Today we celebrate Warwick Davis’ 45th birthday! Anyone who considers themselves a proper fan of Fantasy and Sci-Fi knows that we owe many of our most beloved characters to the endearing talent of this charming man.

Davis has played titular roles in some of the most famous movie and television series of our time. He has left an indelible mark in pop culture and cinematic history. With a career spanning 32 years, let’s give this man his due today as he celebrates being 45! In case we’re ever in doubt about just how little we’ve accomplished in our lives, we have only to look to him to confirm it.

And with that, here are some fun facts about Warwick Davis to shed some light on just how incredible a life can be in the short span of 45 years:

#1. He started playing the Ewok, Wicket, (beginning with Star Wars: Return of the Jedi) when he was just 11 years old. Originally cast as an extra, he moved up in the world when the actor previously planned to play Wicket fell ill.

#2. He must have made quite an impression on George Lucas who wrote this next movie with Davis in mind for the leading role. Perhaps a bit overshadowed by Val Kilmer’s flamboyantly delightful Madmartigan, Warwick Davis played the title character of that unforgettable and courageous Nelwyn in Willow.

#3. Harry Potter spotlighted the talents of almost every well known contemporary British actor and Davis was no exception. He played both Professor Filius Flitwick as well as Griphook.

#4. One of Jennifer Aniston’s first leading men, Warwick (pronounced Warrick) haunted us as that horrifying fantastical menace, Leprechaun. Six times.

#5. He played Nikabrik in Disney’s The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. (He had played Reepicheep in the BBC version in 1989).

#6. Perhaps the character everyone most looked forward to in Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, Marvin the Paranoid Android, was brought to life in 2005 by Davis, at least physically (the voice was provided by Alan Rickman).

#7. He was a part of the Goblin Corps in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth.

#8. In 2013, he starred in an episode of Doctor Who opposite the Eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith.

#9. Remember that fantasy TV mini-series, The Tenth Kingdom, that tugged at our adolescent heartstrings in the year 2000? He played Acorn, the Dwarf!

#10. Has both a daughter and a son with his wife, Samantha. His son’s name? Harrison.

#11. In 2011, he published his Autobiography, “Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis”. It’s available to order on Amazon. In pretty much every format you could want.

We are in awe of your life, Mr. Davis! Have a wonderful Birthday!

Gia Coppola’s debut film Palo Alto, adapted from James Franco’s collection of short stories, opened last weekend in Los Angeles in New York. The film scored the second highest per screen average of the weekend (only behind the limited release of Jon Favreau’s Chef) and has been a hit with the critics.

Two new clips from the film have been released and can be seen below. Both clips involve the film’s star, Emma Roberts, interacting with two adult men in her life. Also, keep an eye out for our interview with Gia Copploa later today.

“I Think You Should Play Striker” Clip

In the first clip, April’s soccer coach Mr. B (James Franco) offers her a babysitting job. Though a brief and fairly innocuous scene, it is loaded with the subtext of their flirtatious relationship that follows through in the film. Roberts is fantastic here, playing up her shy and cute qualities, leading to the scene’s end moment where she holds a pretty complex expression that reads a million different ways.

“I Corrected Your Paper” Clip

The second clip shows April with a teacher (Val Kilmer). Though there isn’t exactly a lot going on in this clip, it does showcase Kilmer, whose character has an authoritative stoner vibe that could prove quite funny in the film.

Francis Ford Coppola, who has been on an experimental kick with films like Tetro and Youth Without Youth, returns to the horror genre with Twixt. Directed, written, produced and financed by Coppola himself, Twixt is clearly a personal project right down to its shooting locations on Coppola’s own estate. While seeing Coppola make a return to form after his apparent banishment from Hollywood would have been ideal, Twixt is baffling throughout.

The film starts with a narrator (Tom Waits) introducing the small town setting and storyline. The town has several distinct features, including a broken clock tower with seven faces and a mass murder that no one likes to talk about. Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), a writer who is described as “third-rate” and a “bargain basement Stephen King,” arrives to sell copies of his newest book. Baltimore is trying to think of a new idea that’ll put him back on top but keeps coming up short until the town’s sheriff (Bruce Dern) shows him the corpse of a girl who was staked in the heart. The same night Baltimore has a dream involving a young girl named V (Elle Fanning) and Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin) that convinces him to stay and try to write a new novel.

Anyone going into Twixt expecting an easy time is setting themselves up for disappointment. There are at least three storylines going on in the film involving the mystery behind whoever staked the girl, the dreams that explain the town’s history and the novel being written by Baltimore in the film. Twixt switches back and forth between all three of these, with the only distinction coming in the form of the black and white imagery of Baltimore’s dreams. Distinguishing reality from fiction seems easy at first, but by the final act everything blurs together so much Twixt becomes a tangled mess of a film.

The confusing nature of the plot isn’t even the worst thing about Twixt either. Coppola, shooting the film on what appears to be consumer grade cameras, makes everything look cheap and inept. The use of colour in the black and white dream sequences (mostly reserved for reds) looks hokey, and a subplot involving a boy who might be a vampire (Alden Ehrenreich) is downright laughable. Some of the worst examples are when Edgar Allen Poe’s face is superimposed on to the moon and when Ehrenreich rides a motorcycle with a CG background that would look impressive over 20 years ago.

Val Kilmer luckily has enough talent to pull off a good performance as Baltimore, but the same can’t be said for others in the cast. Elle Fanning mostly looks lost at sea, but it’s understandable why she’d have a hard time considering how bizarrely awful the rest of the film is. Alden Ehrenreich doesn’t say much outside of one scene but he does manage to show off some seriously stilted delivery before driving off on a motorcycle. Ben Chaplin and Bruce Dern manage to walk away mostly unscathed, with Dern’s hammy performance heightening some of the film’s similarities with David Lynch’s work.

The incompetent way that Twixt is shot might have been done intentionally by Coppola to match the pulpy B-movie storyline, but the result is laughable. It’s unsurprising that Coppola shot the majority of Twixt on his own estate because, for the most part, it feels like someone messing around in their backyard. A few interesting moments here and there don’t salvage the messy, amateurish quality that runs throughout the film. If this is Coppola experimenting, then the result is a complete failure.