Last weekend, two new films opened by famous filmmakers who are, to varying degrees, getting the hell out of the film business. Haywire director Steven Soderbergh has been teasing his early retirement for months now; it’s somewhat comical, actually, the way he keeps adding in projects that he wants to do before his self-imposed exile. George Lucas, who spent decades getting Red Tails made, told The New York Times that he was retiring, at least from the business of making blockbuster films (maybe).

Soderbergh is 49. Lucas is 67. Making movies doesn’t have a mandatory retirement age, like fighting fires or flying planes. But should it?

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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. 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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We’ve been looking forward to Friday for a while here at Flavorwire: it’s release day for Haywire, Steven Soderbergh’s uncommonly smart, disarmingly taut, ridiculously entertaining action/spy picture, an unexpectedly frisky exception to the rule that January releases are generally terrible. The reason for its creation — and a big part of its success — is the leading performance of MMA fighter Gina Carano (more on her later). Though she had a minor role in one previous film, Gina’s terrific starring turn got us thinking about other non-actors who made a big splash in their debuts; after the jump, we’ve collected ten of them for your perusal.

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1. It has been announced that Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Melissa McCarthy will be among the presenters at this year’s Golden Globe Awards, which airs this Sunday night at 8pm on NBC. So, there you go, that’s three celebrities who aren’t afraid to be in the same room with the evening’s host, Ricky Gervais. [via EW]

2. Exciting news for contemporary art lovers: Yesterday, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board approved the hire of Sheena Wagstaff, the chief curator at the Tate Modern in London for the past ten years, to oversee a new department at the Met that will be devoted entirely to work from the 20th and 21st century. [via Daily Intel]

3. Apparently director Alexander Payne already has a lead actor in mind for Nebraska, his black-and-white followup to The Descendants, but the person who he wants hasn’t even read the script for the father/son road trip comedy yet. Any guesses who it could be? [via The Playlist]

4. Diplo has a picture book called 128 Beats Per Minute: Diplo’s Visual Guide to Music, Culture, and Everything in Between coming out in April on Universe Publishing, a Rizzoli imprint. He also thinks that this year’s Coachella lineup looks pretty lame. [via Pitchfork]

5. In case you missed this yesterday, the very intense first five minutes of Steven Soderbergh’s excellent new action flick Haywire are streaming on Hulu. We’ve seen the entire film, and promise you that it’s definitely worth checking out in theaters when it opens on January 20th.

Bonus Buzz: The Original Keyboard Cat Has Been Found

[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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Hey, guess what: 2012 is like, four days away. Exciting, eh? Well, aside from that whole Mayan calendar/end of the world business. And that there’s going to be a Presidential campaign all damned year, and the economy’s still in the toilet, and Community is on a “hiatus”… On second thought, 2012 is already looking pretty terrible, and it hasn’t even started yet.

No, wait! There will be new movies! Many, many new movies. And don’t kid yourself: plenty of them are going to be terrible (I mean, there’s a Battleship movie coming out, for God’s sake). But some of them look awesome! So in the spirit of cautious optimism, join us after the jump for a look at ten 2012 releases that we’re genuinely looking forward to.

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As the year winds to a close, you’ve seen plenty of “best of 2011″ lists — and we’ve certainly contributed a few of our own to the mix. Wading through them can lead to a sense of fatigue; yes, we liked The Artist and Hugo and The Descendants and The Tree of Life just fine too, but it feels like we’re reading praise for all the same movies and performances, everywhere we look. So, late in the “best of” season, we wanted to take a moment to spotlight a few films and actors who, we feel, are getting overlooked in the year-end shuffle. Our picks are after the jump; yours (we hope) will join in the comments.

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1. Soon-to-be retired filmmaker Steven Soderbergh wasted no time lining up a replacement project for The Man From U.N.C.L.E.; Vulture reports that he plans to shoot The Bitter Pill, a pharmapsychology thriller, in the brief window he has before beginning work on his final project, a Liberace biopic called Behind the Candelabra.

2. Bryan Singer (X-Men and Superman Returns) is finalizing a deal to both direct and executive produce the pilot of Bryan Fuller’s reboot of The Munsters for NBC. We’re not certain that this is good news for anyone involved. [via Deadline]

3. Variety reports that Harrison Ford is among a group of actors being looked at for the role of Colonel Hyrum Graff in Gavin Hood’s forthcoming adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s award-winning sci-fi novel Ender’s Game. We think it’s a perfect fit — and after 30 years, it’s about time that he returned to space. [via Slashfilm]

4. Here’s the trailer for this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special, “The Doctor, The Widow, and The Wardrobe.” It will premiere on BBC America on December 25 at 9pm, following a marathon of all 13 episodes of the recently aired season six.

5. According to Publishers Weekly, Microwave for One by Sonia Allison is the worst book of all time.

Bonus Buzz: A One-Percenter Speaks

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 seven new trailers this week, including, yes, Hunger Games; check ‘em out after the jump. Read More »

Last weekend, a “secret screening” at Los Angeles’ AFI Fest marked the first public outing for Haywire, Steven Soderbergh’s new… mixed-martial-arts based action/spy thriller. Come again? Yes, according to Movieline’s report from the post-screening Q&A, Soderbergh cooked up the project while on the rebound after losing Moneyball, stumbling across one of MMA star Gina Carano’s fights and deciding to build a movie around her. While Soderbergh’s filmography has been fairly esoteric, genre-wise (he’s skipped from experimental dramas to big-budget heist movies to dark comedies to coming-of-age tales to sci-fi), we certainly didn’t expect him to get all hyped up about making a film that he would compare to the early pictures of Steven Seagal.

But maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here: too often, filmmakers become defined by a certain type of movie, locked into a specific genre or style. Some break out occasionally (see Scorsese’s upcoming Hugo), and a few have made a career of genre-jumping (think Danny Boyle). But back in the “studio era,” directors-for-hire like Howard Hawks and John Ford were given assignments, and had to adapt themselves into journeymen who could make any kind of film with style and skill. After the jump, we’ve compiled a short list of a few filmmakers who we’d like to see class up some B-movies.

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