Watch Inside Llewyn Davis star Oscar Issac sing a folk version of Katy Perry's "Roar"

The Coen brothers' faux folk music biography, Inside Llewyn Davis, gets a wide release today, so now seems like a good time to watch star Oscar Issac perform a folksy take on Katy Perry's pop hit "Roar." The actor stopped by Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last week to promote the movie and growled out an acoustic cover that makes the song sound about as gritty and world-weary as a number one pop single can sound. Featuring Jimmy Fallon on harmonies. Watch the video below.

Check out these pics of Benedict Cumberbatch doing motion-capture work as Smaug the dragon from The Hobbit

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug opened last weekend to critical praise that ran the gamut from "not as boring as the last one" to "actually kind of decent in its own right," but pretty much everyone agreed that the best part of the movie was the towering, fire-breathing dragon Smaug, voiced by Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch. Feel free to observe this collection of behind-the-scenes shots of the British actor mugging for the camera and crawling on top of tables like a giant lizard while wearing little motion-capturing dots all over his face.

Funny thing: Cumberbatch didn't have to do motion capture for Smaug at all, since humans and dragons don't look enough alike for the technique to really be useful, but he volunteered as a way to get into character, with these pictures as a memento. Check them out below, alongside an interview with Weta Digital's special effects supervisor Joe Letteri about the challenges of bringing Smaug to the big screen.

Listen to Christopher Lee's new heavy-metal Christmas single

This past weekend, Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug opened in theaters. Next week is Christmas. This breather seems like a perfect time for Christopher Lee, the 90-something actor best known for playing the velvet-voiced Saruman in Jackson's last Hobbit-themed movie trilogy, to release his latest single, "Jingle Hell," a heavy-metal reworking of the classic American holiday song.

Lee is no stranger to the music scene, having already released two heavy-metal LPs about the life of Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne. "Jingle Hell," which features Lee's rich, booming baritone set against a hard-driving guitar track, is available on iTunes. Lee recorded a promotional video for the single below. It is, in his own words, a bit "naughty," so consider yourself warned.

The B-side to "Jingle Hell" is a cover of Frank Sinatra's "My Way."

Christmas to be cancelled if global warming not stopped, threatens Santa in distressing video

You have been warned. To celebrate the holidays and the destruction thereof, Greenpeace has released a very dramatic video in which Santa Claus, looking a bit like a beleaguered terrorist and broadcasting from what what appears to be an arctic fallout shelter, warns the children of the world that he may have to cancel Christmas unless global warming is stopped. Santa is played by Jim Carter, best known as butler Mr. Carson from Downton Abbey, as a grizzled, unkempt man at the end of his rope. He confirms that Presidents Obama and Putin are on the top of his naughty list for remaining indifferent to his plight and that unless action is taken he will "have to warn you of the possibility of an empty stocking... forevermore." Remain calm, watch the video below, and keep it from the eyes of actual children unless you want to answer some uncomfortable questions.

Check out one veteran Disney animator's concept art for a Wicked movie

Minkyu Lee is a Disney artist who worked as an animator on The Princess and the Frog and Wreck-It Ralph and as a director on the Oscar-nominated animated short Adam and Dog. In 2008, still an intern, he was trying to land a spot in Disney's Visual Development department. To show off his skills, he created a portfolio of character designs for a hypothetical movie: an animated adaptation of Wicked, the hugely successful stage musical that's been running on Broadway since 2003. Now he's posted his incredibly charming designs on two Tumblr pages.

Industry types have been trying to turn the Wicked musical into a movie for nearly as long as it's been around, and although the Wizard of Oz-themed spinoff market is currently stuffed beyond sense, it must be pointed out that Stephen Schwartz's all-singing, all-dancing take on the Wicked Witch of the West's past did get there first. Lee's designs make a good argument for giving the property to Disney and letting them animate it, since animated musicals about empowered princesses are kind of their thing.

Listen to a bonus track off the special edition of David Lynch's second studio album

Many people know David Lynch as the film director behind dense, alternatively plotted art movies like Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. But he is more. He is also a teacher of transcendental meditation, an advocate for cow-based movie marketing, and a weatherman. He is also, apparently, a musician with two full-length albums to his credit. His latest, The Big Dream, came out this past July.

A special edition of The Big Dream will be available for download later this month. It will sport two new tracks and a couple of remixes. One of those remixes, of Lynch's song We Roll Together by Swedish producer Björn Yttling, is now available online. It features a heavily distorted Lynch intoning mysterious portents like 'Smokestack barking' and 'Went down to the ice cream store' over a minimalist backing track. It's actually pretty effective in an eerie, hypnotic way, but I'm at a loss for words to describe exactly why it works. Like most of Lynch's work, then. Listen below.

Read this: What the 'No Animals Were Harmed' credit at the end of movies really means

Last week, the Hollywood Reporter published an absorbing exposé about the oft-seen 'No Animals Were Harmed' credit that appears at the end of many movies and television shows. The article is thoroughly researched and features interviews with members of the American Humane Association, the organization that gives out the credit, but the gist is that the credit often doesn't mean what it seems to mean. Author Gary Barun reveals that the AHA routinely approves use of the credit for movies on which animals were badly hurt. Or, if the the harm done to the animals is too severe to ignore, the AHA rewrites the credit to read 'American Humane Association monitored the animal action' and doesn't follow up on the reasons for the downgrade. Among the worst abuses:

"A Husky dog was punched repeatedly in its diaphragm on Disney’s 2006 Antarctic sledding movie Eight Below, starring Paul Walker, and a chipmunk was fatally squashed in Paramount’s 2006 Matthew McConaughey-Sarah Jessica Parker romantic comedy Failure to Launch. In 2003, the AHA chose not to publicly speak of the dozens of dead fish and squid that washed up on shore over four days during the filming of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Crewmembers had taken no precautions to protect marine life when they set off special-effects explosions in the ocean, according to the AHA rep on set."

The AHA doesn't count putting animals into dangerous situations as harming them, either. For instance, Ang Lee's Life of Pi, a movie about a boy stranded in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, received the 'No Harm' credit despite the real-life tiger used in the film nearly drowning in a water tank during a dicey take. Baurn depicts the AHA, once a crusader for the humane treatment of animals in the film industry, as increasingly unwilling to speak out against Hollywood interests, in no small part because much of its budget now depends on grants from industry organizations. It's a sobering read sure to upset some animal lovers, but also a stirring piece of journalism good enough to inspire people to action. Read it here.

Someone has made soap bars shaped like classic Nintendo game cartridges

If you're a fan of retro video games but don't enjoy washing your hands as much as you think you should, online retailer Firebox has a solution for you. Their website is selling a line of soap bars made in the likeness of classic Nintendo games, allowing people to wash themselves clean and think about Donkey Kong Country at the same time. The commitment to realism is impressive: the Super NES soaps even come with their own (non-made of soap) dust jackets. Gamers, or people with gamer friends wondering how to delight them over the holidays, can buy the soaps in Super NES or Game Boy varieties.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

         A more fully developed world, better drawn characters and sharper satire mark this superior sequel to 2012’s The Hunger Games. Not that The Hunger Games was that bad. It’s easy to lump this movie series in with other sci-fi/fantasy stories aimed at young adults, like Twilight. But both Catching Fire and The Hunger Games do more than coast on the appeal of their young stars. Catching Fire, in particular, is a full-blooded pop satire with a well-realized sci-fi setting and characters you want to root for. Yes, it’s still a movie that pits a couple of good-looking teenagers against the world, but here their struggles actually seem to mean something.

        When we last saw Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), she had survived the Hunger Games, a kind of mash-up between gladiatorial fights to the death and American Idol, and was headed home. When she gets a chilly house-call from the calculating President Snow (Donald Sutherland), she learns she won’t get off so easy. Her attempted double-suicide at the end of the last Hunger Games, President Snow tells her, is being viewed as a sign of rebellion against the all-powerful Capitol. This cannot be tolerated, and if she wants to avoid retaliation she and fellow victor Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) must convince the populace of their loyalty.

        The ever-earnest Katniss can’t quite pull this off, and Snow decides that the only way to get rid of her without turning her into a martyr is to throw her back into the Games where she can die by the hand of someone other than him. Like the last movie, a large amount of Catching Fire is devoted to the time before the Games begin, and it’s a lot better for it. There’s both drama and comedy in the way the rough-and-tumble Katniss tries to adjust to her new role as propaganda tool, and Donald Sutherland gets to lend his glowering charisma in an expanded part. There’s a love triangle, too. Katniss is torn between Peeta, who likes Katniss more than she likes him, and brooding childhood friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth), but her decision is never the focus of the movie. It’s all about public opinion- how to create, keep, and hold it- with the steely, likable Katniss caught in the middle.

        The behind-the-scenes lead-up to the Hunger Games is so compelling that it’s almost a disappointment when they finally begin. Like last time, Katniss must face off against a vast field of contestants, but most have a bit more personality this go-round, especially Jena Malone as an unhinged combatant prone to public acts of nudity. The action also moves at a much faster clip, as though the filmmakers know the Hunger Games are the least interesting part of The Hunger Games and want to run through them as quickly as possible.

        Catching Fire has officially become a massive box office hit, so it comes as no surprise that the producers intend to milk the series for all it’s worth. There are two more movies queued up, each based off one half of the third and final book in author Suzanne Collins’ series.  Catching Fire ends on a cliffhanger, but this nervy blockbuster gives us a reason to feel excited rather than cheated.