Where the Wild Things Are director Spike Jonze recently gave his most expansive interview yet about his troubled, tortured, presumed-dead and reanimated fantasy epic, which Warner Bros. is now committed to opening Oct. 19, 2009. And while light-treading Jonze makes his biggest statement about the delay by offering virtually no statement at all, a teasing philosophical aside about his young star Max Records summarizes pretty much all you need to know about Jonze v. Warners:

In an appearance Saturday on NPR's Weekend Edition, Terrence Howard interrupted his discussion of his new album with a Zen meditation on his recent departure from the Iron Man franchise. And if it seemed unusual last week that Howard might bow out of the blockbuster's sequel, leaving his role as Tony Stark confidante Jim Rhodes (and his own heroic alter-ego War Machine) to the capable, cheaper hands of Don Cheadle, the scenario didn't get any clearer as the actor wavered between the high road and calling Marvel Studios a scandalous gang of thieves and pimps:

After the stirring creative success of his English-language debut Gothika — still hovering around a 15% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes — no one could really fault French filmmaker-actor Mathieu Kassovitz for expecting miles of auteurist latitude on his new film, the sci-fi Vin Diesel thriller Babylon A.D. Least of all Kassovitz himself, it appears, whose journey to the farthest-flung frontiers of studio hackery (or Eastern Europe, whichever came first) nevertheless found him face-to-face with micromanagers from 20th Century Fox — "lawyers who were only looking at all the commas and the dots," he recently told inquiring minds at AMC. Things quickly deteriorated from there, alas, but Kassovitz's loss is our gain today as he disowns Babylon A.D. in the most spectacular, career-immolating fashion imaginable:

We hoped you liked the clip "test footage" of Spike Jonze's troubled adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, which made the rounds in February amid rumors of the $75 million film's slow demise at Warner Bros. We're reading now that that may be all you see for at least a few more years while Jonze tinkers and tweaks on Warners' watch, prompting Alan Horn to offer an update today to his bloggy BFF Patrick Goldstein.

And now back to the ongoing drama revolving around Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze's reported $75 million adaptation of the classic Maurice Sendak picture book for Warner Bros. After some early test footage surfaced, a statement from the director qualified that the Wild Thing suit and child actor featured in the scene were both placeholders for what was to come. Still, Slashfilm floated rumors that early test screenings tanked with audiences, calling it "too adult and even too scary for children." (Translation: Probably genius.) Now CHUD.com reports twitchy suits are on the verge of pressing the panic buttons beneath their desks that would conveniently dispense with creator and floundering project through their office trapdoor:

Steven Spielberg has long been attached to the 2008 summer games in Beijing, his wizardry over childlike wonder™ secured by organizers for their opening ceremonies. The decision greatly angered Mia Farrow, who blamed the Sudanese-backing Chinese government of helping to fund the Darfur genocide; in a now-famous WSJ op-ed from last March, she likened the Schindler's List director to Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl for agreeing to work with a regime with so much blood on its hands. Minutes ago, news broke that Spielberg would be pulling out of the Olympics, citing Darfur as the reason. His statement follows after the jump:

More bad Dallas-remake news: they're still going to remake Dallas. Also, John Travolta is no longer in it. I guess that's more like bad news and irrelevant news. (Yes, that last line was lifted directly from the British Office, so look for this site to win a Pulitzer soon.) Page Six is reporting that the in-his-umpteenth-career-renaissance actor is heading into his umpteenth-plus-one career turnaround with the news that he's been dropped from the coveted role of J.R. Ewing, with Ben Stiller opting to take the bullet instead. Reps for both both actors quickly went into denial mode, refuting that Travolta was fired and that Stiller has any attachment to the doomed project:

It was on Howard Stern's show that Tina Fey described SNL guest host Paris Hilton as "a piece of shit" who was universally hated by the cast, and now in Playboy (sorry Feynatics—just an interview, not a Naughty Showrunner spread in which she delivers script notes wearing only glasses and an unbuttoned men's dress shirt with the collar up), she recalls the experience of working with Paula Abdul:

The first reviews have begun to trickle in for The Invasion, a Warner Bros. production plagued by paparazzi-captured car crashes and a German auteur, discharged by the studio after his esoteric vision failed to deliver the kinds of zombie car chases that put asses into summer movie theater seats. With an early Tomatometer Score of 15%, the ominous buzz hanging over the late-August dumping ground release appears to have been justified. The Invasion may have reportedly brought in the Wachowski siblings at the 11th hour to hit all the required projectile-vomiting notes, but, ironically, for a movie about a dehumanizing alien virus, the consensus seems to be that that it woefully lacks a heart. Here's sample of what the critics are saying: