Briefly Behold the New 'Total Recall'; The Muppets Take Goldman Sachs
We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today: a brief look at the new Total Recall, The Muppets go to Goldman Sachs, where the language is horrible, and Tenacious D gets by with a little help from Val Kilmer.
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The full trailer for the long-in-the-pipeline Total Recall remake will debut Sunday during the Heat-Celtics NBA game on ABC, but we like what we see from these first 30 seconds. This is partially attributable to the fact that we are suckers for movies where the hero can't decide if he's going crazy or if everyone he's ever known or loved is part of an intergalactic conspiracy that's all just coming together. We're pleased to see Colin Farrell and Ethan Hawke, two actors we like, are on-hand. So is Kate Beckinsale, who we've yet to form an opinion about, 13 years after Brokedown Palace. (Her husband, Len Wiseman, is directing. They made about 72 of those Underworld movies together, which means they must really enjoy each other's company, or they have trouble thinking of fun things to do on dates.) Also in the cast is Jessica Biel, an actress we are very much looking forward to enjoying in a movie one day, because she seems to have a nice hypothetical way about her. The good thing is, eventually they all end up on Mars.[Sony]
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The Muppets have finally responded to Greg Smith public resignation from Goldman Sachs. They are entitled, because the higher-ups at Goldman allegedly used the word 'muppet' in an unflattering way. This leads to some business about Muppet anti-Defamation Leagues (ugh), but the real star is the corporate oiliness of Kyle Maclachlan and Neal McDonough. Admittedly, these two could do heartless muppet-haters ten minutes off a shuttle flight -- and no doubt they have -- but there's so, so much pleasure to be had listening to Neal McDonough call people bums. That's much, much funnier than all the casual swearing that pervades the sketch. What's the deal with that? The Muppets are in the room. It doesn't matter what the Funny or Die guy has written. You don't work blue when Grover's within earshot. [Funny or Die]
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The humorously hard rocking Tenacious D is back with a video for their new single, "Be the Best." Even if you never quite found the antics of Kyle Gass and Jack Black as funny as others thought you should have during the late-'90s, it's hard not to crack a smile during the six-minute video, which features self-aware references to their disastrous 2006 feature film, The Pick of Destiny, and a lovely, dead-serious cameo from Val Kilmer, who should be getting all these goofy walk-on roles Liam Neeson has been doing over the past two years, except he's too much of a sport to make it clear he's in the gag. Poor, tortured, compulsively watchable Val Kilmer. [Rolling Stone]
So about that JetBlue flight from New York to Las Vegas that was rerouted to Amarillo, Texas this morning following what the airline is calling "a medical situation involving the captain." This particular medical situation apparently involved the captain banging on the cockpit door until the co-pilot made him leave, at which point the passengers were told to restrain their wayward captain, who, according to witnesses, was talking about bombs and saying "Gimme the code!" Five passengers restrained him on the ground until the plane landed. Obviously, a captain with "a medical situation" that causes him to scream things about "the codes" will make people that much more frustrated and anxious about every step of the air travel process. Even if the captain was really sick, which it sounds like he was, one mid-air freakout is too many, from a consumer confidence point of view. [CBS]
