Here are some of the top news items that have been plucked from my Facebook and Twitter feed:

In honor of The Muppets movie coming out on November 23, the geniuses behind the Muppets have decided to throw a “Fan-a-thon” in an attempt. The goal? Reach ONE BAZILLION “likes” on their Facebook page. The reward for the “likers”? A chance to see an advance screening of the movie before it opens in theaters.

Sounds like a brilliant idea to me. I’m thinking of doing the same thing with my Facebook page but instead of a BAZILLION likes, I am trying to reach 100. And instead of giving away a chance to see an advance screening of The Muppets, I am giving away old freeze-dried packages of Sizzlean.

Nonetheless, check out the videos of Miss Piggy, Kermit, Fozzie and Gonzo talking about the “Fan-a-thon”:

Don’t forget to “like” The Muppets Facebook page! Do it now or else you will regret it for the rest of your life…and while you’re at it… like my page too.

Before we get into the most intelligent Facebook conversation you will read all week, let’s watch the source material:

In the history of female piano players, Alicia Keys probably has the most swagger.

In this particular song, her swag comes out at the end during the “spoken” portion. Even so, I do have a small problem with spoken conversations during songs (you can reference early works by Boyz II Men for examples). I thought I was the only person who had snarky apprehensions about accepting the “spoken” part during “You Don’t Know My Name” until my friend Mark randomly posted one of the lyrics on his Facebook wall. I immediately knew what he was referencing and responded:

Then I posted another lyric on his wall:

It’s conversations like these that make me feel like I am contributing a lot to society.

In The Hunger Games, Cinna is Katniss’s flamboyant, yet subdued & serene stylist that preps her “catching fire” look for the Games. During the course of the story, he becomes a confidant of the heroine and is a fan favorite.

Whilst reading the description of Cinna, an image of figure skating sensation Johnny Weir popped into my head. But alas, fans started throwing Cillian Murphy‘s name around and I immediately hopped on that bandwagon.

In April, one of my go-to sites for “Hungry” news, TheHob.org, shared a bit of news about Woody Harrelson, Stanely Tucci, and Lenny Kravitz being considered for major roles in the movie. I let this stew in my crock pot for a while, but thought that out of all three, Kravitz would be good for Cinna — so I waited in anticipation for the “official” announcement.

But wait. This story gets more exciting.

I obsessively and obnoxiously post casting announcements on my Facebook page to alert my fellow Hunger Gamers about the progress of the movie. It also annoys all my other Facebook friends. That said, when they announced the casting of stylists Octavia and Portia on Monday, I posted it on my wall and the following conversation ensued:

Later that evening, my friend Melissa posted this on my wall:

Boo yah. My self-worth has been validated. And the fact that I get joy out of analyzing and predicting the casting of a movie based on a series of young adult novels about a dystopian world where teens fight to the death doesn’t make my life sad AT ALL.

Considering Facebook runs almost everybody’s life, why wouldn’t they offer movie rentals on the world’s hugest and obnoxiously addictive social networking platform.

Today they announced that they will be offering a selected movies for purchase or rental through Warner Bros. Entertainment’s Facebook movie Pages. You can use Facebook Credits as as currency to buy or rent the aforementioned select movies.

The rentals start today with the millions of people who “Liked” The Dark Knight. Fans of the movie can rent the movie for a bargain price of 30 Facebook Credits (equivalent to $3). But don’t worry! More titles will be available soon!

Now all Facebook needs to do is offer porn rentals and they will be the Mecca of all that is good.

If you have missed the chance to dork out this week — DON’T FRET! The X-Men: First Class is going to debut on Facebook TODAY in a couple of hours.

Make sure you “Like” the X-men page at Facebook.com/XMenMovies so you can get updated on the movie (in theaters June 3). This way, you can overhype the movie until your hearts content!

That said, watch the trailer, come back here and tell us what ya think of it!

***UPDATED***

Here’s the trailer!

The best way to start 2011 is with a brand new subscription to [amazon_link id="B001U5SPI8" target="_blank" ]GQ[/amazon_link] featuring Blue Valentine star and Mickey Mouse Club alum, Ryan Gosling on the cover.

With that in mind, I had a rousing conversation on Facebook about Mr. Gosling:

Please take note of the duo of “likes.”

The following is a captivating conversation about the movie in the best place to have a conversation: Facebook.

Sorkin’s small role (besides being the screenwriter) in ‘The Social Network’

The movie has already garnered bushels of praise from critics and moviegoers. Of all the reviews Sorkin says that one theme that remains the same is that this movie “defines a generation.”

Now I ain’t no genius, but I think that’s a good thing.

Sitting in a room with Sorkin is like being in a shooting range. He’s an uze and his words are rapid fire bullets that can render you unconscious and incredibly enlightened. You wouldn’t expect anything less from the screenwriter (and trained actor) who served us dialogue-heavy movies and television shows like A Few Good Men, The West Wing, Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and the upcoming feature Moneyball. Here, he talks (a lot) about working with director David Fincher, his love/hate relationship with Facebook, tragic heroes and everything else there is you need to know about The Social Network.

How did you work in parallel to Ben Mezrich’s book, ‘The Accidental Billionaires’?

I wouldn’t want to reduce Ben’s role. I wouldn’t think there would be a movie without Ben’s 14-page book proposal. His publisher was shopping it around to studios to get a simultaneous film deal – that’s how it wound up in my hands. I think I said yes on page three – but I assumed that the studio wanted the book to be written before I adapted it. They wanted me to start right away so Ben and I were researching and writing at the same time. I had no idea what he was going to write; he had no idea what I was going to write. We met two or three times to share information. I approached it from a slightly different angle than he did, but like I said, if Ben didn’t do what he did, we wouldn’t be sitting here today.

What was important for you to research when writing this story?

There were two types of research: the kind anyone could get their hands on and then there was the first-person research: talking to the people who were characters in the movie, talking to people who aren’t characters in the movie, people who were very close to the events and the subject – what became clear was that there were two lawsuits brought against Facebook at the roughly at the same time. What we came away with was three very different versions of a story. Instead of picking one and deciding, “That’s the truth, that’s the story I’ll tell,” or “That’s the juiciest, that’s the story I’ll tell,” I thought I would tell all three. I would keep moving from point of view to point of view whether it is the Winklevosses, Mark or Eduardo and not have the movie take a stance on what the truth was and let those arguments happen in the parking lot.

How did you deal with creating the reality of the story?

There was nothing in the movie invented for the sake of making it sensational. There was nothing in the movie that was “Hollywood-ized.” There are a couple of cases when it didn’t matter at all – I conflated characters. There are three cases where I changed the character’s name – one of the cases it’s offscreen. The other two cases, there was no need to embarrass this person. The rest is whatever anybody does when they’re writing non-fiction. If you look at The Queen by Peter Morgan, he wasn’t in the bedroom when Queen Elizabeth was talking to her husband about their daughter-in-law – you have to be a writer in that case and write a scene. Same thing with Frost/Nixon or William Goldman’s All the President’s Men. David Fincher and I have much more factual information than in any of those movies.

Follow the jump to read more.

When portraying Mark Zuckerberg, how did you go about making him compelling to the audience and, at the same time, making him sympathetic?

With a character like that – he’s an anti-hero. He spends the first hour and fifty-five minutes being an anti-hero and the last five minutes of the movie being a tragic hero. To be a tragic hero, there are two requirements: you have to pay a price and you have to feel remorse. I was sent an excerpt from a review the other day and it said, “The movie made me want to egg Mark Zuckerberg’s house and then help him clean it up” – and I thought that was perfect. That’s what we were going for. When I write a character like that, I write it as if they are making a case to God in why they should be allowed into heaven. In other words, you can’t have them twirl their mustache. You can’t think they are a bad guy, you have to put obstacles in front of them. If can break yourself from the habit of telling the audience of who the character is and instead showing the audience what the character wants, you are going to avoid traps.

How did Jesse Eisenberg help as portraying this anti-hero?

He never asks the audience to like him. Jesse wasn’t a movie star when we cast him. There are a lot of directors and executives who said, ‘This character is not lovable – we like the cuddly nerds from the ’80s.” It was as if we had to open the movie with the character as a 10-year-old with his father beating him. There was never any of that from Jesse, Fincher, the studio – anybody. We were just going to own these guys and the situation.

Did you ever meet the real Mark?

I’ve never met or spoken to Mark – but I will say this: I don’t think there is anybody who would like a movie made about them when they were 19 years old. He’s a very young man – he’s at the head of this whole thing. He’s awkward in public and he knows it. He knows it because he has been told it so many times. He doesn’t care much about money so I don’t think his billions of dollars are making things much easier for him. I actually feel affection, respect and empathy for him.

Do you think this movie will remain timeless?

I have been asked different versions of that question. I haven’t, in my mind, yet to come up with an answer to that. First, I don’t think it is my place to say that this movie will be timeless. One of my many heroes is William Goldman. He’s a two-time Academy Award winning screenwriter. He probably wrote one out of five movies you like – he also writes non-fiction. He wrote a book called “Adventures in the Screen Trade.” He talks about that we somehow lowered the standard of what a classic is. At the time he wrote this book, E.T. had just opened and 10 days after a fairly respected critic had called it a timeless classic. Then Goldman goes on to talk about what is a timeless classic. He said he loved E.T. but also said before we call it a classic, can it be open for two weeks?

How do you think social networking has changed the way we communicate?

I’m going to tell you in a moment why it’s not my cup of tea – but first, you have to acknowledge the incredibly positive events that occurred through social networking. Whether it is protesting the election in Iran, Jena Six, the Obama election – you cannot only thank the Internet but a minor character in The Social Network, Chris Hughes. He’s the guy in the movie in charge of community outreach. He left Facebook to run Obama’s Internet operation. Here’s the other thing it’s done – for a device that’s supposed to bring us closer together, I feel like it’s done the opposite. I feel like social networking is to socializing as reality TV is to reality. In a way, we are performing for each other. Do not have a fight with your girlfriend by email. Nobody is going to win that fight – it’s just going to get worse because you’re not talking, you’re writing. You’re writing at each other – and it’s just gonna be a “gotcha” thing. Someone just told me he took his family to a safari in Africa and his son took his laptop and the son was forever on Facebook. It’s as if it’s not happening unless he’s telling other people about it. It just doesn’t feel good to me. I hear myself speak – and I sound like my father and my grandfather. I understand that it’s every generation’s job to overthrow the generation that came before them and do something new – but it seems like it has always been done with music and music has always gotten better as a result – I don’t know about (Facebook). But I know that 500 million people disagree.

Click here to check out more interviews from the cast of The Social Network.

He dons an hipster Thom Browne plaid shirt to fit his slender frame — which he constantly fiddles with during the interview. While sitting down, he does what seems to be sit-and-be-fit yoga chair exercises which could be the result of an assumed rigorous training regiment that he is doing for his next big web-slinging role as the new Spider-Man. In addition to that, he can currently be seen in the emotionally hefty movie adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro‘s novel, “Never Let Me Go”.

But we are not here to talk about either of those. We are here to talk about his role as Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network — a role which also required extreme physical training. Mainly Afro-Brazilian martial art dancing.

“I did a lot of capoeira,” jokes Garfield of his role of the real life co-founder of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg’s BFF. He says that Eduardo was born in Brazil, raised in Miami and went to Harvard — so he had to familiar with that culture.

It’s really not a joke. He did practice capoeira.

Nonetheless, I had the chance to talk to the new, emerging talent in Hollywood about his role in a movie that will be the first of many that will launch him into the respectable stratosphere of young & hip Hollywood. (and there’s audio — which is needed to get the full effect of his dreamy British accent).

Was the Sorkin-style of script of overlapping dialogue challenging for you? Especially when doing an accent?

The idea for me in doing an accent is not to put it on, but to make it second nature so that your ear is used to it, because if my ear isn’t used to it, then how is anyone else going to be convinced that I am that person? That was the first thing – I had to make sure my ear was trained and ready. As for the rhythm of “Sorkinian” language, you just need to try to not get in the way of it, like Shakespeare or Chekov or any of the great playwrights – I consider him in that bracket. An actor wants to put his own mark on something and that’s your ego – you don’t need that so you try not to get in the way of these beautiful sequences of thoughts that have been expressed so deftly and seeped with subtext. It’s all there in the script. All you have to be is truthful in that situation and allow the thoughts to turn into words and the words turn into an action. If you honor what is written, you’re taken care of.

What is it you look for when working with a director?

Andrew Garfield’s take on directors

The following sound clip is of me asking a question about the severed relationship between Mark and Eduardo in the film…this is also audio evidence that I actually talked to him and that I am not making up this whole interview.

Mark vs. Eduardo

When you auditioned for the movie, it was said that you tested for a lot of the other roles – but none of them were for Eduardo.

I only read scenes for Mark – but I think they were using those scenes as a template to see what actors could bring to that – but as far as I was concerned I was auditioning for Mark. So when they called me and said they were interested in me for another role I was really confused at first but then I was like I would do anything in this movie – I would sweep the floors. It was one of those rare times with a director-writer-producer trifecta – that holy trinity comes together and tells a story that is not only exciting and entertaining, but meaningful and human.

Click here to check out more interviews from the cast of The Social Network.