1. The Help was the big winner at last night’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, nabbing Best Cast, Best Actress (Viola Davis), and Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer), but the biggest surprise of the evening was Jean Dujardin’s victory over George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role category. [via The Wrap]

2. Thanks to a $6-a-ticket Groupon deal, Katherine Heigl’s poorly reviewed new film One for the Money came in third place at the weekend box office, earning a respectable $11.8 million. Topping it was Liam Neeson’s harrowing survival drama, The Grey, which took in $20 million, and Underworld Awakening, which made $12.5 million. [via I Watch Stuff]

3. The Sundance Film Festival handed out its 2012 awards over the weekend, with top honors going to buzzed-about titles like Beasts of The Southern Wild and The Surrogate; check out the full list of winners here.

4. The first teaser for Season 5 of True Blood is online, and while it doesn’t reveal any new footage, the tagline — “In Bon Temps, Nothing Stays Buried Forever” — suggests that a Russell Edgington-dominated storyline lies ahead. [via TVLine]

5. “You have to take a drink every time, and I mean every time, you hear the word ‘Scorsese.’ You’d be surprised how much that comes up in just casual conversation because people like to throw that thing around.” — Melissa McCarthy explains the drinking game that she and her Bridesmaids co-stars Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph came up with at last night’s SAG Awards.

Bonus Buzz: The Zombie Presidents Of The United States

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 for you this week from all-star directors and former child stars; check ‘em all out after the jump.

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When you have to keep an obsessive eye on film, music, books, visual art, television, the Internet, and all other manner of popular culture, something eventually has to give, and for us — well, for this author, anyway — it’s sports. An almost-complete disinterest in professional and collegiate sporting events can make one feel a bit of an outcast (and it certainly makes for a confusing Facebook feed; apparently some guy who’s really into Jesus won something important on Sunday?), but after faking it through high school and college, I can’t pretend to care anymore. Maybe it makes me a pencil-necked geek, but the idea of spending three hours watching a football going to and fro — particularly when there are still Hitchcock movies I haven’t seen — is simply unacceptable.

However, many of the same film fans who are patently disinterested in a Sunday afternoon of TV sports will gladly spend that same time planted in front of a sports-themed movie — basically the same thing, albeit with better camera angles and a scripted ending. (And the angles are the only difference in a wrestling movie, HA HA!) And that’s fine with this viewer; as I told a friend after its release, “I’d watch football every week if it looked like Any Given Sunday.” But cinephiles more sport-phobic than I (and they’re out there!) might prefer films that keep the game play squarely off-screen. In honor of today’s DVD release of Moneyball, one of the best of the bunch, we offer ten genuinely good movies about sports that are notable for their minimal sports action. Check them out after the jump, and add your own in the comments.

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[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 10, 2011.] Earlier this summer, a shocking number of our readers flocked to read (and amend) our list of the harshest author-on-author insults in history. But you know who is even more childish, trifling, vindictive, and nasty than your favorite scribes? Your favorite filmmakers. These directors may not have quite the same precision with the written word as those rancorous authors, but when it comes to pettiness, they can’t be beat. After the jump, we’ll run down 30 of our favorite slights, slanders, and cheap shots from filmmakers both classic and contemporary; we’d love to hear yours in the comments.

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[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 May 23, 2011.] A few weeks back, we mentioned that list of Steven Soderbergh’s “cultural diet” (films viewed and books read and TV watched over the course of one year), noting that, in one week, he took in Raiders of the Lost Ark no less than three times — and that he carefully pointed out that each viewing was in black and white. In writing about that list, I said that this was something “we’re totally going to do now,” and last week, I did. Guess what? Soderbergh’s right. Raiders is way better in black and white.

That little experiment got me thinking about other modern movies that might play better in this decidedly less-than-modern format. There is, we can all agree, just something about black and white. In his wonderful 1989 essay “Why I Love Black and White,” Roger Ebert wrote: “There are basic aesthetic issues here. Colors have emotional resonance for us… Black and white movies present the deliberate absence of color. This makes them less realistic than color films (for the real world is in color). They are more dreamlike, more pure, composed of shapes and forms and movements and light and shadow. Color films can simply be illuminated. Black and white films have to be lighted. With color, you can throw light in everywhere, and the colors will help the viewer determine one shape from another, and the foreground from the background. With black and white, everything would tend toward a shapeless blur if it were not for meticulous attention to light and shadow, which can actually create a world in which the lighting indicates a hierarchy of moral values.”

Once I picked the movies that we thought would work for this experiment, I realized that trying to just describe them in a standard post wouldn’t work at all. So I’m doing something different with this post: I made a little video for each title, with clips transformed to black and white and commentary explaining why each one was selected. Check out Raiders and my other choices after the jump.

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We thought it was strange when rumors circulated last year that Lars von Trier and Martin Scorsese were planning to team up for a remake of Taxi Driver. You know what’s even more bizarre? Michel Gondry’s new two-minute version of the movie, which he created for the French premiere of Hugo. As fans of Be Kind Rewind might expect, Gondry’s “sweded” remake is decidedly more arts and crafty than the original; colored pencils stand in for bullets, and when Travis Bickle (who’s played by the French auteur) delivers his famous “You talkin’ to me?” lines, the dramatic scene is suddenly transformed into something that’s wacky and adorable. Click through to check out the charming short now. Read More »

1. Chewbacca is making a non-singing guest appearance on the Christmas episode of Glee. Why? According to Matthew Morrison, there’s “a special within the episode that’s a throwback to the Star Wars holiday special and the Judy Garland Christmas special.” [via THR]

2. Martin Scorsese has revealed that his next film project will be a long-delayed adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, a story which focuses on a group of Jesuit missionaries in 17th century Japan. [via Slashfilm]

3. This image of Viggo Mortensen on the cover of New York Times Magazine has us convinced that he would have made a much better Benjamin Button than Brad Pitt. [via Best Week Ever]

4. Can you picture Jason Stackhouse having a one night stand with Zooey Deschanel’s awkward New Girl character Jess? Neither can we (unless there was some V involved), but it looks like it will be happening in an upcoming episode of the show. [via Vulture]

5. It has been announced that Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood will compose the score The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming film that’s believed to be based on the life of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Given how well this creative pairing worked for There Will Be Blood, we can’t wait to hear what Greenwood comes up with. [via Collider]

Bonus Buzz: Baby Chameleons Are Adorable

When we think about the films of Martin Scorsese, a few key words come to mind: gritty, dark, New York City, gangsters. But, as the fantastic infographic above — published by Fast Company as part of a great profile of the filmmaker — reminds us, Scorsese has actually mastered multiple genres and moods over the course of four decades as a major director. He’s still one of the best music documentarians, with a filmography spanning from The Last Waltz to this year’s George Harrison: Living in the Material World. Scorsese has even explored religion, in The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun. And, of course, his just-released, ecstatically reviewed Hugo represents two firsts for the filmmaker, who had never before made either a 3D or a kid’s movie. [via Slashfilm]

Over the past week, we’ve done features on mouth-watering feasts on film and parental-friendly playlists for your Thanksgiving dinner. We’ve looked at some of the most culturally-relevant birds that we could find and ranked TV’s best Thanksgiving-centered episodes — Zagat-style. Now it’s finally game day. But rather than forbidding you to eat things like Cherpumple Pie while simultaneously encouraging you to indulge in a booze-tastic four-course meal, we’ve decided that today we’re going to focus on what this holiday is really about: giving thanks. Click through for a list of the cultural gems that Flavorpill staffers have been the most grateful to experience this past year, and if you’re feeling in the holiday spirit, keep it going in the comments! Read More »

The most surprising thing about Martin Scorsese’s new film Hugo (out Wednesday) is how much more there is to it than has been indicated in the ad campaign, which presents the picture — probably wisely, from a mass-market standpoint — as a standard children’s adventure with a dose of magic and a dash of slapstick, all in 3D (of course). To be clear: it is all of that, though done with a skill and intelligence that puts most “family movies” to shame.

But Scorsese also uses the film as something of an Introduction to Cinema course for its young audiences — and, frankly, for older moviegoers who may not be as well-versed in the form as the encyclopedic director. There’s nothing dry or educational about it, but within the confines of the big-budget studio 3D holiday movie, he is also presenting the story of film’s earliest days — specifically of Georges Méliès, the artist behind hundreds of early silent fantasies, including the immortal 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. Read More »