This week, we got excited by a few first glimpses of Will Ferrell’s upcoming film, Dog Fight, in which he plays a presidential hopeful from South Carolina with a serious side part. We don’t know about you, but we think a movie with Ferrell running for office with Zach Galifianakis as his rival is likely to be highly hilarious. While we’re not sure yet whether Ferrell’s character will be a good guy, a bad guy, or just a doofus, the set photo got us thinking about the fictional politicians we love, and which ones we’d actually like to see run for office out here in the non-HD real world.  Click through to read our list, and if we’ve forgotten your favorite, be sure to let us know in the comments!

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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. This week’s seven trailers include several big-franchise sequels and (sort of) prequels (we think); check ‘em all out after the jump.
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Today at Flavorpill, we decided that these have got to be the most hardcore holiday decorations that we’ve ever seen. We heard that NYU will be offering a course on Occupy Wall Street next semester. We wished that Will Ferrell would make a free commercial for us. We learned some interesting things about the way that Pixar works. We watched a funny outtake from Louis CK’s upcoming comedy special. We read an interview with Carrie Brownstein in which she discusses why she loves Portland. We wished that The Lonely Island guys were really releasing a Christmas album. We were happy to see that the viral marketing campaign for The Dark Knight Rises is already underway thanks to a pair of leaked “CIA documents.” We rather enjoyed this clip which reimagines Angry Birds through the eyes of Guy Ritchie. And finally, we decided that this guy who has 15,000 websites tattooed on his body has to be faking us all out. Right?

Nestled among this week’s new theatrical releases is The Big Year, a rather syrupy looking Bucket List riff co-starring Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson. Let’s be clear: we have not yet seen it. But we’re not holding out much hope for a movie that puts those three guys together and cannot find one single laugh to put in a trailer.

How could you combine three men as (granted, not always reliably) funny as these and not come up with a laugh riot? Quite easily, turns out. The recent cinema is all but littered with pictures that teamed up established comedic talents and thus sounded like sure-fire crowd pleasers, but which ended up tickling the funny bones of neither critics nor moviegoers. After the jump, we’ll run down ten comic combinations that misfired.

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Tonight, Alec Baldwin will host the premiere of the 37th season of Saturday Night Live, breaking the record (which he currently holds, tied with Steve Martin) for the most episodes hosted (tonight will be number 16!). We understand why SNL keeps bringing Baldwin back — he’s roundly awesome at it. He even has his own ‘Best Of’ DVD, even though he was never a cast member. We’re pretty confident that Baldwin will start off this season with a bang, but to gear us up for one of our all-time favorite hosts, we decided to take a look at a few of his funniest SNL skits of all time. Now, to be fair, some of our favorites — “The Mimic,” “Zinger vs. Burns,” and “French Class” in particular — aren’t available online, but rest assured that they definitely would have cleared the top ten. Click through to check out our favorites, and let us know if we’ve missed any of yours in the comments.

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There are an abundance of reasons to put “see Moneyball” on your weekend to-do list: First film since Capote from director Bennett Miller; Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillan adapting a Michael Lewis book; Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, and Chris Pratt (aka Andy Dwyer) in supporting roles; the baby blues of one William Bradley Pitt. And then there is our old friend Jonah Hill, who has taken the opportunity here to make the leap we’ve come to expect from any comedic performer of note: the transition to “serious acting.”

Now from the looks of the trailer, it doesn’t appear that Hill is exactly doing Hamlet — Moneyball is a fast, witty, seriocomic drama, allowing Hill some comedic opportunities within a larger and more serious context. That is one way to go; there are others. After the jump, join us for a look at the strategies that Hill’s predecessors adopted in making their move towards drama, and how they fared.

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Everything Must Go, the low-key but masterful Will Ferrell comedy/drama (based on a Carver short story), hits DVD and Blu-ray today, and as with most recent releases, the disc includes a small selection of deleted scenes. More often than not, there isn’t a hell of a lot of value added by that particular bonus feature; we tend to see a lot of throwaway transition scenes, unnecessary exposition, or scenes so poorly written, directed, and/or played that the filmmakers were clearly wise to chop them. But on occasion, for reasons of pacing or time constraints, scenes are lost that are perfectly good in and of themselves — they merely don’t fit into the final version of the picture. That’s the case with Everything Must Go, which includes several charming little scenes that could easily have made the final cut.

So we decided to take a look at some of our favorite deleted scenes on DVD. A word of warning: as this is a phenomenon that only dates back to the age of the laserdisc, there is a decidedly modern bent to our rundown. While many classics were famously chopped by their studios or directors (Greed, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Sunset Blvd. leap to mind), no one saw any reason to keep those scenes around, and they’re (presumably) lost to the ages. (Maybe we’ll return to this topic at a later date.) At any rate, click through to see nine truly great deleted scenes — and one that may very well be the worst deleted scene of all time.

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This week, we saw the trailer for The Woman in Black, the project that is to be Daniel Radcliffe’s first post-Potter film. Though we have faith in Radcliffe as an actor, we’re not sure that this film will be the one that launches him into dramatic films, per se — maybe it’s just us, but all we can see in this video is Harry Potter dressed up as a lawyer running from Voldemort — but you never know. Either way, the trailer got us thinking about films that have launched the dramatic careers of actors who previously primarily starred in family or kids’ films. This kind of list relies on largely subjective data, and therefore is definitely an arguable one, so let us know what you think of our picks in the comments.

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1. Last night, after a whopping 122 million votes had been tallied (a new record for American Idol), 17-year-old country singer Scotty McCreery, who quite frankly reminds us of Howdy Doody, was named the winner of season 10. [via People]

2. According to TMZ, British import Cheryl Cole has been replaced as a judge on X-Factor by Nicole Scherzinger, formerly of the Pussycat Dolls. The Daily Mail claims that it’s because of Cole’s lack of chemistry with Paula Abdul and producers’ fears that Americans wouldn’t be able to understand her accent.

3. In the latest installment of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifiankis, guest Will Ferrell feeds his host cherries, Jon Hamm makes a cameo, and there’s an unfortunate incident involving a monkey’s genitals. Sound good to you? Watch it here.

4. The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum has just announced the winners of the 2011 National Design Awards. View the full list here.

5. Bill Nighy has joined Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Bryan Cranston, and Jessica Biel in the cast of Len Wiseman’s Total Recall reboot, which drops the Martian storyline from the 1990 original. He’ll be playing Quatto (“Kuato” in the Arnold Schwarzenegger version), “the enigmatic and charming” leader of the resistance. [via TotalFilm]

Bonus link: Where in the World Are Exiled Leaders?

Today at Flavorpill, we liked Vulture’s checklist of things that you’re sure to find in any wedding comedy. We wished that we had dance moves half as good as the First Lady’s version of the Running Man. We got excited about all of the new books coming out out this month. We met a 29-year-old man baby who sleeps in a crib. We decided that Budweiser might be on to something with this whole “poolball” thing. We were impressed by this DNA helix chain made up of almost 3,000 people. We were confused by the premise of a new show starring Nathan Lane about “an unlucky actor whose career has been perpetually cursed by the fact that he resembles, but is in fact not, Nathan Lane.” We wondered if there’s any chance that Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s movie that sounds a bit like Party Down will help fill the hole that the dearly departed comedy left in our heart. We decided after watching this preview clip that we’ll be DVRing AMC’s latest soon-to-be critical darling, Hell on Wheels, even if it is a Western. We were excited to hear that Melissa Leo is writing a memoir that will be published by Simon & Schuster. And finally, we considered ditching our IRA in favor of investing in Barbies — although it sounds like it may be pretty risky.