Michelle Dockery, in some brilliant viral marketing for Downton Abbey (or maybe just trying to remind casting directors she has range), has popped up in a new video for Funny or Die. What starts as a fairly believable new TNT cop drama, slowly bleeds across fictional universe lines into something altogether hilarious. It’s not always funny when actors poke fun at their most famous roles (Lady Mary in this case), but when they do so successfully it can be comedy gold.
Author: Justin
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Netflix has just released a new trailer for Season 2 of House of Cards (the American version, I should note). The trailer itself is plenty cool and looks perfectly devilish just like the first season. What’s extra cool about this particular trailer is that it’s presented in 4K resolution (well, at least TV 4K resolution, but that’s another story). Netflix has announced that House of Cards will be streaming in 4K in 2014. Click through the trailer above to see the trailer in its full 4K glory on YouTube. Now, if only cable channels could consistently show 1080p. February 14,…
To successfully tweak a formula, one must first immerse oneself in it. No one could argue that Disney hasn’t been immersed in the princess formula over the years, but it took screenwriter and co-director Jennifer Lee to finally shatter that formula for good. Frozen is a loose adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s Snow Queen story. A pinch of Wicked helps give us the story of two sisters scarred by a childhood accident that eventually will lead one on a path to darkness. That path comes so organically here that by the time Elsa (Idina Menzel) is belting out the show…
Philomena, likely like the woman who gives the film its name, is slight. Where you would expect the film to go big, it instead goes small. When you expect something serious, it instead turns almost slapstick. That might make it too clever a film for some—such as New York Post critic Kyle Smith. He accuses the film of being “organized hate” against Catholics and Republicans. It’s not—a point made clear by both the real Philomena and the film itself. The story in short is that Philomena (Judi Dench) gets pregnant, nuns give her baby away, and she spends the rest…
This year saw some changes for Professor Hobo as a comic. For the past few years we’ve been producing three comics a week. About midway through this year we switched to about one a week. Why? Some personal changes in our lives made the upkeep of a three-times-a-week comic a bit too much to handle. Nevertheless, we still found success in a more restricted fashion. Below are the ten most popular comics we published in 2013. It’s always fun seeing which ones hit and which ones fizzle. If you’re interested, here are the top tens for 2012 and 2011. 10.…
Former FBI supervisor John Good, who oversaw the Abscam operation that makes up the heart of American Hustle, said of the film’s plot, “If they just did it the way Abscam was done, it would be a very boring movie.” American Hustle is anything but boring, but simply not being boring is not the same as being interesting. David O. Russell directs this story of a love triangle (parallelogram?) that sits at the center of an FBI corruption scandal, which would eventually result in the sentencing of six congressional representatives and one senator to prison. Christian Bale and Amy Adams…
Is the creative spark forged in the fires of passion or adversity? Saving Mr. Banks, the story of the making of Mary Poppins, tries to answer this question, and comes down somewhere between the two. It argues it was the unique passion of those at Disney coupled with the adversity-filled childhood of Poppins author P.L. Travers that gave birth to one of cinema’s classic musicals. Emma Thompson plays Travers as a wound woman. You feel her bristle at the slightest change in the wind, and fully petrify at human interaction. She insults the Sherman brothers (Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak),…
Oscar Wilde wrote, “Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” It might be the most succinct thematic summation of Nebraska, the wonderful new film from director Alexander Payne. Payne has made a name for himself in recent years with films such as Sideways and The Descendants where the setting is as much a lead as any of the actors. He continues that tradition here where the rural spaces of Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska dominate the screen in stark black and white cinematography. There’s something quite refreshing these…
If you’ve been on Facebook in the past 24 hours, it’s likely you’ve been inundated with statuses either in support or against Phil Robertson of the TV show Duck Dynasty. Likely too, you’ve already formed an opinion in the us-against-them war of words. Maybe you’ve liked a new page asking for Robertson to be reinstated, or you’ve commented furiously on a liberal blog denouncing him as a bigot. Still, what I get form this banter is a lack of reading of the man’s actual words. They’re much worse than simply saying God doesn’t approve of homosexuality. Still, how to make…
The following is in response to the viral article “Dear Mom On The iPhone”. You have probably seen it pop up in your Facebook news feed–perhaps while browsing on your iPhone or, gasp, Android (don’t even get me started about those Windows Phone 8 jerks). Anyway, it’s one of those uniquely asinine posts that deserve a response. Yes, the heart may be in the right place, but certainly the content doesn’t follow it. You can read the original article here, and the response below.