Misery loves honesty

Until I watched Honest Trailers - Les Miserables, I didn't think I could want to see this movie any less.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" -- Martin Luther King Jr.

iHops

Ain't nothing like the real thing... a low-tech product gets a turn at lampooning Apple ads in this spot hawking a new cider from Carlsberg.

"Cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays." - Sun Tzu

Cake walk

Great mood in this video of a guy eating a wedding cake in reverse for reasons left to the imagination. (Apparently the clip required two takes, and therefore two cakes, along with the unavoidable confetti and glitter fallout.)

"The greatest remedy for anger is delay." - Seneca

Can't retouch this

Creative sneak-attack marketing campaign from Dove, booby-trapping graphic artists who "clean up" the photos used in ads.

"Older women are like aging strudels — the crust may not be so lovely, but the filling has come at last into its own." - Robert Farrar Capon

To a degree

What probably should be an all-time crappy commercial for an Australian university is actually highly entertaining and almost charming, if not a little macabre.

"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest." - Benjamin Franklin

Name on

Grawlix, Baader-Meinhof, zarf, et al. — names for everyday things that you never knew had them.

"Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting." - Edmund Burke

Paper or plastic?

Clever-ish TV commercial for — of all things — French toilet paper (a.k.a., "petits drapeaux blancs").

"I'd rather live with a good question than a bad answer." - Aryeh Frimer

Fire flighters

Dancers shot in super-slo-mo and then overlaid with CG flames so they look like they've been set ablaze. It took just over a year to complete, six months of which was creating and rendering the fire, which makes you wonder whether it would have been easier to actually just set the dancers on fire.

"Ego is to the true self what a flashlight is to a spotlight." - John Bradshaw

Fall guy

More like a sight gag than a fail, this "trust fall" nonetheless goes wrong, somewhat unexpectedly.

"A man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts." - Harold MacMillan

Orientation

Cracked tries to live up to its name with a humorous take on "If Famous Websites Were Real People". Amusing, though seems like I've seen it somewhere before. (It is, after all, the internet.)

"I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally." - W.C. Fields

The customer is always fright

Fun time watching NASCAR legend Jeff Gordon put on a disguise and take a (supposedly) unwitting car salesman on a kamikaze test drive in a Chevy Camaro.

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." - Winston Churchill

Putting the "oo" in moon

Watch the full moon rise. Footage straight out of the camera. No editing. Holy crap.

"Sadness is but a wall between two gardens." - Khalil Gibran

The Punisher

Bus driver in Russia who clearly has earned his nickname, "The Punisher", shows why he's famous for exacting revenge on rude drivers by simply not slowing down when they cut him off.

"Expect problems and eat them for breakfast." - Alfred A. Montapert

Wing and a prayer

Insane idiots don wingsuits and fly into Rio de Janeiro. My wingsuit would definitely need some professional cleaning after touch-down. (Thanks Raygun. And I agree completely that this "looks like an amazingly bad idea".)

"If God had really intended men to fly, he'd make it easier to get to the airport." - George Winters

The internet... Have you heard of it?

This internet instruction video from the 90s kids learn how to play games, cheat on homework, and all the other time-honored traditions might invoke a little nostalgia.

"I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde

Luck of the draw

Nothing like a catchy name. The so-called Jim'll Paint It showcases the incredible work of a man named Jim who will indeed draw anything requested — anything — in MS Paint.

And speaking of the arts, Selfless Portraits is a project where random people draw other random peoples' Facebook profile pics for side-by-side display.

"Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose." - Wilfred Owen

Raspberries on ice

Pretty well terrifying first-person footage of a mountain climber nearly meeting his maker down an ice- and rock-covered slope.

"Every man dies. Not every man really lives." - William Wallace

Runaway inflation

The tension builds, literally and figuratively, watching this giant weather balloon inflate to ridiculous proportions until it...

"If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Glow sticks

Dude covers himself with glow-in-the-dark paint to become something of a creepy luminous musical stickman. (And the guy can play a little bit, too.)

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." - Leo Tolstoy

Dottering

Low-res but semi-trippy, a video called "Freckle" puts 19,000 velcro dots to work as pixels used to create shapes.

"Happiness can be defined, in part at least, as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually." - Stephen Covey

Horn o' plenty

Dark spoof, children's book-style, "Why Unicorn Drinks", illustrating life's sadnesses.

1 small difference

Nope, it's not The Onion — it's a distantly related cousin called The On1on, a well-executed concept to aggregate news so zany and offbeat that it looks like snarky satire.

Penguin or chicken?

The question almost answered in "Penguin vs. Diving Board - The Translation", a viral voiceover video.

"The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed." - Buddha

Chocolate shake

Is there enough education value in How To Shake A Black Guy's Hand that it should be added to the "For Dummies" series?

"Advice is like snow -- the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper in sinks into the mind." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I think I canyon

Stomach-churning footage of crunchy outdoor thrill-seekers enthusiastically chucking themselves off a cliff just for the heck of it. Not shown: giant heap of dead thrill-seekers without great big smiles on their faces.

"But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself." - Albert Camus

Just a little off

If you like quick-fire animated mini-gags — Python-esque with a touch of "Robot Chicken" — then Offcuts is a vid for you.

"If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking." - Benjamin Franklin

Goes to 11

Literally heavy metal, this all-robot band called Compressorhead plays Motorhead's "Ace of Spades".

"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly." - Richard Bach

Lift / off

When you think of safety on the slopes, you probably don't think of this: teenager falls off chairlift with only snow-covered rocks to cushion his fall.

"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading." - Lao Tzu

Meshy

Quiet that inner OCD voice with a visit to things fitting perfectly into things, a gallery of unrelated objects that fit together as if by design.

And obeying the letter, if not the spirit, of the law -- the strange phenomenon of litterplugs, where people stash trash in unexpectedly creative places.

Argonomic

It only recently took home the Oscar for Best Picture, but it's not too soon to mash it with another classic work of movie-dom to create "Argo Home Alone".

"Children are likely to live up to what you believe of them." - Lady Bird Johnson