Corey

Yet another adaptation of Stephen King‘s work is on the way next year, with a series take on his time travel novel 11.22.63. coming to Hulu from executive producer J.J. Abrams. The story sees a high school teacher sent back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But it turns to be much easier said than done with a variety of obstacles in his way, including love, of course. Now a new 11.22.63 trailer shows off some more footage from the series coming to Hulu next year.

Here’s the 11.22.63 trailer straight from Hulu:

The first half of the trailer plays with time by running some of the footage in reverse before switching gears and getting a little more ominous and creepy. We still don’t get much of a semblance of the story with just snippets of footage being shown here, but at the very least, I’m intrigued to see how this plays out. After all, I’m a sucker for time travel, and this series has a solid cast that includes James Franco in the lead along with Chris Cooper, Cherry Jones and Sarah Gadon.

The first two episodes of the series are directed by Kevin Macdonald (Black Sea, The Last King of Scotland), so at the very least we know those episodes will be pretty cinematic. Hopefully the rest of the series can keep delivering what Macdonald sets up in those first two hours.

If you want to see more from 11.22.63, you can check out the first teaser trailer for the Hulu series right here. We’ll likely be seeing more footage from the show as we get closer to the 2016 premiere, so stay tuned.

Hulu Original series 11.22.63 is a thriller in which high school English teacher Jake Epping (James Franco) travels back in time to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — but his mission is threatened by Lee Harvey Oswald, falling in love and the past itself, which doesn’t want to be changed. Also starring Chris Cooper, Josh Duhamel, T.R. Knight, Cherry Jones, Sarah Gadon, Lucy Fry, George MacKay and Daniel Webber.

The eight-part event series based upon the New York Times best-selling 2011 novel written by Stephen King premieres Presidents Day, Feb. 15, 2016, on Hulu. J.J. Abrams, Stephen King, Bridget Carpenter and Bryan Burk serve as executive producers. Academy Award®-winning Director Kevin Macdonald (Last King of Scotland, State of Play, Black Sea) directs and executive produces the first two hours.

All of 11.22.63 will drop on February 15, 2016.

The post ‘11.22.63’ Trailer: James Franco Trespasses on the Past in Hulu’s New Series appeared first on /Film.

JJ Abrams is one of those filmmakers who loves to hide easter eggs in his films and television shows. And we love to go on the easter egg hunt and find them. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is packed with inside jokes, cameos, fun references to past films, as well as some things that pay homage to the inspiration and fandom of the series.

How many Game of Thrones cameos did you spot? Is it possible the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark might be hidden in this movie somewhere? Find out this and over 50 other Star Wars: The Force Awakens easter eggs, after the jump.

Maz’s Flags

Boba Fett’s Mandelorian flag is featured in the scene where they arrive at Maz Kanata’s castle. Most of the other flags and symbols are from the prequels. You can even see the flag of the 501st Legion.

Force For Change Winner

DC Barnes is the Star Wars fan who won the Star Wars: Force For Change charity contest to have a walk on role in The Force Awakens. Barnes appears as a bar patron in Maz’s Castle.

Phantasm

J.J. Abrams is a big fan of Don Coscarelli‘s horror cult classic Phantasm. He’s such a big fan of it, in fact, that he even pays tribute to it in Star Wars: The Force Awakens — Phasma, the “Chrome Trooper” played by Gwendoline Christie, is named after the 1979 movie.

“It reminded me of the ball in Phantasm, and I just thought, Phasma sounds really cool.”

And his love for the film doesn’t stop there. Abrams’ company Bad Robot has secretly overseen a 4K restoration of Phantasm from the original camera negative.

Carrie Fisher’s Daughter

Billie Lourd, Carrie Fisher‘s daughter plays a Resistance officer credited as “Lieutenant Connix” but named Kaydel Ko Connix in the visual dictionary. Notice she is wearing a variation of the famous hairbuns that her mother made famous. She can be seen in the film working with PZ-4CO, who is partially in control of the droid operations for The Resistance.

The Voices of BB-8

Saturday Night Live veteran Bill Hader and House of Lies star Ben Schwartz (who starred in the short lived Abrams produced tv series Undercovers) are both credited as “BB-8 Voice Consultants.” What does that mean? From what I’ve heard, Ben worked on the film for a couple years trying to give the new ball droid a voice.

Apparently they had gotten it to a certain point but it wasn’t sounding completely right, so they brought in Hader. Hader tried doing a voice but it sounded “too human.” So the sound you hear in the movie ended up being, according to Hader, “JJ fucking around with this sound effects app on his iPad that was attached to a talk box operated by me. It looked ridiculous but it made BB-8’s voice.”

This isn’t the first time Hader has given his vocal talents to a film on the downlow. In fact, he’s done some vocal work for J.J. Abrams before as a voice on the Enterprise.

JJ Abrams Father

JJ Abrams often has his father Gerry Abrams have small cameos in his films. In Star Trek he was a “Barfly” in the earth bar, in Star Trek Into Darkness he was a Starfleet Memorial Admiral, and now in Star Wars: The Force Awakens he plays Resistance Captain Cypress.

Holochess Sequence Stop Motion Animated Again By

I was originally not going to feature the Holochess shot in the easter eggs post because its just so obvious, but there is some interesting bits about the making of the sequence that I thought was worth talking about. The original Holochess sequence in A New Hope was created using stop motion animation by Phil Tippett and his team. Lucasfilm brought Tippett and his team back to create the stop-motion animation sequence for the new film. You can watch an extensive behind the scenes video about the making of the sequence above thanks to Tested.

Warwick Davis Cameo

Warwick Davis, who played the Ewok Wicket in Return of the Jedi, plays a patron to Maz’s castle named Wollivan. According to the Visual Dictionary (above), Wollican is an “interstellar scout and hyperspace trailblazer who sells or gambles away valuable astrogational data and  scavenged trinkets to smugglers and traders.”

The Ark Of The Covenant

I have not been able to confirm this is in the actual film, but the cross section guide for The Force Awakens shows that one of the cargo modules in Han’s freighter is numbered “9906753”. You can see the cargo container in question in the top left of the right hand page screen captured above.

Indiana Jones fans will recognize the number as the identifying number used on the crate that held the Ark of the Covenant in the cavernous warehouse of Hangar 51, after it was retrieved by the US government following its discovery by Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Trailer Editor Spots Starkiller Base’s Point Of Weakness

Stefan Grube might have made you cry. He edited the brilliant first two teaser trailers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and probably a bunch of the modern trailers you loved (above is a photo of him accepting an award for the Best Drama TV Spot Award for ‘There Will Be Blood’ backstage during the Movie Marketing Key Art Awards). Stefan appears in the film as X-Wing pilot Yolo Ziff, who spots the hole in the oscillator of Starkiller Base which ends up being the intel that allows the Resistance to land the knockout blast.

Continue Reading Star Wars: The Force Awakens Easter Eggs >>

The post The Ultimate Guide To Star Wars: The Force Awakens Easter Eggs appeared first on /Film.

Clinton Berry took this closeup of a penguin with a GoPro camera near Casey Station in Antarctica.

"I studied the movements of the penguins for weeks," Berry writes. "They walked in the same area almost every day. We would get maybe a dozen or less going by. The day this was taken there were over 60 penguins. It was a bit of luck involved too."

This is just one of twenty photographs that made not only National Geographic’s Photo of the Day in 2015, but were selected as the top pictures of the year. See them all in a slideshow at the magazine’s website. -via HuffPo

We saw STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS on opening night, and we've got a lot to say.

David Bowie may have invented all of your favorite bands, but he’s not done. On January 8, his birthday, the Thin White Duke will release ★ (pronounced “Blackstar”). It will be Bowie’s 25th album. Last month, Bowie released the album’s first single and title track “Blackstar”, ...

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When your flight is delayed, the airline might compensate you , but certain credit cards also offer travel delay protection, paying you back up to $500 in expenses when you’re delayed.

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Especially around the holidays, you can expect hub airports to be pretty crowded. With a little preparation, you can navigate through your terminal with ease. This cheat sheet from the New York Times gives you specific details about the layout of ten popular hubs, from JFK to LAX.

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Gawker Media readers have purchased more than 10 million products through links on our sites. Here are the 15 most popular from this year.

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With the success of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is already demonstrating, Rumors have been swirling of a sequel to 1987’s Spaceballs. Recently, Mel Brooks spoke with Adam Carolla’s ‘Take A Knee’ Podcast and said that he wants to start filming in 2016.

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Huge props to io9 readers Johnny Larocque and Nicole Cooper, who crafted this adorably spooky yet undeniably festive gingerbread house inspired by the TV show Ash vs Evil Dead and the Evil Dead movies. Ash vs Gingerdead? Check out more photos below!

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For $69, the skilled artists at Budsies will turn photos of your pets or loved ones into plush figurines, or transform your child’s drawing into a stuffed animal.

Source

Marc Johns

Tomer Hanuka

City of God by Daniel Norris

Duolingo is a game-like app and website that teaches you foreign languages. It’s free and has no ads because some users who want to practice their skills are actually generating revenue by translating articles for clients like CNN and Buzzfeed. Source

There’s a Nikola Tesla statue in Silicon Valley that broadcasts a free WiFi signal. Source

Just like every year, there was no real shortage of great scenes in Hollywood in 2015. Even without accounting for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Hateful Eight – whose secrets are known only to the most inner circle of Rejects – the field of suggestions for ‘Best Scene’ was incredibly deep. There were votes for The Room, for Slow West, and for The Martian. More than one person cast their vote for the dance sequence in Ex Machina, the rare time in film history where you could actually feel every member of the audience falling in love with a movie’s leading man.

And then there was Mad Max: Fury Road. How to pick a single scene in a film that is essentially one long chase sequence? To make sure that the movie was treated fairly, we spent time trying to narrow down Fury Road into a single concise sequence of action; the farther we got, though, the more it seemed like the film’s first major chase – regardless of whether it be a scene, a sequence, or an act – had to be the right choice. The only alternative was to punish director George Miller for doing his job too well, and that was a distinction that none of us particularly wanted to make.

In a year where Hollywood deliberately and shamelessly tried to connect with the inner child of every audience member, it was Mad Max that wrote the script for unlocking our collective imagination. Nostalgia is limited by its own association with the past; while many movies want to recreate the feeling of being a child at the theater, a part of us is always aware that what we are being made to feel has been locked away forever. A film that lives entirely in a faithful recreation of our past can only provide us with echoes of we felt one time during one movie. To make your audience feel like a kid again, you have to overwhelm them, to confuse them, and leave them wondering if the things they saw on the screen were even really possible. You have to create a spectacle so grand, so illogical, and so sincere, that years of skepticism and cynicism are washed away in an instant.

You have to create Mad Max: Fury Road.

If that sounds like an overindulgence, then great, maybe now you’re starting to catch on. The action sequences in Fury Road work on so many levels – and have been enjoyed by so many difference audience members – that it’s easy to understate the purely visceral impact they have on viewers. On the most basic level, Miller and his army of technicians have created a movie that stuns us – that prevents us from being able to react to the movie in anything other than involuntary ways. When we think back to the great action movies of our youth, we like to describe ourselves as overcome by the senses, slack-jawed and simply plugged into the screen. Miller doesn’t simply recreate those experiences; he approaches us as adults and proceeds to bludgeon us into submission.

First, we watch a War Boy die. To this point in the chase sequence, all of the action has flowed from left to right on the screen. We’ve watched as cars accelerate towards the horizon and pale men hurl their explosives towards the bottom-right corner of the screen. Miller and composer Tom Holkenborg (also known as Junkie XL) subtly increase the tempo of the soundtrack, moving from the rhythmic pounding of Immortan Joe’s drumline to the descending string lines of the non-diegetic orchestra. And in a moment, everything is reversed. The War Boy is shot; the music drops out; as a counter to all that has come before, the dying War Boy gathers his courage and throws himself from the war rig to a fiery death. Suddenly, the entire visual direction of the movie is upset; Miller puts his audience in motion from right to left and uses that momentum to drive home an understanding of what Furiosa and Max are up against.

A few minutes later, another War Boy dies, then another, and suddenly the muted yellows and blacks of the desert have given way to an explosion of color – often quite literally – as the War Rig and its pursuers head into the center of the storm. Here Miller once more catches us unaware. Amidst the explosions and the flashes of lightning, the full range of Mad Max’s color palette explodes into being. We see quick flashes of the deepest red against the horizon; and suddenly, the War Boys’ car explodes, bathing everything in a red glow. As Nux continues in his valiant effort to die with honor for Immortan Joe, his car begins to reflect the light of the gasoline, bathing half the shots in a green translucent glow. Just as before, Miller does more than simply subvert our expectations, he uses them as a weapon against us. The sights and sounds of the film are not to be trusted.

Present through it all is a uniquely physical dimension that does not shy away from digital imagery, but rather instills every frame with the vague hint of bodily threat. We know that the stuntman playing the wounded War Boy does not leap to his death; we also know that Hardy and Hoult were never in any real danger as their car rolls wildly end over end. What we can’t do is easily explain it away. We don’t leave the theater discussing the overt usages of CGI because the seams of Miller’s universe are too neatly tucked into the fabric. Instead, we speak in a simplified language of profanity and exclamation points. George Miller has done the impossible: turned us back into the gushing children that we spend hundreds of dollars every year trying to rediscover at the movie theater.

As they did in 2013, Beutler Ink commissioned an illustration that sums up the memorable events of the past year. This year, the artist is Luke McGarry. There are 143 news items, pop culture icons, notable people, memes, and themes in this one picture. Can you identify them all?

Click twice at the post about it to greatly enlarge the picture. If you get stumped, scroll down at the same link for a map and a list. Oh, you can also buy a print.  -via reddit

(Photo: garritcole)

A now-deleted Craigslist offering in Boston offered the ideal Christmas party entertainment: a living Elf on the Shelf staring at your guests. It's the perfect way to set the mood!

I wonder if he's available for service off-season. I'd like to have an Elf on the Shelf around the office to keep morale up.

-via Dave Barry

George Carlin once said, “Have you ever noticed, when you’re driving, that anybody who’s driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac?” The rest of life is like that, too, when everyone around us is judged by the standard that is us. Meanwhile, we are being judged by that standard that is everyone else in their own minds. How much happier we could be if we could only delight in each other’s differences! This is the latest from John McNamee at Pie Comic.

When Batman leaves Gotham to travel to Tokyo, this is his ideal abode. The Batcave is an apartment available for rent on Airbnb. It costs $75 a night. For that low price, you get a suite that is decorated with Batman paraphernalia, including posters, hundreds of original comics, bedding, and furniture.

It does not come with a butler, though, or batpoles or bat shark repellent. These are serious oversights that probably explain the low price.

-via Rocket News 24

(Cyanide & Happiness/Kris Wilson)

You have made the Gingerbread Man. You have made him as a monster. He cannot be anything beyond his original form. His reality is confined to a world that he cannot differentiate from himself. And his agony ends only when you eat him.

But the Gingerbread Man is not the true monster. You are.

-via Tastefully Offensive

We’ve shared our lists for the best albums and the best songs of 2015—now it’s Diplo’s turn. He shares his 2-hour mix of his favorites of the year for the BBC. Listen on the player below.It’s a great way for the unlikely super-producer to cap off a record-breaking year. ...

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“Too Legit I Am” by fishbiscuit Quit I cannot. Too legit I am. Yoda is too legit to quit.

queenoftorture:

Parks and Recreation; 7 season: episode 5 - Gryzzlbox

For 6 years a continual winner of the McDonald’s Monopoly game was Jerome Jacobson, head of security for the firm that created the game pieces. He stole over $20 million worth of the valuable game pieces and sold them off until he was finally reported to the FBI. He was sentenced to 3 years in federal prison. Source

We’ve made no secret of our slobbering love for Ash vs Evil Dead, which has just three episodes left in its kick-ass first season. What will we do between January 2 and whenever season two starts? Well, we’ll binge-watch season one a lot ... and ponder all the reasons why it’s so freaking enjoyable.

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In Bruges captures the existential weight of the Christmas season

Martin McDonagh’s debut feature In Bruges only mentions the word “Christmas” a couple of times, but the existential weight of the season hangs so strongly over the film that it’s unnecessary to underline it any further. The story of two hitmen (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) camped out in Bruges, Belgium, after a murder gone wrong functions as a Christmas film precisely because it deeply inhabits the season’s pensive nature. For its first half, In Bruges more or less operates as a vulgar comedy, much of it featuring Ray and Ken sightseeing around Bruges, like the stars of a crude The Odd Couple Goes To Belgium. It even has a religious bent to it, as the characters struggle with how the realities of their profession brush up against their ingrained Catholic morality. But more than that, In Bruges, like the Christmas holiday, adopts a light veneer mainly as a smokescreen for something much darker—in this case, heady discussions about the guilt and consequences of breaking ironclad moral principles, specifically Ray’s accidental murder of a child. In effect, In Bruges is a moral parable gussied up to look like a Euro vacation film.

Full story at avclub.com

The world is a scary place sometimes, but we can all take solace in the fact that the forces of good have come together and made this happen: The Garbage Pail Kids Movie has just been released on Blu-ray, with all manner of special features befitting its “Collector’s Edition” status.

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