The way casting announcements and pics of a pudgier Matt Damon had come down the pike, one had every reason to think that Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! (now with exclamation point) was going to skew more serious than its newly debuted trailer sells.

It's not that there's anything wrong with telling the real-life story of a bi-polar whistle-blower (Damon) with a more decidedly comedic bent, but 'thriller', this does not scream. Then again, maybe Soderbergh just wanted to lighten things up after the epic Che and the austere The Girlfriend Experience, and if that's indeed the case, things do seem to be heading more towards the Ocean's Whatever lark end of his spectrum.

Although most sites seem to have The Informant! with an October 9th release date, the trailer and the page around it (you know, with the 40-Year-Old Virgin-like possible poster art) both state September (in line with a 9/18 date we've seen floating around elsewhere). Either way, I suspect that an appearance at one of this fall's high-profile festivals will help assure us that the film does indeed merit its especially enthused punctuation and that the Damon does indeed merit his schlub-tastic appearance.

Overture has acquired the movie The Men Who Stare At Goats, which is based on the awesomely insane non-fiction book by intrepid reporter Jon Ronson. The book is a series of Ronson's investigations into the more bizarre aspects of the Bush administration's military, er, strategies. Like trying to kill goats just by staring at them or control the weather with your mind and, well, basically everything that dude in college who took too much acid was trying to tell you was true.

George Clooney plays the nutty (yet dreamy!) psychic spy Lyn Cassady who claims that he's been "reactivated" after 9/11, and Ewan McGregor is the reporter who investigates Cassady's strange tales. The fictionalized version of Ronson's book sounds a little more madcap than the reporter's tales of torturing suspected terrorists with the Barney theme song for hours, but I can't wait to see Clooney go eye-to-eye with a "de-bleated" goat for hours.

Goats is slated for a December 2009 release.

Ah, another week, another jumble to the calendar -- specifically, to 20th Century Fox's release slate.

According to Box Office Mojo, the studio has moved The Tooth Fairy back from November 13th to next January (because where else are you going to stick a Dwayne-Johnson-as-hockey-player-as-tooth-fairy outing?), and Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr. Fox has moved back a week from 11/6 to 11/13 as their choice contender for the family dollar. This now places it right after Disney and Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol (really, the first week of November?) and just before Warners' Cats & Dogs sequel (really, the second movie of Cats & Dogs?).

I'm not sure how much Johnson's recent Race to Witch Mountain cost, but I can't help but think that he'd like to outperform that film's good-not-great $60-ish million gross, and January could be just the grounds to do that in. (Paul Blart: Mall Cop opened within a week of the proposed new date and has raked in... almost $144 million? Yep, over $140 million.) Mr. Fox, on the other hand, is a mainstream proving ground for the ever-quirky Anderson, and with a voice cast that includes George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, and Anjelica Huston, let's hope it has reason to top the $28 million gross of that last animated adaptation of a Roald Dahl book, 1996's James and the Giant Peach.

But of course, none of that matters, because the real news is that Sandra Bullock's apparent psychological thriller rom-com All About Steve has found itself a home on September 4th. Sure, it's a little early in the awards season to stake a claim, but I'll leave the for-your-consideration campaign in their hands...

When it comes to George Clooney's political leanings, I have to tell you, I'm a little conflicted. Does it make me a hypocrite that I cringe whenever most actors wax poetic on the state of the union, but whenever Clooney gets a little high on the horse I tend to give him a pass -- maybe it's because I usually agree with him, or maybe like most of the world, I just can't seem to say no to 'The Clooney'. So while most of Clooney's political fare has been a relatively easy sell, his latest politically charged flick definitely will not fall into that category. Luckily for him, he has found the perfect partner in crime. Variety reports that Clooney has joined forces with Liberal darling Aaron Sorkin to write a script for the film version of Jonathan Mahler's book, The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power.

Clooney is producing under his Smoke House banner, and is reportedly looking to direct and star as the Navy lawyer, Charles Swift. Along with the Georgetown U. law professor Neal Katyal, Swift worked tirelessly to ensure a fair trail for Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan. Hamdan was captured back in 2001, and was convicted and sentenced to 5 1/2 years for providing material support to Al-Qaeda after being held at the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison. So even if you don't agree with Clooney and Sorkin's politics -- and I can guarantee that there are a lot of you out there who don't. I'll just be keeping my fingers crossed that The Challenge doesn't keep Sorkin so busy he doesn't have time for that other legal drama we have been hearing so much about.

So where does that leave me with actors and their politics? Plenty has already been said on the subject, so I won't rehash it all here. But while Iraq movies continue to crumble at the box-office, and the only presidents we are willing to dissect are the ones long past. I have to give Clooney credit for his willingness to tackle one hell of an unpopular subject -- don't you?

Sometimes a little patience will be well rewarded. The picture to the right isn't some image from the archives -- it's George Clooney on the ER set. (One of a few you can check out over at Starzlife.)

Last March, word hit that ER would be looking back to past characters, and Clooney could possibly reprise his role as Dr. Doug Ross. Cinematical readers weighed in, and while I was hoping for a rush of love from Facts of Life fans, 58.2% of you wanted to see Clooney return to the emergency room, and your wish has been granted.

There is no word on what sort of storyline Clooney is jumping into, but sleuthing the images has proved one thing: A wedding ring can also be seen in the pictures, which means that Ross is probably still shacked up with wife Carol (Julianna Margulies).

But after Burn After Reading, I can't help but wonder if Ross has the same sort of carpentry-related extracurricular activities that Harry Pfarrer had...

[via Ace Showbiz]

It's hard not to admire George Clooney. The man has worked his way up the ranks, became a superstar, and still manages to be loved and admired. But me, I'm not a fan because of his recent stints in films like the Ocean series, nor for his Batman, nor his sexy stint on ER. I'm a die-hard fan of the old Clooney days, where he sported a mullet and popped up in television shows like The Facts of Life and awesome flicks like Return of the Killer Tomatoes.

Seeing the above pictures, which are peeks of Clooney while shooting his new movie Men Who Stare at Goats (courtesy of Just Jared and The Bad and the Ugly), I couldn't help but think back to how the heartthrob has changed over the years, morphing from awkward kid to handsome leading man. So, I'm going to go backwards.

Consider the above number one, and then head through the jump to watch him become a sexy, bespeckled youngin' in six steps.

"Well, you tried it just for once, found it all right for kicks.
But now you found out that it's a habit that sticks,
and you're an orgasm addict." – The Buzzcocks

The new movie Choke, adapted from the Chuck Palahniuk novel, is about a sex addict (Sam Rockwell) who, in one element of the plot, hooks up with other sex addicts who attend the same Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings as him. Ah, the irony. The same thing happened to Sam Malone on Cheers, if I'm not mistaken, which makes the joke around 20 years old. Yet, despite that fact, sexual addiction as a term and a (non-DSM-recognized) medical problem seem fairly new to cinema.

Sure, there have been sex addicts in films for many decades, but they were more likely to be described as nymphomaniacs, lechers or typical men. Think of Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind, a number of the female characters created by Tennessee Williams and certainly the locked up nymphos in Shock Corridor. In the past few years, however, there have been a slew of actual "sexaholics," both male and female, though some aren't exactly referred to in such a manner.

Do you remember a George Clooney project, green-lit in May, Men Who Stare at Goats?
Not only does it boast the coolest title in the world, but it's racking up a cast of equal greatness. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, and Jeff Bridges are joining Clooney, under Grant Heslov's direction.

The film is based on Jon Ronson's book of the same title, and follows his investigation into the secret wing of the U.S. First Earth Battalion, a paranormal research unit created in 1978. Its goal was to create "Warrior Monks," supersoldiers who could do all sorts of comic-booky things like walk through walls, become invisible, read minds, and kill creatures by staring at them long enough. One soldier in Ronson's book claims he killed a hamster and a goat doing just that.

The adaptation is already switching things around a bit -- it's set in Iraq (where some of the supersoldiers have been reportedly deployed), and McGregor will be playing a stand-in for Ronson named Bob Wilton. He's desperate for a story, and stumbles upon the craziest one of a lifetime when he meets Lyn Cassady, played by Clooney, who claims to be a secret psychic soldier, reactivated after 9/11. As they travel through Iraq, investigating the story, they meet Bill Django, played by Bridges, who is the founder of the program and Cassady's mentor. Spacey will play Larry Hooper, another former psychic who is running a prison camp in Iraq.

While the topic of psychic supersoldiers seems to lend itself to comedy, Iraq and prison camps don't, so who knows what tone this will strike. Every actor in this can switch effortlessly from dramatic to quirky -- it's going to be a treat seeing them all in one film. Especially one with psychics and goat murders.

When the worlds of Washington, DC political intrigue, infidelity, fitness centers and internet dating intersect and collide in a darkly hilarious fashion, you must be watching a film by the Coen brothers. Burn After Reading, Joel and Ethan Coen's follow-up to last year's critically lauded award winner, No Country for Old Men, was actually written by the duo as they were adapting No Country, but the two films couldn't be more different.

The colliding worlds in Burn After Reading involve a CIA analyst named Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), who's summoned to a top-secret meeting only to find out that the secret is he's being demoted due to his drinking problem. Cox blows a gasket and quits rather than taking the demotion, planning to spend his new-found spare time working on his memoirs and refining his drinking. Cox is married to Katie (Tilda Swinton), a icy pediatrician with the worst bedside manner imaginable, and she's less than sympathetic to her husband's life crisis.

Welcome back to another edition of Insert Caption -- the game you won't want to burn after reading ... because, well, how could you win any prizes then? Last week we asked you to give us your best college-esque caption for a photo from the new comedy College. In return for your brilliance, we were shelling out a one-of-a-kind beer pong table. Sweeet! Only one winner this week, so congrats to John R. for his inspiring take on a classic tale ...



1. "Unfortunately, try as he might, Peter just couldn't find his way back into Narnia" -- John R.

See full image and all captions






This week, we're shacking up with our old Oscar-winning pals Joel and Ethan Coen as they get ready to unveil their latest darkly comedic crime caper, Burn After Reading, starring folks like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand. Prizes? Oh yeah, check it: One Grand Prize winner will receive one Burn After Reading USB 2.0, one T-shirt, one Water Bottle and two Wrist Bands. Wait, there's more! Four first prize winners will each receive one T-shirt, one Water Bottle, and two Wrist Bands. Sound off below!



Read the official rules for this contest