New "Annie" movie less about "Tomorrow" and all about today
December 17, 2014
"Tomorrow" is still the signature song, but the "Annie," produced by a team that includes rapper Jay-Z and actor Will Smith, is all about today.
Quvenzhane Wallis, 11, who two years ago became the youngest person to win a Best Actress Oscar nomination, plays the foster kid living a hard-knock life in the multiethnic version of the Tony-winning 1977 Broadway musical that opens in U.S. movie
theaters on Friday.
Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks is transformed from a 1930s industrialist into the workaholic telecoms tycoon Will Stacks, (Jamie Foxx), while actor Bobby Cannavale adds a topical,
satirical edge as his scheming political campaign adviser.
The musical´s famous songs get a pop music makeover,sprinkled with the sounds of street jackhammers and trash can lids, and Annie´s fake parents are found in mass reality
TV-style auditions.
Cannavale said the updates bring the beloved musical "to a contemporary American audience which is one of many different colors, shapes, sizes and ethnicities."
"It is really exciting that kids can go and see themselves now in this movie in a way they were not able to before," Cannavale told ReutersCameron Diaz plays mean foster mother Miss Hannigan, as a pill-popping, failed pop star.
"This is a woman who thinks that to be loved she has to be famous, which is kind of an epidemic in our society right now," Diaz said.
Wallis made a big splash as an enigmatic child survivalist in the 2012 independent movie "Beasts of the Southern Wild." But like much of the rest of the "Annie" cast, she had little
previous experience as a singer and dancer and said she had not seen the stage musical or any of its many TV or film remakes.
