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There are times in this busy world when I forget just how cool The Muppets are. Randomly mention the beastly little guys and gals, and I'll smile politely, vaguely remembering the good old days. Put them in front of me, however, and it's a challenge to not let out a real world, ear-breaking shriek of squee. I don't care how long they've been around -- The Muppets are cool, and they are no cooler than when they're delighting in the epic grandeur of rhapsody ... Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," that is.

We all know the song. It was pretty epic in its own right, and then soared to new levels in Wayne's World, where it grabbed the #2 spot on the Billboard charts almost two decades after its release. Now the MuppetsStudio on YouTube have released the ultra-awesome clip you can see after the jump -- an arseload of Muppets singing the classic Queen song just like the old-school music video. And it's convinced me that Beaker is a lost member of the band.

The bad thing about all of this is that it's making me wish for a whole different sort of Muppet movie. Sure, Jason Segel is planning The Greatest Muppet Movie of All Time, and the project will involve the gang reuniting to save the studio. But considering this video, and the utter awesomeness that is Segel's rock opera in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, couldn't they halt things, change scope, and make this The Greatest Muppet Rock Opera of All Time? The possibilities are wonderfully epic and so utterly perfect. Who's with me?

Hit the jump for the Muppets' performance, plus the original video and that bit from Wayne's World.

[via Movieline]

By all accounts, 1999 was one of the best years in film history, featuring an amazing glut of debuts and career-defining follow-ups from a rich and varied roster of directors who are steadily working some ten years later. For example American Beauty, which was also released in '99, was one of the first films revisited in our "Shelf Life" series, and it seemed most likely to lose its luster, especially given its Oscar win and almost universal critical acclaim, but thankfully the film sustained most of its initial appeal and impact.

Fight Club, meanwhile, faced markedly more polarizing reactions from audiences and critics, although like Alan Ball and Same Mendes' film it captured a moment in the zeitgeist that made it important almost regardless of how good it was. Ten years later, Fox Home Entertainment just released the film on Blu-ray in a gorgeous new set, and after a decade of conspicuous consumption and ironic detachment, it's time to see whether the weight of its message or meaning still holds relevance.

It's the day before a major holiday, and all you want to do is surf around looking for things to occupy your time before the boss finally lets you leave a drop early. Am I right? Well here's a little treat that will take up all of about a minute and a half of your time. Pieced together to celebrate the 10th anniversary of The Matrix, a group of freaks with 440 extra hours on their hands decided to recreate the famous "Trinity Help" sequence using LEGOs. This is the scene where Neo manages to dodge some agent bullets in super slow-mo before Trinity finally shows up to help her man squeeze out of a tough spot.

And yes, I wasn't joking -- it really did take a whopping 440 hours to put this together. The folks behind it even created a website dedicated solely to this project. In it, they describe the making-of process and include a side-by-side video comparison featuring both the real scene and the LEGO version (we included both after the jump). From their description:

Just in time for its 10th year anniversary, "Trinity Help" is a frame-accurate stop-frame animation of the famous bullet-dodge scene from the 1999 movie The Matrix, all done in Lego. By "frame accurate" we mean that we took all of the video frames from that part of the movie (that's nearly 900 frames for just 44 seconds of footage) and reproduced them all in Lego.

Early in the piece we decided we wanted to do everything "in camera". No wire-removal, no special effects, no crazy Photoshop tricks. We pretty much regret this now, but I guess it gives us bragging rights of some sort. We did do some colour correction and image stabilising, and at one point we edited a very small number of frames in one scene so that some minor background shake was taken out, but that's it.

Watch the video(s) after the jump.

Just a few weeks ago, Peter Hall brought you the news that Dwight Schultz, aka the original Howlin' Mad Murdock, had earned a cameo in Joe Carnahan's remake of The A-Team. Obviously, you can't invite Schultz and not invite the rest of the surviving team, and it seems Faceman will also be getting some facetime. According to Dirk Benedict Central, Dirk Benedict will also be appearing in the film in an unspecified role.

Remember when this kind of thing stayed secret? I'm not losing sleep over the production of The A-Team or anything, but it makes me nostalgic for the days down the long haul and into history back when you didn't know anything about secret cameos until you were in the dark theater. Then you could nudge whoever you were with and say "Oh my gosh! That's Dirk Benedict! Ha ha!" If you had your head bitten off when you started blabbing about the Zombieland cameo, this is the reason why. People like surprise cameos!

So, who do you think Benedict will be? Bradley Cooper's father? Someone helpful they meet along the way? One of the commanding officers coordinating the task force that's hunting them down? Or will Schultz, Benedict and Mr. T (you know he'll be the next one confirmed) all have a scene together where they hand over keys to the iconic van?

This week Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles is finally making its way to the big screen. It's not a big buzzed-about film, but it is, indeed, one worthy of your time. The movie offers a peek at Efron's possible future (which the abysmal 17 Again completely failed to do), a delightful look into creating art in the '30s, and it recreates the nuances of theater on the big screen. And hey, it's a Linklater film, which seems to be painfully rare these days.

But none of those reasons are why I urge you to see it. It all rests on the shoulders of actor Christian McKay, who plays Orson Welles. I missed the film at TIFF, and spent the next year listening to raves over McKay's performance before I finally got the chance to make it to a screening. Even with the rave reviews and raised expectations, it was quite easy to get mesmerized by McKay, who not only bears an uncanny resemblance to the iconic actor and filmmaker, but also adeptly embodies the man's larger-than-life ways.

To get the full experience, you must be familiar with Welles, and if you're not, well, good lord, now's the time to change that. What follows are some of Welles' essential work, as well as glimpses into the man's real life so you can see just how good McKay's performance is.

The first reviews for Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones are beginning to pour in, and, naturally (for a popular, fan-friendly director like Jackson), there are the raves (Harry Knowles from AICN) and the pans (Todd McCarthy from Variety). Just posted this evening over at Variety, McCarthy's review is perhaps the hardest one to swallow. Essentially his biggest problem with the movie were the effects, claiming Jackson uses them way too much (and too often) for a film (and story) that doesn't really require them. He calls it "show-offy" and says the film "rates as a significant artistic disappointment." It's an unfortunate review for a film that was a shoe-in (and still may be, especially for Stanley Tucci) for multiple Oscar nods on almost everyone's list.

Some other quotes (no spoilers):

-- "This is an incredibly lovely film. From the visuals to the performances to the story-telling and film work... it all goes to capture a very powerful story in a way that makes you want to hug those close to you." -- Harry Knowles, AICN

-- "It's not that The Lovely Bones is a bad movie, exactly. It is handsomely made and strongly acted, while its woozy, lullaby ambience recalls Jackson's work on the brilliant Heavenly Creatures, before he set forth on his epic voyage through The Lord of the Rings." -- Xan Brooks, Guardian

-- "Peter Jackson's eagerly awaited film version of Alice Sebold's bestselling novel is sometimes exquisitely realised, sometimes frustratingly uneven. ... While The Lovely Bones is as dark as it gets thematically, it will still be an event movie for the adult audience." -- Mike Goodridge, Screen Daily

-- This was never going to be an easy story to film. Using the same characters and many events, Jackson and his team tell a fundamentally different story. It's one that is not without its tension, humor and compelling details. But it's also a simpler, more button-pushing tale that misses the joy and heartbreak of the original." -- Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter

The Lovely Bones hits theaters on December 11th.

Gotta love the book tour Stephen King is currently on to promote Under the Dome. First he tells a crowd in Maryland that he has written a draft of the television screenplay for Cell, that HBO wants to do an Under the Dome miniseries, and that he is working on new Talisman and The Dark Tower novels. And now an even bigger bombshell comes: he's got a book plan for a sequel to The Shining brewing in the back of his always-working mind.

But before getting to the news, I'd like to address the means by which it leaked out, which is equally interesting. While in Toronto, King followed up a 15-minute reading from Under the Dome with an hour long Q&A in a packed theater. The interviewer? David Cronenberg. Thinking about that taking place makes my heart hurt. My favorite director interviewing my favorite writer? What kind of cruel world hides such an event from me?

Fortunately the books portion of the Torontoist was there to cover the event and they've got all the details surrounding The Shining sequel Cronenberg and King talked about, tentatively titled Doctor Sleep. King explained that he had spent the last summer wondering what Danny Torrance would be like as a grown up and how the emotional scars carved into his psyche by the Overlook Hotel would have impacted the path of his otherwise happy life. The author charts the basic premise thusly:

Read the rest over at Horror Squad.

Everyone loves the brooding, over-bearing look of Darth Vader; clad all in black, draped in a cape, wearing an almost featureless mask. We're given no glimpse of any speck of his flesh, forcing us to speculate what kind of person the embodiment of evil actually looks like, and when we're finally given a look at the man under the mask in Return of the Jedi, we understand the reason for his full-body suit: Vader is horribly disfigured, his body severely withered for reasons yet to be revealed.

However, protecting his crippled frame is not the real reason behind Darth Vader's helmet and breathing mask. The following may be common knowledge for die hard Star Wars trivia masters, but for those of us casually in love with the original trilogy, it should come as an amusing bit of insight into the design of one of cinemas most iconic characters. SCI-FI Wire recently interviewed Ralph McQuarrie, George Lucas' conceptual designer responsible for the look of much of what ended up in Star Wars, including Vader's appearance, and the reason he gave is more mundane than menacing:

An extended trailer for the next Family Guy Star Wars special has arrived online over at Apple and iTunes (watch it after the jump). Titled Something, Something, Something Dark Side, this time the animated sitcom is aiming their lightsabers at Empire Strikes Back. Featuring large camel robots who hurt their knees, annoying high-pitched princesses and a giant chicken dressed as Boba Fett, fans should expect the same sorta hilarious shtick that came out of Family Guy's first Star Wars spoof, Blue Harvest (though some feel the Robot Chicken Star Wars episodes one-upped them considerably, but that's a topic for a different day).

Because of the popularity of the first special, 20th Century Fox is pimping out the follow-up pretty hard. It's due to hit DVD and Blu-ray on December 22nd, and I imagine they'll actually air it on television at some point in 2010. A spoof of Return of the Jedi, titled We Have A Bad Feeling About This, is also being planned.

The official description for Something, Something, Something Dark Side goes something like this: "Holy ship! The Family Guy empire strikes back with another hilarious parody of your favorite sci-fi saga! May the laughs be with you as (Chris) Skywalker joins forces with (Peter) Solo and Princess (Lois) Leia to battle (Stewie) Vader and his Imperial minions. A host of new characters comes along for the wild ride, including Mort Goldman as Lando Calrissian, Chris's boss Carl as Yoda, and the Giant Chicken as the nefarious Boba Fett. It's an outrageous, out-of-this-world experience you'll "saber" for light-years to come!"

Watch both trailers for Something, Something, Something Dark Side after the jump.