Thanks to the six-year-old site April Fool’s Day On The Web, there isn’t much need for me to link to film-related gags that can be found on the Internet today. And thanks to Cinematical’s annual roundup, you’ve probably already been clued into some of the best film foolery, including the very cool, very unfortunately fake Empire Strikes Back-referencing Tauntaun Sleeping Bag posted on ThinkGeek. Regardless, I’m going to sample some of the most creative of bloggery bamboozlement. Because there isn’t any other story that’s funnier or more interesting than the stuff that was made up for this special occasion.

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First of all, kudos to all the bloggers who downplayed the Monsters vs. Aliens box office triumph over the weekend by recognizing how inflated the gross is thanks to premium 3D fees that have some people paying as much as $20 per ticket. Second of all, shame on all of you who are posting “exclusive” photos of posters on display at ShoWest while ignoring the story (coming out of the same convention) about Fox fucking exhibitors with its decision to put the cost of 3D glasses solely to the cinemas. I wish I could say that this news has inspired me to boycott Fox’s upcoming 3D animated film Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, but I actually wouldn’t go see that piece of crap anyway.

What has me so angry over Fox’s decision? The fact that this adds to a long history of studios bullying theater owners. Hollywood acts like it’s only the cinemas who need the studios, yet it’s totally a reciprocal relationship. On top of that, though, Fox doesn’t need to make 3D movies if it doesn’t want to. Or, it can make them and just have nowhere to show them. Unfortunately theater chains are submissive and would never attempt to put the studios in their place by refusing to put up the cost for something like this.

Sadly, either way, moviegoers will continue paying a premium fee, even if they bring their own 3D glasses saved from the last 3D feature. Because once the studios and the exhibitors manage to get people to pay a certain price, that price isn’t ever going to come down. When it comes to moviegoing, the savings are never passed on to the customer.

Quotes from the few bloggers who thankfully wrote on this story after the jump.

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• Fox may frustrate fanboys once again. Though not as sharp a jab as the studio’s Watchmen lawsuit, an option Fox holds on Emily Blunt could potentially keep her from playing Black Widow in Marvel/Paramount’s Iron Man 2 (a role she’s perfect for). Instead, she’ll have to settle on starring opposite Jack Black in Fox’s reimagined adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels.
• And speaking of disappointing fanboys: as if Scott Derrickson hasn’t already done enough damage to science fiction with his recent remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, he has just been tapped to direct a single movie combining two of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion novels.
• 2009 Oscar nominee John Stevenson (Kung Fu Panda) will direct the new He-Man movie, Masters of the Universe. Worse than that, however, is Variety’s reminder that another 2009 nominee, Frank Langella, costarred as Skeletor in the godawful 1987 Masters of the Universe.
• 2009 Oscar nominee Mickey Rourke (who is also slated for Iron Man 2) will star in a kind of anti-Slumdog Millionaire, an American gangster flick titled Broken Horses, that will be scripted, directed and co-produced by Indian filmmakers. It will be the first Hollywood film from Reliance Entertainment since the company funded the DreamWorks exit from Paramount last year.
• “Breaking a longstanding taboo, Fox is releasing male-driven pic Taken on Super Bowl weekend,” begins the weekend box office preview from Variety. While I may believe that Taken could indeed be a guy movie, it certainly hasn’t been marketed as such. Anyway, I never understood the concept of a Sunday event keeping men from going to the movies on the Friday and Saturday before. So, if the film does take the top spot this weekend, I for one won’t be too shocked.

• Fox has brought a lawsuit against Warner Brothers, claiming that the latter studio does not have the right to release Zach Snyder’s Watchmen movie, because the former studio never full gave up their rights to the property. The movie’s supposed to come out on March 6, and though a court could decide that Fox should be cut in on its eventual profits, apparently that studio would prefer if the film was shelved altogether. Why did they wait until the film was finished in order to take action? Your thoughts, please.
• Josh Brolin, Ben Affleck, Charlize Theron and Morgan Spurlock are among the celebrities expected to “either cross paths with or interface with such politicians as Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and assorted other city, state and national elected officials” at the Starz! Green Room at the Democratic National Convention next week.
• The Coen Brothers have hired “Michael Stuhlbarg, a Tony-nominated actor with little experience in front of the cameras, and Richard Kind, a character actor best known for his role on ABC’s Spin City,” to star as brothers in their upcoming period comedy, A Serious Man.

• Analysts are expecting opening week sales of Grand Theft Auto IV to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million. Why do we care? Because, as Ben Fritz puts it at Variety, that’ll be “close to, if not above, the No. 1 film bow of all time, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which grossed $404 million worldwide in its first six days. For a taste of what the fuss is about, check out the game’s trailer above.
• After the massive success on the site of the film’s soundtrack, Juno became the first Fox film to became available for download-to-own on iTunes yesterday, the same day as its DVD release.
• Universal’s Vivendi Entertainment has made its first theatrical acquisition with New York, New York, that omnibus thing with the Natalie Portmans and the Scarlett Johanssons and the etcs.

A U.S. District judge threw out a defamation case against the makers of Borat yesterday, on the grounds that Sacha Baron Cohen’s fake journalist schtick is protected under the same laws as real journalism. A New York businessman had sued for unspecified, claiming he was humiliated against his will when footage of Cohen chasing him down the street appeared in the film, and complaining that 20th Century Fox had no right to make a profit off of said humiliation. But the judge disagreed, citing a section of a NY State civil rights law that says  “nonconsensual use of a person’s image to depict newsworthy events or matters of public interest is exempt from the law.” If you’re scratching your head trying to puzzle out just how performance art built around the harassment of strangers qualifies as a “newsworthy event,” here’s Judge Loretta Preska’s explanation of her ruling:

[Borat] employs as its chief medium a brand of humor that appeals to the most childish and vulgar in its viewers..[But] the movie challenges its viewers to confront, not only the bizarre and offensive Borat character himself, but the equally bizarre and offensive reactions he elicits from `average’ Americans.

I’m alternately admiring of and infuriated by Cohen’s ability to exploit the right loopholes that allow him to get away with using real people as raw material for his act, which never seems to be as sharp as either comedy or social commentary as he thinks it is. But childish, vulgar, bizarre and offensive *does* sounds like a pretty accurate description of most televised news.

Hmm, maybe the programming execs at FOX have souls after all: they’ve mercifully taken The Return of Jezebel James, a disastrous waste of Parker Posey masquerading as a sitcom, off their schedule after just three episodes. At BigScreenLittleScreen, Ted Zee describes how a scene from the second episode (he’s obviously more dedicated to the Save Parker cause than me, because I couldn’t get past the pilot) pretty much sums up the whole situation: “you’re relieved that it’s over, because it’s not funny, and you feel embarrassed for everyone involved.” Unfortunately, video evidence of the crime inexplicably lives on at Hulu, thus ensuring that this blight on Posey’s resume won’t fade as quickly as it should.

When we first saw clips of Parker Posey’s stab at sitcom stardom, the long-delayed FOX offering The Return of Jezebel James, we were skeptical that the sometime high school hazer and incestuous Jackie O impersonator would be able to make the transition to laugh track anchor without diluting her own charms, or worse, becoming really, really annoying. Based on the first two episodes, which are already available for watching and embedding via Hulu (see the pilot above), both of our fears were valid––Posey’s total inability to grasp sitcom comic timing is a big problem, and her flailing attempts to do so strip her of all likeability. It’s such a sad thing to see such a strong actress in a debacle like this, especially just one year after making a really good film which, in a fair and just world, would have sat at the top of her resume until she could get cast in something even better.

But there are sadder things about Jezebel James to discuss…

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A number of stories from Juno press confabs fueled rumors last week that Jason Bateman is trying to jump-start a movie based on his much-missed FOX comedy Arrested Development. Keith Olbermann, who admits to being friends with at least three ex-AD cast members, passed along a statement from the actor and series creator Mitchell Hurwitz, confirming that the movie is “something [they're] very interested in doing, but only after the writers’ strike, and only if the powers that be approve.”

For those not in the know, AD starred Bateman as Michael Bluth, the one sort-of together member of a high-profile Southern California family, whose real estate tycoon patriarch (Jeffrey Tambor) has been thrown in jail whilst awaiting trial on charges of (among other things) building mansions for Sadaam Hussein. Michael Cera, Bateman’s so-hot-right-now Juno costar, played his son on the show; Will Arnet, Portia DiRossi and David Cross rounded out the cast.

I was a huge Arrested Development fan (I wrote this much-misread post about the show in spring 2005), but I was also fairly satisfied with the series’ conclusion. I sat down to try to imagine/divine possible plotlines for a movie, but because there was very little that I was dying to see resolved, I decided to call in some reinforcements. I sent out emails to some bloggy friends, I trolled Facebook looking for fans. Then, weirdness: for every AD fan who happily offered up an idea for The Bluth family’s big screen debut, another essentially refused to comment. It looks like there’s a decent contingent of AD fans who really don’t want to see the show they love ruined by a false, cinematic extension–and really, having seen the careless cash-in that is the Sex and the City trailer, can you blame them?

In any case, between my own fixations and those of three blogger friends, after the jump I manage to cobble together a list of five pretty promising potential plotlines for this not-yet-even-greenlit Arrested Development movie. These aren’t prognostications, just narrative directions that actual AD fans would like to see explored. Toss out your own thoughts in the comments.

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On Friday, Danny Leigh at the Guardian linked to and excerpted from my post about Brawndo, the fictional scourge of mankind from Idiocracy, which Fox has allegedly inked a deal to produce as a real-life energy drink. Admittedly, the story does seem a little too future-world-y, irony-oblivious, Baudrillard-rolling-in-his-grave-y to take at face value, and the Guardian commenters expressed doubts.

“Er, hang on a second, is Brawndo really really real?” asked commenter JohnCooperClarke. “Have a look at the manufacturer listed at the bottom of the page - it’s Omni Consumer Products. From Robocop. A fictional big nasty corporation. Mind you, I had to Google to make sure that somebody hadn’t opened a real OCP…”

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Remember last week, when I told you about how Fox had struck a deal to produce real-life Brawdo, the fictional energy drink that threw the Earth into chaos in Idiocracy, a film that Fox barely released and all but refused to promote? That energy drink now has a website (emblazoned with the Fox logo, natch) and a commercial, embedded above. You can even add Brawndo as a friend on MySpace (preferred, to complete the corporate circle) or Facebook.

So, to recap: Fox wouldn’t support a film about Brawndo, the energy drink that destroys plants, debases the human race, and makes those who drink “win at yelling,” but they are now putting wholehearted support behind the actual drink, which they’re attempting to sell to social network junkies without a trace of a reference back to the film. To be fair, I’ve seen the movie, and as far as I can tell, it didn’t exactly feel “like having sex with a tractor trailer in a parking lot.” So I’m going to give Fox the benefit of the doubt on this one.

[Via Pullquote]

Remember way back in June, when clips of that Fox sitcom starring Parker Posey hit YouTube? Yeah, that’s not going so well. According to Variety, although The Return of Jezebel James is still on Fox’s midseason schedule (meaning it’ll premiere alongside American Idol and 24 in early 2008), the network has cut their order of episodes in half. Fox is basically like, “It’s cool, we love the show, we’ve just got SO MUCH QUALITY PROGRAMMING planned that we’re only gonna have room for 7 episodes!” The realists at The Culture Czar suspect it has something to do with the fact that the show is “only so-so funny,” and I’m with them.

The annual nerd bachanal that is Comic-con begins today in San Diego. Here’s a look at some of the chatter going into the comic/horror/sci-fi/fantasy fan’s biggest weekend of the year.

• David Poland got an email from a friend who has a friend who is a director who was told by someone at Comic-con that he won’t be allowed to show “adult” material at his Con presentation this year. Poland’s friend confirms that this was the main reason for Fox’s last minute pull-out. And Poland says they’re actually going to be there anyway–in lieu of the big panel presentation, there will be something involving Wolverine director Gavin Hood, as well as a breakfast screening of footage from Death Sentence.
• If you, like me, are not making it down to San Diego yourself but don’t want to miss a beat, you can follow Alex Billington’s updates on Twitter. Meanwhile, San Diego Dreaming is compiling a Fest Mob-esque ticker tape of Con updates. If you are on the ground and want to participate, the info’s at the link. Both of those tidbits come to us courtesy of The Beat.
• John Campea has posted his schedule at The Movie Blog, in case anyone wants to “take a minute and say ‘hi’.”
• Patton Oswalt won’t be in San Diego, but he’s posted a scavenger hunt for anyone who is. One of the ten items he implores you to find: “Two of the following 7 “variations” on a Star Wars stormtrooper: Elvis, slutty, NASCAR, steampunk, KISS Army, pimp, western.” And yes, I found the above picture by doing a Google Image search for “stormtrooper NASCAR.”

***A Variety story published last night partially backs up the CHUD theory for why Fox pulled out of ComicCon–ie: they couldn’t/didn’t want to tone down their R-rated material after being reprimanded for showing racy Borat footage last year–but also suggests that the studio might have had to do a reality check on their presentation’s “wow” factor. “The pics Fox wanted to promote are all f/x-intensive, with many of the money shots not yet complete.”

***Why is it okay to consistently, pejoratively use words like “doughy” to describe Seth Rogan? Would a casting item about Renee Zellweger refer to her as “the bony, squinty-eyed thesp”? Whatever–the guy’s gonna write and star in The Green Hornet.

***Gavin Hood, who won a Best Foreign Film Oscar two years ago for Tsotsi, has been hired to direct the X-men spin-off Wolverine. Variety describes the pic as an action-loaded “origin story about how Logan emerged from a barbaric experiment as an indestructible mutant with retractable razor-sharp claws.”