In the excitement following last year's Hollywood writer's strike, a lot of projects got restarted or greenlit. The fruits of those labors are now unfolding in movie theaters across the country, and some of them are too weird to live, and too rare to die. Whether it was studio enthusiasm to get any project going, any at all, or a desire to repeat the same old formulas and see if they could still make money (or do so for the first time), these upcoming films seem particularly unlikely to succeed:
Are the executives who put together these projects high, or just crazy enough to be billionaires?

The salacious title of the Weinstein Co.'s new Kevin Smith flick Zack and Miri Make a Porno is proving to be a bad decision. It's already screwed up the movie's marketing efforts. Must it lead to stilted reviews as well? "And so it will hardly be shocking that 'Zack and Miri Make a Porno' is about two people, named Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks), who make what my copy editors would prefer that I call a pornographic movie," writes A.O. Scott in the Times today. To be fair, the Times is full of pussy-ass hoes.

The Weinstein Co. has a few issues at the moment. Including—but not limited to!—the hasty departure of top executives; an ongoing struggle with Bravo over Project Runway, the company's strongest TV property; and a consistently weak outlook for Harvey Weinstein's myriad businesses. The one thing Weinstein's investors really have to look forward to is the possible success of the company's upcoming Kevin Smith/ Seth Rogen flick, Zack And Miri Make A Porno. But has the Weinstein Co. managed to screw up the film's prospects before it's even released? Last month the MPAA banned the movie's poster for being too raunchy. That was a huge red flag. The company responded by thumbing its nose with a cute little riff on the controversy, and continued on its merry way, marketing-wise. But ads for the film were still getting banned across the country. Now it seems to be sinking in that the very title of the movie could prevent it from being properly marketed and advertised, dooming it to box office failure:

Early Monday morning, Arkansas news anchor Anne Pressly—who had a bit part as Ann Coulter in the new movie W—was attacked and stabbed in her home. By Tuesday she was national news. By Wednesday, she was international news, and the less savory members of the media were scrambling point out that it had not been ruled out that she could have been attacked by a crazy political Hollywood stalker potential serial killer. Today, even the Post acknowledges that police think the attack was likely random. Which of course means that the conspiracy angle will be back tomorrow. Get well soon, Anne!

Goodness, the bad news just doesn't stop for Harvey Weinstein. The movie mogul and Weinstein Co. head—who recently lost his bid to move Project Runway, his big moneymaker, to Lifetime—has had a rough time lately, dealing with everything from a flagging fashion line to a flagging internet company to a flagging video distribution service. So much flagging! And now the precarious nature of Weinstein's business is clear to everybody; his own executives are abandoning him, in a terrible job market:

Yesterday we told you that Anne Pressly, an Arkansas morning news anchorwoman who played an Ann Coulter-like pundit in the new Oliver Stone flick W, was attacked and stabbed in her home early Monday morning (she's now expected to recover). The crime has predictably attracted a lot of international attention: it involves a pretty woman, a journalist, Hollywood, and politics. So what new facts have we learned about the case today? None at all, really. Unless you ask the media, in which case, CONSPIRACY?!?!?: In a neat trick, various news outlets are now able to go with totally opposite angles on this story—based on no new facts, and also sometimes based upon the same exact sources! New York Post:

Anne Pressly, the anchorwoman of a 5 a.m. TV newscast in Little Rock, Arkansas, was attacked in her home, beaten, and stabbed some time early Monday morning. She's now in critical condition. Her other claim to fame: she played (a younger, more attractive) Ann Coulter in the new Oliver Stone flick W. And like the restaurant critic yesterday who was attacked in Albany, there seems to be some suspicion Pressly may have been specifically targeted:

Rudy Ray Moore, the star of classic blaxploitation flick Dolemite and hero to an entire generation of aspiring badasses, has died at the age of 81. He was the consummate big pimpin, shit-talking superman in his day. But as white newspaper USA Today succinctly puts it, "His stage personality featured blunt sex routines but unlike contemporaries Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor, he never crossed over to the white audience mainstream." His voice will live on as samples on hundreds of rap albums. The Dolemite trailer is after the jump; do your lady right tonight in his honor:

Why else would we even go to the movies or turn on the television? Okay, there are a few other reasons, but mostly it's the sex and violence. So. What are you favorite scenes of people getting it on or having it out? Or both at once? Obviously, keep it tasteful and SFW. I'll get us going after the jump.

Playboy is cutting 80 jobs , including 55 layoffs, in an effort to save $12 million. The company is also exiting the DVD business completely, moving far-flung employees into the LA office, using cheaper paper, and cutting entertainment expenses (noooo!). This has all been easy to foresee. We hear Playboy's main money source at the moment is international brand licensing, along with distribution of their archives online. Not even nekkid women can convince people to buy magazines these days.

Oh America, when will your bothersome Puritanism stop infringing on The Weinstein Co.'s movie marketing efforts? First the MPAA banned the poster for the upcoming Kevin Smith flick Zack and Miri Make a Porno, on the grounds that it was too blowjob-y. So they changed the poster to one featuring simple stick figures. Sorry, whores of Hollywood Babylon, that's not enough to protect our children!: Ads for the movie are being rejected across the nation! Boston ads drew complaints. Philly banned them altogether. And in Los Angeles, the dastardly marketing scheme is preventing children from understanding a baseball strategy in which a runner on third base breaks for home as the pitch is thrown and the batter simultaneously bunts, which can pay off in a run unless the batter misses the bunt, in which case it's almost surely an out at the plate:

Many, many movies and TV shows have been wholly saved by the presence of a sage oldster. While there certainly is ageism rampant in Hollywood—illustrated by the fact that there are just a freaking ton of new "actors" and "actresses" starring in flicks and shows that no one over 25 could ever identify—there is still, and always has been, a beloved place for the elders. So that's the preamble. I'm getting us started with Joel Grey kicking much, much ass in 1985 when he was just starting to become an old.

Last week, Paul Newman passed away while his contemporaries Al Pacino and Robert Deniro stunk up the screen with A Righteous Kill. And I got to wondering, when did Pacino go from the soft-spoken, menacing, understated actor that made him a legend, to this guy who just shows up and screams the end of every sentence? But then, it occurred to me, that overacting and eating the fuck out of the scenery is actually a very good thing now and then, depending on the movie or TV show. So, let us give props to the masters of straight-up over-doing it tonight, shall we? Come on, you know you love it when they go over the top, crap on the top, and then eat the top. I'll get us started after the jump.

Famous actresses should really write something into their contracts that says that in the case of their ex-boyfriend being arrested for international money-laundering and fraud, all mandatory TV interviews for a new movie can be postponed at least until his trial is over. Anne Hathaway already had to face David Letterman's questions about her ex, conman Raffaello Follieri, and today she had to go on Good Morning America to explain what she "learned" by dating an Italian hustler. Uh, not to do it? Click to watch her speak poignantly enough to live up to GMA's standards of public purging. [The saddest part of all is that the movie she's promoting, "Rachel Getting Married" is absolutely terrible. Epically grating. I even got free tickets, but Jesus. It's not worth the headache, Anne.]

Tonight, let's get musical. Awesome, amazing, stupendous, rocking live music moments. That's it. I'm taking my wayback machine to a magical concert in 1973 to get us started.

In the wake of Paul Newman's death, it would be just obscene to focus on anything random for tonight's Youtube video fest. I agree with all of the commenters who said they never thought a celebrity death would make them cry until this amazing man went and proved that we are all human and that we all need to cry sometimes. But there's only a certain amount of Paul Newman movies and clips, and we've been sharing them all day in the posts about his passing. However, a huge part of his legacy is that he was a member of the generation of actors and actresses that changed movies forever. Method actors, Actors' Studio people—people who put real human emotion and experience into their roles, rather than the staged, scene-eating acting that marks most of what went before it. Newman's generation—in terms of his training—includes, but is not limited to, Brando, Dennis Hopper, Pacino, Deniro, Ellen Barkin, Steve McQueen, Gene Wilder, Marylin Monroe, Nicholson, Harvey Keitel, James Dean, Sidney Poitiere, Chris Walken, Rip Torn, Dustin Hoffman, George Peppard, Anne Bancroft, and Halloween star P.J. Soles. More Actors' Studio grads here. Let me get us started.

Harvey Weinstein—who used to alternately flatter and cow the gossip columnists and reporters into submission—doesn't exert the same power over the New York press that he used to. The movie producer lunched Tony Ortega but the Village Voice editor still published embarassing business correspondence found in The Weinstein Company's trash. A second private phone conversation has now been leaked to Page Six at the New York Post, a newspaper which used to lap up Weinstein's tips and favors. (Click the thumb for the clip.) And more revelations are promised in a book called Film Fellas which is being touted around. It's as if they all think Harvey Weinstein won't be around to exact retribution.

So Tina Brown's job as creative consultant to troubled HBO—"If I collide with some interesting material, I’ll call or e-mail them"—has finally paid off. The former New Yorker editor is to produce a movie version of Tom Wolfe's college novel I am Charlotte Simmons. It's not as much as a stretch as one might think. The magazine veteran and the Bonfire of the Vanities author are both still on the Upper East Side scene; many editors, including Clay Felker of New York and Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair have been flattered by Hollywood into the movie business; Tina Brown's father George was himself a moderately successful producer in the UK. But it's still a perplexing role.

Grab your 40 and roll a blunt: The trailer for Notorious has finally hit the interweb. With Brooklyn rapper Gravy (née Jamal Woolard) playing Biggie and Derek Luke as P. Diddy, we can't wait for this one. But will the film be a fitting legacy to one of the greatest rappers of all time? It's hard to say from this teaser, which offers only a few glimpses of actual footage. Still, those glimpses are pretty awesome: Biggie as a little kid counting money? That pinstripe suit? Gold, Jerry, gold. On the other hand, the film is being released on Jan. 16, 2009 — historically a studio dumping ground. If it was really "sicker than your average," wouldn't Fox Searchlight drop it over Christmas? Only time will tell, but for now, the trailer holds us over after the jump.

There was a time when third world countries would rip off any Western product they wanted to. Because how much time were US companies really willing to invest wading through dusty Asian market stalls looking for bootlegs of their precious brand names? But things have changed! As China and India have grown into serious global economic powerhouses over the past decade, they've been forced to respect intellectual property laws in order to maintain good business relations with the West. Which makes this whole "Hari Puttar" thing a bit of a stretch. Warner Bros. sued an Indian film company for making a movie called "Hari Puttar," claiming that it was a ripoff of Harry Potter. They just lost the case in an Indian court. Home team advantage? Actually, when you hear the facts it seems more like sheer bullying or paranoia on Warner Bros. part: