To celebrate our 5 week long holiday promotion, we reached out to Los Angeles-based artist Justin Martin to create an original drawing to capture the essence of the holidays. In his untitled wintry illustration, he portrays a young family walking home in the sunset from a day of sledding in the snow. Below is a brief Q&A with the artist. Be sure to check out more of his work on his blog. — The Hulu Team

What are you currently working on?
My 9 to 5 gig- though it is anything but- is as Background Painter at Warner Bros. Animation. I’m currently working on a new series called “The Looney Tunes Show”, due to air in 2011 on Cartoon Network.
I’m also creating all the artwork for a new graphic novel with the working title Badge of the Guardian, about a young boy who goes on a wild adventure in Outer Space.
Mainly, however, I’m trying to play the role of Dad for my 11 month old daughter. Maybe I should have started with that, as it’s unquestionably its own full time job.

What has been your most unusual project?
That’s a tough call. Each project has its own unique quirkiness. That’s a major reason why I opted to go into the Animation Industry. I’ve made monsters with tank turret underwear attacking the Golden Gate Bridge, space pirates who listen to Reggae while “beaming up” unsuspecting human prisoners, and an evil genius beaver who lives in the Hoover Dam. The weirdness just doesn’t stop around these parts.

On second thought, though, I might go with the whole fatherhood thing again. That certainly fits the “unusual” criteria.

Where do you find your inspiration?
Anywhere and everywhere I can. I’ve always thought that one of the most important lessons an artist can learn is to maintain constant awareness. There’s a Huxley book called Island in which talking birds are trained to fly around saying only the word “Attention”. I need one of those birds.
Instead I try to carry a camera with me everywhere I go, and to always have a book going. I have an “inspiration” section on my own blog that I stopped updating a long time ago because the list just got too enormous. It’s really staggering how many amazing artists there are out there, each with his or her own viewpoint, medium, or technique.

What is your favorite subject matter?
Anything thought provoking. I like to make pieces that you have to take a closer look at, so the subject has to have some depth to it. (See earlier answer re: space pirates and evil genius beavers.)

Do you prefer to use a pencil and paper, or a Wacom Tablet?
I generally sketch on paper in the early stages and move to digital a little later down the line. Some day I intend to get back to much more traditional media, but some of the chemicals involved aren’t so good for babies so it may be a while. Until then digital is nice and clean.

What are you favorite shows on Hulu?
I loves me some Arrested Development and 30 Rock. Modern Family is also great. We saw the guy that plays the dad who always slips on the stairs when we were out the other day. Part of me wanted to pull his earbuds out just so I could tell him how awesome he is.

With Thanksgiving just a few days away, the holiday season is officially in full swing. Hulu’s gift to you this winter? New shows and movies every weekday through Christmas, plus new site features that are specially designed to make finding, watching and sharing videos on Hulu even easier. Yesterday, Hulu for the Holidays kicked off with tags and the ABC series Dirty Sexy Money, featuring Six Feet Under‘s Peter Krause as a lawyer to one of Manhattan’s wealthiest families. It’s his job to keep the Darlings out of the tabloids and out of jail — no easy feat given the scandals this high-profile family seems to attract.

Our “gifts” for today: The award-winning The Larry Sanders Show starring Garry Shandling and a cavalcade of guest stars, but you may also recognize a few familiar faces, including Rip Torn, Jeffrey Tambor, Jeremy Piven and Janeane Garofalo. Season 1 is now available in its entirety; we also have a sampling of episodes from Season 2 and 3 (streaming rights aren’t available for the entire run at this time).

Long before Love Guru, Mike Myers made a name for himself by playing characters seemingly like himself. In So I Married an Axe Murderer, the former SNL star shines as Charlie McKenzie, an ordinary guy, albeit a tad paranoid, who’s fallen in love with the blonde butcher in his San Francisco neighborhood. Myers channels his more outrageous side as Charlie’s Scottish father, Stuart, and the film is full of quotes many of us here at Hulu HQ still remember — – “Harriet! Harry-it, hard-hearted harbinger of haggis” — years after the movie’s premiere.

You can keep track of the latest content on our Hulu for the Holidays calendar page. What’s in store the rest of the season? Check back each day to find out!

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

As a special treat this Christmas, we’ve put together a collection of some Christmas-themed episodes from current shows and old favorites. It’s an easy way to get in the spirit of the season, whether you take Dwight’s profiteering approach (anyone need a Princess Unicorn?) or prefer to celebrate Chrismukkah-style, with eight days of presents followed by a day of many presents. Our Best of Christmas collection has those now-classic episodes, as well has a sampling from Monk, American Dad!, Married…With Children and more.

While you’re watching, don’t forget to check out our new embed feature, which allows you to watch each video in full screen. To do so, simply click on the “expand” box that appears to the right of the search bar when the embedded video is playing.

From all of us at Hulu, happy holidays!

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

Today’s Hulu for the Holidays movie, One True Thing, is a tear-jerker. It’s the story of Ellen (Renee Zellweger), a young New York City journalist whose career is on the rise. But when she returns home for a birthday party, her life changes in ways she never expected. Her mother (Meryl Streep), Kate, has just been diagnosed with cancer and needs someone to look after her. Ellen’s father (William Hurt), a college prof, puts the burden of Kate’s care on Ellen’s shoulders.

The tone is set when Kate, dressed up as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, says “There’s no place like home,” and Ellen mutters — under her breath behind mom’s back, of course — “Thank god.”

What follows is the story of a young woman discovering that her homemaker mother was stronger than anyone thought, and that her father — long idolized by Ellen — is not the man she thought he was.

Hope you enjoy the movie,

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

Hulu’s Holiday gift today is a star-studded film with serious overtones — a film that commands your attention. 21 Grams weaves together three lives brought together by tragedy, slipping back and forth in time to wrap you in grief.

Naomi Watts, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro bring Guillermo Arriaga’s (Amores Perros) screenplay to life, with Watts playing a grieving mother who’s slipping into old habits. Meanwhile Penn and Del Toro play very two different men — a critically ill mathematician and a born-again ex-con — who are brought together by Watts’ character.

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (also from Amores Perros) spins 21 Grams into an intricate web, mixing the past and present of each character to tell their stories. But the result isn’t as confusing as it sounds. Once you stop trying to make sense of the pieces, you find that everything comes together.

Another feature film comes tomorrow, this one a Meryl Streep tear-jerker. We’ll reveal the title at hulu.com/holidays tomorrow.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

Hulu is excited to add three new documentaries to our Holiday lineup. In addition to two made-for-TV documentaries, Amos ‘n’ Andy: Anatomy of a Controversy and America’s Prince: The John F. Kennedy Jr. Story, we’re introducing a new documentary, Speed and Angels, which is available exclusively on Hulu. To mark the premiere, we asked the film’s director and producer to contribute to our blog today. They’ve shared their Speed and Angels stories below.

From Peyton Wilson, Director, Speed and Angels

I’m a filmmaker. I’m also a pretty liberal woman and I was living in San Francisco when Paco [Chierici, the film's producer] called me up and said, “Let’s make a kick-ass film about Navy fighter pilots.” “Hmmm … what? Who? Do I care about jets? Are fighter pilots really that interesting? Not my world.” But Paco pestered me until I grew curious. Entering a Navy base is an alien experience; hanging out in a squadron full of fighter pilots is more than surreal. My fear melted in about two minutes. The guys were great, deep, intelligent, funny, relaxed; they were real.

Before I knew it, I began to document their world. While I still wasn’t that into jets, I was fascinated by their passion. Over the next few months I went to the Officer’s Club and learned what a “butterfly” start to a dogfight is. I had never been with a group of people who so fiercely loved what they did and who’d all fought against some steep odds to achieve their dream. That was the story I knew I had to tell.

I went where they went: aircraft carriers, their homes, flight simulators, classrooms, etc. And I was always on the ramp waiting for their return from a flight. It was extremely personal. Even the aerial footage had to be personal. My mantra: put the audience in the cockpit. Eventually, two stories rose to the surface: Meagan and Jay. Two pilots who — had they listened to adults when they were teenagers — absolutely shouldn’t be in the cockpit: a woman who decided she was going to be a fighter pilot at a time when women weren’t allowed to, and a young man who is lucky to be alive, much less flying. For two years I attached myself to Meagan and Jay. Their journeys are heartbreaking, scary, breathtaking and deeply moving. By understanding their world in such a personal way, I finally began to share their fascination with jets. And their continual fight to go after their dream changed something in me forever.

From Paco Chierici, Fighter Pilot/Producer, Speed and Angels

I first saw Top Gun in the fall of ’86 as a twenty-year-old and I was blown away. I had flown in the back seat of an F-14 Tomcat just three months prior and was still spinning. I fell in love that summer — with a big hunk of aluminum. I loved everything about that big beast: the smell of the jet exhaust, the sinewy shoulders, the impossibly thin fuselage, the massive engines sprouting rudders and elevators the size of the wings on most planes, and, of course, the ridiculous thrust.

The movie and that plane are forever linked in my mind. The aerial and carrier scenes are iconic. When I was in flight school, we used to play the first five minutes to get pumped up before a big flight. The quotes are ingrained in the American lexicon: “Feel the need … the need for speed,” “I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you,” and the overused but always fun “Goose, take me to bed or lose me forever!”

The problem I had with Top Gun can be summed up thusly: in fighter squadrons only the biggest moron is now given the call sign “Maverick.” I felt the need … to make a movie that blew away the flying and carrier scenes and showed the real people, the real drama, the real call signs — the real Top Gun. Lucky for me, I’m friends with Peyton Wilson.

– - –

Thanks, Paco and Peyton for sharing your inspiration with us. Hulu for the Holidays has a Sean Penn feature in store tomorrow.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

Hulu continues its string of double features with Go and Wimbledon today. These Hulu for the Holidays picks are our way of giving you a chance to “get away from it all” during the holiday festivities.

For grocery store cashiers Ronna and Simon, it will be a night unlike any other. From attempted drug busts and car wrecks to strip clubs and shootings, the kids featured in Go attract a lot trouble. Ronna (Sarah Polley) just wants some rent money, so when two guys (Party of Five‘s Scott Wolf and Action‘s Jay Mohr) approach her looking to score some ecstasy, she’s willing to oblige — and even use her best friend, Claire (Katie Holmes), as collateral to make the score. And from there, it’s all downhill. There’s the undercover cop (Prison Break‘s William Fitchner) who’s out to make a bust, an angry drug dealer, and a little problem with a Miata at a Christmas Eve rave. Meanwhile, Simon (Desmond Askew) is having a boys-gone-wild weekend in Las Vegas, where he runs into trouble in the back room of a strip club. And while the film seems to take more than a few cues from Pulp Fiction, director Doug Liman (Swingers) ensures that it strikes a chord with a Gen X point of view.

Today’s second feature, Wimbledon, is a lighthearted look at love on and off the grassy courts. Kirsten Dunst stars as a bad-girl tennis superstar; Paul Bettany is a has-been tennis pro taking one last swing at Wimbledon. Can their romance survive the competition? Watch and see.

Hulu for the Holidays is back on Monday with a classic animation block. We’ll take you from a junkyard to Eternia and on to Frostbite Falls for some classic cartoons from our youth.

Rebecca (rebeccaharper@hulu.com),
Editor

With Christmas just around the corner, we wanted to up the ante for our Hulu for the Holidays event. So for the rest of the workweek, we’re adding not just one film, but two each day, starting off with In the Name of the Father and The Milagro Beanfield War.

I missed In the Name of the Father when it was first released, but there’s no mistaking that this Jim Sheridan-directed film is powerful. The soundtrack — featuring Bono, Jimi Hendrix, the Kinks, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan and Sinéad O’Connor — creates the backdrop for the true-life story of the Guildford Four, the four people who were wrongly convicted for the 1974 terrorist bombing of the Guildford pub. The movie went on to receive seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), Best Supporting Actor (Pete Postlethwaite), Best Supporting Actress (Emma Thompson), Best Director (Jim Sheriden) and Best Picture. It was a big year for movies, though — 1993 also saw the release of Schindler’s List, The Fugitive, The Piano and Philadelphia, all of which beat out In the Name of the Father for Oscars.

While Daniel Day-Lewis fights a justice system in In the Name of the Father, Joe Mondragon takes on real estate developers in The Milagro Beanfield War. Directed by Robert Redford, it’s the story of this New Mexican handyman who illegally irrigates a parched beanfield using water that was meant for a major development. You’ll recognize a few faces throughout the movie: Melanie Griffith, Daniel Stern, Freddy Fender and, best of all, Christopher “Can I Get a Little More Cowbell?” Walken.

We hope you enjoy today’s double feature. We’ll be back with another pair of films tomorrow. Check back to see what’s in store!

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

By now, Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt are familiar faces on Hulu — after all, we’re currently offering Air Force One with Ford and A River Runs Through It with Pitt — but the two appear together in today’s Hulu for the Holidays feature, The Devil’s Own.

This thriller casts Pitt as Frankie McGuire, an IRA terrorist — you decide whether Pitt’s Irish accent is convincing — who’s dead-set on revenge, and Ford as Tom O’Meara, a New York City cop who allows the Irish émigré to stay in his home, totally unaware of his criminal background. As O’Meara begins to suspect that his houseguest has a deadly past, he finds himself torn between sympathy for McGuire’s cause and his fear of getting into trouble with the FBI and British police.

While the film glosses over the Irish conflict, choosing to focus on O’Meara’s moral dilemma instead, Pitt and Ford themselves deliver strong performances. For a more detailed look at the Protestant-Catholic conflict, check back tomorrow as the IRA takes center stage once again. Hulu for the Holidays is set to continue with a film that was based on real events, although it raised some controversy for not sticking to the facts. Even so, it received seven Oscar nominations — but Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List swept the awards that year.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

Hulu for the Holidays continues with a pair of new site features today. One of them answers a request we’ve received from many of our users, while the other brings additional functionality to Hulu videos that are shared on other sites.

The first feature — a buffer progress bar — is something you’ll notice only if you pause a video during playback. When a video is paused, Hulu loads a small portion of the video into your computer’s memory. The new buffer progress bar allows you to see how much of a video has been stored, and when the bars reach “full,” about five minutes of the video have been loaded. (Due to legal reasons, Hulu currently does not buffer more than a small portion of a video at a given time.) For users who are experiencing choppy playback due to network congestion, this progress bar lets you know when the video has reached its buffering limit so you can hit “play” and enjoy the show.

The second feature we’ve introduced today allows you to watch any Hulu video embedded on any site in full-screen mode. To use this feature from a blog or website with an embedded Hulu video (such as this blog; I’ve embedded the first video blog from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Conan’s future replacement, in today’s post), just start playing the video. When the video begins, move your mouse over the Hulu player and a small button to go full screen will appear in the upper right corner, next to the search bar. Hulu’s keyboard shortcuts — “f” to go full screen, “space” to pause, “escape” to return to normal view — also work in this mode. (Our full-screen feature only works when using a single monitor; the Flash software we use to stream videos doesn’t support full-screen mode with dual monitors.)

Tomorrow, Hulu for the Holidays brings another movie to our lineup. If you’ve been following the Holidays calendar, you’ll recognize the two leads in this selection: they each appeared in films introduced at the end of November. This one’s about a deadly Irish assassin. We’ve got more movies to finish off the work week; check back every day to see the latest. While you’re at it, check out the latest posts from Jimmy Fallon and see what you think of the new kid in late night.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

Hulu’s Holiday gift to you today is the first season of Da Vinci’s Inquest, a TV series about a controversial coroner who has no qualms re-opening old cases or burning bridges at the office. It brings to mind police procedurals like CSI, Crossing Jordan and Law & Order, but with a bit of the more old-school Quincy for good measure.

If Da Vinci’s Inquest has been under your radar, don’t be surprised. It was originally broadcast in Canada, a seven-season run that started in 1998. But with the popularity we’ve seen with another Canadian series, ReGenesis, it only made sense to add another to Hulu’s collection of TV. And so Da Vinci’s Inquest is the story of Dominic Da Vinci (Nicholas Campbell), an ex-cop turned coroner for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, who struggles with his own personal vices as he pursues truth and justice.

In the series opener, embedded here, Da Vinci works on a case that involves a young prostitute found in Vancouver Harbor. After another doctor in the morgue notes similarities between this case and several others, Da Vinci begins re-opening the old cases. This, of course, gets under the skin of the original doctor who performed the autopsies (who just happens to be his ex-wife) as well as his boss. An alliance with a new cop in Homicide is his only hope in putting these victims to rest.

The show is partly based on the real-life experiences of Larry Campbell, the former chief coroner for Vancouver. He went on to become elected mayor of the city in 2002, and our TV coroner follows suit in a spinoff series, Da Vinci’s City Hall. We’ll continue to work toward acquiring additional seasons of Da Vinci’s Inquest, but in the meantime, check back tomorrow for some new site features. Our holiday gift to you for the rest of the week? Big stars — think Brad Pitt, Katie Holmes and Daniel Day-Lewis — each of the remaining days.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

Wandering eyes can get a guy in a heap of trouble. Worst-case scenario? That could be today’s Hulu for the Holidays selection, Fatal Attraction. From menacing phone calls to a kidnapping, with a boiled bunny thrown in for good measure, this classic thriller shows how a one-night stand can go terribly wrong.

As the lead in Fatal Attraction, Michael Douglas plays Dan Gallagher, a Manhattan lawyer who seemingly has it all: a great wife, a beautiful daughter and a successful career. But one thing leads to another one night while his family is out of town, and he ends up having a dangerous liaison with an associate, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close). When Dan starts avoiding Alex’s calls, this short-lived fling takes a dangerous turn as Alex goes into stalker mode, turning up at Dan’s office and even his home. “Well, what am I supposed to do?” she demands. “You won’t answer my calls, you change your number, I’m not going to be ignored, Dan!” Alex’s obsession only grows stronger over time, and that’s when things get a little bit scary.

A combination of sex and suspense — not to mention fear — made Fatal Attraction the second-highest grossing film of 1987. (Behind Three Men and a Baby!) And those same thrills are what make its storyline so memorable today.

As for next Monday’s TV pick, we’re leaving behind the obsessed lovers and planning an imported, award-winning serial drama instead. Called a “Canadian masterpiece” by TV Guide, it focuses on a coroner who’s deemed charismatic and controversial. Check back next week to see what it is!

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

I love a good nickname, and lucky for me, today’s Hulu for the Holidays movie, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, is full of them. There’s Bacon, Soap, Hatchet, Barry the Baptist, Big Chris, Little Chris, Dog and Nick the Greek — all questionable characters who make the film so much fun to watch.