The cheap-o version of the not particularly enjoyable movie was posted on Amazon with a few other pilots in the first wave of the company’s experiments with original programming. It was the highest profile pilot released but thanks to an absence of quality and an abundance of negative feedback, the series will not be moving forward. In fact, I hear the cast will never work again. Even the ones who hid their faces behind heavy amounts of zombie makeup.

What’s most impressive is how quickly and well this system worked. You have to hate something sooo hard to make it no longer exist. So good job! Now let’s get to work on making the movie version disappear too. Hate until it hurts! (CHUD)

The Daily Mail has offered that the producers of the franchise, Michael G. Wilson and the disgustingly named Barbara Broccoli, have approached Nolan with an offer to direct the next installment. No (reported) word on what the outcome of the (reported) talks are, but I’m sure we can hear all about it as soon as we get a source on the inside (allegedly).

Iron Man 3 is the 16th film to cross that threshold, with the other fifteen being:

• Ladybugs
• Monkeybone
• Goodburger
• Spy Kids 3
• All five of the Resident Evil Movies
• Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj
• Air Bud: Golden Receiver
• Take This Waltz
• Picture Perfect
• JCVD
• Major League 3: Back to the Minors

I can’t believe I was able to rattle off that whole list just from memory.

With their fists.

What do you think? Did they nail it? Nerd fight in the comments below!

That’s actually not true at all. We write about it because it’s the best comedy of the past million years, and stories about Arrested Development are largely more interesting than stories about anything else.

This one is no exception.

After months of rumors (that I apparently had never heard) that the new season of A.D. was going to be constructed in such a fashion that the episodes can be played in any order, it turns out that creator Mitch Hurwitz has taken to Twitter to deny that.

Oh well. As far as I’m concerned, the first three seasons can be watched in any order with a such a small drop-off of enjoyment that I’m pretty sure this next season will be the same thing.

Unless the season sucks.

OH NO!

The show, so far untitled, has a murderer’s row of comedians, including T.J. Miller, Thomas Middleditch, Josh Brener, Lindsey Broad, Christopher Evan Welch, Amanda Crew, Angela Trimbur, ZachWoods and Kumail Nanjiani. But those guys will be pretty funny!

The tagline that has been bandied about here is “the people most qualified to succeed are the least capable of handling success.” Ugh. That describes every Aaron Sorkin project ever. Of course, it’s Mike Judge, so we needn’t worry.

You know, staplers, and whatnot.

Soooo… (SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN SEASON 8 FINALE)

If Ted doesn’t find his wife over the course of this weekend, I’m pretty sure this announcement allows us to bludgeon the producers, the cast, and most any other person on the planet out of sheer frustration.

It’s anticipated that the future wife/mother will be played by Cristin Milioti, and it’s been revealed that Ted will be the last of his friends to meet her, possibly because he’s a whiney tool, possibly because it helps the story.

It’s like First Blood in space! How come nobody thought to make this sooner?

However, you’ll have to make peace with your decision knowing that there is a fake Tobias Fünke website out there that serves the fictitious purpose of promoting a closeted homosexual’s fledgling acting career.

So, you can refuse to binge on AD hype for the next few days, or you can give in to those urges and visit Insert My Anywhere.

If it helps, Insert Me Anywhere has this banner ad:

Your involvement is simple. Just visit the This Is The End Facebook page and give them a LIKE. The more likes that they receive, the more crazy stuff you can see them do. For instance, if the page gets 500K likes, Danny McBride will wax Seth Rogen’s back (trust us, he’s overdue);  650K likes will force Jay Baruchel and Danny McBride to eat the same spaghetti noodle like a couple of lovesick dogs;  and for 800K likes Seth Rogen will paint a (hopefully tasteful) nude portrait of James Franco.

So, get to it. There’s hilarious male nudity out there just waiting for you! And remember to check back here as new videos are unlocked.

Enough is enough. Famous people have two things we normals don’t: money and access.  By turning to crowdfunding, they’ve gamed the system, cashing in on their fame to make any project they want with no risk to their own bankroll, and owing no profits to their “investors” if its a success.

We need to send them a message that this is NOT OK, and with your help we can do just that…

We’ve put together a full-page advertisement telling everyone we “Don’t back Zach.” We’ll need $10,000 to run it in the local film & TV industry magazine, the Hollywood Reporter, and if we hit $200,00 we’ll go national in a magazine like Entertainment Weekly.  And if we get $5,000,000 we’ll carve it into the moon! All funds will be returned if we don’t hit our 10k goal!

Yet here we are as Robert Rodriguez divulges that the adaptation will be the backbone of his El Rey Network, which is an English-language station that will be geared towards Hispanic audiences. Already, I can hear hipsters salivating over the prospect of enjoying this channel ironically, spilling their taco truck tacos all over their vests and mustaches.

What a bloodbath.

It’s reported that Schwarzenegger will play The Exterminator, which is not exactly a complimentary title when applied to someone often mistaken for being German, a former black ops agent who trains the Toxic Avenger to fight polluters. Here are some confusing quotes from people who should know better:

“Moviegoers around the world were thrilled when Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to acting so effortlessly filling the gap that he left behind,” said producer and International Film Trust co-founder Michael Benaroya in a statement.

“Our film is a perfect combination of commercial genre, star power and award winning filmmakers to set it apart from other titles on offer at Cannes this year,” IFT president Ariel Veneziano added.

They do realize that Steve Pink made Hot Tub Time Machine, yes? I recall that film being passed over by the Academy. (Coming Soon)

Yesterday came news of Seth Meyers plans to move down the hall, it’s suspected that Jason Sudeikis will leave to focus on film work, and Fred Armisen’s future with the show is uncertain. Unfortunately, there have been no reports that Kenan Thompson plans to depart.

The production houses Benderspink and Broken Road have teamed up to buy the rights to make a film out of the experiential chain restaurant. Although it’s not explicitly disclosed, I’m surprised that it took two parties to raise the $217 (I assume) to buy the rights to make a movie about a restaurant.

Exciting stuff.

No. No it isn’t.

In which case, not cool Netflix and Ron Howard. We’ll find out for sure on May 26th.

Meyers will wrap up SNL’s fall season before moving to Late Night this winter, and then probably return to SNL when Leno decides he’s not giving up The Tonight Show after all. (NY Times)

Like Tim Burton and Wes Anderson, Baz Luhrmann is one of a handful of directors whose name evokes an instantly recognizable visual style. There’s something admirably self-assured about the Australian filmmaker’s ability to insert anything – dance competitions in Strict Ballroom, Shakespeare in Romeo + Juliet, ultra-generic opera plots in Moulin Rouge – in the Luhrmannizer, extruding a homogeneous, garish but fun product that exhausts as much as it exhilarates.

As you’ve probably already seen in the film’s trailer, The Great Gatsby brims full with the kind of optical overdose that Luhrmann has made his signature. The party scenes, which rival the ruffles-and-lace circus madness of Moulin Rouge, have glittery confetti and Disneyland fireworks sparkling above Jazz Age twerkers, swarms of women dressed like sea creatures, and a Williamsburg version of that creepy dancing man from the Six Flags commercials.

The construction and choreography of these set pieces are as sleek as ever, but the rest of the film is astonishingly visually inept. Much too often, Tobey Maguire’s voiceover tells us how the characters feel and how they develop instead of allowing us to see for ourselves. The resulting effect is to make the movie feel less like an adaptation than the next generation of books-on-tape, where we absorb the story aurally. But hey, it comes with some pretty if utterly redundant illustrations if you want to something to look at.

To be fair, Luhrmann is also faithful to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel in a good way – in that the plot is lifted pretty much straight from the book. It’s the Roaring Twenties, and Nick Carraway (Maguire), a wide-eyed Midwesterner, moves to the Big Apple to become a bankster like all the other cool kids. His next-door neighbor, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), is a reclusive young millionaire who ropes him into arranging an accidentally-on-purpose reunion with Gatsby’s first love, Daisy (Carey Mulligan), who happens to be Nick’s cousin. Nick agrees, despite the fact that Daisy is already married to – and has a daughter with – patrician douchebag Tom (Joel Edgerton, Australia’s answer to Benedict Cumberbatch). The small cast of pretty young things also includes Tom’s working-class mistress (Isla Fisher) and girl-golfer Jordan (Elizabeth Debicki), the only character that resembles an actual person, despite existing only to introduce Nick to How Things Are Done in rich-person circles.

As intended by Fitzgerald, Gatsby is a stern fable about the moral hazards of wealth. But a studio film made by a bunch of millionaires and financed by a bunch of billionaires has pretty much no chance at remaining Occupy agitprop. So Luhrmann remade Gatsby for the multiplex as a saga of romantic martyrdom, rendered all the more glamorous and tragic by the opulence the source material condemned. DiCaprio is the perfect actor for this Gatsby, despite speaking in a bizarre accent somewhere between Katharine Hepburn and a fancy horse that’s so wispy it tends disappears by the end of a sentence. He has only a single substantial scene here, but his Gatsby has so many echoes from the Leomania days – his roles from Romeo + Juliet, Titanic, and Catch Me If You Can – that all DiCaprio has to do to summon estrogen devotion is to stand around in spiffy linen suits looking dapper. For her part, Mulligan adds her natural sweetness and kitten eyes to their thoroughly adequate pantomime of mutual adoration.

Unfortunately, the camera returns again and again to Maguire’s Nick, a garrulous nonentity. When the character’s narration doesn’t fast-forward through all the interesting action for you, Maguire’s proximity to DiCaprio distracts from the film’s fiction by reminding you of the BFF stars’ real-life adventures in poonhoundery as the senior partners of the Pussy Posse. Their sexploits would probably embarrass the novel’s Gatsby, but their Hollywood excess would make a great Baz Luhrmann movie.

See it now, See it later, or Run in the other direction? Run in the other direction, unless you need another fix of Jack and Rose.

So, we’re left to wait to hear whether or not Fichtner will wear knife shoulder pads or a warthog, rhinoceros, or samurai rabbit costume. Keep in mind, he does have reasonable experience in dressing ridiculously.

What scene? A scene on Klingon with Kirk, John Harrison, and Uhuru. None of that means anything to me, but maybe it will to you. Note the conspicuous absence of Mr. Pegg. COULD THERE BE TROUBLE IN PARADISE BETWEEN THE LONGTIME FRIENDS?

Nah. They seem pretty chill.

The film has already opened in Europe, and hits US theaters next week, so you’ll have to writhe around until then to see what all the fuss is about. You can do it. I know you can.

Namely, he doesn’t like that cable bundles force us to buy channels we don’t want or use. It’s a familiar criticism, but one that’s unlikely to change due to the power of cable companies, McCain’s distance from the Senate Commerce Committee, and the fact that the cure might be worse than the disease.

Should cable companies unbundle, subscribers will have to shell out big bucks for their favorite channels like ESPN, FX, AMC, USA, TNT, and TBS, forcing them to realize that maybe they weren’t paying all that much for the Lifetime Movie Network in the first place.

The plan McCain is sponsoring is called the Television Consumer Freedom Act. The phrase “Television Consumer” makes me think of a fat person on the couch watching Anger Management, and “Freedom” makes me think that person is holding a tiny USA flag while doing so.

David O. Russell‘s Spanking The Monkey was a close second choice.

An eyewitness has reported to Hollywood.com that West was filming a scene on a rooftop with Paul Rudd and Christina Applegate. Honestly, that could have been anyone and this should only be considered a rumor. Says the witness, “he required an umbrella for shade most of the time he was on the roof.” Yeah, okay. So I guess Kanye is in this movie now.

Now to what “bastard” am I referring?

Marvel’s Big Hero 6, which comes our way on November 7, 2014. The film follows a scientist and his robot who, along with myriad other colorful crimefighters, will take down the bad guys in a fictional city known as San Fransokyo.

Unsurprisingly, it looks as though Disney is trying to find the natural overlap between its core animation audience and the more kid-friendly Marvel titles. So far, so good.

“We’re in way over our bloody heads here. Let’s just license Raymond.”

(That’s how I imagine the BBC producers addressing the issue. You can tell they’re British because of their colorful language.)

It’s called The Smiths, and it will star Catherine Tate and Lee Mack as the schlubmaster general.

Of course, Russia already took to adapting Raymond, which tells us that a) TV execs aren’t very creative in other countries either, and b) lots of audiences worldwide hate their families.