Fred Armisen

For a director who works as infrequently as Noah Baumbach, a misfire always adds insult to injury. It has been a little over a year since he wildly disappointed us with the so-difficult-it-caused-migraines Margot at the Wedding, and yet if Mr. Baumbach were a prolific filmmaker like Woody Allen, we probably wouldn't have even noticed how bad it really was. (To wit: does anyone even remember Cassandra's Dream?) While the screenwriter half of Mr. Baumbach has been busy, with both the long gestating Wes Anderson film The Fantastic Mr. Fox and the on-the-nose adaptation of Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children for Ron Howard, we figured it would be quite some time before we heard from his directorial alter-ego again. Wrong! We've been seeing his work all Fall and hadn't even known. According to our friends at Videogum, Mr. Baumbach has been directing short films for none other than Lorne Michaels and Saturday Night Live.      read more »

We love former Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein. We love SNL funny-man Fred Armisen. And you should love ThunderAnt, a video blog in which Armisen and Brownstein collaborate on a particularly quirky brand of sketch comedy parodying everything from feminist bookstores to Mr. Saddam Hussein. Their riotous new sketch, "One Man Show," takes on performance art—something we, well, don’t love.  read more »