After oodles of anticipatory action, the full Daft Punk x Pharrell single is finally here, and so now the Internet can start arguing about it (vis-à-vis the correctness of the hype cycle, over/underratedness, classic dance music vs. neo-EDM, etc. etc.). Don't fall into the trap! Just put this on blast, on repeat, find a friend, and do something along the lines of this here for a while:
First things first: In a new video released to TMZ, Lil Wayne shows himself for the first time since his terrible seizure scare, says he's "more than good," and actually seems like he is. I mean this is a person we all thought might actually die a week ago, and now he's eating lollipops and announcing tours and palling around with T.I.? He's also totally indifferent about his new record I Am Not a Human Being 2 coming out ("my bum-ass album coming out March 26 ... it's 26? You're gonna get that shit or you won't. If not, it's whatever"). Is it because it's secretly a contractually mandated, mailed-in release? Is it because, as is necessitated by any brush with death, he's had all his priorities radically transformed and now just wants to live and think and appreciate ladybugs? Or is it because he knows his last album, Tha Carter IV, sold nearly a million copies its first week despite not being very good, meaning our dude is at a point of lifelong, tween-based fame where he could release the pencil-scratch noises from the latest Trukfit zebra-print-hoodie design session and still move major units? Oh, also: above, his new, surprisingly kind of dope new single.
Here's what I didn't expect would happen when I saw Brave this summer: that I would bawl like a damn baby. This is not to say that Pixar movies haven't made me cry before — I saw Up and Finding Nemo, and the look on Sully's face at the very end of Monsters, Inc. might set me off just remembering it ... yep, there I go. But I thought I'd be impervious to Brave. Between How to Train Your Dragon and the continuing existence of Gerard Butler, I thought that Scottish stuff was all played out.
If I'm being perfectly honest, the Scottish stuff is a bit played out. Kilts, bare bums, haggis, Braveheart face-painting references ... we get it. But I didn't worry about that stuff too much because I was so engrossed by the mother-daughter stuff played out by Queen Elinor (voice of Emma Thompson) and Princess Merida (voice of Kelly Macdonald). I just didn't expect Nicole Holofcener-level psychological realism in a CG-animated kids' movie, but it's very effective and very true — and will, I hope, go completely over the heads of its juvenile target audience! (Speaking of kids: I advised a lot of my friends with young children not to see the film in theaters due to bear-related scariness. Now that it's on home video, so that it can be watched in full daylight and paused, if need be, for reassurance, it might be OK.)
The big news from this weekend's box office breakdown is that, as expected, The Amazing Spider-Man crushed it. Opening on July 4, Eduardo Saverin's Spidey rolled into $65 million in its first weekend and $140 million in its first six days. As EW explains, those numbers are actually lower than the pace set by all three of Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man movies, none of which had the benefit of boosted 3-D and IMAX ticket prices. But considering both the possibility of the quickie reboot flopping altogether, and the fact that this is just the first installment of a whole new franchise, the numbers (and an A- Cinemascore) are wholly promising.
Don Winslow’s on the kind of roll that’d make other crime writers want to fold him up in a cement sofa bed next to Jimmy Hoffa. Not only is his critically beloved New York Times best seller Savages getting the full Hollywood treatment as a film by Oliver Stone this weekend — fortunately, gonzo U-Turn/Natural Born Killers Stone, not What’s-This-Love-Story-in-Wall Street 2 Stone — but Winslow’s latest, the Savages prequel Kings of Cool, is again on the best seller list, and Warner Brothers picked up his Go-master/hit-man novel Satori as a vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio. And, oh yeah, he’s writing a script with Chuck Hogan (i.e., the Prince of Thieves author who was indirectly responsible for giving us the Jeremy Renner/Ben Affleck Southie showdown in Affleck’s adaptation The Town). It’d be easy to schaden-hate him, if his novels weren’t so damn fun — full of crackling wit and head-turning action, all with a sly eye for the social ills of the drug trade he knows so well.
Django Unchained - International Trailer (December 25)
[Note: If you can't see the videos, please try another browser. We put the trailers in this post, we promise.]
Dan Silver: I admire Quentin Tarantino for a great many reasons, but none more than his skillful employment of hyperbole. Not so much in his dialogue or set pieces, but as an overarching motif in all his films. Genre and time period aside, Q.T. has consistently played out the events of his film in a heightened reality. Where we, as audience members, have no choice but to accept that someone can fight 88 assassins solo and run up a banister, or that an exchange like ...
Honey Bunny: I love you, Pumkin. Pumkin: I love you, Honey Bunny.
... is anything but sincere and plausible. Call Inglourious Basterds a fairy tale or Death Proof a comic, it doesn’t matter.
