James Franco's Animated Adventures in Academia; Ryan Gosling's Drunk Christmas

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.

Ryan Gosling was everywhere this year, and today he was in a Funny or Die parody video with girlfriend Eva Mendes, who was wearing a highly aggressive bonnet. (Jim Carrey is also there too, as a very skinny Santa Claus.) The joke is that a bunch of people get liquored up and slur their way through the story of Christmas, a conceit that's gently ribald at best. Gosling refuses to play ball, even though the bit seems tailored to fit his penchant for mumbliness. He's alive and wired, and for that we're grateful. He was due to break out of the dumps at some point.  [Funny or Die]

James Franco's 'D' in his "Directing the Actor II" course -- and the lawsuit and allegations of unethical behavior by faculty members at New York University's Tisch School the Arts that followed -- have been given the Taiwanese animated video treatment. Franco doesn't come off well in the footage, especially when he's teaching his own class and smoking a pipe, but the real villains are the mortarboard-wearing academics charging through Greenwich Village with torches and that crazy look in their eye. It's scarier than 127 Hours and almost as silly as Rise of the Planet of the Apes. [NMA.TV via Movieline via Vulture]

Brian Selznik is the author The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the children's book Martin Scorsese made into a movie that they're just calling Hugo. Selznik's new illustrated book is called Wonderstruck, and he says it was inspired by the various rooms in the American Natural History Museum, so publisher Scholastic has filmed a series of "virtual field trips" to take young readers to the museum with the author. As kids, we would have balked at the entire notion of a "virtual field trip," because it always seemed to involve reinstalling Encarta on the classroom computer. This is great though. If the kids don't like it, we'll go on the next one.    [GalleyCat]

We like Saul Bass here at The Atlantic Wire, and we like him even more after seeing the video of him pitching At&T on his designs back in the 1960s. The man did the North By Northwest credit sequence, and still he had to pitch the phone company. [AT&T]