I’ve pretty much avoided everything on the Prometheus front since the first two trailers and the Peter Weyland Ted Talk. I’m already sold, but Ridley Scott and company seem desperate to oversell this movie and reveal every bit of footage before the movie hits theaters in June. Ugh, it’s the worst. Hence the avoidance.
However, a new viral hit today that isn’t all that interesting in and of itself. But, Noomi Rapace’s character, who is central to the film’s plot (and if I were guessing is probably going to be revealed as Ripley’s great-grandmother or something) begs Weyland Industries to help her and the entire video call is being monitored by the Yutani Company. Alien nerds will be keenly aware by now that in the first Alien movie, Ripley is sent aboard a ship courtesy of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
I’m totally fascinated by this world that Ridley Scott is building. Is it weird that I’m more fascinated by the story behind Weyland-Yutani than I am about the face huggers?
Rather than improve ratings by noticeably changing course (as Parks and Recreation had done after its first season), the cast and crew leaned into the weirdness of their comedy. Coupe and Wayans, who play married couple Jane and Brad turned their characters’ initial overachieving-bobo quirks into a full-blown orgy of neuroses—the second season finds Brad wearing a shirtdress because “Daddy likes a deep tuck,” and Jane stalking a kid she thinks might be her egg-donor baby (in fact the parents didn’t use her egg because they thought she seemed just the kind of crazy who would stalk her egg-donor baby). Wilson gave her singleton an ability to rebound that verges on masochism. And Pally’s gay character, Max, so brilliantly overhauls TV’s go-to flamboyant stereotype that in one episode he slovenly hibernates for the winter, like a bear. “It’s like we’re all kind of sharing a brain, and we’re just like, ‘Yeah, this is the direction [the show] needs to go in,’ and we all pushed it into that direction,” says Coupe. “We’ll come up with stuff together and be like, ‘Let’s do this.’ And sometimes there will be a director who’ll say, ‘Please give us a normal take,’ and we’ll be like, ‘No, we want to do it our way.’ And what’s funny is they’ll cave in.”
Scratch that, someone this show has become one of the three consistently funny shows on television. It looks like a Friends clone, but it has more in common with Arrested Development or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It’s a bit surprising the show hasn’t been embraced by the Internet denizens like many others.
Related: Maske, over at Uproxx, feels me on this show. Go check out his massive collection of Happy Endings multipanes.
“I think it’s really exciting, will be a little strange and fun to wear color at Wimbledon.I’m looking forward to it.” — Maria Sharapova, on the announcement that All England Club would be suspending its traditional “all white” garment rules at Wimbledon for the London Olympics.
How important is sound editing to a movie? Quite a bit, actually. More important than most people are willing to consider. In this one-minute clip above, editor Kogonada, illustrates the importance of sound through the films of director Darren Aronofsky beginning with Pi and ending with Black Swan.
Anchorman: The Legend Continues reunites the Channel 4 News Team as played by Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell and David Koechner. The sequel takes place at the dawn of racial integration in the newsroom and the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle.
You know something has reached the pop culture canon when there’s a teaser poster for a movie still being written that only needs the character’s feet to get people excited.
Because Flickr wasn’t as profitable as some of the other bigger properties, like Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Sports, it wasn’t given the resources that were dedicated to other products. That meant it had to spend its resources on integration, rather than innovation. Which made it harder to attract new users, which meant it couldn’t make as much money, which meant (full circle) it didn’t get more resources. And so it goes.
As a result of being resource-starved, Flickr quit planting the anchors it needed to climb ever higher. It missed the boat on local, on real time, on mobile, and even ultimately on social-the field it pioneered. And so, it never became the Flickr of video; YouTube snagged that ring. It never became the Flickr of people, which was of course Facebook. It remained the Flickr of photos. At least, until Instagram came along.
This is a great case study for business, technology and web start-ups. [via @timoreilly]
Kenya’s Sammy Wanjiru won the country its first Olympic medal when he won gold at the 2008 Beijing marathon. That made Wanjiru rich and famous and promised a decade of earnings potential as an elite marathon runner. He was just 21-years-old. He followed up his win at the Olympics with wins at the London and Chicago marathons in 2009. Wanjiru would be dead by 24.
But, in the end, Sammy’s death may show nothing as much as the shockingly cavalier way Kenya treats its abundant athletic resources. Sammy is buried in a dairy farm he purchased near his home where a single sheep grazes by the red marble tomb embossed with a photo of him smiling in a shiny brown suit. There’s no statue to him, no race named in his honor. On the contrary, Kenya has moved on from his passing in spectacular fashion.
Four Kenyans ran 2:04 or better last year, and at the end of this month, Athletics Kenya will pick a three-man Olympic marathon team from a field of six that includes Patrick Makau, who shattered the world record in Berlin with 2:03:38, and Geoffrey Mutai, the New York City Marathon winner whose personal best is 2:03:02. The stark reality is that Sammy might not even have made Kenya’s 2012 Olympic marathon squad.
“I was the head of the delegation in Beijing,” says David Okeyo, the secretary general of Athletics Kenya, “and I was one of the happiest people in the world when Wanjiru won that marathon. What happened with him is very sad.” Asked what he thinks about the charges and counter-charges, he says, “One day the truth will come out. I am sure of it.”
But it already has. It wasn’t the fall that killed Sammy Wanjiru. In Kenya, it’s always the rise.
His death is a tragic and mysterious story, one that ESPN has tried to piece together.
Here’s what they say about the show: “Synopsis: A nuclear sub is given is orders to fire upon Pakistan and, because those orders are shady in origin, the captain of the sub decides not to fire. Some nefarious part of the US government then orders an attack on our heroes who end up taking control of a small island nation and declaring themselves a new country. It is Crimson Tide meets the Rock.”
‘Last Resort’ comes courtesy of Shawn Ryan (The Shield, Terriors, and other great shows) and stars Andre Braugher. The show will air on Thursday at 8 p.m.
NBC has a new show coming out this fall from producer J.J. Abrams and director John Favreau about what happens 15 years after the entire world loses electricity. The premise for the show is cool, but doesn’t it just feel like this show is going to get cancelled after about five episodes? Maybe it’s that the trailer reveals the electricity hasn’t really gone out, or maybe it’s the solidly bland cast or maybe it’s NBC’s poor track record when it comes to science fiction.
Like CBS’s long-cancelled Jericho, this feels like a show that needs to be on a premium cable channel or at the very least FX. (Also, combing through the upfront trailers seems harder and harder to find shows that look promising)
