Whenever I watch Entourage I wonder how Turtle can get so much play, even if he is friends with a big movie star like Vinnie Chase. He’s fat and obnoxious and … okay, so I don’t need to get into a fight with Jerry Ferrara, the actor who plays Turtle, so I’ll stop right there. But I will say that I found it ironic and hypocritical that the show is in the news today for being similarly dubious of Seth Rogen’s attractiveness to Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up. I also find it interesting that Entourage could be so harsh about a movie star without that person showing up on the show and being in on the mockery (as is typically the case). Instead, Rogen is apparently upset enough about the jabs that he’s been vocal about an appararent longstanding feud between him and Entourage creators Doug Ellin and Mark Wahlberg to the E! program Daily 10. In addition to calling the Entourage gang “assholes,” he claims “it’s on.” Of course, Rogen doesn’t need to be so defensive since he got the last laugh by losing so much weight and becoming far more successful in the past two years than anyone associated with the HBO series (including Wahlberg).

Still, despite Rogen being the victor so far in the feud, I do hope it escalates until climaxing in a streetfight reminiscent of the massive battle in Anchorman (which Rogen appears in, though not in that scene). The Apatow gang vs. the Entourage boys, with eventual appearances from the State guys and the Broken Lizard troupe, etc. Maybe someone will even die by trident if we’re lucky.

Check out other blogs’ commentary on the feud after the jump:
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Everyone was talking today about how Mark Wahlberg’s long-delayed boxing movie The Fighter is finally back on track now that David O. Russell has been tapped to direct and Christian Bale is set to co-star. Some have obviously noted the potential for problems during the shoot, since both new players have had their share of outbursts on film sets, but otherwise most of us are excited about Bale reteaming with the producers of 3:10 to Yuma and Russell back together with Wahlberg for their third collaboration (following the terrific Three Kings and the disappointing I Heart Huckabees).

Anyway, because I’ve been looking at viral marketing gimmicks all day long, I have a crazy idea for Paramount Pictures’ promotion of the “Irish” Mickey Ward biopic: live reality series. Let us watch as the whole thing unfolds, unedited and raw, via webcams. Will Russell and/or Bale shout at a cast or crew member? Will the film be shut down due for financial reasons (even if Reality Media has enough money, it should pretend it doesn’t, just to create drama out of Russell)? We’ll all be tuning in. And then we’ll probably also show up to see the finished product when it hits theaters, too.

Other blogger reactions to the latest Fighter news after the jump:
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A new Zooey Deschanel movie came out last weekend. But is it the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Paul Dano or the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt? It’s the former, and it’s called Gigantic, which is also not to be confused with this coming week’s new DVD release, Yes Man, in which she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Jim Carrey.

Sure, Deschanel has range and talent (see this fan-made montage of some of her more varied performances), but she also has a certain repetitive nature to her characters. And this “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” nature became all the more confusing recently when trailers for Gigantic and (500) Days of Summer (the Gordon-Levitt one, which is actually her second romantic pairing with the actor) appeared online around the same time. Maybe instead of worrying about people confusing her for Katy Perry, the actress should worry more about people confusing her characters and films for each other.

Or, maybe not. Plenty of us can’t get enough of Deschanel’s quirky, free-spirited performances. In his Yes Man review, Roger Ebert noted that two critics proposed marriage to the character at the end of the film. We wouldn’t go that far, but we have crushed on the actress since All the Real Girls and haven’t yet gotten sick of her or her similar, typecast roles. In fact, to us, the problem is not that indie films too often employ the MPDG character; it’s that they don’t cast Deschanel for every such part. So, instead of wishing she’d broaden her career to include other types of characters (it didn’t work well for her with The Happening, after all), we’ve selected ten MPDG characters that she should have additionally played.
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Max Payne had a fairly complex plot for a video game. Detective Max Payne comes home one day and finds junkies in his home, and kills a couple of them before discovering that they’ve murdered his wife and infant child. He decides to transfer to the DEA as a result, and later discovers that there is a link between the pharmaceutical company his wife used to work for, the junkies, the mafia, and dirty DEA agents. The game was also infamous for featuring scenes inside Max’s head: there’s the constant sound of a baby crying, and you have to walk along a blood trail on the ground suspended over a dark void. If you fall off, Max fully loses it, goes nuts, and dies. To this day the “baby levels” are still used as examples of nightmare-inducing bad game design.

The Mark Wahlberg-starring movie, which opens today, tries to simplify the plot, and ends up differing from the game quite a bit. However, those changes are for the worse. What was a dark and gritty video game full of gunplay becomes a stylistic mess where the director tries to imitate other movies.

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FOX Studio really does it up at Comic-Con 2008 with Keanu, Jennifer Connelly (The Day the Earth Stood Still) Mark Wahlberg, Ludacris (Max Payne) and a surprise appearance by Hugh Jackman with footage “from his bag” of Wolverine.

Highlights:

- Surprise preview reel of Wolverine joins previews of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Max Payne.

- TDESS should really piss of conservatives with it’s heavy human vs. environment condemnation.

- Mark Wahlberg speaks Russian? (Of course, girls love it)

- Max Payne looks like “The Departed with 1,000 times more violence.”

- Wolverine will cut Liev Schreiber’s “goddam head off.”

Read the full liveblogging transcript below.
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• Why doesn’t anyone care about M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening? iO9’s Graeme McMillan has a theory: “The trailer gives you absolutely no idea what the movie is about, apart from people dying and Mark Wahlberg looking confused. People probably thought that it’s some kind of big-budget sequel to A&E’s turgid Andromeda Strain remake.”
• Paul Scheer’s first paid job as an actor was in The Onion: The Movie. “I shot it about 6 years ago, I’ve never seen it, nor did I ever see a script for the entire film (just my scene) but after reading this quote from the Washington Post, I’m intrigued…” We assume he was as “intrigued” as us by the part about the film co-starring “Kevin Federline, who — oh irony of ironies! — appears as a dancer in a music video that satirizes soon-to-be-wife Spears.”
• Jeff Wells takes a look at a piece by Gregg Goldstein on Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche, New York. “The title of Goldstein’s piece is ‘Synecdoche could improve with edit’; the subhead is ‘Hypnotic film may undergo further cuts.’ The Hollywood Elsewhere response: ‘No shit?’”

I hate twist endings, especially those in the films of M. Night Shyamalan. Maybe it’s because I was told the twist of The Sixth Sense prior to seeing it and haven’t been able to appreciate the filmmaker ever since. It’s not so much that I believe films shouldn’t have twist endings, it’s that I believe films that have twist endings should be enjoyable even when you know the secret (Psycho is still great after a thousand viewings, for example). The only one of Shyamalan’s movies to hold up even with the spoilers revealed is Unbreakable.

So, I had no problem reading about the big secret of Shyamalan’s latest, The Happening. An early review of a rough cut of the thriller has shown up on Collider, and in addition to claiming the thing is “a terrible, terrible movie,” and that, “Mark Wahlberg might very well give the worst performance I’ve ever seen in anything,” the critic includes a complete plot synopsis, including the big revelation of what is causing people to suddenly kill themselves (surely you’ve seen the trailer).

I won’t write out the spoiler here (but here’s a hint: the film has something in common with both The Wizard of Oz and Harry Potter), but you’re welcome to head over to Collider (or Vulture blog) to ruin it for yourself.

Maybe I read too much Curbed, but it seems we’ve been having a lot of construction accidents in New York City lately (actually, the Daily News has also taken notice). So, while watching the new teaser trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, I couldn’t help but think about last Wednesday’s tragedy in Brooklyn involving a man falling 13 stories to his death. The trailer, which features construction workers throwing themselves off a site due to some strange “happening” that causes people to suddenly commit suicide, may hit too close to home for other people, too. A few blogs and forums have noted the similarity to the images of airborne jumpers/fallers from the World Trade Center on 9/11 (this wouldn’t be the first time Shyamalan made a 9/11 metaphor).

Now, I’m not the kind of guy to normally get sensitive about trailers unintentionally evoking tragedy (I thought it was unnecessary for trailers for The Core to be pulled following the Columbia disaster, but I guess I’m heartless). But this one hit me differently. Maybe it’s because these accidents are more of an ongoing/continuing problem, and certainly I’m also letting my bias against most NYC real estate developers get me heated up. However, I don’t think the trailer should be pulled — no, I’d rather it be seen by enough locals who might also relate the imagery to the tragedies.

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Honestly, I didn’t want to write anything about the ending of There Will Be Blood until the film is in theaters. The holidays are tough enough–I really, really don’t need the spoiler brigade on my ass to add to it. But this post by Craig Kennedy reminded me of a conversation I had earlier today with Paul and Kevin, and I have to get the thought out before it goes away. Noting that P.T. Anderson’s film currently carries a 100% Fresh rating amongst Cream of the Crop critics on Rotten Tomatoes, Craig writes:

I’m only skimming reviews until I finish my own, but one theme keeps popping up in review after review: On the surface, There Will Be Blood is unlike anything Anderson has done before…It’s like watching a runner sprinting at the limit of his ability when, just before the finish line, he kicks into another gear you didn’t even know he had and he surges ahead of the pack. It’s exhilarating.

It’s true that Anderson’s previous films were essentially ensemble pieces, which There Will Be Blood is not. And as a director, Anderson seems to have matured, in that he seems less interested than ever in showing off. But “unlike anything Anderson has done before”? I don’t think that’s true at all.

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• Lions For Lambs is, according to Dade Hayes, a “remarkably strident political work that takes dead aim at the Bush White House and assails post-9/11 foreign policy.” It’s also the first project to see release from the Tom Cruise-controlled United Artists, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Cruise’s comeback is riding on its success. And yet, it seems as though Cruise the producer hasn’t given Cruise the star (who plays a right-wing senator in Lambs) talking points on how to package his own political views in relation to the film.
• Ryan Gosling gained 20 pounds and grew a beard for the job, and yet, a day before shooting was to begin, he was fired from Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones and replaced with Mark Wahlberg. Who wants to put money on what “creative differences” actually means in this case?
• Graphic novel adaptation 30 Days of Night barely squeaked past Why Did I Get Married? at the box office this weekend, earning $16 million to Tyler Perry’s $12 million. Michael Clayton, which has already been written off as a failure by some Clooney haters, held on to the fourth place slot for the second week in a row. Star-studded Oscar bait continued to bomb pretty hard: Rendition opened wide in ninth place, and Reservation Road managed just $2,630 per screen in limited release.

Hopwood DePree, screenwriter and co-founder for the Waterfront Film Festival, wraps up Sundance. Paul, Dave and Kevin debate questions like, who is The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? How do they pick a winner? Are losers chosen so they make better films? What is up with Dreamgirls among other bizarre anomalies of the 2007 Oscars?

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