The appropriation continues! Another old-timey throwbacky kinda thing will be made into a movie, because no one knows what else to do anymore. Remember Castlevania, that sorta-creepy, sorta-silly vampire videogame from long ago? It will be a movie now. Directed by the guy who directed Saw. Sigh. [Variety]

Wow, does Mila Kunis keep defying the odds (whither Wilmer, Laura, Topher, and Danny?) and getting work. She'll next star opposite Natalie Portman in a new Darren Aronofsky movie. Quite a get! The film is Black Swan, a "supernatural drama" about a ballet dancer (Portman) who is haunted by a rival (Kelso's girlfriend). [THR]

Robert Downey Jr. is jumping on another gravy train, this one called the Todd Phillips express. He's signed on to star opposite Zach Galifianakis in Due Date, a buddy road trip comedy. Which Phillips does a lot of! So, capable hands and all that. [Variety]

Moon Bloodgood, who didn't embarrass herself in Terminator Salvation but didn't ennoble herself either, has been cast in the Spielberg-produced TNT pilot that is about aliens invading. The tentative title is Not 'V', Sorry Elizabeth Mitchell. (Not really). [THR]

Speaking of the Kunis-factor! Her new Mike Judge comedy Extract, got a "warm" reception at Comic-Con this year. What this movie has to do with comics is a mystery. Is it that Jason Bateman sorta looks like a cartoon? [Variety]

Out of 15 TV channels, HBO has topped (heh) GLAAD's Network Responsibility Index. NBC and CBS failed. Unsurprisingly. Please make David Caruso gay on CSI. 'Twould be hilarious. [THR]

Area unattractive person Natalie Portman may be working with the creepily-mustachioed Darren Aronofsky on a new supernatural thriller-chiller. Black Swan is about a prima ballerina who is suddenly threatened by a rival dancer—but is the rival dancer even real? The title is sorta interesting, given all the stuff about Black Swan theory and the creepy, tingling, post-millennial thoughts of destruction and apocalypse it evokes. But, yeah, this is just a movie about ghost ballet. So. [THR]

The Hallmark Channel is doing something with how commercials are aired, by like jiggering with the length and continuity of commercial pods, where like Mutual of Omaha will sponsor a whole, shortened commercial pod, and it's going to revolutionize, maybe, the way sponsorship is delineated and these are important things to discuss, no really they are, because TV is sorta scratching its head right now trying to figure out this whole DVR thing and industries rise and fall and Black Swans occur and here we are powerless to stop it and all, but mostly... Mostly we're just surprised that people want to pay to advertise on the Hallmark Channel. Really, guys? Really? [Variety]

That cutesy-sounding comedy You Again, about Kristen Bell being upset 'cause her brother is marrying a girl who used to make her life a living hell, has rounded out its cast with a bunch of fabulous broads. Like Kristin Chenowith and Sigourney Weaver and Betty White and Jamie Lee Curtis. The film's original title Lady Bits: The Legend of Bear Mountain now seems, more than ever, like it was the right one to go with. [THR]

Local butt-face Leonardo DiCaprio has signed on to star (and produce with his Appian Way movie making company) an as yet untitled thriller about online casinos. Yes, it's true. There are many online casinos and we've known many a young lad who've profited and suffered at their hands. Though that's all a kind of pallid-faced, blue-tinted early evening sadness sort of thing. Not really the stuff of thrillers. But, hell. If you can jazz up cellphones like they did in One Missed Call, sure, why not, you can jazz up internet cards. (Note: They did not jazz up anything in One Missed Call, which should have been called Just Don't Answer the Damn Phone, Shannyn Sossamon.) [Variety]

Thousands of sad people lined up on Sunday in Massachusetts. No, it wasn't a Bruins game. It was for American Idol! Determined to realize their dreams of becoming walking, talking, singing contracts, hopefuls like our proud homegirl Tiffany "Shorty" Dorsey from mighty Walpole (they've got a prison there, you know) showed up and belted-while-crying for the judges. We know it's happened before, Boston, but still some of us thought you were better than this. Nothing terribly Puritanical about weeping in front of Paula Abdul, is there? [THR]

Oh, more girlnews! Paramount has picked up an action-comedy pitch from Liz Meriwether called Honey Pot that is basically about if a bunch of ladies were superspies like Jason Bourne. Surely there'd be a lot more talk about periods and commitment! Meriwether is the salient cultural critic who is also giving us the upcoming TV pilot Sluts and the film Fuckbuddies. And no, we are not making those up! [Variety]

Stuart Beattie, who cowrote the documentary Australia, has been tapped to direct a movie version of Tomorrow When the World Ends. That book is part of a series (The Tomorrow Series) about a group of Aussie teenagers who band together to defend their homeland against invaders. Evidently the film has "youth-targeted themes and PG-13 sex and violence", so that's kind of exciting, but we thought we already covered all this with Home and Away. Isn't that what that was about? Australian teenagers? Saving Australia? Or something? [THR]

Much of the country did manage to witness the offending digit-extension (above), however. That in turn elicited 18 separate complaints to the FCC from outraged Americans—citizens not all that different from you or us, save for their distaste for Aronosfky's obscene (but artistically assured) hand gesture. From the LAT:

"We received 18 complaints about the Golden Globes telecast," FCC spokeswoman Edie Herman wrote in an e-mail to The Times, "and the commission is reviewing the matter."

An NBC spokeswoman confirmed that it aired the Aronofsky gesture on the live telecast. "On the West Coast, it went to black for two seconds," the spokeswoman e-mailed. "Beyond that, we have no further comment."

We're in a very different climate from the post-NippleGate days, when the FCC could strike terror in the hearts of network-heads by affixing ludicrous penalty sums to exposed parts (somewhere in the vicinity of $250k per mammilla) of Janet Jackson's anatomy. Of course, that would be overturned four years later, and it's going to take something a lot worse than a middle finger to shock more than 18 Americans these days—especially when the airwaves have run amok with vulgarities like Rosie Live! and Cloris Leachman's malfunctioning nethers.

• Breaking: FCC reviewing NBC's Golden Globes telecast [LAT]

• The Wrestler [via /Film]

Moreover, the voters he hasn't alienated over the years will crawl over each other to be a part of Rourke's comeback story. Fox Searchlight is packaging it as we speak, and Rourke himself was candidly — maybe too candidly — selling its prototype at a press conference following today's screening.

"I mean, if I knew it would take me 15 years to get back in the saddle and work again because of the way I handled things, I really would have handled things differently," he told the crowd. "I just didn't have the tools. I'm doing things differently this time around — understanding what it is to be a professional, be responsible and to be consistent. Those are things that weren't in my vocabulary back then. Change for me didn't come easy; I didn't wanna change until I lost everything until I realized that you better change, or, you know, blow your fucking brains out. Either you change and go on with life, or you're just a piece of shit.

"Everything I felt was that I would be weak — that it was a weakness to change, for the armor that I put on my whole life. I was too proud to change, because my strength at the time was a weakness. I'm all right with it now, and yeah, it took me 15, 16, 17 years out of the game. But it's really nice, because I get to come back and work with these people here."

He gestured to his left, where Aronofsky, Tomei and co-producer Scott Franklin were seated alongside him at the dais. They're probably short-listers, too, along with screenwriter Robert Siegel, likely the first Onion alumnus to be considered for an Academy Award. Really, that's the story we can't wait to write, but we'll take this in the meantime.

The critical accolades to date suggest the campaign will only expand from there, perhaps starting with revisions to the publicity stills currently circulating in the trades. After all, we know Oscar voters love a comeback story, but rarely against the backdrop of slogans invoking the sucking of "a fat dick." Don't take our word for it, though; see above where The Hollywood Reporter got burned, Variety drew the line, and where a better tomorrow begins today with a little bit of Photoshop and a whole lot of love.

• 'The Wrestler' wins Venice's Golden Lion [THR]
• Fox Searchlight pins 'Wrestler' [Variety]

Stylistically, it's agile, alert and most interested in what's going on in the characters' faces. And that is a lot. Physically imposing at 57 [sic], with a face that bespeaks untold battering and alteration, Rourke is simply staggering as Ram. The camera is rarely off him, and one doesn't want it to be, so entirely does he express the full life of this man with his every word and gesture. Ram's life has been dominated by pain in all its forms, but he's also devoted it to the one thing he loves and excels at, so he asks for no sympathy; he may have regrets, but no complaints.

In fact, Rourke only turns 52 this month — yet another testament to his prodigious talent for playing older, uglier and more selflessly than his preening peers. Look for the discussion to continue to this week in Toronto, where The Wrestler will square off with another has-been high-water mark, Jean-Claude Van Damme's JCVD — thus reviving the Rourke/Van Damme rivalry that so engrossed Razzie Award voters after their doomed 1997 collaboration Double Team. We're likely as glad as they they are to see those days behind them, but we still hope they'll follow proper star-reunion etiquette when passing each other en route to screenings. If we didn't pay to see the fight then, Lord knows we wouldn't pay to see it now.

• 'The Wrestler' [Variety]

But at least we have some more local laying-waste to look forward to, as opposed to, you know, Detroit:

Here's the logline: Present day Los Angeles, 20 years afterthe termination of the RoboCop program, the city decides to reinstate the program. If this all happens, I'd love to introduce Aronofsky to The Dark Knight, where he can see how to do it right...

Of course, Aronofsky was the one Warners passed over in favor of Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, leaving Aronofsky the indistinct pleasure of watching the studio dump his messy, misbegotten The Fountain in the general vicinity of the multiplex in late 2006. The filmmaker needs a boost as much as MGM itself; he's a risk, but one worth taking if they must overhaul the franchise. We figure Justin Theroux will be on the hook for a screenplay draft by the end of August.

• 'RoboCop' Logline Reveals It's Actually a Sequel [Bloody Disgusting via /Film]

The superstar actor began demanding extensive script revisions during conferences at his house in the Hollywood hills. The studio was asking for its own rewrites as well. In mid-2002, after endless script wrangling, Village Roadshow announced that it was withdrawing its support. Everyone on the project was immediately laid off. Weeks passed. Eventually another production house, New Regency, stepped in, and set construction recommenced down under. "We had cleared every hurdle you can imagine," Watson says. "There was a sense that now, finally, we were going to make this movie. The momentum was there."

Then, just seven weeks before the first day of shooting, Pitt called Aronofsky and told him he was pulling out. "After working together for two and a half years, Brad lost trust in me and faith in the project," Aronofsky admits. "He told me he felt like he was breaking up with a girl."

After that presumably heart-wrenching conversation, Pitt quickly attached himself to Troy and jetted off with director Wolfgang Peterson. But to his credit, Aronofsky handled the loss of Pitt's capricious affections with a delicacy not employed by another of the actor's suddenly jilted partners, refusing to cooperate with opportunistic tabloids seeking to exploit his pain in cover stories blaring headlines like DARREN SPEAKS; WHY BRAD LEFT ME FOR WOLFIE.

• The Outsider [Wired]