In 2012 Roland Emmerich lays the following things to waste: the Washington Monument, the White House, Yosemite National Park, the city of Los Angeles, Christ the Redeemer, the Vatican, the Himalayas, Las Vegas, Air Force One, and a Buddhist Monastery. Notably absent from the carnage (besides the Kaaba in Mecca) is the fair city of New York, which Emmerich vaporized in Independence Day, flattened in Godzilla, and froze in The Day After Tomorrow. So we have one question: why?

Unlike her younger self Megan Fox, nobody doubts the acting abilities of Angelina Jolie. You know that shiny gold man she keeps in that cardboard box in the attic? Well, it's called an Academy Award, and she won it for being an excellent pretender. Today, we get our first look at Angie's latest exercise in make-believe, in the trailer for her espionage movie Salt. Jolie plays a CIA agent who is wrongly accused of spying for the Russians, and she gets chased around New York City by people who may or may not be her friends. Angelina Jolie's fame is so mind-fucking that it's hard to imagine her as anything else other than the mother of Brad Pitt's International School of Children, but her talent is so huge that she can vanish into just about any role. After the jump, we have your free pass to Acting 101, taught to you by none other than Angelina Jolie herself.

You'd be forgiven for thinking the first proper movie about the humanitarian crisis happening in Darfur would go something like this: Ridley Scott or Edward Zwick direct Daniel Craig and Russell Crowe as the "rugged" foreign journalists (better at loading guns than they are at forming proper paragraphs) who travel to Sudan to report on the conflict that's been raging since 2003. Sienna Miller would play the Red Cross worker who falls for Crowe (or is it Craig?), and the whole thing will end with some stats about how many people have died so far (somewhere in the hundreds of thousands). Real life Darfur activist George Clooney would produce, it would get nominated for five Academy Awards, and win none. Well, that's not what happened at all.

Robert Pattinson, he's just like us! Or so says Vanity Fair in their new profile -- excerpts of which are online -- of the most famous British actor in the world. The cover story, which hits newsstands in New York and L.A. on November 4, reveals a young man so shredded by self-consciousness that he has to drink constantly to buff the edges of his social awkwardness. And here I thought I was the only one.

November 1 - Texting behind the wheel becomes illegal in NY State. Thank God for Twitter.

November 3 - It’s Cliche Day, so make hay while the sun shines, because it’s a dog eat dog world.

November 5 - Ricky Gervais at Carnegie Hall as part of the New York Comedy Festival promises to be a lot funnier than this sentence.

November 11 - Leonardo DiCaprio celebrates his 35th birthday in a Bar.

Two weeks ago I had a religious experience. A higher power -- probably Angelina Jolie -- spared my life by incarcerating me while I was supposed to be forgetting my own name in Jamaica with Thrillist on their Jet Mystery trip. Since that life-changing experience, I've sworn off alcohol, I don't go out anymore, and I only do hard drugs if they're not cut with anything. I've kidnapped two inner-city children and plan on giving them the kind of life I never had. I was trying to make the world a better place, for everyone. And then Thrillist e-mailed me. It was an invite to the Jet Mystery reunion party, and it was on a yacht. And the booze was gratis. What was I going to do, decline?

Oh no! The first reviews of Richard Kelly's make-it-or-break it career saver The Box are finally online, and it's not looking good for the Donnie Darko director. In a piece in last Sunday's New York Times, Kelly made it clear that after the colossal misfire that was Southland Tales that The Box's fate would be his fate, too. It's still relatively early in the game, but if the first reviews tell you anything, it's that Mr. Kelly should begin checking Craigslist wanted ads.

This evening, Sony cleared out all the other movies at the Regal E-Walk megaplex in Times Square, and instead screened Michael Jackson's This Is It on what seemed like every theater in the building. Our ticket was checked by burly men in suits about five times before we got into the theater, and all ushers were wearing The Glove. The whole thing had the weird air of the premiere that wasn't really the premiere. When we got inside, the actual premiere was happening in L.A., and was being broadcast live on the big screen. Seeing some microphone-wielding dame call Jennifer Love Hewitt a "singer/songwriter" and then ask her what kind of impact Michael Jackson had on her life was going to be tough to top, as far as pure entertainment is concerned. So how did This Is It do? First impressions, after the jump.

During my entire undergrad stint at McGill University in Montreal, the only film ever shot on campus (besides crappy student ones) was Abandon, that throwaway thriller starring Julia Roberts' ex-squeeze toy Benjamin Bratt, Katie Holmes before she was kidnapped by Tom Cruise, and Zooey Deschanel before me and every other guy who dances poorly to Passion Pit fell in love with her. The whole escapade was no big deal, and campus authorities felt no need to tell students that C-list celebrities were invading their campus. Not so at Johns Hopkins University, where a pretty big deal of a movie starts shooting on campus beginning November 2nd.

In an in-depth and self-defeating profile this weekend on Donnie Darko provoc-auteur (I proudly coined that term when describing Kelly in the table of contents for our October issue), The New York Times did not understate the importance of the box-office performance of his next film, The Box. "I have a lot riding on this film ... Until I have a theatrical hit, people aren’t going to keep giving me chances,” Kelly told the newspaper. The film in question is The Box, a paranormal thriller starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden. They play a couple in strife who get a visit from a mysterious stranger (a disfigured Frank Langella) who has with him a box with a button on top. If the couple pushes the button, they get $1 million, but someone, somewhere in the world, dies. While it sounds like the set-up to a straightforward thriller, the film's website alone (Kelly has been known to construct creepy maze-like websites for all his films) points to a trippy, offbeat film that probably has more in common with Kelly's Olympian flop Southland Tales -- the film that got him into this moment of career reckoning in the first place.