Healthwatch! Verne "Mini Me" Troyer has reportedly been "rushed to the hospital" with vaguely described flu-like symptoms. Troyer has been working on The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus, the same film that Heath Ledger was starring in at the time of his death. [Us]

Let's face a hard truth: most movies that started out as video games end up sucking pretty bad. Sure, some of them make plenty of money, but are you really able to suspend your critical faculties long enough to enjoy them without gagging a little bit on the forced synergy? Well now, a company called Radar Group is planning to develop "storyverses," which are ideas that can simultaneously spawn video games, movies, and other content. First up: a movie spinoff of the game "Max Payne," starring Mark Wahlberg as a rogue cop. Future ideas: an environmental disaster story, an alien invasion story, and "a horror story in which evil must be hunted down and imprisoned." Will they suck less than previous game/ movie efforts? Well, they're from the "Storyverse," so of course. Everything is different now! [Portfolio; image via Vayacine]

Sacha "Borat" Baron "Ali G" Cohen is working on his upcoming flick about his character "Bruno," the supergay Austrian fashion reporter. Since everyone on both coasts (except for Ben Affleck) is obviously too familiar with his work to be punked, Bruno has traveled to the heart of flyover land, Wichita, Kansas. Where he was captured on film doing supergay stuff! His act reportedly "almost looked like pornography," at least to Kansas sensibilities. After the jump, video [via Towleroad] of Bruno and his funky pants dance, which brings joy to the dreary confines of the Wichita terminal.

Entertainment Weekly provides one its handy listicles this weekend, in two parts. "50 Most Vile Movie Villains" wisely hands first place to Darth Vader and runner-up to Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But after that, the selections grow maddening. First of all, Halloween's Michael Myers is nowhere on the list! And, please, Michael could-and would-totally gut the hell out of any villain anywhere, ever.

Under the Same Moon is, we're told, "a heart-warming tale of a Mexican immigrant mom working as a domestic in Los Angeles, and her Mexico-residing son from whom she's separated." It will open in limited release in April, and apparently the attached commercial for it is airing today on CNN. CNN specifically because the three review quotes pulled for the trailer all claim the film would have a profound emotional effect on Lou Dobbs, the noted Xenophobic scumbag. Of course, a cute Mexican kid would not actually have any effect on Lou Dobbs whatsoever. He would only cry if you took away his millions of dollars, or possibly his daughter's pony. Trailer below.

How come I can't get past the sneaky feeling that Common is a tool? The feel-good, conscious-style Chicago rapper makes truly fresh music, he reps causes like animal rights, and he's an Obama supporter. He's even speaking out with a message of love to defend Obama's controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright [BV Buzz]! I can get with that. So what's the problem? Oh! I know what it is. He rhymed in a fucking GAP ad. Then there was that fucking Lincoln Navigator ad. And the fucking Smirnoff ads. And now he's going to be a gunslinging tough guy in a fucking Keanu Reeves movie? Yes, I think I've put my finger on it. I never really liked his stupid outfits either, honestly. But then again, I'm a hater. Trailer for Street Kings—with Common blasting away like a tool—after the jump.

Remember in 1984 when you went to see Dune and you were totally psyched but 20 minutes into it you started thinking maybe you got a hold of some bad fish sticks at lunch? And after an hour the theater was all hot and twisting and you were sure you had mono? And then in 2000 there was that Dune miniseries that only had three parts but felt like it had a lot more? Well, Paramount is having another go at bringing Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi novel to the screen. Friday Night Lights director Peter Berg is signed to helm what producers promise will be a "more faithful" interpretation of the book. Is that a good thing? [Wired]

Here's a feature about how this poster for American Teen, a documentary about five Indiana high school kids, "isn't just just clever marketing." The image is a cute homage to John Hughes' perennial favorite The Breakfast Club, and American Teen "examines a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel and a recluse, but then delves deeper, revealing these real kids to be far more than superficial stereotypes." But the part that I care about is that it's been done before.

Entertainment Weekly gets in on the fiery death of Eliot Spitzer's every last hope and dream with a list! Predictably, the mag's "25 Hollywood Hookers" reserves its top spot for the Julia Roberts fantasy Pretty Woman. But it does give a nod to Jon Voight's awesome Joe Buck from Midnight Cowboy. Better yet, there's a full-body shot of a teen Jody Foster in the pedo-bait outfit that helped make Taxi Driver such an iconic must-see. [EW]

Discussion: break dancing—cool, embarrassing, or some mixture thereof? A new film called "Planet B-Boy," opening tonight in New York, takes a look at break dancing across the globe—the type of thing that could spark a revived cultural moment for the niche urban phenomenon, like "Spellbound" did for spelling bees. The Times gives it a fairly positive review; the New York Sun kind of pans it, but what do they know about B-boys? I always considered them to be fun to watch, but not something I would ever personally become. Will we soon see nouveau break dancing battles across Soho and Williamsburg as the form gains a brief, ironic throwback popularity? Or will it remain consigned to circles in Union Square and Rock Steady anniversary parties? After the jump, the movie's trailer, and a clip from LOZ—the best b-boy crew that I ever saw up close—in action. DC stand up!

Tina Fey has been cast in Ricky Gervais' directorial debut film This Side of Truth, which will also feature Christopher Guest, Jeffery Tambor, John Hodgman (whee!), and Jonah Hill, among others. Funnee overload! Let's hope they don't all cancel each other out and just stand around blinking for two hours.

A tipster tells us that the odd Josh Hartnett short film on the Times' website—which shows the actor stumbling through the snow and chatting with a hotel desk clerk, as the first installment of a series that will somehow promote the NYT's fashion magazine—is the twisted byproduct of one thing only: asshole friends! Hartnett is "an extremely nice guy" and a "very loyal friend," but he's surrounded by "asshole user" fake friends who try to use him to further their careers in the industry. Or so we hear. If true, that would definitely solve the mystery of why Hartnett would make time for an aimless project like that. After the jump, more detailed ranting from our tipster, and a bonus clip of the obscure Josh Hartnett-Scarlett Johansson short that is supposedly a precursor to the Times dreck.

China, the land where the human body is illegal, is threatening to ban a perfectly innocuous ad campaign by Pond's because it stars Tang Wei, the lead actress in Ang Lee's recent flick "Lust, Caution." The Chinese government feels that Tang Wei's sexy nude scenes in the film render her unfit for advertising. Heaven forbid the people of China be influenced in their skin cream purchasing decisions by a fellow citizen who was once naked—China got its population of 1.3 billion strictly through asexual reproduction. More than a week after the initial blacklisting of the actress, the fate of the ad campaign is still unclear [Ad Age]. After the jump, one of the Tang Wei ads, and the trailer for "Lust, Caution." Watch for yourself and be corrupted.

Abe Karpen is a Hasidic Jewish hunk who was supposed to star in New York I Love You with Natalie Portman. He had to drop out of the film after being threatened by members of his community. Due to his strict religious beliefs, Karpen refrained from holding Portman's hand during filming, but he still freaked out all of his Hasidic homies.

Did the winter movie season—with its prestigious yet completely depressing crop of cattle-bolt murderers, paralyzed wink-authors, Alzheimer's sufferers, and the like—get you down? Fear not: As the NY Times reports, a massive crop of Hollywood comedies are coming down the pike. Didn't care for the potty-mouthed Russian Roulette humor of Semi-Pro? No matter, as every taste will be accounted for in The Great Comedy Rush of 2008: Apatowian sex farce, period screwball, and the wacky worlds of surrogate pregnancy and Mossad have all been covered. To predict how they fare, we might look to the past—in 1988, the Times notes, a recent writers strike and weakening domestic economy provided the backdrop to four comedies (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Coming to America, Big, and Crocodile Dundee II) that dominated that summer's box office. But as it turns out, there's a far simpler method to determine how much your dumb comedy is going to rake in:

I know I'm the only person on earth tired of the Onion, so here's the trailer for The Onion Movie. While the film was supposed to come out in 2005, the trailer that was just released on the Darjeeling Limited DVD says the movie will go straight to DVD this year. Good call. Not only is the thing outdated, but I doubt most theater audiences could sit still for ninety minutes of the same deadpan news schtick. Even Monty Python knew they had to have a plot if they wanted to make a feature-length film. Trailer's below.

So! Jeff Zucker says Universal will inevitably release movies simultaneously on various media. DVDs! Theaters! Downloads! Which is kind of like it already is for those of us who steal movies online! It's a magical wonderful future, not because I'll get to instantly watch a lamer version of a movie at home on my iMac and my Logitech speakers, but because the only way theaters could survive this change is to kick the theater-going experience up a notch. And that had better mean beer, food and double features.

Nielsen estimates the Academy Awards telecast attracted about a fifth fewer viewers than last year. The dip's been blamed on the bleakness of contenders such as the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, and the short buildup to the awards ceremony: it wasn't even clear until a couple of weeks ago that the show would be going ahead. Last night's disappointing television ratings shouldn't have been a surprise: a chart of user searches for "Oscars" on Google shows that the January blip, when nominations are announced, was less than half the average of the previous four years (see point F on the chart). The spike for Oscars night, which will take a day or two to show on this Google Trends chart, will be similarly unimpressive.

Post gossip great-aunt Cindy Adams got the fresh dirt from Hollywood mega-producer Scott Rudin as to how, exactly, that crazy Oscar-nommed "No Country For Old Men" came to be. "Look, you never know when something great's going to come through the transom. I do movies, plays. I'm always looking. My office covers lots of material. I have people who read books and manuscripts all the time. There was no great aha! moment. This didn't come by wrapped in a big pink ribbon and ushered through with great fanfare from some superimportant VIP with a 'must read' sticker on it. The thing came to us simply. As an unpublished manuscript." Yes. A real Hollywood fairytale, optioning novels by world famous, award-winning, ICM-managed authors is. Then Rudin took a chance on a couple of complete unknowns from far away Minnesota named Joel and Ethan Coen, and the rest is history. (After the jump, for kicks, the Hollywood Reporter story announcing the NCFOM deal.) [NYP]

Dave Eggers' adaptation of children's book Where The Wild Things Are is not expected until next year, but an apparent screen test circulating online is already drumming up more interest in the Spike Jonze film, if that's possible. In a deleted post about the clip, Entertainment Weekly writer Adam Vary wrote, "the emotional impact of this scene is... readily apparent," and mentioned "a peek at footage" he got last fall, in which "I was totally hooked from the first frame." (It's not clear why Vary's post was pulled, but it's worth noting that his magazine's parent company is producing the film.) Director Spencer Sloan is "more excited for the real deal than [I] ever thought possible. This is pitch perfect." All this just adds to the buzz around the film, whose script New York magazine called "really, really good" in the fall. The clip is after the jump, but here's a question while you watch, via Sloan: Who is voicing wild thing Carol?