Now that Christmas shopping season is in full effect, it’s time for your Flavorwire editors to swing into public service mode. Yes, yes, all the lists and links and commentary are fun, we know you’re saying, but where are the shopping tips? What do I get my movie-obsessed cousin Donovan? Do I have to actually communicate with him to find out what he wants? Those phone calls always last twice as long as I want them to, and his breathing patterns are disturbing! Fear no more, gentle reader, for after the jump, you’ll find a collection of films and books guaranteed to warm the hearts of your film fan relatives on Christmas morning, which they’ll enjoy to the fullest before fleeing the premises to catch the 1:20 matinee of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Check them out and add your own after the jump! Read More »
Today is the 56th birthday of one of our most beloved childhood companions: Bill Nye (yes, the Science Guy). To celebrate, and to prove that TV doesn’t always rot your brain, Mom, we’ve compiled a list of the coolest-ever educational shows for kids, on everything from biology to grammar to drawing. Click through to see our list and indulge in a little smarty-pants nostalgia, and be sure to let us know which of your favorites we’ve missed in the comments (yes, we left out Schoolhouse Rock, but it isn’t strictly a television show). Hey, maybe you’ll even learn something! Full disclosure: we did. Read More »
Today at Flavorpill, we looked at some of the most challenged books of the past year. We drooled over a few of these haute couture-inspired versions of the Disney Princess costumes. We wondered if the fried chicken necklace trend — as spotted on Nicki Minaj over the weekend in Vegas — will catch on. We learned what George Clooney considers to be the best 100 films made between 1964 an 1976. We laughed out loud (and possibly got a contact high) while watching this supercut of the most memorable movie stoners. We danced along to Weird Al’s latest polka medley of some recent pop hits. We liked the Guardian’s roundup of the 10 best songs based on books. We crushed a little harder on Mindy Kaling after reading her confess her irrational love for romantic comedies in the New Yorker. We wanted to adopt one of these adorable bear cubs. And finally, we thought that hacking a knitting machine from the ’80s so that it would print out Cosby sweaters with Bill Cosby’s face on them was the most inspired thing we’d seen in a long, long time.
Sean Penn, never the wallflower, has some opinions he’d like to share about his latest film, The Tree of Life. His thoughts may surprise you! (If you know absolutely nothing about Sean Penn, that is.) The actor told the French publication Le Figaro, “I didn’t at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I’ve ever read. A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.”
While Penn’s complaints may have resonated with the refund-refused moviegoers of Connecticut, most have seen it as rather bad form—particularly for a critically-acclaimed picture that is still in general release. On the other hand, he’s certainly not the first actor to publicly diss his own work; we’ve collected some of our favorites after the jump.
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When Universal announced last year that an epic adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower was in the works, which would include a trilogy of feature films directed by Ron Howard and a two-season television series, it sounded like a massive undertaking — from both a creative and financial perspective. This week, the studio decided it was too massive and pulled the plug on the project, breaking the hearts of fanboys and King readers the world over.
From the beginning, some had wondered if Howard was the right director for the project — now, unless the filmmaker attempts to set the project up elsewhere (unlikely, as both Howard and his Imagine production company have a long history with Uni), we’ll never know. It seems that we can add The Dark Tower to the long list of proposed book-to-film adaptations by famed directors that never saw the light of day. We’ve assembled ten of them after the jump; add yours in the comments.
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Earlier this morning the Primetime Emmy nominations were announced, and the internet is abuzz over who deserved recognition and who was outrageously snubbed. If there’s remotely the same kind of interest in the nominations as there has been in years past, then TV fans and critics are already having a field day. But before we weigh-in on what we think of this year’s crop, let’s take a look at some of the oddest nominees in Emmy history.
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The first season of Louie, the FX sitcom written and directed by star Louis C.K., hits DVD and Blu-ray today; this innovative, somewhat subversive, and reliably uproarious series takes the notion of the tightly-constructed stand-up sit-com and turns it on its head, with a stream-of-consciousness narrative style and surrealist streak that brands it a true original. Of course, the stages of comedy clubs (and, before that, coffee houses and vaudeville stages) have been television’s most reliable source of comedy stars; Louie is the latest in a very long line of television series created for (and sometimes by) stand-up comedians.
In assembling this list of our favorites, we concentrated only on those who starred in their own series, rather than in a supporting role in someone else’s (so no Andy Kaufman, Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Billy Crystal, or Kathy Griffin); only those whose sitcoms were hits (sorry, Margaret Cho); and only those who were successful stand-ups first (hence, no Larry David — by his own admission). The rest is opinion, and sorry, there’s no convincing us that either Tim Allen’s stand-up act or Home Improvement were funny. With those parameters in mind, our list of the best stand-ups-turned-sitcom stars is after the jump.
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While the delivery methods might be more inventive these days (ahem, Twitter), the idea of celebrity endorsements is nothing new. In fact, if anything has changed over the past few decades, we’d say that today’s stars must have better publicists/managers/image consultants/etc., because for the most part their brand choices make some kind of sense — at least in comparison. After the jump, find a suited up Woody Allen crawling out of a gigantic conch shell for a taste of Smirnoff, Sammy Davis, Jr. stuffing Alka Seltzer into his Christmas stocking, and a very serious looking Bogey shilling boxed chocolates.
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Today at Flavorpill, we were impressed that someone took the time to scrawl the entire first chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone on a bathroom stall wall. We found Ulysses much easier to understand when translated into bar codes. We were impressed by these customized Nike Dunks inspired by Firefox, Twitter and Google, which were designed by Daniel Reese. We were intrigued by rumors that Kevin Costner may have a “key role” in Zack Snyder’s Superman movie. We were surprised to hear that Bill Cosby agrees with Katie Couric that a “Muslim Cosby Show” could help combat Islamophobia in America. We learned that an Egyptian man has named his daughter “Facebook” in tribute to success of protests. We loved this list of 10 British costume dramas to Netflix while we wait for Downton Abbey to return. And finally, we feared the potential trickle down effect of the face tattoos trend in the hip-hop world. Will kids in the suburbs be requesting the “pink duck” in the not-so-distant future?
Since the Revolutionary War, Americans have been getting revenge on the British by appropriating their culture. A Brit made the first television broadcast in 1925, but since we’d like to think we can claim the medium as our own, it’s only natural that we do everything we can to steal their successful telly programming. Sometimes it works, sometimes it gets lost in translation, but we never stop trying. As we look forward to (or, more accurately, dread) MTV’s remake of the fantastic UK series Skins, which premieres in January, here’s a look at the best and worst American versions of UK TV shows.
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