Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. We’ve got six new clips for your perusal, ranging from a teaser for a flick that puts Tim Riggins on Mars to an extended, eight-minute version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trailer; check ‘em out after the jump.

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Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. We’ve got seven new trailers this week, including, yes, Hunger Games; check ‘em out after the jump. Read More »

Lars von Trier is a great filmmaker, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy you’d much like to hang out and have a drink with. Aside from all that Nazi stuff, his films tend to traffic in the grimmest possible subject matter: he’s tackled rape, slavery, the death penalty, paralysis, and genital mutilation, so it somehow seems logical that his latest picture, Melancholia (on demand now, in theaters Friday) is about nothing less than the end of the world.

Apocalypses are a popular topic for filmmakers — though most are more interested in the narrative possibilities of the post-apocalyptic world than the event itself. Melancholia distinguishes itself by being something of a pre-apocalyptic picture, delving into the anxiety and fear of those who are awaiting the earth’s possible collision with a foreign object (timely!). After the jump, we’ll take a look back at a few of our favorite cinematic apocalypses. Read More »

Today at Flavorpill, we learned that even World Scrabble Championship players can be tempted to “misplace” their crappy tiles. We tried our best to guess a few novels by their famous opening lines. We wished that The Real Housewives of South Boston would get picked up by Bravo. We thought that this Luxo Jr. Pixar desk lamp Halloween costume was such an inspired idea. We were excited to hear that the lovely and talented Judy Greer is developing her own sitcom for ABC. We wondered if the world is really ready for The Real World: Occupy Wall Street. We were amazed by this clip which syncs up all seven timelines from last week’s episode of Community. We decided that this is one of the scariest jack-o’-lanterns that we’ve ever seen. We wanted a list of the names and addresses of anyone who purchases this ridiculous $75K yurt that’s in the new Neiman Marcus “Christmas Book.” We were embarrassed by how much we want to try this Paula Deen butter-flavored lip balm. And finally, we wondered if whoever built this crazy climbing wall intended for it to look like something straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Also: does this mean that going to the gym in Japan is more fun?

Today at Flavorpill, we were surprised that both Jane Austen and William Shakespeare failed to make the cut in this list of Americans’ favorite British authors. We found out what our favorite ’80s band says about us. We wondered what an ad for Zookeeper was doing hanging out in an old episode of How I Met Your Mother. We took a black and white photo tour of old school Harlem. We felt inspired by this open letter to aspiring artists from Pixar animator Austin Madison. We were amused by the changes made in this abbreviated and simplified version of The Great Gatsby. We saw how easy it is to drop $1 million at Tiffany when you’ve got a ten-point action plan. We wondered how Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s short story collection will compare to James Franco’s. We were surprised to find out that Eminem is the first artist to sell 1 million downloads of an album. And finally, we loved Laura Miller’s feature on the Invisible Library and the greatest books that never were. Do you have a favorite imaginary book?

Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. This week, we’ve got eight new trailers, from filmmakers as distinguished as Brad Bird and Steven Spielberg to, um, the guy who did the Resident Evil movies. Check ‘em out after the jump.

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Today at Flavorpill, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of Labyrinth by listening to “Magic Dance” on repeat and watching a behind-the-scenes documentary on the beloved Jim Henson film. We were happy to see that some of our favorite spots (Greenlight Books! Politics and Prose!) made this interactive list of the best independent bookstores in the world. We got a preview of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor, which opens to the public later this week. We fell in love with the latest minimalist pop culture print from Fabian Gonzalez — our favorite super heroes as flags. We wondered if Tom Hanks is in trouble with Pixar for blabbing that Toy Story 4 is already in the works. (In related news, we watched the trailer for Brave, the studio’s first fairytale.) We felt bad for eating so many tomatoes this past winter. We thought that Tina Fey’s hilarious memoir Bossypants deserved a higher ranking on Amazon’s roundup of the best books of 2011 so far. We couldn’t help but dance along to this catchy violin rendition of Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night.” And finally we wondered what Lady Gaga was trying to say with this crazy eye makeup. Boo?

1. Last night Stephen Colbert debuted his new Jack White produced-single on The Colbert Report. Watch a clip of him performing “Charlene II (I’m Over You)” with some help from the Black Belles here, and if you live in New York, head over to 10th Avenue and 30th Street, where Colbert and White will be selling copies of the 7″ starting at 11am.

2. MGM is planning to reboot WarGames, with Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses, The King of Kong) attached to direct. Considering that the 1983 original, which starred Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, was a movie about the Cold War, we wonder if they’re planning to shift its focus to the Middle East to make it feel more relevant. [via Variety]

3. Remember how we told you yesterday that the beefy Winklevoss twins had dropped their case against Facebook? Well, it turns out that it was because they are launching a brand new suit that will determine whether Mark Zuckerberg “intentionally or inadvertently suppressed evidence” during settlement proceedings. [via The Daily Beast]

4. Word has it that the lovely Emma Thompson may write the screenplay for the Will Smith/Jay-Z film adaptation of Annie that will feature Willow Smith in the titular role. Seriously guys, is there any way this movie can fail? [via Vulture]

5. We suppose it was bound to happen eventually, but it looks like Cars 2 will be Pixar‘s first “rotten” movie on Rotten Tomatoes — not that what the critics think will affect sales of tickets/merchandise tie-ins. [via Slashfilm]

Bonus link: World’s Most-Wanted Hacker Says He’s Never Felt Safer

Happy Friday afternoon, everybody! How’s your summer? Big plans for the weekend? More importantly — shouldn’t you be working? Our crack Flavorpill research teams inform us that over 93%* of our daytime traffic consists of people reading the site from work, where their browser window is open behind whatever Excel spreadsheet or TPS Report they’re supposed to be working on, along with Solitaire and Angry Birds and Gawker and the Blake Lively naked pictures (we’re not judging) and that vintage lunchbox that’s been on your eBay watch list for like three days (just buy the damn thing already).

But don’t worry, we’re not gonna rat you out. We totally understand — we’re not really working this afternoon either. C’mon, it’s a Friday afternoon, it’s gorgeous out, who the hell wants to be productive? But even your disposable time on someone else’s dime is precious, so make the most of it. After the jump, we’ve assembled some of today’s best diversions for film fans. Take a glance, click some links, and seize the day.

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So apparently it’s 1993 again, because there are two competing Wyatt Earp movies in development. Upon reading this, we immediately checked to make sure we weren’t perusing the movie news page on Prodigy via dial-up connection. But no, we’ve not entered some kind of wormhole: instead of Tombstone and Wyatt Earp racing each other to theaters, we’ve got Tombstone co-star Val Kilmer signing on to the indie Western The First Ride of Wyatt Earp, while Warner Brothers has picked up the spec script for the fictionalized Earp-and-Holliday adventure tale Wild Guns.

Parallel thinking is nothing new in Hollywood — hell, there’s half a dozen (no exaggeration) Peter Pan-related projects in development now, and nearly as many re-bootings, re-imaginings, and re-whatevers of Wizard of Oz and Snow White in the pipeline. Sometimes executives, writers, and producers just have the same ideas (or the idea to go back to the same ideas) at the same time. Often, competing projects will disappear as one gets into production first — but sometimes that game of Hollywood chicken leads to multiple versions of, basically, the same movie or TV show making it all the way to release (witness Deep Impact and Armageddon, Dante’s Peak and Volcano, 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, and many more). Usually, the better project ultimately wins the respect of critics and audiences — though there have been a few occasions when the second place runner is unfairly overlooked. Join us after the jump for a few unjustly forgotten runners-up.

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