Stephen Dorff and Chris Pontius (Jackass) aren't the only men gearing up for Sofia Coppola's upcoming film Somewhere. It turns out the rumors are true -- Movieline has confirmed that Benicio del Toro will be making an appearance. Unfortunately, it's only brief. He'll play someone Dorff has a run-in with at the Chateau Marmont (where Dorff's character is holed up). This is fitting, as the site points out, since that's where he had that rumored sexy run-in with Scarlett Johansson. Will they meet in an elevator?

Meanwhile, funny woman Kathryn Hahn, who you surely remember from films like Anchorman and Step Brothers, has scored two new gigs -- one on the big screen, and one on TV. The Hollywood Reporter posts that she has grabbed a part in James Brooks' untitled baseball comedy, and is also developing a pilot with husband Ethan Sandler that she will potentially star in. As for the comedy -- that's the Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson, and possibly Jack Nicholson flick focusing on romance, laughs, and baseball. She'll play Rudd's assistant.

Finally, Cher is really doing what she can to perk up her career lately. Aside from Drop Out and The Zookeeper, Variety has confirmed that the earlier talks have now been sealed -- Cher will head to Christina Aguilera's upcoming Burlesque. The saucy icon will play "a former dancer who struggles to keep the club open and gives the young girl a chance to shine." Cher will sing for the film, but there's no word on whether she'll turn back time to wear that bathing-suit like body floss.

Aside from a brief dalliance playing Macro in Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula, Benicio Del Toro has been laying on the serious work ever since his snatchy time as Franky Four Fingers. But it looks like he's finally lightening up the load again. While I wouldn't say that the Moe gig in The Three Stooges is the best way to go about it, there's another project cooking that could remind us of the glory days of Benicio and Johnny hallucinating their way through Vegas.

In a talk with MTV, Bret Easton Ellis said that the gestating Lunar Park adaptation is in some state of pre-production and: "Oddly enough, Benicio Del Toro I think is going to do it." Why oddly? "Benicio would actually be playing Bret Easton Ellis. It's a strange bit of casting." Indeed -- it's not every day that Del Toro gets to bite at an anglo role.

Lunar Park is a mix between fact and fiction, taking nibbles from Ellis' early fame (drug use, Glamorama book tours), and then morphing it into ghost story as he moves into a haunted house in a fictional New York City suburb. The AV Club called it a "quasi-plausible" "domestic horror-comedy." While the actor might be far from my first choice visually for Ellis, I can't help but love the thought of him getting into the writer's darkly comic world. You?

Whenever you imagined a dream cast to play the Three Stooges in a movie, did you ever imagine an Academy Award-winning gay activist would be the first to sign? Sean Penn (?!) has agreed to play Larry in The Three Stooges, according to Variety, and Jim Carrey is negotiating for the part of Curly. Reportedly, Carrey is preparing to gain 40 pounds so he can play the role. And to play Moe? None other than Benicio Del Toro is being targeted by MGM and the Farrelly Brothers.

Jim Carrey would be a natural, of course, but Sean Penn? Does he have a funny bone in his body? His last attempt at a humorous role came in 1989's We're No Angels, a woefully unfunny film in which Penn was teamed with Robert DeNiro. Sure, he made his bones as the stoned surfer Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but it takes a real stretch of imagination to think he can play a Stooge. Stranger things have happened, though, and maybe Penn will pull a rabbit out of his ultra-serious persona and shock us all.

Del Toro doesn't have much of a comedy resume, either, though Variety's article claims he "showed comic chops" in Guy Ritchie's Snatch. Peter and Bobby Farrelly have written the script and will direct. The film is intended to be "not a biopic, but rather a comedy built around the antics of the three characters that Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Howard played in the Columbia Pictures shorts." Production is scheduled to begin in the fall for a 2010 release.

Am I underrating Sean Penn's comic abilities? Are you itching to see Penn, Carrey, and Del Toro as The Three Stooges?

I was beginning to think that Martin Scorsese was on a merry-go-round of music and organized mayhem, since he's been quite busy balancing crime with big-screen concert-going. But just as it looks like he's in a rut, Scorsese throws us something from left field. Well, not quite left field since we heard about it back in 2006, but close enough.

Variety reports that he's "determined" to make Silence next. Based on the Japanese novel, the film will follow a few Jesuit priests who head to Japan in the name of Christianity, only to discover that converts are being persecuted in defiance of Western influence. Marty has been sitting on this sucker for eons (he wrote a script of the Japanese novel ten years ago), and was set to film it in Vancouver in 2007. But now it's headed to New Zealand (Canada, sheep land, same difference?!), and Marty is negotiating with Daniel Day-Lewis and Benicio Del Toro to star, with Gael Garcia Bernal also entering talks.

I've been itching to see what he'd make of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, but you can't blame a guy for getting a decade-old project into gear, especially when you've got Daniel and Benicio ready to star. But will it still have "implications related to the war in Iraq"? And how will he fare on "Japanese" turf?

(We're reposting our review of Che from the Cannes Film Festival to coincide with the film's theatrical release)

By: James Rocchi

Plenty of people are going to be talking about Steven Soderbergh's Che Guevara biographical films -- The Argentine and Guerrilla, screened at Cannes tonight as one presentation simply called Che -- over the next few months. There will be arguments about the politics of the films; there will be discussions of whether or not the films have any emotional center; there will be questions of if, when the film gets some kind of U.S. distribution deal, exactly how they should be released -- two films released staggered throughout the last half of the year or cut down to one three-hour film or shown as a long, big double bill that presents the separate films back-to-back. There will be talk of if Benicio Del Toro deserves a Best Actor nomination for his work as Guevara, or if Soderbergh's portrait of Che is too flat to engage us; I can easily imagine discussions of the look and feel of the film, shot in high-resolution digital with all the craft and care Soderbergh usually brings to shooting on film. I can't predict how all of these questions and possibilities will play out, but I can say -- and will say -- what a rare pleasure it is to have a film (or films) that, in our box-office obsessed, event-movie, Oscar-craving age, is actually worth talking about on so many levels.

I was originally going to start out this post by going off on those studios that habitually change dates on their releases and wait until the last minute to do so. Instead, I'll try to remain positive and emphasize one particular studio that has given us a head's up on the shuffling of their 2009 slate: Universal.

Of utmost priority is director Joe Johnston and star Benicio del Toro's take on The Wolfman, which has been bumped back from this spring to next November (not unlike The Box). Usually, such shuffling might seem like a bad thing, but about six more months to polish what I'm guessing are so very many special effects sounds like a fair enough compromise (which isn't to suggest that Oscar-winning make-up wizard Rick Baker didn't do a fine job the first time around). Also moving back is Ridley Scott's Nottingham, now pushed to a TBD date in 2010.

"Darren did not put a strip pole in his office." -- Marisa Tomei.

Does the New York Film Festival still matter? The 46th edition opened last Friday, and while the fest may not have the celebrity cachet and discovery intent of Sundance and Cannes, or the welcoming populist mentality of Toronto, it stubbornly insists on being recognized as the gatekeeper for all that is worthwhile in world cinema.

Nonetheless, press conferences with a big-name American director and a resurrected American star (and his fetching, Academy Award-winning co-star) have stolen the spotlight during the first week of the festival. Looking somewhat like a guerilla himself, Steven Soderbergh arrived to promote his four-hour epic Che, starring Benicio del Toro as the revolutionary leader. According to the director, "There are a million Ches -– he means something different to everyone."

That attitude has irked some critics; Karina Longworth at Spout felt that Soderbergh's "unwillingness to make a statement may be a major part of the problem." On the other hand, Glenn Kenny of Some Came Running opined: "Silly me, I imagined that such an approach constituted a statement sufficient unto itself, but apparently not." The film will get a rare "roadshow" treatment when it opens in December: trotted around in its four-hour entirety to selected cities for one week only by IFC Films in December, complete with elevated ticket prices and a fancy giveaway program of some sort. Dreamgirls for the intelligentsia?

After the jump: The Wrestler and two fresh new films about those darn kids.

If you're like me, stuck at home, reading about all the great films playing in Toronto, and wondering, "When can I actually get to see the darn things?," I have some good news. Two "big buzz" titles have been acquired for distribution: Steven Soderbergh's Che, starring Benecio del Toro in the title role, has been nabbed by IFC Films (not Mark Cuban) for North America, and Summit Entertainment has secured US rights to Katheryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, featuring Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes.

IFC will release Che for a one-week awards qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles in December, according to an official statement received by Cinematical. It will then open in January via the company's "IFC in Theaters" platform, which means it will be available in select theaters and "on demand" through cable and satellite systems the same day. Ever since Che's world premiere at Cannes in May (where James Rocchi reviewed it), there has been speculation about how the film would be presented. Che is comprised of two stand alone parts -- The Argentine and Guerilla -- and the total running time is more than four hours. Now we know we'll some of us will be able to see the whole thing at one time. *

There's good news and bad news, Soderbergh fans: The bad news is that the director's two-part, Benicio Del Toro-starring Che Guevara biopic Che, as noted in a recent piece in The Hollywood Reporter, still doesn't have a U.S. distributor. Gregg Goldstein's piece (which also looks at the similar challenges faced by Cannes '08 films Synedoche, New York and Two Lovers) notes that there are four offers on the table from independent distributors, but no deal has yet been signed.

For many who saw Che at Cannes (including myself), this is vexing news. Goldstein also relates that one distributor's hopes to purchase Che as a single film with a three-hour running time has been roundly rebuffed. However, in case anyone would like to see what all the fuss is about -- albeit in blurry, bootleg fashion -- a grainy, blurry bootleg of the trailer (in all Spanish with no subtitles) for the first half of Che, The Argentine, has hit YouTube (see above) -- and while the bootlegged trailer may lack clarity and definition, it also gives a great sense of the look and the feel of the film.

Does The Argentine's trailer make you hunger for all of Soderbergh's Che? Or does it just make you appreciate how hard it's going to be to get a distributor to back a four-hour long historical drama in Spanish?

I'm not sure how long this will remain up, so I'd clear out the room, grab some popcorn, poor a glass of blood -- or whatever the hell is it that you do to prepare for awesomeness -- and check out the video above right away. What you'll see is the much buzzed-about footage from The Wolfman that screened at Comic Con last week (read our panel coverage here). I was at this panel and absolutely loved what I saw of this flick; it looks creepy, chilly and Gothic. And when your cast spits out names like Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt and Hugo Weaving (not to mention special makeup effects from a dude by the name of Rick Baker), then you know something special is in the works. Check out the gallery below for more kickass Wolfness.

The Wolfman is currently set to attack theaters on April 3, 2009.