Comedy fans will find the documentary Mel Brooks: Make a Noise irresistible. Part of the upcoming American Masters series on PBS, Noise is more than just a retrospective of Brooks' career. He gives new interviews to filmmaker Robert Trachtenberg, as do many of his cohorts including frequent partner Carl Reiner, Nathan Lane and Joan Rivers, Rob Reiner, Cloris Leachman and Barry Levinson. Each of them sit at a simple table, nothing much in the way of a set around them, looking straight into the camera and recalling highlights (and insider jokes) about Brooks' career. There are, of course, some film clips: Young Frankenstein, The Producers and Blazing Saddles among them. Interviews with the late Anne Bancroft (the second Mrs. Brooks) and Madeline Kahn, two of his favorite collaborators, round out the portrait we see of Brooks.

Brooks plays down his own talent, insisting he got some lucky breaks but never tried to engineer his success. He says he played to an audience of one: "I've got to admit something, I don't really do anything for the audience ever. I do it for me, and most of the time the audience joins me." We've been among the many happy fans to have joined him on what's been one of comedy's most prolific and influential careers.

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The second biggest mystery in Into Darkness: Why does Alice Eve strip to her underwear in this scene?

Before we get in to the nuts and bolts of Star Trek Into Darkness, let us take a moment to see what the studio behind the film wants us to believe the movie is about:

When the crew of the Enterprise is called back home, they find an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization has detonated the fleet and everything it stands for, leaving our world in a state of crisis. With a personal score to settle, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one man weapon of mass destruction.

Now, because this is a J.J. Abrams flick, we all knew that we were going to have to take this synopsis with a grain of salt. At least it gave fans something to spend the run up to the movie debating about: who is this "one man weapon of mass destruction?"

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Earlier this week public pressure managed to convince Disney to drop its make-over of Merida from the Pixar release Brave as she was being prepared for induction into the official 11 princesses in the Disney universe. Her princess model featured a more slender waist, slightly larger bust, make-up, tamer hair, and no appearance of her trademark weaponry. This led to calls of objectification and overly prissing up the girl we can all agree is the most assertive and badass of the royal female heroines in Disney.

Personally, it didn't bother me. Yes, I know, I'm a guy and I don't understand. I am, however, a father to a three-year-old daughter who loves Merida (Even if she sometimes confuses her with Amy Pond from Doctor Who) and the son of a woman who taught him to ride horses, rope cattle, shoot, drink, swear, and punch in the head those who so desperately need punching in the head. I consider myself more of a male tomboy than anything else.

I recognized the make-over for what it was... a unified marketing strategy meant to make all the princesses look like part of the same universe. Merida didn't just change for her inclusion in this weird, decorative stable that Disney created, every single princess did. All of them, from Snow White to Rapunzel. Click that Jezebel link up above, and you can see a side-by-side comparison of all the girls, everything from boob jobs to making Tiana slightly less black.

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Tom Hanks and Halle Berry star in the sci-fi epic Cloud Atlas.

Our sister paper the Village Voice named Cloud Atlas one of the worst movies of 2012. Film critic Roger Ebert named it one of the best. For us, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

At just under three hours, Cloud Atlas does much too much in terms of plot (the actors play various characters in seven different time periods ranging from 1849 to 2321). Then again, Halle Berry is easy on the eyes, which makes the time go by (though the part where she wears white-face is extremely uncomfortable and seems to drag out). Both Berry and Hanks turn in good performances, but all that jumping through time jumbles the story and by Act III, we had lost most of the plot connections.

Village Voice film critic Nick Pinkerton wrote, "If you want to learn something about feeling, you're at the wrong movie," and we agree with that. Ebert called it "ambitious" and we certainly agree with that. Our verdict: Cloud Atlas is ambitiously wrong. Or wrongly ambitious. Either. Both. Neither. We changed our mind several times as we watched. But by the end, we were more tired than entertained.

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On the left, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan in the 2013 version, and Mia Farrow in the same role in 1974.

Anyone who's familiar with the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford should recognize the scenes and shots from trailers for the 2013 film, which opens Friday with Leonardo DiCaprio. Here, in animated GIFs, are shot-by-shot comparisons from the 1974 version and the 2013 version -- which will be the fifth film of the Fitzgerald story.

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Adam Brody and Kristen Bell in "Some Girls" which will go straight to Vimeo.

Straight-to-video has gotten a 2013 makeover. Last week, Vimeo, the mature brother of Youtube, released that it would be starting an On Demand service and it will kick off with Neil LaBute's Some Girls. Some Girls is an indie/low budget film version of LaBute's 2006 play about a man who goes on an adventure in exes to find his true match. The movie was directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer (Party Girl) and boasts some big names with indie cred like Zoe Kazan and Kristen Bell. But it's how the film is being released that is getting the bigger buzz.

Some Girls premiered this year at SXSW and rather than going for the standard distribution model of waiting forever to get picked injected into mainstream theaters, the film will open online on June 28 on Vimeo's On Demand platform. For $10 to own the movie and $5 to rent, the producers of the movie are entering into some unexplored territory. Are people ready to watch new movies online without the addition of the big screen?

There's been some feet wetting already in this arena. The female comedy Bachelorette was first released on iTunes prior to its airing in theaters, which gave it a good amount of buzz and viewers. This model is rumored to be in future use for the upcoming Nicolas Refn film, Only God Forgives. We shall see.

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Courtesy of Music Box Films

Besedka Johnson (left) and Dree Hemingway

Two actors make surprising film debuts in Starlet, winner of a special jury prize at SXSW. Dree Hemingway (yes, one of those Hemingways) is Jane, a 21-year-old porn film worker surrounded by a host of dysfunctional friends and co-workers (Stella Maeve as Melissa). Besedka Johnson is Sadie, an 86-year-old widow living on her own. Jane buys a thermos from Sadie at a garage sale and discovers it's stuffed with cash. Filled with guilt, curiosity, and looking for life off the XXX-movie set, Jane befriends Sadie. Things don't go quite smoothly at first (Jane ends up with a face full of mace early on), but eventually the two disparate women form a bond. When her friends discover that Jane's spent the found cash on Sadie instead of them, they set out to sabotage the relationship.

Director Sean Baker, co-writing here with Chris Bergoch, keeps Starlet from meandering into silly sentimentality. Echoing Lizzie Bordon's 1986 Working Girls, he shows sex workers as something more than unhappy victims caught by circumstance. Barker gives both women dimension and complexity, keeping either from becoming merely stereotypical pulling nuanced performances from both (an especially neat trick since he reportedly found the completely untrained and inexperienced Johnson at a YMCA).

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Rebel scum.

News broke last week that John Williams, the prolific film score composer who's one of maybe three film score composers you've ever heard of, will almost definitely lend his talents to the all-new, all-Disney Star Wars film set to be directed by J.J. Abrams.

It was Abrams himself who threw out some strong hints as to Williams' involvement, but it would have been a pretty safe assumption even if he hadn't. Williams' "Main Title" theme and "Imperial March" from the original trilogy are among the best-loved music in film history, and Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars without him.

The soundtrack to George Lucas' space opera is only one of many blockbuster feathers in Williams' cap, of course. He's equally well-known for the memorable scores to epics like Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Superman: The Movie and even the Harry Potter flicks. Chances are, if you can hum the theme music to a billion-dollar film franchise, Williams penned it.

Despite his towering homeruns, however, he ain't exactly batting 1.000. Williams has written the music for dozens and dozens of films in his long career, including more than a few turds you've likely long since flushed from your memory. Just for fun, let's break out the toilet snake and dredge a few back up, shall we?

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Funny hair, fingernails are too long, needs chest wax - 2/10 would not bang.

Got a question about The Wolverine? Of course you do, and now you can ask the man himself (or the actor who plays him, anyway):

Fans are getting the special opportunity to ask Hugh Jackman questions about the highly anticipated film "The Wolverine." Check out the Twitter pages for Hugh Jackman and The Wolverine on Thursday, May 2nd at 12:00 pm ET to see Hugh answer your questions via video!

Start tweeting your questions now with #TheWolverine #AskHugh and comment on Facebook for the chance to have them presented.

This goes up on Art Attack at 8 AM CT, there's still time to send in those super important queries. Some of us, however, aren't lazy bums like you and have already submitted our own. So before you get to it, make sure you're not being redundant.

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As of this post Zach Braff's Kickstarter campaign to finance his next
film, Wish You Were Here, has already garnered $2.25 million in less
than a week. Braff has put together a very polished and glossy video
appeal as to why "we the people" should fund his next film, which he
plans on directing, starring in and writing. Why this campaign hit so
huge is because Wish You Were Here is a proposed follow-up to his 2004 "indie" flick Garden State.

Braff's reasoning for the Kickstarter platform is that "the money
people" who fund films will make him do stuff he doesn't want to do,
such as NOT wear shirts that are the same design as the wallpaper or
use the actors that he so desires. With our money, he will
be given the directorial freedom he has earned and room full of
professional producers, who understand the ins and outs of filmmaking,
will not be able to tell him if they think his film sucks.

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