One film I’ve been looking forward to, or at least keeping a cursory eye on is director Greg Mottola’s followup to Superbad. The dramedy Adventureland stars Kristen Stewart (sure to be a much bigger star after the clusterfuck known as Twilight) and Jesse Eisenberg.  It’s set in 1987 and is based upon Mottola’s own experience working in an amusement park.

The film follows James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), an uptight recent college grad forced to take a minimum wage job at an amusement park when he realizes he can’t afford his dream tour of Europe.  Besides Eisenberg and Stewart we can expect to see Ryan Reynolds (still looking for that breakout role), Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig and Martin Starr.  Solid cast all around, especially for a comedy/drama.

I never thought I’d live to see the day when the Violent Femmes came to represent quirky, offbeat, indie coming of age movies.  No seriously.  This is not something to take lightly, especially for someone that is a huge fan of the Femmes.

Watch the trailer now in High Defintiion on MySpace. Adventureland is now set for a Spring 2009 (possibly March 27th?) release.

That’s a big if.  But still.  I’ve been advocating to get rid of this for several years now and more importantly I think we should condensce our time zones from four to two in the United States.  I don’t have any hope that this will actually happen, but one can dream can’t he.  DST is utterly pointless in this non-railroad economy we live in.  [Green Daily]

When I finally got an ice cream maker, the first thing I kept thinking about was all the various flavors I could make.  And I wasn’t thinking simple vanilla, chocolate, etc.  I was thinking like chocolate stout with raspberries, Swedish Fish with strawberry swirls, fucking asinine crazy flavors of ice cream that only exist in my head.

And one of those was bacon.  Some sort of candied bacon.  And now I have a blue print thanks to David Lebovitz.

Recipe below the fold.  MORE »

I love when Axl runs into this song like WWE outside interference about 3 minutes into the song.  And yes, I’ve been searching YouTube for Axle Rose/Guns N’ Roses songs all day in light of Chinese Democracy finally being released.

When done right, this blistering song has no comparison. It is so amazing that it lends itself to interpretation over and over again.  Yes, Dylan may have recorded it originally and Hendrix may have perfected it, but there have been so many other great covers.

Enjoy renditions from some of the greats. Perhaps the most enjoyable thing is to see how all these great musicians interpret this Bob Dylan song.

Jimi Hendrix

Anyone who tells you that Hendrix’s version of this song isn’t the definitive version of this song is just lying to themselves.

Here he is at the Isle of Wright in 1970.

Neil Young

His version isn’t that bad.  It’s almost what you’d expect.  Very grungy, full of energy, and just straight nasty.

MORE »

I think this speaks for itself.  But, one of the things I love about Mathew Sweet and his brand of mid-nineties alt-rock is that the guitars are doing their own thing.  It’s almost like there is the song and there is the guitar part rocking out independent of the actual song.

That’s difficult to achieve.

Anytime I come across a story about pandas, I think of Ed Norton in Fight Club. He goes, “I wanted to put a bullet in every panda that wouldn’t have sex to save itself.”  Or something like that.

And then there are the pandas who bite people in China.

He said the student was bitten in the arms and legs. Two foreign visitors who saw the attack ran to get help from workers at a nearby refreshment stand, who notified park officials, the employee said.

The student was pale as he was taken away by medics but appeared clear-headed, he said.

“Yang Yang was so cute and I just wanted to cuddle him. I didn’t expect he would attack,” the 20-year-old student, surnamed Liu, said in a local hospital, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Liu underwent surgery Friday evening and was out of danger, but will remain in the hospital for several days, Xinhua said.

Yang Yang, who was flown to Guilin last year from Sichuan province, was behaving normally on Saturday and did not seem to suffer any negative psychological effects, the park employee said.

Seriously?  I just wanted to cuddle with the panda?  What is wrong with people?

Why is this interesting? Because Florida State safety Myron Rolle is the first major-college athlete to win the most prestigious academic scholarship since Princeton basketball player Bill Bradley won the award in 1965.

Rolle is in his final football season at Florida State and now faces a difficult decision. He will have to choose between perhaps playing in the N.F.L. next year and studying at Oxford. His planned course of study would be a one-year master’s degree in medical anthropology; he plans to become a doctor and open a clinic to help needy people in the Bahamas. Rolle has said that if he wins the award, he will make a decision with his family when things settle down.

“I wouldn’t be surprised one bit if he heads off to Oxford in October,” Karioth said of Rolle. “He’s really an academic. There aren’t a lot of Renaissance kids out there. He really is.”

Rolle has long stood out at Florida State. He was the country’s top recruit, started as a freshman and has had an all-American-caliber junior year in 2008.

Along with graduating in two and a half years with a 3.75 grade point average in pre-med, Rolle was awarded a $4,000 grant to conduct cancer research and set up a program in Okeechobee, Fla., to teach Seminole Indian children about health and physical fitness.

Whether Myron Rolle decides to play in the NFL or take his academic scholarship, it has been awhile since any major college athlete has been known more for his smarts than his play on the field. This is something that should be celebrated.

Everything is ship shape. Or something to that effect.

There is no way to know the veracity of this video clip and the skeptic in me understands it’s probably a fake.  However, the thought of this being real is kinda cool and the clip itself is rather compelling.

I’m worried that with The Dark Knight having come and gone so long ago that Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker will get overlooked come awards season.  And though at the time I thought Aaron Eckhart’s performance was the better of the two, I can’t shake Ledger’s turn as the maniacal Joker some six months later.

Maybe part of that is tied into his early death, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else turning in a better performance acting wise this year.  Well, okay, that’s a stretch and things like acting performances are always subjective but still it was a captivating performance.

Warner Bros. has begun their publicity push with advertisements in Variety for Heath Ledger as Best Supporting Actor.  Academy Award ballots are mailed on December 26th, polls close on January 12th, and the nominations are announced on January 22nd.

According to Slashfilm, his competition in the category includes: Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road, Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt, John Malkovich in Changeling, Ralph Fiennes in Duchess, John Malkovich and Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading and Robert Downey, Jr. in Tropic Thunder.

Strange that three of those performances are strictly comedic and Ledger’s comes from a “comic book” movie.  Two genres the academy has consistantly looked down their noses at.  I can’t really imagine Ledger not being nominated for several reasons, but mostly because of his searing performance and his untimely death.

Especially in light of quotes like this from his ex-wife Michelle Williams: “It’s so sad. I guess it’s always changing. What else can I say? I just wake up each day in a slightly different place. Grief is like a moving river, so that’s what I mean by ‘it’s always changing’.It’s a strange thing to say because I’m at heart an optimistic person, but I would say in some ways it just gets worse. It’s just that the more time that passes, the more you miss someone. In some ways it gets worse. That’s what I would say,” speaking about late husband Heath Ledger with Newsweek’s Ramin Setoodeh.

Much like the kid from Nirvana’s Nevermind album cover, the girl who played the bee in Blind Melon’s “No Rain” video won’t go away.  Are people always going to care about what she’s up to?  I suppose.

The NY Post caught up with actress Heather DeLoach, who is now 25 and not the awkwardly pudgy girl from the video.  She’s, dare I say it, pretty attractive.

“I thought I would never live this down,” she told The Post from her home in Lake Forest, Calif. “But this is the best thing that happened to me. At 80 years old, people are still going to be wondering what I’m doing,” she says. “It’s opened so many doors with acting and my personal life, it’s been a blessing.”

You know, when push comes to shove being the bee girl from the “No Rain” video is a dang good claim to fame.  Even if her acting career doesn’t pan out (though it looks like she’s getting some roles) I image it’s a great conversation starter at a bar.

[photo via Lucas - and if you haven't checked out the newly redesigned Hypeful it's scrumtulescent!]

I love this time of year, well, this week more than anything else.  If you’re a foodie you live for this time of year.  I picked up my turkey yesterday and then spent part of an afternoon shopping for wine - making sure to pick up a good mix of white and red.  I settled on an Oregon Pinot Noir from Copper Hill, an Erath Pinot Gris and then a few bottles of nothing special - Cotes du Rhone, a South Australian Shiraz, prosecco, etc.

Still, that’s what Thanksgiving is all about.  Good food, good wine, eating glutinous amounts until you can’t eat or drink anymore, slumping on the couch and passing out until night time.

I’m preparing this year by making cinnamon ice cream and a pumpkin tiramisu.  They should complement each other nicely.  Though I made the ice cream last night and unfortunately I added too much vanilla bean and it tastes like really great vanilla rather than cinnamon.  Oh well, it’ll still be delicious.

One thing that always goes overlooked is gravy.  It’s one of those things that you whip up from the pan drippings.  But there is no gray area when it comes to gravy - it’s either world class or terrible.  MORE »

This might be the last time we feel obligated to write about Axl Rose’s magnum opus Chinese Democracy. But today is the day you can sign up for a free Dr. Pepper because GNR released Chinese Democracy before 2009. Good luck though, since it seems everybody loves Dr. Pepper.  It’s struggling under the traffic right now.  Also, in case you were wondering how it takes someone 17 years, $13 million and “a battalion of musicians, producers and advisers to deliver” one album then you might want to read this NY Times article.  Regardless, you can buy the album today at Best Buy or in front of their computers.  Or you could just steal it, I suppose.  Idolator has a timeline of events that transpired from the album’s genesis to its physical release today.

I don’t think Albert Einstein was sweating this one out.  Not the least of all because he’s no longer alive.  But, 103 years after Einstein published his most famous equation, that posits energy equals mass times the speed of light in a vacuum square, it has finally been corroborated by European scientists.

The equation, which essentially says that energy can be converted into mass and vice versa was used as the foundation for the creation of the atomic weapon.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France’s Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world’s mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.

The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five per cent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 per cent?

The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.

In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.

Got that?  The equation was solved, if you will, at the sub-atomic level using quantum chromodynamics.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating things I’ve read in a few weeks.  “This is not a political blog. However, this is a story I couldn’t pass up: the story of how voting patterns in the 2008 election were essentially determined 85 million years ago, in the Cretaceous Period. It’s also a story about how soil science relates to political science, by way of historical chance.”  There are also maps involved.  Lots of maps. The convergence of history, geography and politics - what more could you want? [Vigorous North via Kottke]

It’s safe to say that I miss her already.  Seriously.  Anyway, back home in Alaska Gov. Palin does the ole “pardon a turkey” routine and then pals around with a reporter while some guy drowns a turkey in the background.  At least I think that’s what he’s doing.  Either way, I couldn’t stop laughing at this.

[via YBNBY]

The only reason I’m posting this is because Kristen Bell voices a role in the movie - I almost spelled role as roll, which would be really funny if Kristen Bell were voicing an anthropomorphic dinner roll - and it’s my duty bound obligation to post everything related to Kristen Bell.

It’s the ultimate meh.

Is it possible to have a comeback movie when you’ve never really disappeared?  We’ll find out the answer to that question when Darren Aronoksy’s flick The Wrestler starring actor Mickey Rourke hits theaters.  You’ve heard the buzz, Mickey Rourke’s performance is Oscar worthy.

Official Plot Synopsis: Back in the late ’80s, Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) was a headlining professional wrestler. Now, twenty years later, he ekes out a living performing for handfuls of diehard wrestling fans in high school gyms and community centers around New Jersey. Estranged from his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and unable to sustain any real relationships, Randy lives for the thrill of the show and the adoration of his fans. However, a heart attack forces him into retirement. As his sense of identity starts to slip away, he begins to evaluate the state of his life — trying to reconnect with his daughter, and striking up a blossoming romance with an exotic dancer (Marisa Tomei) who is ready to start a new life. Yet all this cannot compare to the allure of the ring and passion for his art, which threatens to pull Randy “The Ram” back into his world of wrestling. Director Darren Aronofsky presents a powerful portrait of a battered dreamer, who despite himself and the odds stacked against him, lives to be a hero once again in the only place he considers home – inside the ring. THE WRESTLER had its North American premiere at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival and won the Golden Lion at the 2008 Venice Film Festival.

Watch the trailer in High Definition on Apple. The Wrestler hits theaters beginning on December 17th 2008.

You’ll thank me later.