With the holiday season in full swing, it’s easy to get burned out — cable stations are running crappy movies like Jingle All the Way and The Santa Clause 24/7, saccharine holiday music is blasting out of every speaker, and you’ve still got like half your list to buy, and what the hell do I get these freaks?
Calm down. Have an eggnog. Put some rum in it. And enjoy some of our favorite anti-Christmas movies — not films that hate the holiday, per se (though a couple of them do), but ones that cut through all that warmth and good feeling and get at the darkness underneath. Our contrarian Christmas viewing list is after the jump. Read More »
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. We’ve got eight new trailers this week, running the gamut from a big-budget superhero all-star tentpole to indies about cross-dressing and prostitution. Check ‘em out after the jump.
Read More »
1. Here is the full music video for “Countdown.” As expected, Beyoncé‘s baby bump totally steals the show — which is really saying something.
2. Johnny Depp has plans to produce a film about Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, and word is that he’d like to play the beloved writer as well. Given his previous experience portraying famous authors like Hunter S. Thompson and J.M. Barrie, we think this could be a good thing. [via Slashfilm]
3. The first trailer for James McTeigue’s crime thriller The Raven, which is set in 1840s Baltimore and stars John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe, has gone online. Watch it here.
4. A stage adaptation of The King’s Speech won’t be making its way to Broadway was quickly as was originally planned; instead, producers say that the show will premiere in in Guildford, England, and then tour theaters in five other British cities through mid-March. [via ArtsBeat]
5. In the wake of Wednesday night’s tragic news, the release date of Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming biography of Steve Jobs — which already holds the number one spot on Amazon — has been pushed forward to October 24. The highly-anticipated book is made up of material from hours of exclusive interviews with Jobs conducted over the course of two years. [via The Millions]
Bonus Buzz: Shot-For-Shot Remake Of Pete & Pete Intro
Everything Must Go, the low-key but masterful Will Ferrell comedy/drama (based on a Carver short story), hits DVD and Blu-ray today, and as with most recent releases, the disc includes a small selection of deleted scenes. More often than not, there isn’t a hell of a lot of value added by that particular bonus feature; we tend to see a lot of throwaway transition scenes, unnecessary exposition, or scenes so poorly written, directed, and/or played that the filmmakers were clearly wise to chop them. But on occasion, for reasons of pacing or time constraints, scenes are lost that are perfectly good in and of themselves — they merely don’t fit into the final version of the picture. That’s the case with Everything Must Go, which includes several charming little scenes that could easily have made the final cut.
So we decided to take a look at some of our favorite deleted scenes on DVD. A word of warning: as this is a phenomenon that only dates back to the age of the laserdisc, there is a decidedly modern bent to our rundown. While many classics were famously chopped by their studios or directors (Greed, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Sunset Blvd. leap to mind), no one saw any reason to keep those scenes around, and they’re (presumably) lost to the ages. (Maybe we’ll return to this topic at a later date.) At any rate, click through to see nine truly great deleted scenes — and one that may very well be the worst deleted scene of all time.
Read More »
What would Say Anything… look like in 2011? It hadn’t occurred to us that the 1989 film needed to be remade, but at a recent Television Critics Association event, Cameron Crowe admitted that he was considering a sequel. “I’ve thought about it from time to time and talked about it with John Cusack once and just said this is the only story that I kind of think there might be another chapter to that at some point,” he said. That got us thinking about where Lloyd Dobler and our other favorite ’80s teen movie characters would be now. Our best guesses are after the jump.
Read More »
Can you believe that it has been a quarter century since four young chums walked along train tracks in Oregon looking for a dead body? The Stand By Me 25th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray arrives in stores today, so you may want to brush up on what the film’s cast members have been doing since they created this timeless gem. We’ll catch you up, after the jump.
Read More »
Today at Flavorpill, we wondered if aliens are really responsible for the gentrification of Williamsburg. We learned a lot about the science behind kissing. We decided that if The Fantastic Mr. Star Fox was a real movie, we’d totally pay to see it in the theater. We found out why our skin gets wrinkled after spending too much time in the tub. We celebrated The Simpsons’s Milhouse, and characters like him elsewhere in the world of comedy. We wanted to know the back story behind this photo of Hunter S. Thompson, John Cusack, and Johnny Depp riding around in a convertible with a blow-up doll. We met Miss Charlie Brown, the richest dog in South Dakota. We couldn’t believe the news that Cap’n Crunch is being forced to walk the plank. We liked Entertainment Weekly‘s roundup of 15 well-matched young/old pairs in movies. And finally, we may have taken note of this recipe for awesome pot brownies from Jerome Chang, a former pastry sous-chef at Le Cirque and the man behind the DessertTruck Works food truck.
A few weeks ago, in honor of the oh-so-controversial teens of Skins, we rounded up ten of our favorite out-of-control TV teens. And although that show is far from finished making headlines, pop culture already has a new gang of wild youths to contend with. Gregg Araki, known recently for stoner comedy Smiley Face and bracing indie drama Mysterious Skin, is back with Kaboom, a film that hearkens back to his joyfully decadent ’90s fare. In celebration of Araki’s candy-colored ode to collegiate experimentation, we’ve put together a list of our favorite out-of-control teens on film.
Read More »
Reservoir Dogs. sex, lies, and videotape. El Mariachi. Clerks. Slacker. The Blair Witch Project. Blood Simple. Napoleon Dynamite. Memento. Yes, the Sundance Film Festival (which kicks off less than a week from today) is the Holy Grail for aspiring indie filmmakers, who can rattle off those titles (and more) as examples of the wildest-dream scenario: Make a movie on the cheap, take it to the ‘dance, ignite a fierce bidding war, sell it to a scrappy and ingenious distributor with deep pockets, watch as they unleash it on the world, do big box office, become the next Tarantino or Soderbergh.
Read More »
1. Everyone seems pleased by how not boring last night’s Emmy Awards were. Especially this opening number featuring Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Jon Hamm, Betty White, Joel McHale, Jorge Garcia, and the cast of Glee. Also worth watching: Jimmy’s farewell in song to the shows we lost: 24, Lost, and Law & Order.
2. This week Pitchfork is going to be counting down their list of the top 200 tracks of the 1990s. Here are the first 50 tracks.
3. John Cusack reports that he’ll play the role of Edgar Allan Poe in a film called The Raven. [via Twitter]
4. Publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary have confirmed that the third edition — which a team of 80 lexicographers began working on back in 1989 — may never appear in print. [via The Guardian]
5. Saturday Night Live is adding three new cast members this season: Taran Killam from Scrubs and two comedians from Chicago — Paul Brittain and Vanessa Bayer. [via NYP]
Bonus link: Jersey Circus
