as much time as she could in London and in the Yorkshire region before filming began.

“I tried to pay attention. I went up to every single person that I could meet from Yorkshire and asked them as many questions as I could,” she said. “Kate Fox wrote a book, and I’m blanking on the title right now, it’s either ‘Studying the English’ or ‘Watching the English’ or something like that (‘Watching the English – The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour’). It’s an amazing book and it breaks down a lot of typically British characteristics. And the chapter on humor really helped me understand Emma.”

But, the actress said, the best source material of all was Nicholls’ popular novel.

“I was sent the script and as soon as I read it I was deeply in love with it,” she said, “and I then I read the novel and I was thoroughly hooked.

“In developing Emma, I clung to the book, tightly,” she said. “I imagined Emma as a butterfly. I know that sounds very romantic, but just wait, it gets violent. Now, everyone knows a caterpillar makes a cocoon around itself and becomes a butterfly. What I didn’t realize is that’s really a horrifically painful process in which the caterpillar is basically torn apart and then is allowed emerge a butterfly.

“I think the thing that I clung to about Emma was that she’s a survivor,” Hathaway said. “She is someone who gets up when you knock her down. She is somebody who wants to grow and be her best self. She’s somebody who, contrary to what she might profess, believes that things are going to turn out OK.”

On that score, Hathaway said she shares a lot of characteristics with Emma – both in ways she’s changed through the years and ways she’s stayed the same.

Of changes: “I’m happier. I get happier every year,” Hathaway said. “I find that as I get older I take in life more, and I think that’s making me a better person. I think as I get older I find that I become more trusting, but I trust fewer people. The people I do trust, it’s gone much deeper.”

Of staying the same: “I’m a really curious person and always have been,” she said. “I believe that imagination is not something that you grow out of. And I love books.”

Does she believe in soul mates?

“Of course I do. What a drab life you’d have if you didn’t,” the actress said. “I don’t know that I believe the traditional romantic view that there’s one person out there for everyone. I think that we have many soul mates. I think our souls are vast and therefore we must meet other souls that connect with that. I think there is one soul out there that lights up your soul more than any other one. And I think that’s what a soul mate is, just someone who lights you up and you light up in return.”

And does she have a significant date that she marks every year of her life?

“Yeah, August 3rd,” Hathaway said. “That was the day that ‘The Princess Diaries’ came out in 2001. And that date changed my life. It’s funny because I have so many memoires in my life and I’m so bad at remembering dates. But I just had to say that date so many times to try to get people to go see the movie.

“I never remember that it’s coming, but every August 3rd for the past 10 years at some point I remember that was the date and I just give thanks to the universe, a big, big, big open-hearted thank you because that was the day that a bunch of dreams came true for me. There’re a lot of aspects to my life that are very real, but there’re a lot of aspects to my life that are fairy tale, and that’s the day of my fairy tale story.”

Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess

Loads of romantic melodramas in cinema have revolved around Feb. 14th, St. Valentine’s Day, but true to the appealingly quirky nature of its oddly matched young lovers, “One Day” takes its erratic romantic cues from July 15th, St. Swithin’s Day.

That’s the day which holds, according to British folklore, that if it rains it will then rain for the next 40 days; if the sun shines that day the weather will be beautiful for 40 days.

It’s a fitting metaphor for author David Nicholls’ offbeat romantic novel – and the screen adaptation he also penned – about two young people whose lives are tracked on that date over two decades. They are working class Yorkshire girl Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) and upper-crust playboy Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess of “Across the Universe”), who meet on college graduation day, July 15th, and form a platonic-romantic bond that will profoundly inform the next 20 years of their lives.

After Emma and Dex make an awkward, tipsy attempt at a one-night stand, they tentatively agree to remain friends, even though their backgrounds and aspirations couldn’t be more different.

Emma is an earnest lass from the provinces who yearns to do good work and make a difference in the world. As played by Hathaway in stringy hair, boho outfits and owlish, Harry Potter eyeglasses, she’s a plucky, sardonic and very smart Eliza Doolittle figure who is certain to transform from ugly duckling to radiant swan in due time.

Dexter, played by the likable Sturgess with a dash of roguish, rich-boy petulance and a saving dollop of good-hearted warmth, is a son of privilege who views the world as his playground and seems bound to break the hearts of his well-to-do parents – disapproving dad Steven (Ken Stott) and loving but gravely ill mum Alison (Patricia Clarkson).

As Emma takes a dead-end job waitressing at a Mexican restaurant and longs to become a teacher, and maybe even a writer, she and Dex dance around the obvious – that she fancies him but he’s too callow to reciprocate. As Dex rises to dubious fame as the obnoxious host of a late-night TV party show and sinks into an abyss of sex, drugs and rock ‘‘n’ roll, he and Emma remain friends – she perhaps the only sane and stable influence in his wastrel life.

The narrative checks in on the two each July 15th (with clever graphics cues) as their relationship evolves through stages of disgust and acceptance, estrangement and bonding, denial and inevitable love. The evolution of the relationship is suggestive of Stanley Donen’s 1967 “Two for the Road” which followed the ups and downs of Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney’s rocky love affair.

Former Dogma 95 director Lone Scherfig (“Italian for Beginners,” “An Education”) employs jaunty cultural cues to keep things visually interesting. But Nicholls’ script points up the daunting problems of adapting a full-bodied, era-spanning novel into a primarily visual narrative. The leaps in time often feel like lurches, important incidents and key elements of character development fall to the cutting-room floor and the story ends up feeling elliptical.

Fans of the novel can fill in the blanks themselves, but those who haven’t absorbed the full measure of Emma and Dex’s journey on page might well sense the film as a sketchy postcard album of a love story in which too much happens off screen.

Even so, Hathaway and Sturgess are such deft and appealing performers, and they stir up such lovely, compelling chemistry that on the “One Day” when the story turns truly, stunningly heartbreaking, only the most literal-minded and hard-hearted cynics will fail to be touched.

- Dennis King

“One Day”

PG-13
1:48
3 stars
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, Ken Stott, Patricia Clarkson
(Sexual content, partial nudity, language, some violence and substance abuse)

NEW YORK – While Anne Hathaway is busy promoting her latest film, the romantic melodrama “One Day,” she’s also enduring the buffeting winds of a blogosphere that’s all astir over her next big role, that of Selina Kyle/Catwoman in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Catwoman

Already, Hathaway has suffered the brunt of fan criticism over the nature of her Catwoman costume, which apparently was inadvertently leaked over several fan-generated websites. And she cringes at reports that state she’s determined to portray a much sexier Catwoman than her on-screen predecessors, Halle Berry and Michelle Pfeiffer.

So, naturally, Hathaway was a bit reticent during a recent interview to reveal many details of the new Batman movie, which is now in production and due for release in July 2012. Along with Hathaway, the cast will include Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Michael Caine as his faithful butler Alfred.

“I can’t talk about the interpretation because that is an hermetically sealed secret,” Hathaway said during press interviews for “One Day,” hosted by Focus Features. “I mean, if you want to take on Chris Nolan you’re more than welcome, but I’m intimidated.

“But the process for getting the ‘Dark Night Rises’ role was this – Chris met with a bunch of girls to have a general discussion,” she said. “And then he culled the list down about three and a half months later to do screen tests.

“Literally all of Hollywood – women are double X chromosomes, right? – so everyone with a double X chromosome in Hollywood was literally just sitting on pins and needles for three and a half months. Then, I understood he screen tested a few of us.

“I felt bad because we tested on Thursday and I think the Golden Globes were on that Sunday,” Hathaway recalled. “And I didn’t mean to but wherever I went that whole weekend I just kept bumping into Chris. And I’m like, ‘I swear I’m not stalking you. I’m not trying to force your hand. I’m not reading anything into anything.’ But it was really nice because a bunch of people that I had screen tested with, like the director of photography and the producer were there, because they were all nominated for ‘Inception,’ and they all made a point of coming up to me and telling me how well I did.

“So I thought it had gone well, but you never want to get your hopes up too high,” the actress said. “And so a few days later I was back in Brooklyn and my manager called me. And I answered the phone and she goes, ‘Meow.’ And I was like ‘Ha ha. Oh no, wait, really?’ And she said yes. And I just celebrated. Cel-e-brated! One of the best days of my life.”

- Dennis King

Sporting a carnival of eye-popping colors, slapstick comic characters, dazzling 3D imagery and the requisite double-entendre humor that should speak to kids and their adult chaperones on appropriate levels, “Rio” is one smart bird of a movie that shows its feathers brilliantly.

Produced by Fox’s Blue Sky animation division and ably directed by Carlos Saldanha, the guy who co-directed the first animated “Ice Age” epic (with Chris Wedge) and helmed the two successful sequels, this tropical lark might well do for the Brazilian tourist board what the previous films did for the Pleistocene Epoch.

It features a bright and chipper cast of familiar voice actors – lead by dry-witted Jesse Eisenberg as the flightless, domesticated macaw, Blu, and feisty Anne Hathaway as Jewel, the last macaw in the South American wilds.

The story is clever but largely pro forma for this sort of film: Blu lives a comfy, homebound life far from the tropics as the pet of strong-willed owner Linda (Leslie Mann) in the snowy Minnesota town of Moose Lake. Removed from the Brazilian jungles as a small bird, timid Blu never experienced the wild and never learned to fly.

One day, a Brazilian ornithologist named Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro) shows up in the Great White North to tell Linda that Blu may be the last male of his species. Tulio asks Linda to take Blu to his institute in Rio de Janeiro to mate with his female macaw, Jewel. Linda reluctantly agrees.

In Rio, all manner of chaos ensues as the meek Blu and the intrepid Jewel don’t hit it off; as the reluctant love birds are kidnapped by an inept gang of animal smugglers, and as the soon escaped Blu and Jewel benefit from the aid of a band of street smart city birds that includes the friendly canary Nico (Jamie Foxx), a rapping cardinal named Pedro (will.i.am) and a love-struck toucan named Rafael (George Lopez).

The macaws’ chief antagonist in all this is a nasty, psychotic cockatoo named Nigel (Jermaine Clement), who molts evil and spouts corny villain lines such as, “Like an abandoned school, I have no principal.”

Following a pattern set by other recent animal-centric animated features – “Ice Age,” “Madagascar,” “Kung-fu Panda” and the like – the evil and peril here are tempered by laughs, and the kid-friendly story folds in a few neat, life-affirming lessons about love, friendship, bravery and spirits soaring and wings spreading (a key joke concerns Blu’s fumbling efforts to finally learn to fly).

The 3D effects are most effectively rendered in a dizzying opening sequence amid a rainbow-hued flight of birds performing aerial acrobatics over the color-saturated Brazilian rain forest and in soaring, bird’s-eye view shots over Rio de Janiero, especially when the camera swoops around the city’s famed Christ the Redeemer statue.

While “Rio” adds nothing new to the tried-and-true formula of current animation features, it is a film rich with joyful plumage that makes up in exotic setting and feel-good humor what it lacks in narrative freshness.

- Dennis King

“Rio”

G
1:38
3 stars
Starring: voices of Jesse Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, George Lopez, will.i.am
(Mild off-color humor)

This week, the most interesting DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Hoodwinked” Blu-ray/DVD Combo

With feature animation becoming ubiquitous and nearly every major studio entering the game, it’s a good time to revisit one of the first modestly budgeted, off-Hollywood cartoon films to lend an irreverent, independent sass to the genre. The 2005 computer-generated feature “Hoodwinked” is due out Tuesday in a Blu-ray/DVD combo.

Dreamed up by an inventive crew of young filmmakers, this cheeky blush on the fairy tale “Red Riding Hood” is the work of brothers Cory and Todd Edwards and Preston Stutzman and Tony Leech, who learned their chops while making low-budget movies in Tulsa in the 1990s under the umbrella of Blue Yonder Films.

Their own cinema fairy tale took them to Hollywood where they cast around and eventually teamed up with former Disney animation exec (and Tulsa native) Sue Bea Montgomery, who took their project to Kanbar Entertainment (founded by inventor and downtown Tulsa investor Maurice Kanbar). By outsourcing their computer animation to the Philippines and India, the producers were able to make the film for a modest budget of $15-20 million.

“Hoodwinked” recasts the story as an antic, high-energy crime caper with Little Red Riding Hood, known as Red (voiced by Anne Hathaway), setting out to solve the mystery of the notorious Goody Bandit, who has been filching the cookie recipes of various woodland bakers.

While it co-opts the joke-heavy, pop-culture-driven style of the majors (slapstick antics for the kiddies; sharp verbal barbs for adults), it also invests that style with a rebellious sense of freewheeling attitude and brassy satire that’s increasingly homogenized out of the big guys’ product.

“Hoodwinked” succeeds on the strength of its sharp, ingenious writing, its clever characterizations, its youthful energy and its willingness to turn convention on its ear and follow a smarty-pants vision of fairy tales for the hip, media-savvy new millennium.

It’s Little Red Riding Hood by way of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies and “The Simpsons” and “Shrek” and a whole pop-culture panorama of references that inundate the filmmakers’ postmodern view of the world, and increasingly ours as well.

A sequel, “Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil” has been mired a legal disagreement but is tentatively set for release in late April.

“Hoodwinked” Blu-ray/DVD Combo includes a behind-the-scenes featurette, deleted scenes, commentary by the filmmakers, a music video and other extras. The two-disc set is rated PG and is being released by The Weinstein Company.

- Dennis King

“Love and Other Drugs” can’t quite settle on whether to be a frankly adult romantic comedy, a sharp satire of the go-go ’90s dot-com bubble and the rise of Big Pharma, or a tear-jerking degenerative-disease melodrama.

Anne Hathaway, Jake Gyllenhaal

So it waffles among the three: For a while it offers the often naked Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal locked in a sexually explicit affair in which neither can utter the L-word (love) or even consider the C-word (commitment); then it noodles around manically in the shark-filled waters of pharmaceutical sales and high-stakes drug development, and finally it dithers off to a highly conventional, soap-opera conclusion of the “Love Story” kind.
Loosely drawn from Jamie Reidy’s expose “Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman,” it’s a story in which the parts are much stronger than the whole.

Under the hand of director Edward Zwick (best known for epics like “Glory,” but also developer of the late-’80s TV series “thirtysomething”), the film is polished to a high sheen and populated by top-flight actors, even in the smallest of parts (the late Jill Clayburgh turns in a too brief but pithy turn in her final role). And the story gives its extremely photogenic co-stars a chance to inhabit complex and contradictory characters.

But, as scripted by Zwick, Charles Randolph and Marshall Herskovitz, the narrative never quite settles into a cohesive track.

Black sheep in a family of overachieving doctors, Jamie (Gyllenhaal) possesses the bland charm of a natural salesman. He’s especially good at selling women on the idea of hopping in bed with him. But, due to his sexual escapades, he can never hold down a job for long.

That is, until he happens into a trainee gig selling Pfizer pharmaceuticals in the Ohio River valley. In short order, two life-altering events occur. He meets the boho beauty Maggie (Hathaway), a collage artist suffering from early-onset Parkinson’s disease, and, shortly thereafter, Viagra is launched into the marketplace with fervent fanfare.

As Jamie and Maggie fall into a series of heated trysts with (supposedly) no strings attached, and as Jamie, under the rah-rah tutelage of sales manager Bruce (Oliver Platt, very amusing), rides the little-blue-pill wave to riches and star salesman status, the picture’s focus falters.

While it deals with Jamie’s adventures in the cutthroat world of legal drug peddling – featuring quirky encounters with hard-charging competitor Trey (Garbriel Macht) and ethically shady Dr. Knight (Hank Azaria) – it delivers sharp satirical thrusts at our profoundly compromised medical system and the oily practices of powerful pharmaceutical reps. There are even a few detours into gross-out Judd Apatow territory with Jamie’s doofus brother Josh (Josh Gad in a minor-note Zach Galifiankis role).

But the tough-minded comedy eventually gives way to soapy sentimentality as Maggie’s disease rises to the fore and presents the couple with bleak visions of their future together. Hathaway and Gyllenhaal are a very appealing and combustible pairing, and they almost manage keep things from feeling calculated and weepie at the end.

But not totally, and so “Love and Other Drugs” proves itself guilty of the very sort of hard-sell it satirizes. It’s peddling an easy aphrodisiac that seems potent in a darkened theater but wears off quickly in the stark light of day.

- Dennis King

“Love and Other Drugs”

R
1:53
2 1/2 stars
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Jake Gyllenhaal, Oliver Platt, Jill Clayburgh, Hank Azaria
(Strong sexual content, nudity, pervasive language and some drug material)