Tired of parodies of Carly Rae Jepsen’s summer hit? Of course you are. But that’s because you haven’t yet watched the Cookie Monster version.
This is the parody you didn’t know you needed. This is the video that will show you that the Cookie Monster can put more feeling, more longing, more pure love into the line “You got cookie, so share it maybe” than Carly Rae puts into her entire song.
And with any luck, this will be the high-point end to the Call Me Maybe parodies.
Aaron Sorkin came back to TV last Sunday with his new HBO series The Newsroom. If you missed it, don’t worry — you’ve probably heard it all before anyway.
On the occasion of the famed, Emmy- and Oscar-winning screenwriter’s return, some eagle-eyed viewer has compiled “Sorkinisms — A Supercut,” showing how even an acclaimed writer — known for his distinct verbal rhythms — has reused bits of dialogue throughout his career.
It doesn’t include The Newsroom, Moneyball or Sorkin’s play The Farnsworth Invention, but even so, it stacks clips of characters in Sports Night, Studio 60, The West Wing and several of Sorkin’s movies uttering the same phrases over and over: serial earnest entreaties to “look at my face,” compulsive endings of assertions with “and you know it” and a cascade of “you think?” that has to be seen to be believed.
(And if you love Sorkinisms anyhow, and really did miss the series premiere of The Newsroom, it’s on HBO’s YouTube channel here.)
The title of the upcoming Ben Stiller comedy, The Watch, used to be Neighborhood Watch until the Florida shooting death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of a neighbourhood watch volunteer. (BTW, the police chief responsible for the initial investigation has just been fired).
Anytoomuchactualinformation, changing the name didn’t do any favours to the movie, because what the frak is The Watch? Is it a movie about a magical timepiece propelling a group of misfit children through a series of other-worldly adventures? Is it a film about the surly proprietor of a clock store who learns a little bit about the meaning of time and how we need to stop wasting it? Or is it a raunchy, R-rated romp about an awkward teen who learns some life skills from peeping at all neighbourhood housewives?
The trailers that have been released so far haven’t done the comedy any favours either. Boring. But, guess what? This one we like.
The Watch opens July 27. It stars Jonah Hill, Vince Vaughn, Richard Ayoade and Will Forte.
Malene Arpe, Toronto Star
It’s a repetitive clip that, for some, will surely entice repeated viewings all the same. Movie star Shia LaBeouf and dancer Denna Thomsen use dance and full-frontal nudity bring to life a passionate, rocky relationship in the music video for Sigur Ros’ song “Fjogur Piano.”
Given a budget of just $10,000, Israeli director Alma Har’el somehow not only enlisted LaBeouf (reportedly paid $5 million for his role in the most recent Transformers movie) but also included artistic and visually engaging use of a butterfly motif and a colourful underwater drive.
Candy is used as an apparent drug metaphor in the seven-minute clip, set to the Icelandic band’s slow, bleak, piano-driven tune, but Har’el has been quoted “is about addiction to drugs, or sex, or anything — and how you get stuck in a cycle.” At any rate, not safe for work — and not the sort of thing you could ever expect to see on a music-video TV channel.
The Wire: The Musical is the best thing you’ll see today. Funny or Die has outdone itself.
In the video, which is a fake commercial for the musical, several key castmembers, including Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, Michael Kenneth Williams and Sonja Sohn, sing and dance about homicides, drug abuse and dealing dope.
“Experience The Wire’s realistic portrayal of America’s decaying inner cities through the magic of song,” says the voiceover.
If this doesn’t make your day awesome, you need to go lie down.
Malene Arpe, Toronto Star
Audience participation is taken to new heights in this video from the UK that has gone viral, garnering close to 900,000 hits and counting.
Ventriloquist Nina Conti, performing on the Russell Howard's Good News show, tells the audience she needs a volunteer dummy as part of her act.
A young man named Luke is pressed into service. What he doesn't realize is that the job comes with a prop: a mask that needs to go over his mouth. Using a remote control, Conti is now able to move Luke's "mouth" open and closed as Conti makes him talk. Watch what happens when the human dummy reluctantly shows off his dance moves.
Matt, an elementary school student at Colonial Hills Elementary School in Worthington, Ohio, has spastic cerebral palsy. He recently had the option to sit out during his school’s track and field day. But he decided to participate in a race anyway. As he struggles to keep going, his classmates rally around him. We dare you not to cry as he finally crosses the finish line, to the spontaneous cheers of a crowd.
Spastic cerebral palsy is the most common type of cerebral palsy. People who have it often have a hard time moving from one position to another and the condition results in stiff, jerky movements.
The video was posted by a YouTube user named MidwestCurrans. According to his profile, the channel belongs to Simon Currans, who lives in New York but posts inspirational videos of his sister’s family in Ohio. This particular (at times blurry) video has been viewed nearly 500,000 times since it was posted this week.
If you’re a One Direction fanatic, their sole album really isn’t enough to keep you satisfied. A pro animator has filled the gap — but it’s with a video you might not care for.
“The Adventurous Adventures of One Direction,” apparently created by Mark Parsons, the lead animator of the TV series Archer, features the five lads in the Anglo-Irish boy band fighting evil in quasi-superheroic garb, taking orders from a remote and possibly artificial Simon Cowell, their real-life manager. Along the way, they dress in drag, engage in slap fights among themselves and generally look slightly foolish.
It’s far from savage satire; the cartoon everything from the band to their songs to cartoon heroics in general are taken rather lightly, which may explain why an 18-minute video has nonetheless garnered a quarter-million views in a day.
Going to the ballet used to be such a refined affair. But that wasn't the case for the parents and spectators at a recent recital, who were forced to witness violence onstage as a fight erupted between two ballerinas. OK, so the "violence" consisted of a few pokes and pushes, and the fighters were both toddlers. And it didn't seem to disrupt the other dancers, who carried on jumping and twirling to the strains of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." According to the YouTube user who posted the clip online, this was the first recital for the 2-year-old diva, identified as Freya. (She's the smaller of the two pint-size pugilists.)
After wandering around onstage during the recital, Freya strays a little too close to a fellow dancer. A fight of sorts ensues, and eventually a couple of the teachers have to separate them. The video has been viewed nearly 600,000 times and counting. Check it out for yourself: Mean Girls in the making?It’s about that time of year, where students — if they’ve taken care of their end of the bargain — get to hear convocation speakers. At University of Toronto, former mayor David Miller and MLSE chair Larry Tanenbaum are among those getting honours and a podium. In less fortunate places, students had to settle for the likes of Neil Gaiman and Laurie Anderson.
Clips of the latter duo are both gaining attention online. Gaiman, who never attended university, advises London’s University of the Arts graduates of the importance of persevering and continuing to create, ignoring the distractions of both successes and failures. He also passed along a lesson he says he learned in comics, about the real standards for freelancers:
“You get work however you get work, but people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of today’s world is freelance), because their work is good, because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three! Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.”
Gaiman confessed to lying to comics editors to get his earliest writing gigs in that field, and Anderson tells a comparable story to graduates of Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts (her alma mater) about teaching Egyptian architecture in night classes and just making up facts when unfamiliar slides showed up. She quotes Karl Rove, and recounts working for NASA, among other patrons, but warns: “No one will ever ask you to do the thing you really want to do . . . just think of what you’d like to do, what you dream of doing, and just start doing it.”
For a movie that's still more theoretical than real, the excitement about Anchorman 2 is remarkable. And it's been carefully fed by Will Ferrell with moves like Monday's release of the second “teaser” for the film, which got half a million views on Funnyordie.com within hours.
The clip is little more than four lead actors from the original Anchorman — David Koechner, Paul Rudd, Ferrell and Steve Carell — explaining, in character, that the new movie will be great. This is empty (and possibly risky) talk, of course; no script is thought to exist yet for Anchorman 2, not one scene has been filmed and, while the teaser has those four actors and the original film's narrator, Bill Kurtis, Christina Applegate is absent.
Maybe the real creativity here is Ferrell's stoking of the hype, first by announcing the sequel in character on Conan and now with these clips.
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