If you've ever wondered what it looks like to be mauled by a bear in the wilds of Alaska, you have technology and the BBC nature show The Great Bear Stakeout to thank. While guiding a filming crew in the Alaska Peninsula, Brad Josephs, a "naturalist interpreter specializing in bear biology and ecology," placed a small GoPro HD camera in the vicinity of a brown bear cub and let curiosity do the rest of the work. That bear wants to eat that camera so bad! But it is not soft or tasty like food! He even gives it a break and then tries again to see if it's food! Oh, man. I think we've all been there.
Reason no. 289 why Roddenberry Star Trek will always be the one true Star Trek: It's 2013, and we're just now realizing how next-level Commander Riker's sitting game was.
If you have not already had the pleasure of reading the mouth-frothingly psychotic Delta Gamma sorority letter that made the rounds last week, tie yourself down to whatever chair you're sitting in and give it a fucking look. Marvel at the epistolary poetry, think to yourself, Gosh, this seems almost eerily destined to be read in dramatic lighting by any one of our Serious Male Thespians; I sure would like to see something like that, then click back to this tab and bask in the glory of Boardwalk Empire's Michael Shannon spitting boozy bile all over Rebecca Martinson's now immortal words. The whole thing is obviously mandatory viewing, but you knew going in it was going to be pass/fail based on Shannon's delivery of the phrase "c--- punt," and, well, rest assured, the man delivers.
Viral video factory Funny or Die threw its hat into the Steve Jobs biopic ring just about a month ago, and today it beats the Ashton Kutcher–starring jOBS and Untitled Aaron Sorkin–penned Steve Jobs Biographical Motion Picture Classic to the punch with iSteve, a 78-minute parody biopic (yes, the parody now precedes the parodied) starring Justin Long and written and shot by FOD staffer Ryan Perez in 10 days. It features a supporting cast including Jorge Garcia and James Urbaniak, and a fourth wall–removing narration device deeply indebted to the 2012 Lifetime movie Liz & Dick. If you haven't got 78 minutes to spare in this fast-paced digital world of ours, at least skip to the part where Jobs drops acid with Billy Corgan (Paul Rust) at Woodstock '94.
You knew this was coming: It's time for the Spring Breakers permutations to roll on in. Here we have "Disney's Princess Spring Breakers" featuring Abby Elliot ("It means no worries for the rest of ya days, y'all"), and here is the Lena Dunham/Alien "Girls Gone Wild" mash-up. "When you really analyze this film you quickly realize that it may be the first movie to ever be cast by the Internet, for the Internet," so have at it. Gucci Mane was reportedly so stoned during the filming of his sex scene that he passed out. When he woke up, he said "I feel real nice. I feel like Mozart’s on my dick." Meme time.
We here at the Hollywood Prospectus don't just spend all our time on the Internet reading about the Oscars and the season finale of The Bachelor. We also occasionally do things. Thank goodness we have the Internet to show us how!
How to Become Pope
Mark Lisanti: As a Catholic, I was kind of crushed to find out I'm probably not going to be the next pope. There seems to be all these steps you have to go through? I thought that tweeting "Pope me up!" to @Pontifex was all it took to get your name into the mix. Lesson learned.
First off, just want to make sure this is 100 percent clear: Despite the fixation on backbreaking manual labor, the above video comes to us via South Korea, not its northern, MJ-loving counterpart.
Now, on to the video: You know last summer when you were watching the second European trailer for Les Misérables on YouTube, and once it finished you noticed something in the related videos column called "HILARIOUS 'Call Me Maybe' Parody — OMG Must Watch!!" and, feeling particularly complacent that day, you decided to click on it? And after about 15 seconds into the extremely earnest acoustic cover of Carly Rae Jepsen's timeless classic, you realized two things: (1) This is neither a parody, nor hilarious, and (2) this is better than the original, so hating is not really an option? This is how you will feel when you watch "Les Militaribles," this Les Misérables "parody" done by the South Korean Air Force and realize that they have a better Javert than we do.
As the Grantland staff looks back this week on the highlights of the year in music, TV, film, and sports, we would obviously be remiss if we left out the one medium to rule them all: the Internet. Here are our picks for the best (and worst) of the Information Superhighway in 2012.
Jordan Roseman, a.k.a. DJ Earworm, posted his first mash-up of Billboard's Top 25 songs on YouTube in 2007, in what was at the time a one-off experiment to see how many songs he could fit together in one track. Five years later, his annual "United State of Pop" mix is a year-end viral staple, with millions of viewers checking in to see the year in pop music reflected through his dense, hyperactive musical lens. Each mix becomes its own song, a barometer of the national mood, and a pop-culture time capsule as narrated by the likes of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and Bruno Mars.
This weekend Earworm premiered his 2012 mash-up, "Shine Brighter" (embed at bottom). I spoke to him on the phone from his studio in San Francisco in mid-November, when he was still hard at work bringing it all together.
The description on YouTube claims this is "Girl Talk's cat." We cannot confirm nor deny the veracity of that claim. Nor do we care to. Would that make the video any more special? We would argue it would not. [Update: It is confirmed. And we were correct: It didn't make it any more special.]
We will say this: The cat could go all the way on The X Factor.
