PICTURES
The age old dilemma: Another issue of the Press hits newsstands. You rush to open it, skipping past the Vagina Monologues-esque “Dry Martino” and the 41st installment of the Fifteen Albums series in “Sonic Boom” to get to “NBN.” And look! There is a picture set mentioned. They are great pictures. None of this is surprising. But are they only awesome enough to look at, or are they awesome enough to look at and use as your desktop wallpaper? Well no guessing this week because the title says it all. Put any of these as your wallpaper and you will appear hipper, better looking and far more intellectual (results not guaranteed). Some of the wallpapers here are very spacey and visually out there, while others are gorgeous scenic stills run through some Photoshop filters. My favorites are the epic Lego scene and matte painting of Super Mario.
TRAILER
“What if they took Cast Away, put it on the moon and replaced Wilson with a supercomputer?” I’ve lost track of how many times somebody has asked that question (possibly because it’s never happened), but somebody has come up with answer. Moon stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, an isolated worker at the Moon colony Sarang. He spends his days mining some energy source for Earth called Helium-3. His BFF is a computer named GERTY. With only two weeks to go on his three-year stint, Sam takes a lunar rover out to investigate some weird transmission, only to find a living pod similar to his (!) with a person inside (!!) that looks exactly like him (!!!). Is Sam losing his mind? Is the entire operation actually an experiment by the government? Does Moon look really engaging and intriguing (I loved Cast Away)? Yes.
WEBSITE
If there’s one thing wrong with the Internet (you know, besides MySpace, the websites upon websites of Lord of the Rings fan fiction, an overabundance of naked cartoon characters and like a billion other things), it’s that it’s so fast-paced, it can be difficult to keep up with the latest news without staring at www.longislandpress.com and mashing the refresh button. Sure there are RSS feeds for being told when a news site has updated, but what the Internet needs is something…Googlier. Enter Google News Timeline. GNT displays news updates aggregated from outlets of your choosing in columns that can be broken down by any denomination of time from day to decade. Because it’s built by Google, GNT is infinitely searchable and supports custom news queries like “Gimli Pocahontas space battle.”
TRAILER
I’m definitely late to the party on this but Jason Bateman is pretty awesome. On the Leading Males From Hollywood Likeability Ladder, he’s near the top, just under Paul Rudd. And he’s pretty funny too (see: Arrested Development, pretty much anything else he’s in). So it’s not surprising that a movie starring Bateman and written/directed by Mike Judge (writer/director of the classic Office Space) looks great. In Extract, Bateman plays the owner of a flavor extract factory who has a pretty nice life. Until a freak accident leaves one of his employees with half of one testicle left between his legs. And his wife (Kristen Wiig) starts having sex with a gigolo instead of him. And his company hires a very, very hot temp (Mila Kunis). Bateman’s character is basically in a scenario very similar to Peter Gibbons’ in Office Space, with a shaggy-haired and bearded Ben Affleck playing his Lawrence.
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