Simon Pegg and Nick Frost aren't the only ones getting to take a road trip with Seth Rogen. He's gotta move, gotta get out, gotta leave this place, gotta find some place. Some other place, some brand new place ... with Barbra Streisand. (I know, I can't believe I know those lyrics either.)

HitFix has the scoop that Rogen is developing a comedy called Mother's Curse, and while it's one of an estimated 300,000 projects the unlikely A-Lister is working on, this one has Streisand. Mind you, she's not even officially attached, and the movie doesn't even truly exist. Curse's storyline is under tight development wraps, and the script is still in the process of being written. As Drew McWeeny notes, "When I asked Seth about the film, he referred to it as 'one of the many projects I may or may not do in the next fifteen years,' which is a fair description. So keep in mind... I'm not saying this will or won't happen ... just that it could." It's a pet project of Paramount's new head of production Adam Goodman, so that alone could get it made under that fifteen year mark.

Just the names of Rogen and Streisand together is pretty delightful though, isn't it? I like this new trend of mature, Oscar-loaded actors being game for just about anything. It's like we went back to the Golden Age of screwball comedies when it was ok for everyone to cut loose onscreen, and comedy wasn't just Meet the Spartans schlock.

Hot Hollywood star Amy Adams is negotiating to star in The Fighter, along with Terminator Salvation's Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg. David O. Russell is directing the biopic of the boxer "Irish" Micky Ward, which will call for Marky Mark to dust off his tough-guy Boston accent and don boxing gloves to fight his way to the championships with help from his trainer and brother Dick Eklund, who will be played by Bale. Multiple Oscar nominee Adams will be playing Ward's love interest, a tough-talkin' bartender in Lowell, MA.

The Fighter, which will be distributed domestically by Paramount, is supposed to begin filming this summer, although with Russell's track record, whether that will really happen is anyone's guess. The project has been through several incarnations, which you can read about here, and Russell is infamous for his on-set outbursts, as is Bale. Russell's last project, Nailed, is in a holding pattern indefinitely.

So will The Fighter make it to the ring? Will Bale and Russell have a shouting match that will find its way to YouTube? Will Mark Wahlberg say "how's your mother?" And will Amy Adams, star of the upcoming Ephron flick Julie & Julia, be totally awesome? I'm voting yes on all counts!

(Via Hollywood Reporter)

The numbers are in. Moviegoers worldwide voted with their hard-earned dollars (and euros and other monetary currencies) and elected to go see Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Box office receipts placed the sequel at the top of this year's heap o' blockbusters, and by the time all is said and done, the film could rank among the top box office earners of all time. But why did so many people go buy tickets? Why did you?

As pointed out by Eugene Novikov, Transformers 2 "received the most hysterically negative reviews of 2009." Only 21% of reviews by critics at Rotten Tomatoes were positive. (Surprisingly, it fared better at the pickier MetaCritic, with 36% positive.) Eugene acknowledged that it's the kind of movie that defines "critic-proof." So, obviously, critical opinion had no bearing on the box office. Why did this movie hit so big? In his analysis, industry observer David Poland felt that producer Don Murphy and director Michael Bay should be celebrated, the former "for truly believing in this concept being a big home run" and the latter "for understanding the images that will draw massive numbers of people based on 2 minutes or less of images." So was it all about the concept and the trailers?

Marketing obviously plays a huge role in determining how a movie opens, as does, to a somewhat lesser extent, the cast and director. But what was it about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen that pushed your button(s), elevating it to "must see" status? Take our poll and let us know!

Oh, the obvious jokes you can make about Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci being involved with a project called License to Steal. Considering they penned both of Michael Bay's robot-gasm installments, and Star Trek, plus produced The Proposal, one could say that this was their Hollywood life story.

But it's not. According to Variety, License to Steal is actually based on Marc Weingarten's Salon.com article The Learjeat Repo Man, which examines world of repo men. Not just any repo men that come after your flatscreen or your Prius, but the "big game" hunter who steal / repossess private jets, yachts, helicopters, and whatever else it is rich, corrupt people own. For the dangers they face (and oh, do they face dangers) they receive a cut of the overall value.

The script is being penned by Shane Salerno, Kurtzman and Orci are its executive producers. The project was shopped around by WME to three major studios, all with directors lined up to bid, and Salerno pitching it each and every time. McG took the project to Warner Bros., Timur Bekmambetov took it to Universal, and Bryan Singer took it to Sony. But Paramount snapped it up before anyone else had a chance to bid, and without a director attached. But Paramount has the dynamic duo pulling the strings, so they'll undoubtedly pull some major name in to tell the story they describe as "a smart, lighthearted action movie ... with a lot of unexpected plot twists." As you wait for the talent to hook themselves up, you can read the Salon piece, and dream of success and adventure ... either those enjoyed by Weingarten's repo men, or that of Kurtzman and Orci.

(Oversight! Thanks to ScreenRant for the photo up there! -- Weinberg)

As a high-school graduation present to myself in 1993, I stayed up all night watching the original Star Wars trilogy on video. When the Extended Edition of The Return of the King arrived on DVD, I camped out on my couch and sat through all three Lord of the Rings films in their longest versions, one after the other. And for two separate retrospective assignments in anticipation of their recent big-screen rebirths, I endured all ten Star Trek movies and all eleven Friday the 13ths. But I can honestly say that as a film critic and lifelong cinephile, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen may be the most movie I have ever experienced.

Michael Bay, condensing the cumulative total of the spectacle from all of his seven previous films into one unwieldy, gargantuan opus, has exceeded even the possibilities of sequel-driven "moreness," combining his own muscular, high-gloss sensibility with the conventions of blockbusters past, present, and probably future to create a monolithic action masterpiece that feels destined to be the biggest movie of all time.