What's a Ben Stiller movie without Owen Wilson? They've been working together together on and off -- though it seems more like continuously on -- since The Cable Guy. It is no surprise, then, that Wilson has just signed up for Stiller's Tropic Thunder. This is Stiller's fourth feature as director, and with the exception of his debut, Reality Bites, he has so far found a role for his friend in all of them (he also directed Wilson in the TV pilot for Heat Vision and Jack). It isn't clear what kind of role Wilson will have this time, but I'm guessing he will play an actor working on the movie-within-the-movie. So far, these actors, who end up on a war film shoot gone to hell, include Robert Downey Jr. as an Oscar-winning star, Jay Baruchel as an unknown, Jack Black as a drug addicted comic actor, and Stiller himself, who may be a pumped up action star (as per Erik's educated guess). Then, as a non-actor, Tom Cruise is rumored to be making a cameo as a studio tyrant.

Also joining the cast now is Nick Nolte. His part is also unspecified, but he clearly must be some actor playing a lieutenant colonel or something -- basically playing himself playing his part in The Thin Red Line. Nolte is thankfully getting a lot of work these days, despite his infamous personal problems, but this is a welcome chance for the 48 Hrs. actor to return to comedy. Sure, he's not the funniest man in the world, but I think he's a good cranky straight man (in addition to the two 48 Hrs. movies, he's the only good thing about Three Fugitives), and he can even occasionally be the comic, too (Down and Out in Beverly Hills). Unfortunately he really missed the funny boat by working with director Alan Rudolph in Breakfast of Champions and Trixie (he has done great dramatic work for the director), and so it seems easier to just cast him in dramas. Although Nolte probably won't have the opportunity to get a lot of laughs in Tropic Thunder, I at least applaud Stiller for adding him to the ensemble of funnymen.

He wasn't directly associated with the movies, but Kurt Vonnegut was a literary icon whose work and persona often carried over into the cinema, even when he wasn't actually involved. The author, who wrote some of America's funniest and most poignant pieces of fiction and non-fiction, died Wednesday night in New York City, and I have to say that I'm more broken up about it than I have ever been with any celebrity's passing. His wife, photographer Jill Krementz, said that he had fallen several weeks ago and suffered irreversible brain injuries.

A few of his books were made into movies, despite the fact that his prose is more about telling than it is about showing, thereby making his works unlikely candidates for the visual medium. Surprisingly, some, like Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night, are terrific. Unfortunately, others, like Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick (Of Another Kind) are completely wretched. There have been others, mostly based on short stories, mostly made-for-television and mostly unavailable. And there have long been talks of adaptations of the novels Cat's Cradle, which Leonardo DiCaprio is trying to make, and Sirens of Titan, which Mother Night screenwriter Robert B. Weide has been interested in for many years.

One of the most random links Vonnegut had to the movies, though, came with the Rodney Dangerfield guilty pleasure Back to School. The writer made one of the most memorable cameos ever, appearing as himself in a sequence in which Dangerfield's character gets an "F" on a paper about Vonnegut. The joke: Vonnegut himself was paid to write the paper. Also, interestingly enough, Back to School co-star Keith Gordon went on to direct Mother Night. Another strange connection came in the late 1990s, when a lot of so-so teen movies were explicitly referencing Vonnegut or his books. I can only remember this definitely being done in Varsity Blues, Disturbing Behavior and Can't Hardly Wait, but I could swear there were more.