After receiving over 600 entries in our Hunger Games haiku contest, it took some Katniss-strength fortitude to find one victor to take home the coveted grand prize, a pair of tickets to the March 12 Los Angeles premiere. You think choosing between Peeta and Gale is hard? Try selecting a winner from the vivid, emotional, romantic, lyrical, hilarious, and evocative poems submitted by Hunger Games diehards in our Cornucopia of words.
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Davy Jones, once named by Yahoo as the number 1 teen idol of all time, passed away at the age of 66 after suffering a heart attack. As a member of the Beatles-inspired musical group The Monkees, created for their eponymous television show in 1966, Jones rose to fame alongside bandmates Peter Tork, Mickey Dolenz, and Michael Nesmith and subsequently embarked on a successful solo musical career of his own; let's remember Jones with a look back at The Monkees, Jones' acting career, and the group's 1968 psychedelic cult film, Head.
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I won't waste space rattling off a list of the personal and professional troubles that have plagued Lindsay Lohan's life and career in recent years, so let's cut to the chase: Will her Saturday Night Live hosting gig this weekend -- her fourth time on the show after some admittedly hilarious prior turns -- show the world that La Lohan's ready to mount a comeback? Watch a healthy-ish-looking Lohan vaguely touch on her well-documented absence from glory in her SNL promos after the jump.
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Marvel's The Avengers has the pressure of living up to years of hype resting on its shoulders, but a new trailer for the May 4 superhero pic looks promising, if not terribly complicated. Plot details, like what Loki's up to and why? Save it for the movie. This is the chance to give every one of the Avengers their close-up. Well, except for you, Hawkeye.
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In honor of Feb. 29, and just for fun, let's flash back for a moment to the first horrible movie of the '10s. Take it away, Michelle Orange: "It's hard to care about the shabby treatment of the Irish, the Italian, or Amy Adams's poor, spindly ankles when one's own honor is called into question by the film's specious, finger-wagging terms. Every time an Irishman fell off of his chair or dispensed a tediously quaint piece of folklore, every time the decrepitude of Ireland's public works was asserted with a wink, and every time Amy Adams unloaded a shrill expectation that was met with abject humiliation, I felt a little more sorry for myself. Is this really what you think of me, Mr. Tucker? Is this what you think we all deserve? [...] This one's a heart-sinker, fromage of the smelliest order; I am mystified by its existence." Happy leap day!
File under bonehead move of the day: A 41-year-old man in Recife, Brazil was arrested and charged with using false documents and falsification of public document when he tried to open a bank account with a number of fake IDs in his possession, including one featuring a photograph of Jack Nicholson.
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Ridley Scott may or may not be spilling details on how Prometheus factors into the Alien franchise, but a new clip from the film sheds a few shards of light on the connection, and cleverly so: Watch Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland (CEO of Weyland Corporation, to become the future Weyland-Yutani Corp.) give a riveting TED Talk, circa 2023, promising a bright new future to the tech set.
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The Jack Russell Terrier Club of America loves your Uggie obsession, but a word of warning to those swept up in the hunt for lookalike pets: "Today, Jack Russell terriers are hot! Tomorrow, those of us who are truly devoted to the breed will be paying the price for this surge in popularity with greatly increased use of our rescue system.” [ANI via The Dog Files]
It's no secret that Disney's been scrambling to counteract bad tracking and mixed word of mouth on their mega-budgeted March actioner John Carter, so it's worth a look to see what they've done with the latest (and "final") trailer for the Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation. And behold! A trailer filled with nearly everything that makes John Carter worth going to see: Alien creatures, political intrigue, Taylor Kitsch in a loincloth, Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris, and lots of inventive, fantastical action.
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On the eve of a new trailer debut, Marvel has released a new poster for May's superhero superteam pic The Avengers. Here you'll find all your favorite heroes gathered in various states of action and repose: There's Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) stalking her prey while Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) contemplates a sandwich, with Captain America (Chris Evans) having a senior moment in the background as Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) hogs the spotlight. Typical. Get a full look at the cut & paste wonderment after the jump.
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Gaga waxes poetic on pearls and baseball in the March issue of V Magazine: "I lay down on the airplane back from Japan, tossing around some dashi, fondling my pearls. I watched the movie Moneyball for the first time. I began to laugh and smile as [Brad] Pitt talked romantically about the game. I suddenly imagined that my pearls were teeny-tiny baseballs. When a player hits a home run, the baseball is flung into an abyss of enigma and screams so great. It travels so far that only rarely is one caught in the bleachers. Where do these balls go? Where do all these wins get encased? Are they in a heavenly baseball land floating around for players who pass to acknowledge? Or do they disappear?" [V Magazine via Deadspin]
We were just talking about Scenes From a Marriage, too: The Swedish actor-writer-director Erland Josephson has died following a protracted battle with Parkinson's Disease. He was 88. Josephson came to prominence as a friend, theater colleague and eventual ensemble player for the great Ingmar Bergman, finally breaking into the leading-man ranks in the filmmaker's seminal relationship epic Scenes before eventually diversifying with roles in films by Peter Greenaway (Prospero's Books), Philip Kaufman (The Unbearable Light of Being) and, most indelibly, Andrei Tarkovsky, who cast Josephson in his 1986 masterpiece The Sacrifice. Very sad. R.I.P. [NYT]
This is lovely: Ridley Scott is executive producing the "self-portrait" doc Japan in a Day, in the crowd-sourced collected footage vein of Kevin MacDonald's Life in a Day, to draw attention to and benefit the survivors of Japan's devastating 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster. Fuji will donate 200 cameras to the project, which will cull from submissions uploaded to Youtube on March 11 with all profits reportedly going back to the victims. Now that's how you show support, Hollywood. [Deadline]
As The Hunger Games' March 23 release fast approaches, Lionsgate is churning out a steady stream of stills and goodies and tie-ins to stoke the fires of fandom and they've put a surprising bit of marketing muscle behind not only star Jennifer Lawrence, but co-star Elizabeth Banks and her supporting character, Effie Trinket. On second thought, maybe that's not so surprising; Effie's strikingly gaudy visual look, representative of image-obsessed Capitol culture in the fictional nation of Panem, offers more in the way of marketing opportunities than Katniss Everdeen's tomboy-turned-teen warrior ensembles.
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This just in: The makers of the forthcoming CW spin-off series The Carrie Diaries (a prequel to Candace Bushnell's franchise-launching Sex and the City novel) have found their new Carrie Bradshaw in Soul Surfer/Race to Witch Mountain/Bridge to Terabithia star AnnaSophia Robb. The series "chronicles Carrie’s coming of age in the 1980s when she asks her first questions about love, sex, friendship and family while exploring the worlds of high school and Manhattan." So it's basically Gossip Girl with a Carrie Bradshaw who looks nothing like the future Carrie Bradshaw. Oh, fine. Why not? [Deadline]
