[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we're revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published August 3, 2011.] As Roger Ebert says, “It’s not what a movie is about, but how it is about it,” so who knows, maybe The Change-Up isn’t going to be an inane R-rated update of a 20-plus-years-stale narrative. (But it sure as hell looks like it.) We can’t say we’re too hopeful, though, particularly considering its numb-skulled print campaign, which high-lariously juxtaposes Jason Bateman’s miserable handling of twin infants with Ryan Reynolds’s delighted groping of twin models. They’re both in white! Which do you want — babies or babes? HAW HAW! (Indiewire’s @erickohn twit-pic’ed a piece of “subway film criticism” that nailed the issue fairly effectively.)

The movie poster is a tricky form, a very specific merging of art and commerce that must sell a product but hopefully also convey the essence of the picture in question. Occasionally, the marketers and artists responsible for them can run afoul — either in the court of public opinion, or in the boardrooms of the MPAA, who not only rate films but control their advertising. After the jump, we’ll take a look at ten movie posters that stirred up some controversy — sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

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In 2009, audiences were knocked out by Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander, the punk lesbian hacker at the center of Niels Oplev’s Swedish film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and one of the most poweful heroines to hit the big screen this decade. Yesterday, a new Lisbeth Salander, played by Rooney Mara, was born in David Fincher’s English-language version. So who’s the better Lisbeth? We rounded up the critics’ widely divergent opinions. Tell us yours in the comments. Read More »

Anticipation has been building up for David Fincher’s remake of revenge thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, starring Rooney Mara in the role of the ass-kicking Lisbeth Salander. We survived the somewhat controversial nipple-filled poster and new H&M clothing line to see the film open in theaters tomorrow. There’s been a lot of chatter about what will happen after audiences catch a glimpse of the Stieg Larsson story retelling, as the director has been vague about a sequel.

Slash Film is reporting that Fincher has now expressed the desire to shoot both possible follow-ups (The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest) back-to-back since each book essentially tells the same story.

“Yes, the second two books are very much one story and it doesn’t seem prudent to me to go to Sweden for a year. Come back for a year. Put out the second one. Go to Sweden for a year. Come back for a year,” Fincher shared during a recent press conference. “I don’t think Rooney wants to be doing this four years from now. So I think that would be crazy especially given the sense that it’s really one story that’s kind of bifurcated in the middle.”

This is all talk for now, as we wait for Fincher’s box office performance totals to roll in. Are you already anticipating more Mara and Daniel Craig as journalist Mikael Blomkvist?

1. Last night HBO debuted yet another enigmatic teaser trailer for Season 2 of Game of Thrones. Watch the very dramatic, yet totally spoiler-free clip here.

2. The trailer for the third installment of the Men in Black franchise — which features Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones reprising their roles, as well as Josh Brolin as young Agent K — has also landed online. The movie hits theaters on May 25th. [via The Daily What]

3. Crime novelist John Sallis, whose book was the basis for Drive, is now working on a follow-up called Driven, which is expected to hit bookshelves in April 2012. Hopefully this means that we’ll be getting a film sequel as well. [via The Playlist]

4. Mike Myers — who recently signed a deal with New Line for a fourth Austin Powers movie — is planning to bring a musical version of the franchise to Broadway; while the actor would be “heavily involved in writing the show,” he does not plan to star in it. [via NYP]

5. The lovely Meryl Streep will appear on the cover of Vogue for the first time next month. At 62 years old, she’s the oldest cover model in the fashion magazine’s history. [via Jezebel]

Bonus Buzz: The 40 Best Protest Signs Of 2011

By now, you’ve probably heard the Karen O-fronted cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s soundtrack for David Fincher’s much-anticipated The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If you haven’t, it’s worth a listen — the Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman, who claims total ignorance to the classic band, sings a dark, angsty version of the track that is, as far as we can tell, frankly perfect for the film. The digital soundtrack came out on Friday, and the physical version will ship on December 27th. In the meantime, however, we’ve just been treated to a strange, manic video for “Immigrant Song” created by Fincher for the title sequence of the film. Head over to Pitchfork to watch.

Every Wednesday in December, Flavorwire will take a look back at the year in film — the stories, the performances, the movies that we were talking about in 2011. For this week, let’s revisit some of the year’s movie controversies, shall we?

We film folk can get worked up pretty easily, so while we found plenty of things to get all a-tizzy about in 2011, the assembled list of 2011′s film controversies doesn’t exactly read like end-of-the-world, stop-the-presses stuff. But these things are important to us! We’re easily excitable! Thus, ratings and posters and Oscars and Darth Vader’s scream were well worth talking about — then, and now. Join us after the jump to relive some of the year’s very big deals. Read More »

1. All of the details for Trent Reznor’s soundtrack for David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which he composed with Atticus Ross, have been released — including the fact that it’s over three hours long. You can also now hear the full version of Reznor and Karen O‘s cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” as well as a 35-minute sampler of the album, here.

2. Evidently, James Murphy is an actor now. He has a supporting role in The Comedy, a film that stars Tim Heidecker (of Tim and Eric Awesome Show fame) as a guy who “whiles away his days with a group of aging Brooklyn hipsters, engaging in acts of recreational cruelty and pacified boredom.” Okkervil River’s Will Sheff is in it, too. [via Pitchfork]

3. “I was just thinking about my funeral and stuff a couple days ago and thinking who would be at the funeral People who I want to be in the funeral? I wanna have world leaders that were, like, affected, that said, you know, ‘Kanye gave me my shot here.’ Or ‘he pushed me,’ or ‘he told me to believe in myself,’ or ‘when I saw this, it made me feel like that.’ I wanna affect people like that when I, like, pass away.” – Evidently, Kanye West is feeling a bit reflective these days.

4. Showrunner Steven Moffat claims that in spite of what David Yates recently said, there are no real plans for a Doctor Who movie at the moment, and if it does happen, the film will need to star whoever is playing the Doctor on the TV series at that time, and not some Hollywood actor. That’s good news for Matt Smith. [via The Sun]

5. According to Men’s Health magazine, these are the 10 happiest and saddest cities in America. Are you as surprised as we are by a few of the “happiest” cities?

Bonus Buzz: 15 Muppets Auditioning For Other Roles

1. Scarlett Johansson plans to make her full-length directorial debut with Summer Crossing, an adaptation of Truman Capote’s lost novella. The story, which is set in post-World War II New York City, follows “an 18-year-old girl breaking free of her rich, smothering, family to discover her own identity and sexuality.” [via Variety]

2. Emmy Award-winning actor Jim Parsons could be returning to Broadway this spring to star in a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy Harvey; whether or not he plays Elwood P. Dowd, a man who claims to be friends with a six-foot-tall rabbit, hinges on if he can juggle the gig with his schedule for The Big Bang Theory. [via ArtsBeat]

3. Deadline is exclusively reporting that Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker will be reteaming with director David Fincher on his upcoming remake of 20,000 League Under the Sea.

4. Some exciting news for lit nerds and/or fans of period dramas: Vulture reports that HBO is partnering with the BBC to develop a new mini-series based on Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel Wolf Hall.

5. Did you realize that standup comedian and former Grace Under Fire star Brett Butler wound up broke and homeless after a long battle with drug addiction? She’s now hoping to have a comeback of sorts with a reality show about her psychic abilities. [via THR]

Bonus Buzz: Astronomy Photography Of 2011

Any time you have the gumption to pose a list of the ten definitive anything, you’re going to get some pushback. But because Flavorwire has the greatest readers in the world (/blatant sucking up), our post last week of The Most Definitive Music Cues in Film History prompted very little venom, and several excellent additions (including a few that had been on our first, wildly overambitious draft). The concept, once again, is that certain films use pop music cues so well that the movie and the song get inextricably bound together in your head; when you think of the movie, you hear the song, and when you hear the song, your see the film in your mind’s eye. We’ve picked our ten faves from the addendums offered by you, the reader, after the jump; feel free to add more of your favorites in the comments. Read More »

Darren Aronofsky’s unsettling crystal meth PSAs made the rounds earlier this week. The Black Swan director worked with the Meth Project Foundation to trouble us with visions of intense drug addiction, and boy did it work. Aronofsky isn’t the only gifted filmmaker who has dabbled with short-form film and the telly advertising world, however. Many auteur moviemakers found their start on TV, creating some of the most memorable works that have ever been brought to prime time. Others just enjoy creating little bites of film-esque entertainment as a break from the Hollywood machine. Whatever the reasons, the condensed screen time provides a fascinating snapshot of each director’s overall style. Click past the break for a look at ten directors who made creative commercials for the small screen.
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