Consider my fears (temporarily) averted. Via Fandango, the first four minutes of Warm Bodies has popped up online, and shocker, it manages to be funny and kind of touching, and reveals a really interesting take on the whole undead-as-a-metaphor-for-something thing. Previous zombie films have used the shuffling undead as a stand-in for things like consumerism and global pandemics like AIDS. Warm bodies treats it note for note like depression. Have a look and see for yourself.

Rob Corddry as a middle aged zombie who clearly used to be a heavy drinking business traveller is also a nice touch. Yeah, it does mine rather overexploited territory, glossing over the origins of the apocalypse via heavy references to other well known zombie films, but that's fine because it looks like we might be getting our first original take on zombies in several years. Just so long as none of them run.

Please god, please don't let them be runners.

[Source: Fandango]

So when Joey reluctantly entered the local Miss Windjammer beauty contest (for college tuition money!) and warbled the Les Miserables ballad "On My Own" — prompting stupid Dawson to see past Jen and notice Joey for the first time ever — you LOVED EVERY SINGLE SECOND OF IT. Joey was the Eponine of Capeside, Massachusetts, and Dawson was her Marius, and this Eponine was finally getting her man.

I'll admit with no small shred of embarrassment: I've probably seen Joey sing "On My Own" dozens of times in my life. As soon the Internet invented YouTube, I found it and watched it again. (There was that one lost evening when I fell down a k-hole of Joey-Pacey YouTube videos, but that's another story.) I'd never seen Les Miserables onstage, so Dawson's Creek marked my introduction to the soulful, wistful "On My Own" — and in the hazy euphoria of nostalgia, despite Dawson's terrible '90s mane and Joey's reedy baby voice, I still think back on it fondly.

Clearly Holmes doesn't hold a candle to a performer like Samantha Barks, the professional West End veteran who plays Eponine and absolutely slays "On My Own" in Tom Hooper's film adaptation. But the reason why both versions work — Barks as Eponine in the familiar Les Mis tradition, and Holmes as Joey singing to Capeside's finest — is that they both hit that Some Kind of Wonderful sweet spot. Les Mis the musical was written over a decade before Dawson's Creek and the John Hughes gem, and Victor Hugo's novel 130 years before, but they share the same essential DNA: The overlooked girl-next-door pining for the boy who's too blind to see, who loves him so much she'll help him woo the girl of his dreams — even if it kills her.

This is, incidentally, why Some Kind Of Wonderful is so great; Watts gets her happy ending. And a pair of diamond earrings.

Read more on Les Misérables, in theaters December 25:

Early Reaction: Oscar Race Heats Up As NYC Screening Of 'Les Miserables' Prompts Cheers & Tears

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Tarantino took part in a THR roundtable that also featured  Ben Affleck (Argo)  Gus Van Sant (Promised Land),  David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook) and Ang Lee (Life of Pi) . how the final cut of his hotly anticipated slavery-era story is different from the movie he originally envisioned, Tarantino replied, "It's shorter."  But he does recount an interesting anecdote involving a  fan.  The director says that a "14-year-old girl wrote a little synopsis for Kill Bill Vol. 3," explaining: "She wanted to play the daughter grown up, or at least at her age."

Tarantino says he read the synopsis and called the fan to thank her. "I thought it was just so sweet that this little girl liked the movie so much that she continued the story herself," he said. "I always really hope that people take the story on themselves and take it to a different place and fill in the blanks that I didn't tell them about."

Based on this Django Unchained trailer, I say — I say — I foresee some of Tarantino's more computer-savvy fans remaking this trailer with Foghorn Leghorn playing plantation owner Calvin Candie instead of Leonardo DiCaprio.  Check it out below.

[The Hollywood Reporter,  Yahoo! Movies]

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