Daniel Radcliffe shirtless in a bra? Yes, Google, it's true.

I sort of dismissed Harry Potter movies as not my cup of tea a few years ago, but based on this new TV spot for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, perhaps I was wrong. Er, premature.  The sheer bra is cute.  But I wonder: couldn’t the choker be tighter?  LOOK OUT HARRY, THERE’S A GINGER BEHIND YOU!  MOTHER OF GOD, THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!

Guh. British people.  Cross dressing is their solution to everything.

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I’m not one of those smug wieners who will scream your ear off about how the British version is superior every time someone mentions The Office – please, people, jump in a volcano, and take your stinky limey DVDs with you*.  But I still love Ricky Gervais.  Even in his more broad, commercial projects he usually still finds a way to Trojan Horse some balls in there (here’s a horse I made for you! Surprise! I hid my balls in it!).  The latest news makes me even happier: Gervais has been working on a TV series starring Warwick Davis in a fictionalized version of Davis’ life called “Life’s Too Short”.  Gervais says it could eventually become a movie.

Ricky Gervais has hinted there may eventually be a film version of his new TV show Life’s Too Short, which centres on the travails of real-life vertically-challenged actor Warwick Davis.
Gervais and his long-term writing partner Stephen Merchant have penned the comedy series, described as “sort of like Curb Your Enthusiasm” for BBC2.
Asked if the duo were planning any future movie projects, Gervais said: “We want to do another one. Maybe we can do a film of Life’s Too Short.”
Merchant then cautioned: “Let’s see how the series goes. Let’s not get carried away,” to which his partner responded: “Let’s have it ready in case it’s a success. Always plan for success.” [Guardian]

I’d actually be excited about this project even if Gervais wasn’t involved.  If you don’t know who Warwick Davis is, you need to go rent Willow and Leprechaun immediately.  He’s the original Hollywood dwarf.  Dude makes Peter Dinklage look like Verne Troyer.

*And another thing! PAL sucks!  (*throws up ‘NTSC’ gang sign, C-walks*)

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender opened in the UK recently, and according to reports, audiences are laughing at many of the film’s climactic scenes.  Of course, that wouldn’t be news.  The news is that for the first time, it seems something besides Shyamalan’s terrible writing may be to blame.  Writes the Guardian:

Each nation has a certain type of people, a favoured race different from the rest, people with the Jedi-like power to control or “bend” the elements. Firebenders. Earthbenders. Waterbenders. And airbenders. At the cinema showing I attended, the British crowd reacted derisively at key dialogue moments. One wise old lady says solemnly to a young man: “I could tell at once that you were a bender, and that you would realise your destiny.” One character tells another wonderingly: “There are some really powerful benders in the Northern Water Zone.” Another whispers tensely: “We want to minimise their bender sources.” A key figure is taken away by brutal soldiers, one of whom shouts cruelly: “It’s a bender.”
And so on, for almost two hours. Each time, the response from the auditorium was deafeningly immature, and brought many of us to a state of nervous collapse.

Strangely, I found it much too boring to be funny. The Economist explains what I was missing:

“Bender”, of course, is a crude British pejorative for “homosexual”. So why, indeed, didn’t they just check the script? Turns out they didn’t need to. One of its stars, Dev Patel, is a Brit who certainly knew what was going on.  Patel, who plays a young prince, said of the term: “When I came onto the movie, I was like, ‘Really’? Benders?’”
Asked why he did not inform the director of the British slang connotation of the word, he told The Times: “It was too integral to the movie. We couldn’t call them fire or air manipulators. It would have been moving too far from the source material.”

I guess you can add to the growing list of reasons Manny shouldn’t be allowed to write his own movies the fact that he couldn’t think of a word that would keep his movie from being called “The Last Sky Queer” and his characters from constantly gay bashing each other.  Then again, maybe he knowingly left it in there, realizing it was the only thing remotely interesting about it.  In related news, British Tom Cruise just had a panic attack.

I didn’t get to see Four Lions when it played at Sundance, but now it has a trailer and a May 7th release date set for the U.K.  Still no release date in the U.S., and gee, I wonder why. It’s a sort of farce-ish comedy of errors about four hapless British jihadists.  A bombedy, say. It’s supposedly very funny, and I respect the director’s balls for taking this subject, but I didn’t find the trailer all that charming.  I honestly can’t tell whether it’s that I’m not ready to laugh at asshole terrorists (at least not when they’re standing around arguing about breakfast cereal), or if the comedy’s just too British.  Get it, guv?  It’s funny cuz da blokes is just standin’ roun’ lookin at each ovvaz ow awkward loikes, innit.  An’ den da lorrie droivah fell off da lift an’ ruined da bobby’s jumpah!

[via ThePlaylist, one more equally tedious clip below]

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Here you can see the two versions of the Couples Retreat poster (click to enlarge), the UK version on the left, the US version on the right.  Notice anything different?  Oops, where’s my black people!  Naturally, some folks are calling racism.  The studio, meanwhile, has a perfectly logical explanation:

The studio said it regretted causing offence and has abandoned plans to use the revised poster in other countries… A Universal spokesman said the revised advert aimed ‘to simplify the poster to actors who are most recognisable in international markets’. [via DailyMail]

What, Faizon Love isn’t a bankable star? …Okay, yeah, I guess that sounds sorta plausible.  Still, no word on why they felt the need to add in all those clouds and palm trees in the background.  Oh I’m sorry, was the mountain too uppity for you?  Either way, you have to admit both posters are an improvement over the original tagline, “It may be paradise… But it’s no vacation… Because there are black people here.”