This week, we read about one of Rooney Mara’s first acting gigs, as a guest on Law & Order: SVU. She’s not proud of the moment, calling the role “ridiculous,” which, let’s be honest, it probably was. But there’s not necessarily any shame in that. After all, many great (or at least famous) actors started out doing bit parts in cheesy movies and TV shows, especially in horror flicks, crime procedurals and soap operas. Inspired by Mara, we’ve decided to take a look at some of the most notorious (and unknown) early roles of actors and actresses who have stood the test of time. Obviously, every actor has to start somewhere, so there are an unlimited number of these, but these are our personal favorites — be sure to chime in with your own in the comments! Read More »

Everybody loves a good holiday movie. When we wrote last week about the beginning of the season, and our favorite annual Christmas movies (Die Hard and It’s A Wonderful Life), our readers threw in their favorites: A Christmas Story, Christmas Vacation, Bad Santa, Muppets Christmas Carol, Miracle on 34^th Street, etc. But, lest we forget, every film of the season ain’t White Christmas; there are plenty of rotten holiday movies. (And, in fact, one of them is coming out tomorrow: steer clear of New Year’s Eve as though your life depends on it.) As many great Christmas movies as there are, it’s also a very tricky style to get right, requiring the proper mix of holiday cheer, sentiment, laughs, and warmth. It is pretty easy to screw that elixir up, and end up with something sickly sweet and utterly unwatchable. After the jump, we’ll gather up a few lumps of coal from our previous Christmas stockings.
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Nestled among this week’s new theatrical releases is The Big Year, a rather syrupy looking Bucket List riff co-starring Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson. Let’s be clear: we have not yet seen it. But we’re not holding out much hope for a movie that puts those three guys together and cannot find one single laugh to put in a trailer.

How could you combine three men as (granted, not always reliably) funny as these and not come up with a laugh riot? Quite easily, turns out. The recent cinema is all but littered with pictures that teamed up established comedic talents and thus sounded like sure-fire crowd pleasers, but which ended up tickling the funny bones of neither critics nor moviegoers. After the jump, we’ll run down ten comic combinations that misfired.

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Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. It’s rather a light week, presumably due to the holiday and/or the kickoff of the Toronto Film Festival (which serves as something of a starter’s pistol for the fall movie season), but you can check out the meager pickings after the jump.

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We’ve been hearing a lot of buzz recently about Jesse Plemons (ahem, Landry Clarke from Friday Night Lights) and his real-life band, Cowboy and Indian. Some of our favorite Landry scenes in FNL were related to his Christian speed-metal band Crucifictorious, but Cowboy and Indian may be, if anything, its polar opposite. Watching Landry croon bluegrass melodies on guitar and sip whiskey under a warm light in his recently released vido got us thinking about all the characters with bands who actually have bands in real life — and which ones are better. Click through for our roundup of bands from TV and film whose members are — for better or worse — actually musicians, and tell us if you agree with our verdicts in the comments!

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The Office is no 30 Rock in terms of its celebrity guest appearances, and we’re actually pretty thankful for that. But when the show announced last week that Will Ferrell has been cast as another branch manager “who arrives from the home office and proves to be just as inept as Michael Scott,” we’ll admit, we were pretty excited. After all, The Office has a pretty good track record with how they use their guest stars — even the super duper (yes, duper!) famous ones. Check out 10 of our favorite guest stars in Office history below and study up before Ferrell takes on Dunder Mifflin.

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1. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, making him the second youngest recipient of the award ever, after Charles Lindbergh in 1927. In case you’re curious, the Tea Party was the runner-up among Time editors (and the top choice among readers), followed by Julian Assange, Hamid Karzai, and the Chilean miners. [via MSNBC]

2. Meet the 2011 inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Alice Cooper, Neil Diamond, Dr. John, Darlene Love, and Tom Waits. The ceremony will take place on March 14th at the Waldorf Astoria. [via Billboard]

3. “Yeah, it’s cornier. Well, corny’s not a dirty word for us either. When you’re talking about a young-adult adventure story, there’s something very simple and elemental about those kinds of stories. You don’t want to change that. It’s what’s compelling about them as stories. It’s where they get their power.” – The Coen Brothers talk to Vanity Fair about the ending of True Grit

4. Adult Swim has ordered a pilot for a new live-action comedy about the skateboarding world called Shredd: The Jon Johnsonsen Story that will be co-produced by Jack Black and Jason Lee. Lee will also star in it. [via Screen Rant]

5. True Blood casting update: Dane DeHaan (Jesse from HBO’s In Treatment) will play Timbo, one of the teens Jason takes care of in Hotshot. Rebecca Wisocky (who is Principal Nowack on 90210) has scored the part of Queen Mab. [via Deadline]

Bonus Link: The Big Picture’s 2010 in Photos

Earlier this week it was announced that “Fight For Your Right Revisited,” a short film written and directed by Adam Yauch, would premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Now, thanks to Stereogum, we’ve got a photo of Seth Rogen, Elijah Wood, and Danny McBride, who are presumably playing Mike D, Ad-Rock, and MCA. The cast also includes Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, and Jack Black, and while we don’t know anything about the plot, we do have this tagline: “After the boys leave the party.” We’re intrigued. Click through if you need to refresh your memory on the original clip.

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Today at Flavorpill, we couldn’t decide whether to be impressed or depressed by the world’s first graffiti on polar icebergs. We were oddly mesmerized by this supercut of characters saying “blah blah blah” in films. We got a good look inside of Mark Zuckerberg’s old Palo Alto rental. We loved this series of minimalistic posters by Justin Van Genderen that look at some great comic book/graphic novel locations. We played a round of tech blog bingo. We decided that David Bowie and Bing Crosby are greater than Jack Black and Jason Segel — at least when it comes to dueting on “Little Drummer Boy.” We met Brad Ellis, the quiet bearded man who plays the piano on Glee. We thought that Snoop Dogg looked pretty sharp in a naval uniform. And finally, we wondered if moving to Boulder, CO, would increase our IQ. It’s number one on Portfolio.com’s list of America’s smartest cities, while New York didn’t even crack the top 25.

Today at Flavorpill, we tried to understand the multiple levels of symbolism at work in Katy Perry’s Simpsons cameo. We looked at famous skylines made out of old computer parts. We wished that TRON: Lebowski was getting a theatrical release. We met the female filmmaker spearheading the “film sleepy” genre, which actually sounds even more boring than mumblecore. We listened to Billy Joel’s entire catalog, all at once. We were intrigued by Adam Yauch’s “Fight for Your Right Revisited,” a short that is playing Sundance and features Elijah Wood, Danny McBride, Seth Rogen, Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, and Jack Black in its cast. We clapped our hands in excitement over the latest installment of Edith Zimmerman’s super hilarious Letters to the Editors of Women’s Magazines. We appreciated this comprehensive roundup of all of the Hulks on Twitter. And finally, we were surprised to hear that James Franco has an underwear line. But probably not as surprised as he was.