The Birth of 'Friday'; Denzel Washington Makes a Good Bad Spy

Every afternoon The Atlantic Wire highlights the day's video clips that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention.

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 afternoon The Atlantic Wire brings you a well-rounded diet of video goodness.

Denzel Washington's new movie Safe House may look your average young-CIA-agent-meets-grizzled-CIA-agent, young-CIA-agent-learns-nothing-is-what-it-seems thriller, but the script was on the Black List and the last time Washington played a possibly corrupt mentor unmasked by an idealistic protegee, the result was Training Day. Ryan Reynolds is playing the Ethan Hawke role, a fact he'll probably mention if Entertainment Weekly lets him write another meta cover story about the film just prior to release  [Slash Film]

A multi-part online documentary on the origins of "Friday" wasn't the kind of thing we were craving when Rebecca Black's song was going viral in March, but This American Life contributor Jon Ronson's investigation into the song's creation is watchable and weirdly noble. The song (still!) jangles the nerves, but at least it has inspired a pop culture history that's whaleoil smooth. Subsequent installments will probably detail the many messy court battles that ensued. [Videogum]

Seven years ago when they made Mean Girls, Lindsay Lohan was the star and Amanda Seyfried was the silly fourth banana. Now Lohan's going to jail and Seyfried's taking Linda Lovelace biopics away from her. It's funny how Hollywood works. (Also: the Mean Girls production is going to produce a great, gossipy oral history one of these days. Listen to the way Seyfried talks about Rachel McAdams living in her apartment during production, because she was older than the rest of the cast and, presumably, thought she was cooler and successful and more famous than everyone else. And there will be the Lohan stories.)  [Red Band Trailer via Movieline]

The Los Angeles Dodgers divorce fight was long, expensive, and tarnished one of the most iconic brands in professional sports. Thanks to Taiwanese animation, this has all been condensed down into the story of a man with a receding hairline who carries a gym bag around and gets his ex-wife to strikeout on a high fastball. MLB commissioner Bud Selig, however, is fairly depicted as a roguishly handsome angel who waves knives around. [Next Media Animation]

You can't go wrong when it comes to timelapse videos of Earth taken from space. Has there ever been one that's been mediocre. Timelapse Earth could be its own cable channel. Even Time Warner would carry it. [Reuters]