1. Emmerich's campy, well-fortified London townhouse? Saved.

2. Tibet? Gone.

3. Killer-tidal wave CGI technology has not advanced especially far in the five years since Day After Tomorrow.

4. Emmerich is returning to the political satire at which he acquitted himself so expertly before stumbling over historical comedy with 10,000 B.C.

5. If you look really, really close, we think you can spot Cusack boogieboarding into the doomed monastery.

BONUS: If you're especially determined to get something out of this, amuse yourself and your coworkers by reading the intertitles in your best Don LaFontaine voice. It's fun!

• '2012' [Moviefone]

Boomp3.com

Malibu quickly turned into Coolsville, as soon as the world’s number one cool guy John Cusack returned from a stint up in the great white north. One Malibu resident was excited about Cusack’s return to the sleepy beach city. The resident said, “It’s not that we lost our cool status. It’s just we weren’t as cool as we usually are. Now with Mr. Coolsack back in town, we’re about cool as a polar bear. Boosh!”

[Photo Credit: X17]

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

It's too late for that, though, and in any case, he has good — if slim — company in the so-called Nickel Club: A-listers with recent films that couldn't break $100K domestically before heading off to home-entertainment oblivion. Take a deep breath of equally rare air after the jump.

· Jessica Simpson, Blonde Ambition — $6,422

Like several of her fellow Nickel Clubbers, Simpson fared much better internationally. A lot better. As in, 99.6% of Ambition's $1.4 million gross was earned overseas. But things will come around once she pays her dues; it doesn't get much harder than a minty love scene with Dane Cook.

· Paris Hilton, The Hottie and the Nottie — $27,696

Another global sensation who nevertheless couldn't hack it at home, Hilton has since moved into documentaries. We salute her new strategy and wish her only the best.

· John Cusack, Grace is Gone — $50,899

An oft-told tale of hubris, mistiming and waste: Cusack's award-winning Sundance drama cashed in at Park City with $4 million of Harvey Weinstein's money. The mogul dumped the film and his Oscar-campaign plans by the end of the year. NB: Cusack's follow-up, War Inc., did 10 times the business last spring almost entirely via word-of-mouth, never creeping over 33 screens.

Honorable Mention: Katherine Heigl, Zyzzyx Road — $30

Filmed not long before Heigl broke through on Grey's Anatomy, history's lowest-grossing release sold exactly five tickets during a one-week run in Dallas in 2006 — one of which was purchased by its own makeup artist. It has picked up nicely as a cult DVD, on wwhich Heigl receives top billing.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• What happened to Matthew McConaughey's 'Surfer, Dude?' [EW]

JOHN Cusack learned he should stick to acting with his first piece for the Huffington Post Chicago - which was "riddled with more errors than the 2006 Cubs," according to one blogger. Cusack, who was writing about his childhood as a fan of the Cubs, the White Sox, Michael Jordan and Walter Payton, managed to misspell the names of three Cubs players and of playwright Eugene O'Neill. Cusack also erroneously stated that Sammy Sosa played for the '89 Cubs. Finally, the "High Fidelity" star described taking the "express" train to Wrigley Field. There has never been an express to Wrigley. Cusack - whose last two movies, "Grace Is Gone" and "War, Inc.," were both anti-war bombs - also described how he would "scrape together $2.50" to go to a baseball game. "Cusack grew up in a massive house on Sheridan Road," said another reader of the Beachwood Reporter Web site. "It's slightly disingenuous to say he had to 'scrape' together $2.50. I'm thinking that wasn't an issue."

Also, is there really any such person as "John Cusack," or is it an elaborate ruse cooked up by "childhood friend" Jeremy Piven? It's no coincidence that you never see the two of them together anymore... could this be the reason that the Piv was shut out of High Fidelity? Were the CGI costs simply too high? When will the Huffington Post renounce the John Cusack-impersonating Jeremy Piven???

[photo credit: AP]

• Cusack's Strikeout [NY Post]
• Bleary-eyed in Bangkok: Daybreak Memories of Chicago [HuffPo]

The breakdown goes as follows:
· $3,500 – Assistant to apply patented Leatherman B-Gone Spray
· $4,000 – Sweat shop worker to custom make a 6-week supply of Chuck Taylors
· $5,000 – Blogger to ghost write for Huffington Post
· $7,500 – Joan Cusack impersonator to act as security blanket
· $10,000 – Lili Taylor
· $20,000 – On-set shrink to help deal with recently developed scorpion-in-crotch phobia

After canceling production, Intermedia has since sent an olive branch to Cusack in the form of a trench-coat wearing PA, whose elevated iPod serenaded him with the sounds of Peter Gabriel. The PA was last seen running down the PCH being chased by a homicidal paper boy.

• John Cusack: You Played Me, Now Pay Me [TMZ.com]

"If I answer your questions, will you stop writing nasty shit about me?" he asked. Of course we could promise nothing (especially not with a Roland Emmerich collaboration on the horizon), but for now, anyway, it's hard to deny he's on to something with War, Inc. He tells us why after the jump.

Most observers were pretty shocked to see War, Inc. score the way it did last weekend, especially after the reviews it got. What was your reaction?

I wasn't totally shocked, but I'm shocked that it went as well as it did. I've been the beneficiary of a lot of cultural snobbery, so I can't really bitch about it, you know? I don't really mind too much when it goes against me, especially when you do a movie that's different and radical. Some of the most powerful people intellectually that I know had not only seen it but endorsed it: authorities on Iraq, writers, thinkers, artists, comedians — I thought, "Hey, we've got a shot here; we don't need to sell out 6,000 screens, but I thought we could just go grass roots with it."

What's the irony in a critically-snubbed film about the Iraq War doing so well, especially after those same critics complained about commercial failures of films they backed?

Not only didn't it have critical backing, it didn't have corporate backing. But again, the critical backing we had was a different kind of critic. They write about foreign affairs and politics and culture; they don't sit around a bunch of junkets every weekend and then be snarky tastemakers about movies. Many of the press never wrote about movies before; they spent time in Iraq and had written about the issues in the movies for a long time. They said, "I don't know what the hell these critics are seeing, but this is what we see." Some people just get it.

Is that a model that more distributors and studios should take to heart for future Iraq films?

I hope so. I definitely remember thinking that if we pulled this off, it wouldn't have been done before. I was pretty excited about that. But I've also been around long enough to know the response something gets when it's either the flavor of the month or it has nothing to do with the overall life of the film — especially these kinds of edgy political satires and experimental films. We'll see how it does this weekend, but we're already going out to six new markets in two weeks.

Your previous film about the Iraq War, Grace is Gone, was a very well-received last year at Sundance. Harvey Weinstein bought it for $4 million; it made less than $100,000. What happened?

I think, to be honest, releasing it at Christmas was probably not the right time, in retrospect. I think Harvey was thinking it would get into that award season "luge," where it gets nominated for script or actor and that sort of propels the life of the movie. When that didn't happen, there wasn't a back-up plan. When Christmas came around and the debacle in Iraq was so depressing, people didn't want to be reminded of it. What's fun about War Inc. is that it's got these serious ideas but it puts it through an absurdist lens. You remember subversion can be fun; the first thing you want to reclaim is your spirit of defiance.

You're reportedly attached to star in this Roland Emmerich film 2012. You're seriously playing a limo driver in the apocalypse?

I can't divulge that information. It's very secretive stuff.

WHAT'S NEW: There's a holiday-ready, cruise-control part of us that feels like skipping this part of Defamer Attractions, but again, Indiana Jones 4 is not the only new release demanding attention. That said, with $26 million already in the bank on Thursday, and with the Indiana Jones PlunderWatch Projection Ticker speeding toward $9.5 trillion, we should probably just get it out of the way. It's easily going to win the weekend, but can it displace four-day weekend champ Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ($139.7 million) and five-day king Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith ($172 million) as the all-time biggest box-office bow? We doubt it; there's too much cultural competition to overcome the 19-year generation gap. Nevertheless, we're still calling Indy to break $110 million by Sunday and $140 million by Monday, thus promising a fifth installment set in 1967 and pitting our hero and his greaser sidekick/offspring against their toughest adversaries yet: Filthy, filthy hippies.

Also opening: John Cusack's Iraq satire/career nadir War, Inc.; the here-and-gone Jonathan Rhys Meyers drama The Children of Huang Shi; and the acclaimed Vice Magazine-produced doc Heavy Metal in Baghdad.

THE BIG LOSER: Despite early reads positioning Postal in the same critical class as What Happens in Vegas, Speed Racer and Sex and the City, it won't likely be enough to boost Uwe Boll's latest clusterfuck to anything approaching respectable at the box office. Granted, he's on four screens as opposed to, say, Indy 4's 4,200, but if Postal's per-screen average breaks $8,000, we'll volunteer to be the guy eating his own puke in Boll's next film. What? Stoic has already been shot? Whatever. The point is: It will not happen.

THE UNDERDOG: Fatih Akin's 2005 culture-clash stunner Head On captured audiences about as abruptly and unforgettably as its title suggested, and his follow-up, The Edge of Heaven, revisits his volatile Turkish/German roots with no less intensity. Which, considering its scope, is a bit of a marvel: A elderly Turkish man invites a compatriot prostitute into the home he shares with his son in Bremen. It ends... poorly, with the son traveling to Istanbul to find the woman's 20-something daughter. She's embroiled in political actions there, expatriates herself to Germany seeking asylum, falls in love with another young woman, and then — horror of horrors! — is expelled back to prison in Turkey. The interwoven searches and tragedies that follow in Heaven make Babel look like an afterschool special — not for their violence or viciousness (though they have that, too), but for their stoicism and, ultimately, their unalloyed compassion. And in any case, we'd never reject anything featuring both lesbians and Turkish prison.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, the latest terrible George Romero zombie entry Diary of the Dead, the Richard Gere/Claire Danes folly The Flock, and the long, long-awaited complete first season of The Bill Engvall Show.

So are we low-balling Indy's weekend plunder? Are we too generous? And is anybody actually planning to see Postal? Share your own plans, place your own bets and go ahead — tell your boss we said you could take Monday off!

Granted, everything will change as more reviews trickle in — but not necessarily for the worst. In any case, maybe Boll — not Roland Emmerich — is the ideal Euro-hack to helm that forthcoming $200 million Cusack apocalypse flick. At this rate, he may be Sony's only hope with the critics.

• 'Postal' [Rotten Tomatoes]

John Cusack is in negotiations to star in director Roland Emmerich's (10,000 B.C., The Day After Tomorrow) new disaster movie 2012 for Sony Pictures. The title refers to the year the world is supposed to end after a global cataclysm. Cusack is negotiating to play Jackson Curtis, a divorced dad who alternates between writing and driving a limo. ...

Sony acquired the project in a high-stakes bidding war and is aiming for a summer 2009 release. The price tag for the special-effects laden movie could reach $200 million.

The Hollywood Reporter has stepped in over the last hour to specify a July 10, 2009, release date and to talk down the budget below $200 million — a staggering number under any circumstances, but most certainly for a film featuring John Cusack as a divorced limo driver. By the director of 10,000 BC. Alas, we'll miss this one anyway because this is the part of the post where we shoot ourselves.

[Photo Credit: Wireimage]

• John Cusack in talks for Roland Emmerich's '2012' [EW]

• John Cusack ponders disaster flick [THR]

1. "We met at the cast party for How I Met Your Mother, right? We were both pretty drunk... It was kind of a blackout haze."
2. "It was really cool though. It was you, me, and Alyson Hannigan just kind of hanging. Then we kind of broke off and got to talking about stuff that interested us as people. You know, as human beings."
3. "Then we texted for a while and then we hung out."
4. "I think people's reaction to art is often more about themselves than it is about the art. People really project, and they find parts of themselves in the things that they consume. And so it's always interesting to me sometimes the new ideas that people have about things that I didn't even intend to put in there. And that's what's kind of cool."
5. "And that makes it look like birch trees, isn't that sneaky? Heh. Ha. It's gorgeous."

6. "If you go to like a sports bar, or a place, like, where there's a bunch of aggressive males, and you mix that with alcohol, then it becomes that too. Like an almost psychotic extreme."
7. "As my son Steve says, just smoosh it in there."
8. "I'm used to being a little out of step."
9. "I wrote a horror movie? That's shooting right now? In Vancouver? It's called Jennifer's Body?"
10. "People look at me like I'm a little strange, when I go around talking to squirrels and rabbits and stuff. That's ok. Thaaaat's just ok."
11. "It was pretty interesting because the film shifts from surreality to soap opera to black comedy to sincerity, and we sort of wanted to see what would happen if we did all those shifts but didn't telegraph that they were coming? And not explain them?"
12. "It's such an adventurous pastiche!"
13. "Water's like me. It's laaazy... Boy, it allways looks for the easiest way to do things."

ANSWERS: 1. JC 2. DC 3. JC 4. DC 5. BR 6. JC 7. BR 8. JC 9. DC 10. BR 11. JC 12. DC 13. BR

• Artist on Artist: John Cusack and Diablo Cody [MySpace TV]
• Bob Ross [Wikiquote]

Cusack, in the latest of a seemingly endless (and psychologically curious) string of hitman roles, plays Hauser, a typically troubled assassin whose inner psyche is so dead that he resorts to downing shot glasses of hot sauce in order to feel anything. His latest mission, at the behest of Tamerlane — a Halliburton-type corporation run by a Dick Cheney-like former vice president (Dan Aykroyd) — is to assassinate a Middle Eastern oil minister named Omar Sharif (an example of the film's humor) who is threatening to undercut their plans to build an oil pipeline in the wartorn country of Turaqistan. — Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter

He also encounters a reporter for The Nation (Marisa Tomei!), a Central European pop tart named Yonica Babyyeah (Hillary Duff) who drops a scorpion down her pants and a hysterical double-agent (played by Cusack's real-life sister Joan running the trade show that serves as Cusack's cover — featuring a chorus line of amputees with high-tech prosthetic limbs. And I haven't mentioned Sir Ben Kingsley, sporting another one of his eccentric American accents, as a Big Brother-like character. — Lou Lumenick, NY Post

Films like this and Redacted and Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? exist to make their makers feel good about their own political correctness, and content that their razor-thin world views are accurate and viable, when in fact they represent a tiny fraction of the bigger picture. This is not activism—this is self-congratulation. — Karina Longworth, Spout Blog

It gets worse from there, but again, we'd prefer to think of Cusack as we remember him: a tasteful man whose recent lapses into treacle and trash (Martian Child, John? Really?) warrant a Sure Thing sequel or, better yet, the prompt franchising of Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything Else. It's not like Cameron Crowe couldn't use the boost himself.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

Leatherman, who a sheriff's spokesman characterized as a "transient in the Santa Monica area," was brought in for investigation of stalking, violating a restraining order and petty theft, and was held at $150,000 bail. In the past, she has thrown missives accompanied by rocks and screwdrivers into Cusack's home, begging the question: Had Lloyd Dobler given Diane an aerial onslaught of tools instead of his heart, would he have gotten a trip to the pokey instead of a pen?

• Woman Arrested Near Cusack's Home [AP]

Not since Merry Miller's Holly Hunter debacle has an ill-prepared celebrity interviewer caused us to cringe so, as an unnamed host (surely only moments away from being identified, trotted around the morning shows for her viral notoriety, then forgotten about, only to reemerge as a View guest couch-warmer fully in control of her non-inept life after having found God) begins her audience with the lauded actor by explaining that she's missing class, which, funnily enough, is covering American Beauty that day. What's funny about that? To Cusack—not very much. To us, pretty much everything.

• How Not to Start an Interview [YouTube]

Fresh from being tricked on The View into asking Lake on a date, now watch in amazement as the 30-minute-meal guru hovers over Cusack like a freshly baked broccoli, cheese and bacon casserole. As Ray tosses aside a cue card obviously compiled by some Cusack-illiterate to ask her own questions, the Better Off Dead star's reaction can only be described as being about as enthused as someone who's just been gifted with a bag of rocks and screwdrivers from an overzealous fan.

• Rachael Ray Show

Looking relaxed and sexified, guest host Ricki Lake (once divorced) boldly volunteers herself to be Cusack's date should he be nominated for an Oscar. Acknowledging a nomination might not happen, Cusack replies, "We might just have to go dinner." And then, like, Ricki says, "Alright, alright, it's on!" And then the audience goes, "Whooooo!" And then Shepherd says, "We should switch sides, girl." But they don't! We know! Go Ricki, go Ricki! At least someone on that panel should be getting laid regularly besides the Hasselfrau.

• The View

The "Grace" deal went into after-hours negotiations, with the Weinstein Co. clinching it because of its passion for the project, said sources close to the film. Harvey Weinstein, reverting to his old Sundance strategies, didn't leave the negotiating table from 9 p.m. until 4:30 a.m. "The company got its groove back last night," an ebullient Weinstein said. "I'm happy to be back in this game. Fuck it. I'm good at this. It's fun."

If Weinstein sounds a little self-satisfied with his acquisition, it's only because he initially feared that he might have been a little out of practice in implementing his once-legendary Sundance strategies; any seeming braggadocio is merely relief that his rivals from Fox Searchlight and Sony Pictures Classics lacked the desire to chew through their limbs to escape the well-concealed bear traps he'd planted in their condos, then suddenly show up at the marathon Grace session with new bids that might trump his own.

• Sundance starts on cool note [THR via Wiretap]