The Doctor in the Hallway News Report 11.15.06
Posted by Ben Moser on 11.15.2006
A news story about fake lesbians that may also end up being fake, celebrity injury, man crushes, and possibly more if you behave yourselves. If not, I'll turn this column around.
It's Wednesday. So welcome back to The Doctor in the Hallway News Report, kids!
So it looks like ABC is going to exile Boston Legal to Sunday nights with so little fanfare that Mike Wilbon had to tell me about it on an episode of Pardon the Interruption. I suppose it makes sense, though. While the midget dating Denny Crane is fun, the new lawyer characters are beyond uninteresting. So banishment to Sunday may be taking the ol' girl out back before she dies.
Then again, they could turn it around by killing off that Koho character and letting tough New York Lawyer girl get caught in a bar fight after she suggests that Derek Jeter might be a straight man in Boston.
Yeah, that be almost as good as the news:
Maxim's readership has been toyed with
So earlier today, I got this news story:
Beyonce Knowles and Eva Longoria recently revealed they will soon be playing lesbian lovers in a new version of Victorian drama Tipping The Velvet. Director Sofia Coppola aims to bring Sarah Water's novel about sexual repression to the big screen and is anxious for Beyonce and Eva to take the roles of 1890s music hall star Kitty Butler, and her lesbian lover Nan Astley. Longoria says "Yes it's true. We are talking about doing the movie together. It's such a wonderful novel, a beautiful love story." Beyonce, while at a benefit, added "We've had 'Brokeback Mountain' so the time is right for this divine novel to get the same treatment."
The love scenes hold no hesitation for them, a source revealed that "They weren't at all coy about the sex scenes. In fact they both seemed to think it would be more fun than doing the same work with a man. It's going to be very hot".
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Across the globe, FHM readers eagerly welcome the opportunity to see these two "check up on" each other
Cue the Hallelujiah Chorus as this leads me to believe that we're going to be looking at the most sought-after movie clip on the internet ever.* Of course if I were Beyonce I'd probably prefer having Longoria as my love interest to Steve Martin and Mike Meyers, too. So you can see where I'd totally buy this story as legit. Of course, you stopped reading after "lesbian lovers" showed up in the first sentence anyway. Which is too bad, because a mere hour later, I stumbled onto this rumor-killer:
Eva Longoria is shooting down rumors that she plans to star as Beyonce Knowles's lover in a new movie. "Believe me, I would love to work with Beyonce one day. She's so talented. But this is definitely not something we are doing together. It's completely and absolutely not true."
It's actually the first I've ever heard of Longoria not being in something, which in and of itself is rather disorienting. So fans of this casting idea can settle down, think of what could have been, and probably have some photoshopped illustrations of what they wanted it to be like circulating by Friday morning.
To recap: the biggest news item of the day is that another of the day's news items isn't actually a news item.
Cameron Diaz can't talk about fight club
Cameron Diaz is so unhappy with her nose she's decided to go under the knife. Diaz' nose has been broken four times already, the last time in a surfing accident, and now she hopes corrective surgery will put everything back in place. However, the star is adamant she's not undergoing the procedure for vain reasons - the disfigurement is actually hampering her breathing. She explains, "I'm getting it fixed. I can't take it. I cannot breathe at all. One side of my nose is totally shattered - my septum is basically like a train derailed."
I hear tell that Tara Reid knows a good surgeon. Oh! It never hurts to take a cheap shot every now and then. Cheap shots are actually how she broke her nose the other three times. It's a little known fact about Cam Diaz that she likes to start bar fights with strangers. Speaking of celebrity injury...
Suspended disbelief
Hilary Swank suffered a shocking injury on the set of her latest film after being hit in the face by a suspender worn by co-star Gerard Butler. Swank needed three stitches after one of the suspenders snapped and whacked her above the eye. The incident happened on the set of forthcoming movie P.S I Love You, but it wasn't serious enough to stop the actress coming back to work the following day.
It's really bad when your acceptance speeches are so terrible that even articles of clothing want to hit you in the face. That's really all I have to add to that.
Making things last
Reigning Bond Girl Eva Green will be starring in an adaptation of In the Country of Last Things, based on the Paul Auster novel of the same name. It's a dystopian novel about a young woman who comes to an unnamed city looking for her brother. The city has been ravaged economically and is run by street dwellers, squatters and murderous vagrants.
It's my only hope that Green will play the spunky idealist who brings midnight basketball into town to make it all better again!
I know that the "gritty and realistic" James Bond is getting high praise and all that, but this is going to take grit and make it look like cute little candies. Honestly. Street dwellers, squatters, and murderous vagrants...did we really need a movie about former child stars that's so realistic?
Sometimes I'm amazed we won the war
Britney Spears faces legal action from an Irish newspaper after she sued it for suggesting her marriage to Kevin Federline was on the rocks. The Sunday Independent printed an interview with the singer earlier this year, in which it hinted the couple were heading for divorce. The fuming pop star immediately filed suit against the paper. Bosses at the Independent are now furious after the singer served Federline with divorce papers last week. The Sunday Independent's lawyer Simon McAleese says, "She's (Spears) trying to get money. "It was plainly bloody obvious that her marriage was on the rocks when the interview took place. She is a Hollywood airhead. Why should my clients have to pay for her bubble headed rubbish? We're fed up. Her gaffe has been blown. It's a shame we're dealing with ludicrous drivel like this as it can be costly."
I know that, as Americans, we tend to get caught up in the whole "greatest country in the yadda yadda" thing, but it's important to know when other countries cleanly surpass anything we could offer. One of those things is tabloids. If this were an American tabloid, we'd be suffering press releases from lawyers that use words like "disappointed," "mislead," and "without malice." Britishtabloid lawyers, on the other hand, use phrases like "plainly bloody obvious," "bubble headed rubbish," "gaffe," and "ludicrous drivel." I, for one, salute the British tabloids for theirunparalleled success in this area and hope to add "bubble headed rubbish" to my regular vocabulary.
Moore than awesome
Director Zack Snyder recently spilled the beans about his planned adaptation of the Alan Moore classic Watchmen and has good news for the die hard fans.
First up they've finished the script - "I've wanted to try to get back to the source material as much as I could without it being, of course, a six-hour long movie... I will tell you that the draft of the script is long. It's so long in fact that when we turned it in, we turned 'The Black Freighter' stuff in as a separate script so as not to scare them too much".
Better still, an extended cut of the film is already planned - "That's the one cool thing we have is DVD, and in my opinion it's not exploited nearly enough. [We could use that] to create the three-hour version of Watchmen. And [as a director] I'm totally fine with that, but I feel like that's a battle I haven't lost yet, so I'm not going to concede to it yet."
Okay. So, for those keeping score, I'm a total fanboy. So excuse the following geek-out, written in all caps for extra nerdiness:
So, um, there you go. It's gonna be awesome with extra awesomesauce.
Yeah, I'm excited.
It's kind of like when I say I love Devin Hester 108 yards later
New Line Cinema has picked up an untitled comedy from writer-director Rob McKittrick reports the trades. The project is something of a sequel to the yet-to-be-produced McKittrick project Mancrush. That film, which McKittrick wrote and is attached to direct, explored male bonding and heterosexual love between two men.
The studio is so high on Mancrush that it wanted something else in a similar vein. McKittrick came up with the untitled project, which he will write and direct, this time focusing on a love-hate relationship between two women.
Lately, whenever I've heard the phrase "mancrush," I picture the square table guys from the Miller Lite commercials running various dudes that it's okay to have a heterosexual crush on.
"Bret Favre?"
"No, he's only 15 INT's from having more than anyone in history. And he's a total d-bag."
"Fine. Philip Rivers. Man Crush?"
"Man Crush!"
And then they drink.
Matramonial Meyhem!
New Regency and Firm Films will produce the Kate Hudson flick Bride Wars. The comedy pits best friends against one another when the prospective brides have a wedding-date clash and neither will step aside.
Wow. Imagine the drama behind the "two girls wear the same dress to a party" cliche turned up to eleven. Yep. It's going to be that bad. Long-time readers will know that I am engaged myself. I recently went into a Bridal Mart with myfiancee and saw the kind of entourages that usually come with brides-to-be(my financee, who is wonderful, does not have a herd of 10 girls putting weird ideas in her head and jockeying to be the maid of honor...thank God). So if this movie follows that pattern, we could probably see a gang warfare scene on par with the one in Anchorman. I still won't it, though.
Radio Control
The Uma Thurman romantic comedy The Accidental Husband just expanded its cast considerably this weekend. Joining the Yari Film Group production are Colin Firth, Justina Machado, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Isabella Rossellini, Lindsay Sloane and Sam Shepard. Griffin Dunne is directing.
The story revolves around Emma Lloyd, a local talk radio host with a show about relationships. When one of her listeners follows her advice and breaks up with her boyfriend, a New York fireman, the boyfriend plans his revenge and sets Emma's life into crisis.
We're not dealing with a horrible concept here, but advice-dispensing radio hosts aren't the ones we truly need to focus our vengeance on. AM radio DJ's should face more wrath on a daily basis. There's something creepy about driving to work and listening to a studio full of morons spend more time laughing at their own jokes than they do making them. I'm asking you now; how is listening to a morning radio show any different than watching 4 of your dumbest friends after they've spent a little time with a bong?
This week's installment of CHEER UP BEN AFFLECK
The K-Fed/Britbrit saga may be over, but CHEER UP BEN AFFLECK, you got off of the Bennifer train just in time! At least, according to you:
"I should never have got engaged and never gone down that route. I thought I wanted certain things, but I didn't. I got lost and felt suffocated, miserable and gross."
"Being in the middle of a tabloid frenzy, it became so intense I had to stop and think, ‘What am I doing with my life?'"
"I had to smile for the cameras, but I was really in turmoil. I was no longer in control of my life and I didn't know which way to turn. I felt like a hamster in a cage. The faster my legs went, the less distance I seemed to travel."
So when you're thinking that life is terrible, just cuddle your hot wife and think about how bad it could have been.
That'll do it for this week...
Check out Casino Royale this weekend. I have a feeling you won't regret it. Not at all. I'm actually waiting until Thanksgiving so I can watch it with my dad, so no spoilers. Also, as if you needed to be reminded, don't do anything I wouldn't do...
(this week's sources: IMDB, Variety, Dark Horizons, CHUD, People.com, Fametastic)
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