My goodness, the new Alice in Wonderland trailer is dazzling.
It's also extreeeeemely potent nightmare juice, showing off Burton's deftly warped Wonderland, where trippiness is indistinguishable from reality. I may never sleep again.
On a scale of one to awesome, where would you put this teaser trailer, PopWatchers?
Lost got some good news last week in advance of its annual — and final — appearance at Comic-Con this Saturday: Emmy nominations for Best Drama (the third nomination the show has received in this category in its five years on the air), Best Writing (for the season finale, “The Incident,” scripted by exec producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof), and Best Supporting Actor for Michael Emerson (his third for playing Ben Linus). Cuse and Lindelof have been in radio silence since the finale aired in late May, but they briefly broke it when we asked for their reaction to the nods. In a statement, they say: “Once we wrote the words, ‘the island is moving through time,’ we pretty much looked at each other and said, ‘Well, let’s not hold our breath for an Emmy nod this year.’ It feels pretty awesome to let that breath out.” Congrats to the producers, Emerson, and the show.
Speaking of Comic-Con, my Totally Lost partner Dan Snierson and I will be hosting our own Lost geek-out down in San Diego this weekend. Which is to say: Tere is going to be a Totally Lost panel on Saturday, from 3:30-4:30, in Room 5AB. Among the many things that will happen in that room during that hour: discussion, theorizing, humiliations (small and large), ill-considered humor, and a couple surprises. Sorry: No Pig E. If you’re going, please stop by and say hello.
Meanwhile, visit ew.com all this week and into next for my EW University course on Lost. I have some essays on the show’s cult TV roots and its themes, as well as my own testimony of bizarre Lost fandom. PS: You can follow me at Comic-Con via Twitter here: @ewdocjensen.
Rogen himself caught wind of this nonsense and took it a bit more personally. "Doug Ellin is a moron from all I can understand, so it makes sense he doesn’t like me," he told the L.A. Times. "Mark Wahlberg calledus misogynistic in an interview, so I think they kind of started that….It’s on. Luckily, I never have and never plan on watching Entourage."
Which reminds me: I'm one of the only people I know still watching Entourage, mostly because it happens to be a series on which I'm not at least a few episodes (or seasons) behind. When those shows pop up, apparently I cling on for dear life. But after Sunday's episode, which totally underutilized guest starts Jami Gertz and Autumn Reeser (whose "moment of interest" constituted Gary Cole leering at her legs, and not even from a good angle) (now who's misogynistic? how you doin'), I might have to just let go for good. What about you?
There isn't a soul on the face of God's green goodness more excited for the revival of Melrose Place than I am, so I was pretty cheesed for this new promo. Keep your eyes peeled for the Gossip Girl font in full force!
Thoughts: The chintzy weird arches built into the walls of the apartments are intact, which brings me a strange kind of joy, and a mere glimpse of the 4616 address makes me giddy. But man, for a show set in sunny California, does this show ever look dark. Yes, the original had murder, intrigue, drugs, prostitution, cults, explosions, attempted lobotomies, gun violence, suicide, molestation, and so forth, but this just seems sinister and secretive in a way the original really wasn't. That doofy contrast of earnest, sweet young thing and outlandish, bizarre soapiness is what made Melrose really tick for me: How does thoughtful, nice Jane Mancini get herself in such weird situations? Oh, Allison the naive, is there nothing you can't poison with your intense neediness? Even moody Jake and sultry Jo were verifiable good people. But in these promos, the ostensible nice kids are still coming across as brooding and dangerous, as if everyone has tapped in to his or her inner Amanda Woodward.
That said, holy moly, Laura Leighton looks fan-freakin'-tastic! I have missed you, Sydney.
What do you think, PopWatchers? Are you looking forward to the Melrose reboot, and have you come up with a catchier nickname than Melrose (re)Place, which is what I came up with?
And so started one of the most brilliant nights of my life. Because The Boosh aren’t just anycomedy group or stand-up guys. Their show is an interactive, absurdist explosionof pure, crazy, bust-your-gut-laughter plus a boatload of rocking tunes. (Did Ithink I’d ever do the Mick Jagger dance to “Brown Sugar”? No, but yesterdayheld a lot of firsts.) Attendees were invited to jump on stage, caressFielding’s boots, play “pelt the rabbit in his big white face” (don’t ask), andadd their own fan art to the set. There were lots of kisses and hugs, free posters, and a wildparade of costumes (cheers to the guy who kept his Moon character face mask onthe entire night).
A PEOPLE.COM EXCLUSIVE just alerted us that Gidget, the Taco Bell chihuahua responsible for thousands of late-night Border Runs across the nation (hundreds of which took place in my car from 1996-1999), has died of a stroke at age 15. Is it too soon for the clip below?
R.I.P., mi chalupa pequeña.
Hot on the heels of its Chrome browser announcement, Google is yet again expanding its online reach, this time in the form of an e-mail, IM, content-sharing, collaborative environment they've dubbed Wave. It's a lot of…well, everything, but its still in its incubation phase. Google demoed Wave for developers (the actual demo starts around 7:43) in the hopes that they would start building add-on apps and tinkering with Wave's current structure, much in the way people wrote home-grown add-ons for Google Maps. The developers indeed went to town at a hackathon this week.
The gist of Wave, according to the people who wove it out of cotton candy dreams, is "what might e-mail look like if it was invented today?" The biggest change is that the content of the e-mail would be less static — Wave users can respond to just chunks of the message, switch between e-mailing and IMing about it, invite other people into the conversation at any point, etc.You can follow the project's progress on Google's blog about it, and you can sign up for a beta invite (due in September) here.
I'm intrigued, naturally, but I'm also not sure how broken my current e-mail and IM options really are. Other than reliable drag-and-drop file-sharing, I don't have a consistent "why can't I do this?!" function. What do you think, PopWatchers? Does this look like the Wave of the future?
One of the characters may look familiar to hard core Star Wars fans — she's Aurra Sing (pictured above), voiced by Jamie King. First glimpsed in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, Aurra is described by Cartoon Network and Lucasfilm as a companion to cruel mercenary Cad Bane, "though she harbors her own sinister ambitions."
The other new face sounds equally ominous. Her name is Sugi (pictured after the jump), a "ruthless, knife-wielding bounty hunter [who] poses a new threat to the Jedi Knights and the heroes of the Republic." Poor Annie. As if he needed more scum and villainy to contend with.
I don't know if it's the Brit-mania of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince or the fact that all of these summer blockbusters have got me tuckered out, but the trailer for the period romance Bright Star is on my Must List this week. Dreamy floppy-haired poet + an unlikely romance with his next-door neighbor + a true story set in the English countryside (in this case that of the poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne) = perfect summer blockbuster anecdote. Even the hokey "He was a dreamer, she was a realist" voiceover doesn't turn me off. And the voiceover is really hokey. Maybe my excitement has something to do with the fact that The Piano's Oscar-winning writer/director Jane Campion is behind the whole thing.
Watch the trailer for the sure-to-be-epic love story, which comes out on September 18, then share your Musts with us. List up to three items from current TV/movies/music/books/games/online.Don't forget your e-mail address, in case we decide to use yoursubmission in the magazine. Deadline is Thursday, July 23 at noon ET.
We know you've been waiting for this news: Kendra Wilkinson's E! show, Kendra, has been renewed for a second season. The former Playboy model and Girl Next Door reality star is utterly (at times endearingly) clueless regarding all earthly matters. Her now-husband, NFL star Hank Baskett, exhibits genuine affection for Kendra's low wattage. And the pair have ¡A BABY ON THE WAY! Oh, this too: the series' debut scored E!'s highest ratings since The Anna Nicole Show. We have a huge quadruple threat here, and clearly a television series that must go on. If granny takes pole-dancing lessons to improve her form for season 2, I may even watch.
Last month, Kendra told EW she wouldn't want "every single detail" of her baby's life to end up on camera. "I know if we do end up filming with the baby, it's going to bevery, very limited. It won't show as much as Jon & Kate." On season 2 of a reality show pegged to your pregnancy and new family? Good luck. PopWatchers, what do you think?
More Kendra on PopWatch:
Kendra on her laugh, cheesesteaks, and not raising her kids like Jon & Kate
Is Kendra Wilkinson the new Anna Nicole Smith?
