Everyone's got their thing for getting through a rough week. (Read: Every week.) Some people do yoga, others meditate, more still pray, drink, cower tearfully in the office bathroom for 30 minutes at a time, or indulge any number of other palliatives. Myself, I increasingly find myself turning to "Firecracker," quite possibly the greatest unofficial music video ever created.
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The new trailer for People Like Us (nee Welcome to People) is here, featuring Chris Pine and Elizabeth Banks as siblings who meet only after their father dies. The inheritance/estrangement/salvation plot (and a vaguely incestuous vibe that the trailer mostly counteracts with a few key shots of Olivia Wilde as Pine's wife) thickens around the family, with Michelle Pfeiffer dropping in as Pine's mother, which is just as bizarre as I expected it would be. Overall, though? Screenwriter Alex Kurtzman's directorial debut looks all right!
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The new trailer for People Like Us (nee Welcome to People) is here, featuring Chris Pine and Elizabeth Banks as siblings who meet only after their father dies. The inheritance/estrangement/salvation plot (and a vaguely incestuous vibe that the trailer mostly counteracts with a few key shots of Olivia Wilde as Pine's wife) thickens around the family, with Michelle Pfeiffer dropping in as Pine's mother, which is just as bizarre as I expected it would be. Overall, though? Screenwriter Alex Kurtzman's directorial debut looks all right!
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The stirring 2009 documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty took us behind the scenes at Disney Animation to reveal what it's like when good things happen to good people. But before that, there was The Sweatbox, the 2002 doc that exposed how bad things happen to good people at the notoriously demanding studio — a revelation that virtually ensured the film would never see the light of day. The crackdown worked once and may yet work in the future, but for now, YouTube has all 95 unfinished minutes available for a rare look.
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The team at NextMovie today offers this stirring mash-up of deep thoughts proffered by Morgan Freeman — or at least characters played by Morgan Freeman. Even the guy in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves! Incredible.
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Move over, Prometheus: David Cronenberg and Robert Pattinson are here with a 30-second foreign teaser for Cosmopolis, their adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel about a young billionaire's dark, demented and all-around catastrophic 24-hour Manhattan odyssey. And it looks amazing.
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Some years from now, after the dust around the megabudget John Carter debacle settles, and the heads that do wind up rolling in its aftermath come to rest, some expert arbiter of Hollywood travails will survey the carnage and write the definitive tale of what went wrong with Disney and director Andrew Stanton's sci-fi gamble. And you know what? I'd bet $10 right here and now that the real story won't deviate much from the one depicted in this no-budget animated retelling.
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Monday we unveiled the American poster for the Tribeca-bound import Death of a Superhero, and now it's time for a first look at the film's trailer. It's got it all: Live-action, animation, death-defying stunts, the irresistible Aisling Loftus on a scooter, and no less than Andy Serkis demanding to see young star Thomas Brodie-Sangster's war face. Rahhhr! Read on and have a look.
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A week ago brought the first teaser for The Road We've Traveled, a Davis Guggenheim-directed, Tom Hanks-narrated, campaign-driven lighting round through the Obama presidency to date. Last night brought the full 17-minute video, and while it squeezes a lot — from the economy to healthcare to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — into 17 minutes, it's probably most interesting around the 10:35 mark as Joe Biden takes us behind the scenes on the night Osama bin Laden was killed.
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"But this time it's no daydream," the narrator intones. "This is it! You've got the equipment, the practice, the coaching, the training. You have the help of your parents, your coach, your school. But now, brother, it's all up to you." So concludes Modern Football, a half-ad/half-gridiron tutorial recently unearthed at a Kansas City flea market for $10. It's an uncanny bit of portent as well for the rookie director behind the camera, a 26-year-old Missourian named Robert Altman.
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The first trailer for the lonnnng-awaited adaptation of On the Road is here — an international/market spot (the film doesn't yet have US distribution) showcasing Jack Kerouac's shambolic literary stylings and director Walter Salles's ensemble including leads Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart and a kind of staggering supporting ensemble: Viggo Mortensen? Kirsten Dunst? Amy Adams? Terrence Howard? Steve Buscemi? Elisabeth Moss? You can't Beat it!
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Get one minute and 41 seconds closer to the end of this godforsaken week with this latest video from the masterminds at Taiwanese animated-news institution NMA, now featuring the sordid story of Morgan Freeman, his step-granddaughter, some aliens and Woody Allen for good measure. Apologies to anyone I left out.
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I know we were kinda just talking about this, but at a point in time when women's rights and representation are threatened at seemingly every turn by bureaucrats, ideologues, campaign financiers and bald-faced misogynists, how predictable should it have been that the new trailer for What to Expect When You're Expecting — the best-selling, most influential maternity guide in the known universe — would marginalize the actual mothers and focus almost entirely on the guys? Don't change, Hollywood! Actually, yes. Maybe change just a bit.
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With relations between the sexes having recently hit a dispiriting cultural low (news avoiders may consult Time Magazine's helpful round-up "Are Women People?" for cringe-inducing details), now is as good a time as any to ask and perhaps answer the burning question, "Why don't women narrate movie trailers?" Conveniently, the BBC is here to offer some insights.
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It wasn't all tepid, frustrating and demoralizing Sunday night at the Oscars. We'll always have the red carpet with all its bitchy tweets, tuxedo sabotage, wheelchair awkwardness and wackadoodle screen vets getting the live, televised attention they so richly, richly deserve. Take Richard Dreyfuss and Nick Nolte, for example. Who was crazier?
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