The video for “Drunk Girls,” from LCD Soundsystem’s new album This is Happening, went online today and the internet soon learned that it had been directed by none other than Spike Jonze.  The video features band members James Murphy, Nancy Whang (heh) and Pat Mahoney being menaced and sexually assaulted by a gang of thugs dressed like pandas and panda dogs.   On the one hand, it’s not that impressive considering they probably finished the whole thing in a day. But on the other, who cares? It’s about a gang of horny, malevolent pandas.  Get it?  It’s ironic because pandas are notoriously uninterested in sex.  F*cking hipsters.

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Collider talked to Hangover director and gangbang enthusiast Todd Phillips about Hangover 2.  Among other things, he says rumors about the movie being set in Mexico or Thailand aren’t true.  The interviewer tries to get him to compare the Hangover characters to the Sex and the City characters, but he declines.  You can read all about this and more in my upcoming book, Todd Phillips is a Smart Man.

Corey Feldman’s open letter to Corey Haim is definitely not something he did for attention, because when you write an open letter to a dead guy, the last thing you could want is for someone to read it other than the intended recipient.  It’s hard to make a joke about a tragedy, so I’ll simply point out that he signed the letter “CF Core Feldog DAWG C-DOG KID.”  Child actors, dude. |MovieWeb|

Warner is making a fifth Final Destination movie.  This despite the fourth one being called The Final Destination.  Warner chief said the decision was made “because we can’t resist.”  These cheap horror movies are like heroin, you see.  Because the people who buy them are mostly losers. |SlashFilm|

Watch Spike Jonze’s short film I’m Here for free online, courtesy of Absolut Vodka.  I know that’s what I’ll be doing, because the sunlight burns my skin. *hiss*  Get it off! Get it off!  |I’mHere|

Finally, this dog is riding a donkey. Get down from there, dog.  You’re not hiking into the grand canyon, you don’t even have a saddle bag to carry. (Thanks, Jacktion!)

Much as I like Spike Jonze’s movies, I like his weird short videos even more (see also: the short he did in which Kanye West carves a strange little man out of his belly).  These pictures come from Higglety Pigglety Pop or There Must be More to Life (an adaptation of a Maurice Sendak book), a 23-minute short Jonze produced which will be attached to the blu-Ray of Where the Wild Things Are.  It was created by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski and features the voices of Meryl Streep, Forest Whitaker and Jonze.

The plot is that Meryl Streep is a shaggy dog, and she wants to become the star of the Mother Goose theater.  I don’t really know what that means, but I know it’s got talking animals dressed like humans.  Honestly, I’d take cyanide capsules if a dog in a suit told me to.  I’d assassinate the president if Cody the Dog Clerk said so.

[check out some video clips over at /Film]

(Hot chicks dykin’ out?  Hell yeah, now it’s a wild rumpus.)

Where the Wild Things Are is one of the weirder mainstream movies I’ve ever seen.  The pacing is… off. It drags in spots. You’re not sure where it’s going, it feels like an imprecise parable, and it’s full of non-sequitirs.  But in a way, it’s a perfect adaptation of the book — a book which is only ten sentences long and, if you read it as adult, isn’t even that well written.  But there’s something strange and fantastic about it that it’s stuck with so many of us as a pleasant feeling well into adulthood, like an awesome dream you can’t fully articulate and doesn’t make sense after you wake up.  Like the memory of reading the book for the first time, much of WTWTA is like being trapped in the mind of a 10-year-old, but it’s more like the 10-year-old you remember being, rather than the idiot 10-year-old Michael Bay makes movies for.

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Everyone knows movie people love self-congratulatory circle jerks, but they’ve got nothing on the people who market them.  Remember The Dark Knight?  Its success had nothing to do with it being a good movie, it was all because of the “rich transmedia experience” designed by the marketing visionaries at 42 Entertainment.  And according to this new LA Times article, Where the Wild Things Are‘s success?  You guessed it, all because of marketing.

If they gave out Oscars for marketing campaigns, you could pretty much hand out the trophy right now to Warner Bros. marketing chief Sue Kroll, who almost single-handedly managed to find an audience [this may be one of the stupidest phrases I have ever read -Ed.] for “Where the Wild Things Are,” the new family movie that turned out not to really be a family movie at all.

You “found an audience” for a movie that defies genre?  Oh my God, let’s rename the sun in your honor!

According to Hollywood conventional wisdom, “Where the Wild Things Are” looked like a disaster in the making. Over budget and beset by endless delays, the movie kept being pushed back on the Warners schedule, picking up a nasty case of bad buzz after word leaked out that children had fled an early test screening in tears, put off by the dark tone of the film.

Hollywood conventional wisdom is the thing that gave us The Rock as the Tooth Fairy, remember? And I don’t know who you hang with, but where I’m from, “makes children cry” is the highest compliment you can give something.
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