It’s in German, but there’s isn’t much talking anyways. Mostly, it’s worth watching to get a sense of where director David Yates is taking the story visually. He’s taking it to Awesometown via Dark Street. Har! Har!

You can also check out the clip of Harry and Dumbledore preparing for their journey to the cave, which isn’t some sort of pedo-Plato reference. The old man and his young protege are just preparing for some adventure. [via Film Misery]

Also: Paul Dergarabedian heaps lavish praise on the new Potter installment, calling it “not only exquisite in its production values, but was also charming, funny, scary, enchanting, moving (stop me, the adjectives could go on and on) and dare I say, sexy.” He probably ran out of adjectives, if not breath first, but he also proclaimed it Oscar-worthy. Yowzas.

American troops are pulling out of Baghdad and the bigger cities as I write this, prompting dance parties from the people and the oil companies to begin bidding on 20-year contracts for Iraq’s potent oil reserves. 

“Baghdad’s river-front parklands, which have been reclaimed this year after being deserted during the height of the insurgency and sectarian war, were last night transformed into outdoor dance venues, where audiences of around 3,000 – almost all of them men – danced to the strains of a recently returned Iraqi singer, Salah Hassan, exiled in Dubai for the past five years.” 

Mission Accomplished, indeed!  Even if it took six-years and the deaths of 4,500 American troops.  We get grown men dancing in reclaimed parks and oil companies getting what they want. 

“The auction represented the first opportunity for major oil companies to return to Iraq since they were expelled in 1972 amid a regional move toward nationalization,” reports the Washington Post. 

“While eager to tap into Iraq’s fields, oil executives were apprehensive about injecting themselves into a country with volatile politics and an active insurgency. Another disincentive is Iraq’s failure to enact a hydrocarbons law.” BP and China National Petroleum Corp. were the only companies to scoop up an reserves as they sealed the deal for the Rumalia Oil field for $2.85 per barrel. 

It remains unknown if there is a Wal-Mart on every corner of Fallujah and other cities, yet, but probably in a year or two.  Right?

PC Magazine is reporting that Mozilla has officially confirmed the Tuesday release. 

According to Lifehacker, other additions to Firefox 3.5 are: a Private Browsing Mode to hide browser activity (so youse can watch porn all day!), a JavaScript engine known as TraceMonkey, new location services, and HTML5 support.

Just another reason to ditch Microcrash Internet Explorer, if you haven’t already.

No less than Malcolm Gladwell thinks that Wired-editor Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion; $26.99) is wrong.

Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. “Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

The Dirty Projectors have an excellent album and “Stillness is the Move” has been the summer jam and a solid contender for any year end list of 2009’s best songs.  And now, the slightly askew pop song has a slightly askewed video to go with it.

According to Stereogum the video (which looks shot somewhere on the west coast but specifically the Oregon coast and more likely Northern California) was directed Matthew Lessner.  The video, much like the song, has recognizable features to it but it’s strange and weird just the same.  It showcases the synchronized dancing (single ladies dance from Beyonce?) of the Dirty Projector ladies in light blue jumpsuits and Dave Longstreth is some sort of llama herder.

Yup, pretty much when John Turturro’s character looks up at Devastator and says over the radio, “I’m looking at the enemy’s scrotum” and the giant robot has two wrecking balls for a scrotum it’s the definitively crappy moment in a 2.5 hour pooh fest of twisted metal, loud explosions and inane plotlines.

It’s true!  Everything you heard about this movie from the very upset critics is spot on, so I won’t rehash it here for you.  However, if you haven’t seen the movie yet then watch the above clip and call yourself good.  You can read about the making of the clip here.

You’ll thank me for saving you the $10, which you can then go buy yourself a couple of beers or a bottle of wine with.  (big thanks to Scott who’s been absolutely killing it with the clips lately.

It’s true!  Because it’s on the BBC and the host has a British accent and I’ve been conditioned to believe that anything told to me with a British accent has to be truthful.  Regardless, after watching this I want a drunk monkey for a pet.  Mostly so we can drink together on the weekends.  I have no friends.

I haven’t gotten into Blu-Ray because the supposed benefits are marginal.  Sure it’s got better “picture” and “sound” but if you don’t own a sweet surround sound system or own a 1080p HD television then the price for Blu-Ray doesn’t really justify itself.  You’re better of paying $60 for a up-convert DVD player and saying the hell with it. 

But I will admit, that this commentary track from director Zack Snyder — better known as Maximum Movie Mode — has me wanting to find a friend with a Blu-Ray player. 

I understand not a lot of people get geeked out over the process of movie making, so this probably doesn’t matter one iota, but I find the nuts and bolts of the profession just slightly less fascinating than the finished product.  I could watch these types of featurettes for days on end.

It’s the first time I’ve seen any movie show off the supposed advances in technology Blu-Ray offers, even if I’m not entirely sold because of it. Much of this feature rests on the charismatic shoulders of Snyder. Whether you hated or loved Watchmen, you’ve got to give him credit for not just getting the comic made into a movie, but for making sure there would be some choice extras when it arrived on DVD/Blu-Ray.

Watchmen hits Blu-Ray on July 21st 2009. You can order the Director’s Cut on Amazon for around $23 (the suggested retail price is $35.99).

[via these fine sites]

In 1998, Elvis Grbac, a backup quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs stunned the sports world by being named People Magazine’s sexiest athlete of the year. 

If you’ve ever seen a picture of the goofy looking QB, you would know why htis was inherently funny and quite puzzling.  But now, a full decade later, the story behind Grbac’s selection makes the story that much better and manages to generate a little simpathy from us. 

From Jeff Pearlman, a writer at SI:

One of my favorite all-time stories is about Elvis Grbac (left), Rich Gannon (right) and People Magazine’s Sexiest Men issue from 1998. It is both outlandish and 100-percent true.

Back in the day I knew many People staffers, and they were all cool, fun, intelligent-and woefully ignorant about sports. Every year, in planning the Sexiest Men issue, People’s editors would ask a bunch of us at Sports Illustrated for suggestions and insight. In 1998, for a reason I’ll never understand, they decided not to seek out help.

The magazine chose Rich Gannon as its Sexiest Athlete. At the time, Gannon was a member of the Kansas City Chiefs. Still a couple of seasons removed from his golden tenure with the Raiders, Gannon was 33, handsome and likable. In other words, a solid choice. Yet People, being People, simply informed the photographer assigned to the piece that the Sexiest Athlete was the Chiefs’ quarterback. Hence, he took pictures of the Chiefs’ quarterback. Well, one of the Chiefs’ quarterbacks: Elvis Grbac.

Yup.

The pictures made their way back to the New York offices, and editors were dumbfounded. This was their Sexiest Athlete? Yet upon learning the truth, no one with the magazine had the heart (guts?) to tell Grbac that an unfathomable mistake had been made. As a result, Elvis Grbac reigns as People’s 1998 Sexiest Athlete.

The article’s final line says it all: “His personality makes him sexy.”

Amen.

Oof.  [via Deadspin]

Iceland’s Sigur Ros has put out of a bevy of difficult to pronounce but easy to listen to albums over the past tens years.  There’s a fluid, ethereal, dream-like quality to their work.  As if you’re aren’t really listening to their albums, so much as invented them in your head at night.

“Agaetis Byrjun’ is the one album I tell people to start with.  If you like that album, then surely you’ll love their other records too.  Hard to believe but the record just turned 10-years-old.  To celebrate, they have released two exclusive live performances (download one of them here) from the original record launch concert at the Icelandic Opera House on the night of June 10, 1999 – back when few people outside Reykjavik hadn’t heard of them.  What’s great is that neither of these songs appeared on the actual record.

‘Nyja Lagid’ (seen above) shows Jonsi and Co. when they really were still young, performing a song that disappeared from their set-list shortly after. It’s also one of the last tracks performed live by original drummer Gusti. Eventually, however, the audio of this live recording was featured on Sigur Ros’s, ‘Svefn-G-Englar’ EP.

The Invention of Lying hits theaters on September 25, 2009

He will always be the Iron Horse of baseball, a humble and classy person, perhaps the greatest player of his generation, if Lou Gehrig wasn’t overshadowed by the towering stature of Babe Ruth.

It’s not just the 2,130 straight games played, the .340 lifetime average, 1,995 career RBIs, 493 HRs, twice MVP of the American League, Triple Crown winner in 1934 or because he was the first player to hit four homeruns in a single game.  No what’s most impressive about Lou Gehrig were the 277-words he spoke at Yankees Stadium on July 4, 1939 — only 36-years-old and two years shy of his death.

“He taught me that the human spirit can transcend any affliction,” said Chris Pendergast, a former schoolteacher in Miller Place, N.Y., who has battled A.L.S. for more than 16 years. Communicating through his wife, Pendergast said: “I am now a quadriplegic, using a feeding tube and an external ventilator for part of the day. But with Lou as a model, I still feel I have an awful lot to live for.”

Those who face other challenges have also found inspiration in Gehrig’s life. Joshua Prager, a journalist and author, sustained a disabling spinal cord injury in a 1990 bus accident when he was 19. Prager, who wrote “The Echoing Green,” about Bobby Thomson’s 1951 home run at the Polo Grounds, said he admired Gehrig before the accident. In time, his appreciation of Gehrig, who like Prager attended Columbia University, grew deeper.

“In the face of death, he remained defiant,” Prager said. “He hated any maudlin displays, and as he said in his July 4 speech, he still considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

In honor of Mr. Gehrig, MLB will read his speech during the seventh inning stretch next Saturday, July 4. It will be 70 years to the day.

“Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

“Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I’m lucky.

“When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift — that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies — that’s something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter — that’s something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body — it’s a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed — that’s the finest I know.

“So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for. Thank you.”

We could all learn something from those words.