Pandorum
The Story: Two astronauts wake up on a space ship to find they can not remember why they are there. And a monster is attacking them.
The Pitch: Alien meets Momento
Who It's For: Screamers; people with other things they can do during the movie.
Cause for Hope: Remarkably, stars Dennis Quaid; films set on a space ship get an automatic gentleman's C.
Cause for Concern: Produced by Paul WS Resident Evil Anderson.
Residual Cause for Hope: Produced by not directed by Anderson
Gawker Enthusio-Meter: 2

SURROGATES trailer in HD

Surrogates
The Story: In the future, people live life through robot versions of themselves. But when someone starts killing the robots, future cop Bruce Willis must investigate.
The Pitch Westworld meets Streets of San Francisco
Who It's For: Nerds who like to dream about having sex with robots.
Cause for Hope: Director Jonathan Mostow helmed that better-than-expected Terminator 3.
Cause for Concern: You've probably seen every single frame of this film in four to twelve other movies.
Gawker Enthusio-Meter: 3

Fame
The Story: The kids of Performing Arts High dare to dream.
The Pitch: Fame meets High School Musical
Who It's For: Every aspiring dance crew in America.
Cause for Hope: Stars So You Think You Can Dance's Kherington Payne.
Cause for Concern: The sound of Bruno Martelli and Alan Parkers' ghosts crying out in agony will haunt your dreams forever.
Gawker Enthusio-Meter: 7 (It's the song. We can't help ourselves.)

Capitalism: A Love Story
The Story: That lovable cut-up Michael Moore is back, this time poking fun at everyone's favorite economic paradigm: capitalism.
The Pitch::Michael Moore meets Michael Moore with a bit of Michael Moore thrown in for good measure.
Who It's For: The already converted.
Cause for Hope: If this is your cup of tea, your cup will runneth over.
Cause for Concern: The hammer fell off the sledgehammer Moore uses to write his jokes.
Gawker Enthusio-Meter: 5

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
The Story: A researcher decides to study mens' desires in a series of taped interviews.
The Pitch: My Dinner With Andre meets High Fidelity
Who It's For: People who like to be seen thinking big thoughts.
Cause for Hope: It can't actually last forever.
Cause for Concern: David Foster Wallace, the big screen version! The Office's Jim trying to outrun his day job. Did he mention he went to Brown?
Gawker Enthusio-Meter: 2

Coco Before Chanel
The Story: Headstrong young Coco dreams of shaking up fashion.
The Pitch:: La Vie en Rose meets Devil Wears Prada
Who It's For: Those who like to swoon to period design.
Cause for Hope: Looks harmlessly charmante.
Cause for Concern: Isn't this why God invented made for cable movies?
Gawker Enthusio-Meter: 5

I Hope The Serve Beer in Hell
The Story: The adventures of internet cretin Tucker Max
The Pitch:: Porkys meetsa snuff film purchased for three dollars out of a box on the sidewalk in the East Village
Who It's For: The aspiring date rapist next door.
Cause for Hope: This will almost certainly be the end of Tucker Max's film career.
Cause for Concern: You will still share a Universe with him.
Gawker Enthusio-Meter: 0

Jaxson has been a publicist for the likes of that one girl from The Cheetah Club for Girls or whatever, plus he attempted a gossip site called J.J.'s Dirt that, well, never went anywhere. He and his mother used to be professional talk-show guests (discussing Jaxson's deadbeat dad), which prompted Jaxson's fame-hunger and pushed him toward the gossip industry. Mostly he's popped up on Jacksonville, FL local news broadcasts and rehashed celebrity news that everyone already knew as if he'd just scooped it. Perhaps sensing the tidal change away from the scuzzy pink celebrity trashing of yesteryear, Jaxson has shifted his efforts toward a wiser and self-reflecting view of show business.

Because the memoir has worked so well for esteemed figures like Tori Spelling and Chelsea Handler, Jaxson is sending out a proposal for a book sadly titled Don't You Know Who I Am Yet???, a look back at his rollercoaster life and career. In the very-rough drafts of chapters he sent to us, Jaxson issues ruminative ruminations on his troubled childhood:

It was ... my obsession with the happiest hours of my life, the Rosie O'Donnell Show that kept me desiring fame, as I thought it would be my escape to always be financially secure and finally make a life of my own with friends that could last a lifetime. This is when I realized how it may be possible for me to finally meet my father on a talk show while aquiring that 15 minutes of fame I had always desired.

Then he moves on to hissy, non-scandal celebrity outings and partying stories:

Bungalow 8 was the place I met Ms. Mary-Kate Olsen. I was extremely disappointed in finding out that the Mary-Kate I was meeting was cocained up and completely wasted on booze. It was sad really. Really sad. It was during NYC Fashion Week that I was there with celebrities, Kim Kardashian, Chudney Ross, Evan Ross and Cuba Gooding JR.

Finally he urges the reader that he is d-u-n done with all that drama. Because he's been in it, man. He's been in the shit. But now he's seen the light.

Chapter 10: The 16th Minute
(Life beyond fame; making a difference; maturity)
The sucidial moments, the emptiness, the feeling of being lost, development of sever anxiety and the multiple turn of events that made an impact on my life to write this book and begin a new chapter and focus on my life.

Unfortunately for Jaxson, even on the off chance that some tiny publisher does mimeograph a few copies of this thing and distribute it at rest homes, it'd still be a few years too late. That gum bubble has burst, leaving everyone, but some more than others, looking pretty sticky.

Probably the most troubling thing of all is how greedily we've slopped all this stuff up. But after making celebrity baby covers the biggest sellers for the likes of Us, People and OK!, we get the freakshow news we deserve. Still hungry for more and more babies, we've turned to the circus disaster that is regular lives made alien and shocking when bad choices mixed with a few bits of bad luck and stories were born.

Maybe it coms from exhaustion with all the other media. First it was scripted television shows, and then their high-concept reality descendants. And now we've sifted through every last layer of story until we've gone and found a low, universal denominator. People come out of other people's vaginas sometimes. The more that come out of the same one or the younger the owners of the necessary body parts are, the more we're interested. 220 channels and nothing else was on, so we've settled on the baby zoo currently on display on TLC or sitting in a dimly-lit room across from Ann Curry.

While Suleman's desire to go and get herself knocked up with octuplets when she was already a cash-strapped mother of six probably had far more to do with some murky and deep-seated emotional cataclysms than it did with a desire for fame, the end result has been a raft of high profile TV appearances, implied hopes for a reality series, and a website asking fans or followers or whomever to donate money to this Elephantitis-suffering family. Ms. Suleman has become a rickety celebrity simply by making the wreckless decision to bring many children into this world for whom she had no way of caring. Good for us!

Little Mister Patten may not have been courting fame when he got his young girlfriend pregnant, but now he's likely being paid exclusivity fees by the Sun. And, in the wake of the media frenzy surrounding the unsettling story, two more boys have come forward, claiming paternity of 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman's daughter. There are posed photos of the two boys, aged 14 and 16, on Splash, the photo agency where I find many of the silly celebrity pictures I use for Open Caption.

It had become fairly routine for celebrities to profit off the act of procreation, what with the big glossy magazine industry and whatnot. But now common folks are saying "me too!" and the troubling thing is, if you don't already have a certain degree of popularity, you have to make your babymaking pretty sensational to get any attention. And what's sensational is often ugly. Again these folks probably didn't enter into reproduction with designs on tabloid notoriety, but once the first publicist calls or newspaper camera flashes... Well, the Siren call is tough to resist.

Though humanity has its limits, and the public outcry against Nadya Suleman—and the sad revulsion expressed over the Patten thing—suggests that maybe there is a limit to this mayhem. But we don't suspect it will die down quickly. Prepare yourselves for other strange stories, for other curious and unpleasant parlor tricks of the body. After all, while everything's being torn down around it, Coney Island still has its sideshow.

After the jump: Can Martin Scorsese save HBO?

· The Death of the Pilot Era is itself now dead, as the last crop of pilot-free primetime stinkers suggests pilots might actually do some good. [THR]
· Speaking of pilots, Steve Buscemi is nearing a deal to star in Boardwalk Empire, a Martin Scorsese-produced pilot for HBO that follows hooch-runners in 1920s Atlantic City. Did we mention they're also vampires? They're vampire hooch-runners! (OK not really.) [THR]

First, it must be acknowledged that Clooney is a smart man. He's not a grown-up version of Ashton Kutcher, an airheaded frat boy pulling practical jokes that a team of writers dreamed up. Clooney may be a frat boy type and a practical joker, but he knows exactly what he's doing. He has a very solid reason for every career-related move that he makes; look at the crafty, political way he chooses his movies. Except that new one about the old-timey football thing—who knows what that's all about.

The point is, Clooney sees the big picture. Recall his response to the original unveiling of the "Gawker Stalker" map. While lots of celebrities moaned about the intrusion into their privacy and imagined ridiculous implications for their personal safety, Clooney actually had a plan: he told a bunch of entertainment publicists to flood the site with false tips, thereby rendering it useless. It turned out that the Stalker maps are hardly a threat to anyone, and the flood of outrageous fake tips that Clooney inspired eventually disappeared. But he did prove that he was thinking about how to fight back against the celebrity-industrial complex, and even came up with an effective strategy—more than you can say for Brad Pitt, whose decision to fire his publicist will (prediction!) fail to magically allow him to disappear from the eyes of the media.

The problem is that Clooney is a CORNERSTONE of that very same complex. A man who ambitiously rose from a bit part of "The Facts Of Life" to a place in the pantheon of outrageously famous movie stars is hardly a credible spokesman for the cause of anti-publicity. On top of that, the press that Clooney gets is, by celebrity standards, pretty positive. It's impossible to argue that the very same paparazzi and tabloid media that he deplores have not, on balance, been a boon to his career.

And look at it from the poor, poor entertainment reporter's perspective: without some effort at critical coverage, they are bound to feel like nothing more than tools of the equally powerful movie marketing machine. Sure, staking out every nightclub, restaurant, and dwelling place of a celebrity is not really hard-hitting, or even socially redeeming, reporting. But Clooney, whose father was himself a newsman, should understand that it's all part of the package of being a star—a deal that he surely enjoys.

The actor would doubtless say that he supports real journalism, which is all well and good. So do we! But Americans have an unfortunate taste for the minutiae of the lives of their big screen heroes. So perhaps some sort of bargain can be struck. The tabloids can promise to take Clooney's earnest projects seriously, and in return, he can throw them a bone by accepting that his social life will always appear in the gossip pages and on the blogs, until he chooses to retire into obscurity. Besides, even if he were to enlist each and every one of his celebrity friends in his cause of punking the media, it would never work—that story in and of itself would be covered to death, resulting in a level of scrutiny that's equal to the one that the Hollywood types already receive.

So let's all just get along, in the words of famous celebrity Rodney King. Except, of course, for those pranks on the paparazzi. Go right ahead with that. Nobody can stand those guys, anyhow.

Ledger was born in Australia, achieved some degree of teenaged fame on Australian TV, and decamped for America where he quickly became a likable heartthrob in movies destined to be camp favorites (10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight's Tale probably share nothing in common but stars and fates as nostalgia fodder). His turn as Mel Gibson's son in The Patriot earned him a GQ cover. Then he got serious.

He became both a gay icon and an acclaimed thespian with his role as Ennis del Mar in Brokeback Mountain—and in addition to the Academy Award nomination, people were suddenly bestowing upon him the dangerous mantle of "young Brando."

And while he attacked his share of paparazzi, as all young guns must, Ledger became a New York icon not through phone-throwing and cop-slugging but through embodying a certain mid-2000s trend of quiet Brooklyn cohabitation.

In Brooklyn, with fiancee Michelle Williams, Heath Ledger became a Hollywood actor that the more sensitive among us could love, or at least tolerate. Why? Well, he lived in Brooklyn, wasn't afraid to kiss a dude in Brokeback Mountain, and showed us all that achieving (temporary, at least) domestic happiness was indeed possible. He and Williams went to community meetings to protest the Atlantic Yards development, hung out in the same places the rest of the parents in their neighborhood, took their kid to Prospect Park, and just generally behaved like normal people.

But the relationship ended. Ledger moved into Manhattan and began partying and making the columns in the proper young movie star fashion.

In a November piece in the New York Times (tracked down by commenter TedSez), Ledger, in the midst of playing a criminal psychopath in a perhaps unhealthily Method fashion, admitted to being distressed. He popped Ambien.

And then, some months later, he died, surrounded by pills, in an apartment belonging, according to early reports, to an Olsen twin.

He leaves behind a surprisingly short and almost as surprisingly consistent filmography. And he's survived by a two-year-old daughter, Matilda Rose.