Novelist Irvine Welsh will be directing his second movie right soon. The pic is called The Magnificent Eleven, and while it sounds like it's about Spinal Tap's amplifiers, it's actually about football. Like, faggy British "football." So, soccer. [Variety]

Jim Carrey has begun a bizarre-sounding whistle stop tour for his upcoming Robert Zemeckis weirdo half-animation movie, A Christmas Carol. Disney basically gutted four train cars and filled them with shit about the movie and now it'll roll into 40 cities nationwide, with Carrey in tow, so people will go see the movie. We've always said that Jim Carrey is the Harry Truman of Hollywood. Though, as far as train tours go, we've always been partial to Willa Cather's. [Variety]

So Rod Blagojevich can't be on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Outta Here! because, you know, he's like being indicted and junk. But his wife Patti can! And will be! She just flew to LA to film a promo for the June-premiering series, in which a crazy old billionaire hunts the most dangerous game for our viewing entertainment. [THR]

Oh for the... Bazooka Joe, a wildly unfunny comic strip found in gum, will become a movie. In related news, Universal has staked its whole summer 2010 profit plan on their tentpole epic, Howard Huge. [THR]

Midnight screenings of Terminator Salvation nabbed $3 million last night, a good sign for the franchise picture's box office chances. We're going to see it this afternoon at the local. WILL YOU DO YOUR PART, TOO? [Variety]

Be excited for: Flash Forward, the new ABC mindbender about the Hoffs/Drawler Funeral Parlor, Joel McHale's comedy about community college, and a second season of Parks & Recreation. These are shows that the networks are pitching to ad folks as exciting members of their new fall lineup. My Name Is Earl might be canceled. So. He giveth, and He taketh away. [Variety]

Marcus Nispel, who directed that beautifully-filmed-but-scary-and-awful Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, is in talks to steer The Last Voyage of the Demeter, about the Bulgarian boat that Dracula is aboard and everyone dies. It's in Bram Stoker's book, which was based on Francis Ford Coppola's movie, I'm pretty sure. [Variety]

Warner Bros. has acquired the rights to Japanese manga series Death Note, which they plan to make into a live-action movie. The series is about a guy who gets a magical power which enables him to kill anyone just by writing their name down on a piece of paper. We hear Dick Cheney's a fan. [Variety]

I... hm. So? Well. Here's the— Eesh. OK. Hot Tub Time Machine. Is the name of a movie. And it's about exactly what it sounds like it's about. John Cusack and Rob Corddry are in it. And now so are Crispin Glover, Lizzie Kaplan, and Kings boombalottie Sebastian Stan. It's about old friends who travel back to 1987 in a magical hot tub. I guess it's like a throwbacky kinda comedy? 80's comedy pastiche/homage? About a time traveling hot tub? The world is maybe out of ideas? [THR]

Jim Carrey might star in The Beaver, that buzzed-about comedy about a guy who has a relationship with his beaver hand puppet. So Jim Carrey wouldn't be the beaver. Even though he looks like... Anyway, Jodie Foster might direct! [THR]

Oh how faaabulous. Barry Levinson is doing a movie about coming of age in 1960's Baltimore. It's totally not Liberty Heights! That was set in the 50's! [THR]

Congratulations. Your life's dream has been realized. Disney has renewed Wizards of Waverly Place for a third season, plus there's going to be a movie this summer. For those of you who would call star Selena Gomez a rat-faced menace, you people are just crazy. And for those of you who harbor illicit desires for that kid who plays her older brother, well... Happy May Day! Ha! [THR]

For the last fucking time, celebrities, vaccines do not cause autism.

It is fine and noble to say "we should look into what (beyond better, earlier detection and diagnoses) is causing all this autism!" and even "we should make sure we are testing these vaccines extensively!" but to just go around shouting, without evidence, and in spite of evidence to the contrary, "VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM" is 9/11 Truther hysterical idiocy at its dumbest.

But hey, all you non-doctors with absolutely no understanding of the scientific method or medical research can just go ahead and keep using your massive platforms to convince parents not to vaccinate their kids, because what is the worst that could happen?

Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease.

Good work, Arianna, letting this famous person promote his little pet cause on your website, thus is the vast potential of the citizen-driven new media landscape realized.

The Farrellys have been trying to get this thing off the ground for about ten years, hopping between Warner Bros. and Columbia before finally landing on MGM. Penn and Del Toro were always part of the dream cast, but Carrey is a late edition. Funny that the one confirmed comedian is the last, and most surprising, addition to the crew.

Variety remembers that Del Toro displayed 'comic chops' in that movie Snatch, but Guy Ritchie gangster zingers aren't exactly the same thing as heavily-orchestrated socko ballets of physical comedy. Nor are witty, homo-positive Oscar acceptance speeches. Let's hope their rehearsal process is long and fruitful.

Jim Carrey will play the Devil who tempts die-hard Washington Senators fan Joe Boyd, who's sick of watching the Yankees win all the damn time, to sell him his soul in exchange for a victorious season. Carrey in that role makes sense. But Boyd, who magically becomes slugger Joe Hardy and helps the Senators win, will oddly, and sort of annoyingly, be played by noted rap video star Jake Gyllenhaal. His hip-hop career aside, Gyllenhaal's biggest brush with the musical was his disastrous (on purpose, I guess) "And I Am Telling You" warble when he hosted Saturday Night Live a while back. There's been nothing announced about the musical's most important part, the sexy vamp Lola (she gets what she wants) that the Devil uses to tempt Joe. May we suggest not Anne Hathaway. [Variety]

Will Ferrell and the always-hilarious Mark Wahlberg have been cast in The B Team, an action comedy directed by longtime Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay. The producers are working hard to nail down that title, as an adaptation of 80's wacka-wacka fest The A-Team is already in the works. [Variety]

In his continued efforts to one day assemble the world's absolute sexiest film cast, which could make the universe wink out of existence like a hard-bodied Large Hadron Collider, Woody Allen has nabbed Antonio Banderas to be in his next film, which already stars Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Slumdog Millionaire beauty Freida Pinto, and, um, Sir Anthony Hopkins. The film shoots in London and, every night, in the little smut movie house in Allen's head. [Variety]

The sometimes likable, other times irksome Seth Green has been cast in Robert Zemeckis' latest weirdo performance-capture movie, called Mars Needs Moms. He joins his Austin Powers mother Mindy Sterling, as well as Joan Cusack and Dan Fogler, the dude from Balls of Fury (and from the musical 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, for which he won a Tony). [THR]

In TV, Brittany Snow has been cast as a young Lily van der Woodsen in that new Gossip Girl spin-off. Funny, we thought Snow's movie career was burgeoning. Also in television: Respectable actors Denis O'Hare and David Morse have been cast in TV pilots, and Jessica Capshaw now has a gig as a lesbian love interest on Grey's Anatomy. [EW, THR, EW]

It was a happy discovery, made last night along with a giddy crowd of about 1200 at Park City's Eccles Theater for the world premiere of I Love You Phillip Morris. Based on the book of the same name, Morris is the too-strange-for-fiction story of Steven Jay Russell (Carrey), a brilliant Texas con man and prison-escape-artist extraordinaire, who falls deeply for a sweet, blonde Southerner he meets behind bars (McGregor).

Writer/director team Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, the pair who wrote Bad Santa, seem aware that what they found in this wildly unlikely true story—"It really is," a title card insists—is a storytelling goldmine. Their genre-bending script manages the seemingly impossible, ably juggling madcap Coensian crime farce, raunch comedy (with Leslie Mann playing Russell's dumbfounded ex-wife for good measure), and a matter-of-fact gay love story as poignant and frank as anything we found in Milk. No, the camera does not cut away from their passionate kisses or acts of fellative love; dare we say Morris contains some of the most sensitive images of bitch-on-inmate affection that have ever been captured on film.

Ficarra and Requa managed to rein in Carrey's malleable and frequently unhinged skill set, which nicely suits the character's penchant for heart-on-the-sleeve flamboyancy. And while starry-eyed romanticism isn't new territory for the star of Moulin Rouge, the always-surprising McGregor tries something new by allowing himself to become the more passive, pursued half of a doomed entanglement. His Phillip starts out all batted lashes and soft edges, but by the time Russell has pulled his final grift—one of a series of spectacularly executed cons that the audience itself never sees coming—a betrayed Phillip turns ferocious, and ultimately heartbreaking.

The film has yet to find a distributor, leading Ficarra to ask of the appreciative crowd, "Who's buying?" at the post-screening Q & A. A little bit later, Requa revealed some of the mysteries of the feature film casting process, deadpanning, "We sent Jim the script. He said yes. Then we sent Ewan the script. And he said yes."

We're extremely glad they did.

This year's vintage features another barrel of celebrities with equally little margin for error, some less endangered than others. For your handy trajectory-watching reference, we've narrowed their ranks to 10 of the most interesting:

1. Ashton Kutcher: The festival itself describes Kutcher's gigolo farce Spread as "such a perfectly tuned, contemporary depiction of the trials and tribulations of sleeping your way to wealth and success that, guilty pleasure or not, it's irresistible." Either the responsible programmer's tongue is so far in his cheek it'll leave a bruise, or we must forge on with the faith that Kutcher is up to credibly depicting those fraught "trials and tribulations." He's a producer on this as well, upping the skeevy self-casting factor proportionately with the stakes that accompany putting this on the Sundance market. THREAT LEVEL: Severe

2. Rachel Dratch: As co-writer and co-star of the Midnight section highlight Spring Breakdown, Dratch is nominally on the hook for delivering a sort of inverted Sex and the City: Three terminally unsophisticated women (played by Dratch, Amy Poehler and Parker Posey) entrusted to chaperone a teenager to spring break wind up cavorting with the savage youth. Laffs, empowerment and, hopefully for Dratch, a cult following ensue, exhuming this film from the shallow grave where it has languished for months and on to video shelves where it's likely to make its next stop. THREAT LEVEL: Elevated

3. Pierce Brosnan: A man for whom being the most tone-deaf cast member in history's biggest musical is his primary film accomplishment of the last five years, Brosnan needs his grieving-dad weepie The Greatest to find legs during its Saturday premiere — and not those of critics and buyers fleeing the Racquet Club in terror. Like Kutcher and about a million other actors to travel here with movies over the years, he's got a producer credit, which means he needs a sale, which means to needs to be on his game. For once. Whatever that might be. THREAT LEVEL: Dire

4. John Krasinski: He'll be on hand presenting his writing-directing debut Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, an adaptation of the novel by David Foster Wallace. It's a double-jeopardy scenario risking both his own artistic humiliation and the ultimate torpedoing of his recently deceased source. That said, he's John Krasinski — how bad can it really be? Wait, don't answer that. THREAT LEVEL: Moderate

5. Jim Carrey: One month removed from a lukewarm success with Yes Man, Carrey isn't traveling to Sundance to reinvent himself as an indie influence-peddler. But he still has to convince distributors and a game if cynical-by-default press corps that I Love You Phillip Morris is anchored in anything other than the Carrey-on-McGregor romance gimmick. As mentioned here yesterday, this has as much potential to be this year's What Just Happened as it does to be its Little Miss Sunshine; don't look for it to be much in between. THREAT LEVEL: Critical

6 - 10. Billy Bob Thornton's co-stars: The man whose one-time castmates have occasional trouble staying alive arrives with two wildly disparate films — the LA excess potboiler The Informers and the crap-salesman dramedy Manure — featuring two wildly disparate ensembles including Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger, Kyle MacLachlan, Winona Ryder, Tea Leoni and others. Everyone make sure you have your affairs in order before coming to Park City. THREAT LEVEL: Imminent

1. Yes Man - $18.16 million
It's rarer and rarer that we can call Jim Carrey the Biggest Star in the World, so let's savor this moment—granted a $10 million-lighter moment than we had predicted—and consider it a step in the right direction. Two years ago at this time, another forgettable Carrey comedy, Fun with Dick and Jane, opened to $4 million less, eventually earning $110.3 million domestically. With a little luck, this plucky little audience-pleaser could outdo even that, and before long Carrey will be rechristened Hollywood's Set-Terrorizing Jester King, urinating on child co-stars in improvised fits of actorly inspiration.

2. Seven Pounds - $16 million
As we had feared, Seven Pounds's challenging subject matter, and major newspaper reviews calling it the most "transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made," ultimately made it a hard sell. Still, some movies are just decades ahead of their time; something tells us that once society catches up to this rare Will Smith misfire, we'll realize just how in the dark ages Hollywood once was when it came to its big screen depictions of Jellyfish-Americans.

3. The Tale of Despereaux - $10.507 million
The CGI-shlock-making industry held its collective breath on the heels of Delgo's historic, Turds-font-popularizing box office flameout. But unlike that family film, audiences did not treat Despereaux screenings as if they were highly infectious, flesh-eating-contagion chambers, sparing this rodent fairy tale a place in the box office bed-shitting record books.

4. The Day the Earth Stood Still - $10.15 million
Plummeting 67% was this remake, largely accredited to poor word of mouth, as audiences who had hoped they'd be in store for some epic-scale sci-fi destruction instead wound up with two hours of Keanu Reeves on roller skates, sliding up to confused pedestrians and doing his best WALL-E impression.

5. Four Christmases - $7.745 million
This was it! The fourth Christmas. We pack this in the box now with the rest of those weird-smelling ornaments we made in the late '70s from that home-made dough recipe in the Zoom newsletter (are we dating ourselves?), and forget about it 'til next year.

• December 19–21, 2008 [Box Office Mojo]

WHAT'S NEW: Warners, Sony and Universal are the first round of studios to drop what's left of their 2009 slates — not quite the grand finale any of them were looking for, if reviews and box-office forecasts are any indication. Yes Man and Seven Pounds will battle for the week's top spot, with Jim Carrey's comedy about a man who says "yes" to everything (including shagging Zooey Deschanal, despite himself, we're sure) favored to defeat Will Smith's suck-a-riffic Seven Pounds by less than a couple million dollars. We're calling Yes for $28.4 million versus Pounds' $26.7 million, thus ending Smith's No. 1-opening run dating back to 2002. Or maybe the sheer virtuosity of pans like A.O. Scott's or Scott Foundas's will compel more viewers than they alienate, like footage of the Hindenberg explosion or news reports coaxing spectators to the site of a uniquely spectacular train derailment.

Universal will open third with the animated mouse fable The Tale of Despereaux, which will benefit from a bit of adult/counterprogramming crossover to a take around $17.3 million. The art-house infantry is bringing up the rear, led in part by Paul Schrader and Jeff Goldblum's post-Holocaust curio Adam Resurrected, the Valerie Plame/Judy Miller dramatization Nothing But the Truth, and, all the way from France in its Oscar-qualifying run, the Cannes prize-winner The Class.

Also opening: The acclaimed, brutal Italian mob-novel adaptation Gomorrah; Bruce Campbell's misbegotten paean to himself, My Name is Bruce; John Leguizamo's working-class drama Where God Left His Shoes; the Southern-fried ensemble piece (led by William Hurt) The Yellow Handkerchief; and — ZOMG! — Uwe Boll's nasty Vietnam War venture Tunnel Rats.

THE BIG LOSER: Nothing opening this week will flop as mightily as, say, Delgo (what ever could?), but if Six Flags doesn't soon develop a Day the Earth Stood Still Hell Plunge — "the steepest drop of any film-themed thrill ride in America!" — to commemorate the film's 65% freefall in week two, we'll trademark that shit ourselves as the main attraction at Defamer Gardens.

THE UNDERDOG: Neither The Wrestler nor Mickey Rourke need our help to pull in about $260,000 in limited release this weekend, but listen: Like last week's recommendation of Gran Torino, our interest is in your total filmgoing satisfaction in the face of the Carrey/Smith threat. And The Wrestler is as good as you've heard (Kenneth Turan be damned): Rourke is a staggering screen hero in a season full of mere mortals, Marisa Tomei does some of the most dynamic clothes-optional work of her career, and Darren Aronofsky directs with purpose thought lost after the over-indulgence of The Fountain. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll cringe, you'll never handle a stapler the same way again. Increasingly this fall, we don't take that kind of magic for granted, and you shouldn't either.

FOR SHUT-INS: This week's new DVD's include your aunt's fourth most-requested holiday gift Mamma Mia!; the season's gag-gift sensation The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor; the HBO miniseries Generation Kill; and the Criterion edition of Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express. Spend wisely, and make your own sage recommendations below.

On today's show, she attempted to force Jim Carrey into proposing to his lhasa apso-haired sweetheart Jenny McCarthy before the audience realized it was just another one of her weird charity ruses. But do you know why everyone was fooled? Because she does this shit all the time now! Whether she's attempting to set up Jennifer Aniston with Shemar Moore or telling Ryan Seacrest he should ask Eva Mendes out (something the actress's longtime boyfriend would no doubt appreciate), DeGeneres has now become that obnoxious married person that won't settle down until she has coupled up all of her friends. Ellen, we don't care what celebrities do behind closed doors. We just can't stand it when you keep pushing it in our faces.

• Ellen

I'm just going to give you the full transcript to highlight the ridiculousness:

KING: Didn't you suffer from depression?
CARREY: Yes, yes. I'm on a manic high right now. Can't you tell?
KING: How did you get through that to this?
CARREY: Well, that's another thing. You know at the risk of like opening up the whole Tom Cruise Prozac argument, you know, I don't disagree in many ways. I think Prozac and things like that are very valuable to people for short periods of time. But I believe if you're on them for an extended period of time, you never get to the problem. You never get to see what the problem is, because everything is just kind of OK. And so, you don't deal. And people deal when they get desperate.
KING: So how did you do it?
CARREY: I take supplements.
KING: Vitamins?
CARREY: Yes — well, it's not — well, it is vitamins. But it's also certain elements of the brain like Tyrosine and hydroxytryptophan that they're treating depression with now. It is a natural substance that's in your brain. Instead of being a Serotonin inhibitor, which just uses the serotonin you have and Prozac and things like that — it just uses the Serotonin you have and it doesn't allow it go back into the receptor. It metabolizes your serotonin after a while and you have to keep taking more and more to feel good. This actually creates dopamine and creates serotonin. It's a wonderful thing. It's amazing. I'm going to talk a lot about it in the near future.
KING: You're going to write about it?
CARREY: Yes.

Look, these "supplements" seem to have worked for Jim Carrey, and good for him. But Prozac works for other people, and not just for short periods of time. And I'm sure those people don't really want to hear some L.A.-fried new agey bullshit about how they're just not "getting to the problem" or "dealing with their issues." At the beginning of the clip, he babbles on about how getting "mugged in an alleyway [or] hit with a brick in the face" is the best thing that ever happened to you because it's "how the universe works." Pretty easy for someone who gets $20 million a movie to say, right?

CNN Larry King Live Transcript 12/15/08 [CNN]

• I Love You Phillip Morris [Trailer Addict]

But who else should make the cut? A few more possible draftees — plus your own recommendations — after the jump.

Jake Gyllenhaal: Infamously clashed with David Fincher on the set of Zodiac and cried in the press afterward, to which co-star Mark Ruffalo responded with little sympathy. More recently was reported to be dreamily whimpering around the set of David O. Russell's stop-start satire Nailed.

Katherine Heigl: Last week withdrew herself from consideration for an Emmy repeat for Grey's Anatomy, arguing that her role didn't benefit from "the material this season to warrant [a] nomination." As you can imagine, the show's staff supported her zero percent.

Jim Carrey: After early run of hits, managed to alienate studios and directors alike with excessive salary demands and minor on-set idiosyncrasies like pissing in the middle of scenes. For the dual suicides of overbudgeted projects Used Guys and Ripley's Believe it Or Not, we're starting him in front of Paltrow (and he'll probably bitch about that, too).

Debra Winger: Never met a co-star in the early '80s about whom she couldn't find something to hate, from Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman to her fart-target screen mom Shirley Maclaine in Terms of Endearment. But she can laugh about it now! Sort of!

Mike Myers: Made Penelope Spheeris cry. That's stroppy.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• The Incredible Sulk [Guardian]

Some film tie-ins (Mission: Impossible, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) have already been announced, but a half-dozen more rumored attractions trickling out of Paramount HQ have us even more jacked:

—The Sonny Corleone Tollbooth Adventure: Buckle up and grab the phone — it's your sister Connie! Her husband's got the belt again! Swoop down the New Jersey turnpike at speeds in excess of 60 miles per hour before plunging almost 300 feet into a hail of ice water and shrieks. On your way out, purchase your photo with optional Marlon Brando Sobbing Picture Frame™: "Look how they massacred my boy!"

—The "Ow Shia's Balls" Jungle Coaster: Settle in for the ride of your crotch's life as you straddle vehicles on two tracks through the Peruvian rainforest, just like the the young hero from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Don't let the spiky jungle cacti thwacking your genitals distract you as you battle an animatronic Soviet swordstress and her Commie henchmen — it's either your balls or America, kid!

—Ash Wednesday Eye-Lift Experience: Go under the knife just like desperate housewife Liz Taylor did in her forgotten 1973 melodrama, and then leave the park with a younger date than you arrived with.

—Ripley's Believe or Not Development Vortex: See how exactly how movies aren't made as cuddly Paramount mascot Jim Carrey guides guests on a winding backlot tour of production meetings, script revisions, salary haggles and other rollicking studio inertia.

—There Will Be Fun! Daniel Plainview Musical Revue: Relive the joy and wonder of There Will Be Blood with sociopathic oil baron Plainview and your entire family. The entire history of California oil drilling gets the stage treatment with numbers including "Bastard in a Basket," "Give Me the Blood, Eli" and the famous show-stopper "(I Drink Your) Milkshake."

—Sumner Redstone: The Ride: Climb 350 feet over Seoul before a wizened finger brushes you into a terrifying freefall back to Earth. (Sorry kids! You must be taller than Tom Cruise to ride.)

Let us know if you've heard about any others!

• Cannes 2008 in Pictures: Day One — Movie Posters Everywhere [Cinematical]

What's replacing them isn't that surprising either, but the mind reels nevertheless when we see it in print:

[T]here's a sense now — evident in multiple boxoffice metrics and comments uttered privately by the dozens of agents, managers and producers interviewed for this report — that the interplay among consumers, celebrities and entertainment dollars is changing. The new dynamics are a challenge the next generation of up-and-comers — Shia LaBeouf, Seth Rogen, Emile Hirsch and Katherine Heigl often are cited — could face.

"As audiences get younger, they don't care about movie stars in the same way," Sony Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper says. "The idea of seeing a beautiful movie star on the big screen just isn't the same to them."

Yikes! Katherine Heigl will pretend she didn't hear Culpepper — the man responsible for the recent no-name hit revival of Prom Night, incidentally — just say that. Meanwhile, we're looking at Speed Racer's sluggish tracking and wondering if fledgling leading man Emile Hirsch isn't facing that challenge as we speak. On the bright side, his generation already has Orlando Bloom, so he doesn't have to worry about plunging into that niche. Sky's the limit, kid.

• Hollywood's top stars face devaluing of A-list currency [THR]

[Photo Credit: Splash News]

• Actor Jim Carrey dons white jeans, fake tan, and a tight T-shirt for 'gay' film role [DailyMail.co.uk]