"We must treat these dog characters with the same respect we show human characters... no condescension, no looking down, no breaking character for the sake of a gag." And that, my friends, is part of the reason why Walt Disney's legacy on film has stood the test of time. After the jump, find deleted scenes and a nifty video culling notes from Disney's story meetings with collaborators on 1955's Lady and the Tramp.
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Lana Del Rey's 15 minutes may be nearing their end (she did just postpone her tour after tanking on SNL), but she's got one last charge towards relevance up her sleeve; just check out her new jam inspired by The Hunger Games called, simply, "Hunger Games." So Lana. So Katniss. "This District smells like rat piss/My name is Katniss/I play the Hunger Gaaaaames..."
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As previewed earlier today for select audiences around the globe, here's Sony's brand spankin' new theatrical trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man. (Find my full detailed Spider-Man preview Q&A recap, including descriptions of the sizzle reel that has not yet been released, here.) Take a look and weigh in, Spidey fans -- is this the version of the Marvel superhero we both need and deserve?
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Wow! What a Super Bowl! Sorry, Patriots fans, maybe next year. (Though probably not.) As a consolation, here's a new TV spot for Old Milwaukee beer, featuring the brand's periodic pitchman Will Ferrell. Or at least it's new unless you live in North Platte, Nebraska -- the only broadcast zone in which the commercial aired during Sunday's big game.
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Forget Transformers TV spots and Oscar frontrunner Jean Dujardin's racy French posters; let's talk about Best Actor nominee Gary Oldman and the Jersey Shore bump he's about to get from this dramatic reading of Snooki peeing her pants. Jimmy Kimmel put the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy star up to the stunt on his late night show -- Which is on television! That thing that Oscar voters watch!
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Banned in France! Well, kinda: Movie posters featuring Oscar-nominated Jean Dujardin, up for Best Actor for his turn as a silent film star in the sweet and wholesome The Artist, have been deemed too racy by French censors who recommended that certain billboards for Dujardin's French language film Les Infidels (The Players) be taken down. Judging from the film's redband trailer, Les Infidels is a comedy that features lots and lots of sex. Dirty sex. Upside down sex, suggest the naughty, naughty posters!
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On the one hand, the guy who made The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive is entitled to some kind of lifetime exemption to direct whatever he wants whenever he wants -- Duran Duran concert videos, Dior commercials, debt-ceiling riffs, pop albums, whatever. On the other hand, David Lynch may as well be the art-house Donald Trump at this point, pursuer of nominal glories bordering on the fetishistic at best and the gratuitously stupid at worst.
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Need poetic inspiration for the Hunger Games haiku you're composing for tickets to the premiere? Look no further than the newly unveiled Hunger Games Super Bowl trailer, which will air this weekend and features new footage of special moments with Prim, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), Cinna (Lenny Kravitz), and Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci), the all-important mockingjay pin, and the deadly goings-on in the Games.
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Josh Fox, whose Oscar-nominated 2010 documentary Gasland investigated communities affected by natural gas drilling, was arrested today while attempting to film a public House hearing on hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," according to Politico (via Indiewire). "This is a public hearing," Fox said as he was being handcuffed. "I'm within my First Amendment rights, and I'm being taken out."
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I don't know who makes this stuff up, but either way, this Super Bowl spot for Volkswagen featuring a fat dog, the interspecial scalawags from Star Wars's Mos Eisley cantina, and a certain climactic cameo is A) superior to any of that 3-D Lucasian mess heading to theaters next weekend and B) just refreshing enough to flush the taste of Matthew Broderick's Honda ad from one's mouth.
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David Fincher might never have actually entertained the thought of casting Yo-Landi Vi$$er of South African zef rap duo Die Antwoord as his Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (at most, she seems to have been a rabid pixie style icon for Rooney Mara's Oscar-nommed take on Lisbeth Salander), but how much more twisted and subversive might the diminutive Visser have been in the role, tasering old pervs and getting dirty in the "Feel-Bad Movie of the Year?" Watch the video for Die Antwoord's latest grime jam, "I Fink U Freeky," and let's brainstorm ways to make Yo-Landi's movie career happen, already.
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The mysterious Ferris Bueller-themed Honda commercial that I was telling you about last week has been unveiled. On the one hand, it's just Matthew Broderick and a string of references to Ferris Bueller's Day Off, with the actor calling out ill to work to go frolic around town in his Honda CR-V. So technically, no legacies were harmed in the making of this TV spot. On the other hand, for a guy who's supposed to be having a day off, I don't know if I've never seen Broderick work harder in my life.
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What, ya didn't know rapper/personality Ed Lover was a closet cinephile-slash-Oscar pundit? To borrow from the man himself: "C'mon, son!" In a searing video rant over at NextMovie, he reacts to this year's batch of Oscar nominees and glaring snubs (what, no Drive, Harry Potter, or "Dame Julie Dench?") and pretty much takes the words out of my mouth. "They had the Academy Award nominations the other day at like 7 o'clock in the damn morning... C'mon, son!"
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If Kim Novak sincerely thought that hearing music cues from Vertigo in The Artist was tantamount to artistic "rape," then wait until she gets a look at the expropriation binge underway at Press Play. The site, known for its terrific video essays on all things film, is in the waning hours of a "Vertigoed" contest that has found Bernard Herrmann's celebrated "Scene D'Amour" theme applied to everything from Star Wars to Freddy Got Fingered to -- praise God -- Jackass 2.
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We're going to be seeing a run of Lincoln films in the near future, but did Lincoln ever fight werewolves while rolling in a wheelchair tricked out with machine guns? I daresay he did not. (I mean sure, hunted vampires. But vampires are so 2008.) You know who did? Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that's who! At least, according to this new trailer for FDR: American Badass, which gleefully posits an alternate telling of American history.
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