Julianne Moore's Elaborate Palin Prep; Scouting Obama
We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today: Julianne Moore discusses how hard it is to play Sarah Palin, eight minutes of the president playing basketball, and Newt Gingrich nods off.
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Julianne Moore was on Morning Joe this morning to promote Game Change. This was fine by us, because we enjoy hearing Moore talk about all the fascinating, silly, and endearing things she did while preparing to play Sarah Palin. She was accompanied by director Jay Roach, which made sense when the question of the film's accuracy and fairness came up. Roach proudly declared that the production team had tracked down many of John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's original sources "and confirmed that they weren't messing around." The movie is going to be fun, but is "Hey you, it's Jay Roach. Were you serious or messing around when you said that thing to Mark Halperin four years ago" really the best acid test? [MSNBC]
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Today is the 100th birthday of the Oreo cookie. As cookie anniversaries go, the coverage was relentless and largely positive. A noted exception -- albeit an inadvertent one -- was a tour of a Montreal Kraft plant that produces the goo-filled treats. If you were ever tempted to go home and eat a few to mark the occasion, the sight of creme filling -- so much creme filling -- on the assembly line may give you second thought or two. [Toronto Star]
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We've heard a great deal about how much Barack Obama likes playing basketball, but the specifics of his game have remained vague and undocumented. Is he a chucker? Does he play defense? Does he cherry-pick when he's tired? Now that we have eight minutes of grainy, uninterrupted footage from a pick-up game he played on an unspecified date, we now have some answers. He plays a bit like Chicago Bulls guard Richard Hamilton, constantly cutting and moving without the ball. He appears to lack Hamilton's stamina, which results in a prolonged stretch on the bench where he breathes heavily and puts a blue whistle in his mouth. [@buzzfeedandrew]
Uggie -- the small dog who was cute in The Artist and less cute when he started appearing on every talk show in existence -- is now serving as "spokesdog" for Nintendo. Poor Nintendo: Donkey Kong and Princess Peach used to be able to handle these things internally. Then the Wii debuted, and people thought a wand could actually be a bigger star than barrel-throwing gorilla. Those are the kind of decisions that lead to Uggie becoming your spokesdog.
Finally: Newt Gingrich was caught on camera this morning briefly dozing off before speaking to AIPAC. So if you have it handy, feel free to mark "Briefly nodding off while a camera is rolling" from Gingrich scavenger hunt checklist. [ABC via BuzzFeed]
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