This Tea-Time with Alan Rickman Is Truly Epic

Many thanks to Tor.com, which brought the most amazing thing to hit the interwebs in days to our attention. "Epic Tea-Time with Alan Rickman" is probably the perfect blend of the artistic, the absurd, and the needlessly overwrought.

The original video is simply several seconds of footage of Rickman preparing tea and then getting rather upset in high definition at 3000 frames per second; the footage is then slowed down to fill eight and a half minutes. The video was part of a project that artist David Michalek produced last summer called Portraits in Dramatic Time. For "Epic Tea-Time," the video was edited slightly, but what really makes it truly epic is the addition of part of the Inception score. It's probably the best example of intense music paired with mundane action since the Dramatic Chipmunk, himself.

What makes this video even more delightful is that we're pretty sure that this is how our favorite potions instructor, Professor Snape, would react if he were to catch someone spying on him as he was making some tea. (Or, as one of our delightful readers pointed out, perhaps the problem is that he was brought tea with lemon and not a drop of milk.)

Can Edgar Wright Shoot Ant-Man This Year?

First off, we should point out that director Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) is shooting a new movie this year for sure: The World's End with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. The third in Pegg and Wright's Cornetto ice cream–inspired "Blood and Ice Cream" trilogy (which started with Shaun of the Dead and continued with Hot Fuzz), The World's End will see a group of childhood friends reunite for an epic pub crawl they attempted 20 years prior, only to find that their quest to drink their way to the World's End pub is interrupted by a possible end to humankind. Wright co-wrote the movie with Pegg.

Deadline reported last week that The World's End will start shooting this September, which leads to the question: How can Wright also shoot his long-developing Empire podcast.

Things are happening, and other things are happening on other things as well. There’s some interesting plates spinning and I ideally hope I’ll be shooting this year.

Sacha Baron Cohen Falls Victim to His Own Prank; Nick Stahl Reported Missing; Jennifer Lopez Tops Celeb List and Plays It Coy

ReelzChannel Celebrity Rundown

Sacha Baron Cohen nearly became the victim of his own antics today in Cannes. The actor almost fell off a camel during a publicity stunt to promote his movie, The Dictator, while at the Cannes Film Festival. The actor had planned to ride a camel through the city's famous Croisette promenade, but nearly tumbled backward when he tried to mount the animal. Luckily, he was caught and continued with him camel ride through Cannes.

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Nick Stahl, best known for playing John Connor in Terminator 3, has been reported missing, says TMZ. On Monday, the actor's wife, Rose Stahl, filed a missing person's report with the L.A.P.D. saying she had last seen him May 9th. The actor has been separated from his wife since January, and in February she filed court papers expressing that she was concerned that Nick was using drugs and that she wanted visitations with his daughter to be supervised. His wife is now reportedly concerned that drug use has something to do with the actor's disappearance.

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Singer/dancer/actress Jennifer Lopez was just named the number 1 celebrity on Forbes' list of 100 Most Powerful Celebrities. She was followed by Oprah Winfrey in the number two spot, with Justin Bieber, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga rounding out the top 5.

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In other J.Lo news, she was awfully coy about whether she would return to American Idol next season in a recent interview with Ellen DeGeneres. Lopez said, "I really do enjoy it" but continued that she also misses "doing other things. It really does lock you down." Sounds like someone is in contract negotiations. Also, it's interesting to note that in 2009, before Lopez was an idol judge, she didn't even make the Forbes 100 list. Just sayin'.

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In yet more Idol-related news, Ryan Seacrest just spent around $49 million for DeGeneres' Beverly Hills estate. The Idol host's new digs include a 9,200-square-foot main house, as well as 3 guest houses on 2.87 acres.

Channing Tatum to Protect the President in White House Down

Actor Channing Tatum has been toiling this year mostly in romantic dramas like The Vow and comedies like 21 Jump Street and the upcoming Magic Mike, but he'll return to action for one of his next roles. THR reports that Tatum is in talks for the lead role in Columbia's action-thriller White House Down for Independence Day and 2012 director Roland Emmerich.

The project is being described as "Die Hard in the White House" and the comparison is apt. Tatum will play a Secret Service agent who is a single father and finds himself with few resources to defend the President when the White House is taken over by a paramilitary group. (Who's next to be cast — Alan Rickman?) The studio paid $3 million for the spec script written by James Vanderbilt (The Amazing Spider-Man), and also faces competition from a similar project, Olympus Has Fallen, which will star Gerard Butler and will be directed by Antoine Fuqua (Brooklyn's Finest). However, Tatum is coming off of back-to-back hits and will test his action mettle with a (possibly brief) appearance in the upcoming G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which puts White House Down in an excellent position for Columbia.

Already scheduled for a November 1, 2013 release date, production on White House Down is set to start this summer.

The Amazing Spider-Man: Latest Featurette Focuses on Director Marc Webb's "Limitless Inspiration"

After putting the spotlight on Spider-Man's (Andrew Garfield) new movie nemesis in recent weeks — the latest still images, viral video, and featurette have all focused on Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) and his scaly alter-ego, the Lizard — Sony has decided to give the monstrous mutation a break and focus on the man behind the camera, director Marc Webb [(500) Days of Summer].

In the new "Limitless Inspiration" featurette, Webb briefly discusses his approach to making a complex movie like The Amazing Spider-Man, from his initial "feeling" about what the movie should be about to the selection of skilled actors like Garfield and Emma Stone, who can make "words on a page" into something "emotional" to the many artists he collaborates with and the state-of-the-art equipment and technology that allow for pretty much "anything you can imagine" to be made "real."

Trailer for Hit and Run Starring Dax Shepard, Kristen Bell, and Bradley Cooper

Dax Shepard has come a long way since his days helping Ashton Kutcher pull pranks on celebrities as a regular on Punk'd. Shepard has appeared in more than a dozen movies since Punk'd and he not only leads the cast in the upcoming action-comedy Hit and Run (formerly Outrun), but he also wrote and co-directed (with David Palmer) the movie.

Shepard plays Charlie Bronson, a former getaway driver who flees from the Witness Protection Program to drive his girlfriend — played by Shepard's real-life fiancé, Kristen Bell — to Los Angeles for her dream job. Bronson will have to put his driving skills to the test because he's pursued by not only the feds, but his old bank robber buddies, and one of them (Bradley Cooper) has just cause to be more than a little "sore" with Bronson, as revealed in the new trailer for the movie.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes Sequel Gets Contagion Writer to Pen Script

Now that Twentieth Century Fox has its X-Men: First Class sequel lined up to shoot early next year, the studio is concentrating on its other successful 2011 franchise reboot, Planet of the Apes prequel Rise of the Planet of the Apes. According to THR, Contagion screenwriter Scott Z. Burns has been hired to work on the script for the sequel.

Seems like a good fit. Rise saw chimpanzees start to gain a level of human intelligence after being exposed to a gene therapy drug intended to help cure Alzheimer's Disease. The closing moments hinted at the spread of a pandemic virus throughout humanity, a synopsized version of the entirety of Contagion, basically. Rise screenwriters and co-producers Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa have already had a turn on the sequel script, but it's possible that Fox wanted Burns to make the script a bit more "Contagion-y." With the report claiming that the sequel will see "the apes on the path to emerge as society’s new rulers," it's also likely that the studio wanted Burns for the action work he did on The Bourne Ultimatum as well.

Returning for the sequel is Rise director Rupert Wyatt, who said last December that he was "going to level the playing field for the next part of the story, which is the real conflict between humans and apes on a far bigger scale." Clearly, Caesar, the chimp that leads the revolution, is involved, as actor Andy Serkis, who played Caesar in motion capture, is already set to return. No word yet on when production will begin.

Hunger Games Actress Grabs Lead in Suspiria Remake

After spending years in development, director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, Your Highness) is finally ready to move forward with his remake of Suspiria. Originally set for production in 2010, Green shot Your Highness and The Sitter instead, but it looks like the project is finally moving forward with its first cast member.

Variety reports that Green has cast fifteen-year-old Isabelle Fuhrman, who recently played Clove in The Hunger Games, in the lead role of a young girl who travels to well-renowned, European school only to find out that it is being run by a coven of witches. The 1977 original was set at a ballet school, but Green admitted last year that he wanted the remake to be set at "an all-girls boarding school", which explains why he cast a younger lead than Natalie Portman, who at one point was going to star in the movie before taking a role as a ballet dancer in Black Swan. Besides that change, Green has promised that his remake will be "in the spirit" of director Dario Argento's original.

Suspiria is considered a classic amongst horror movie fans, who have seen many favorites getting the reboot treatment over the past decade. Despite fans' misgivings about tampering with a classic, production on Suspiria is set to start in September, after Fuhrman finishes work on writer/director M. Night Shyamalan's sci-fi movie After Earth opposite Will Smith and Jaden (The Karate Kid). Regardless, Green has promised a "beautiful horror movie." We'll wait and see.