The most annoying thing about following movie news and patronizing film festivals is the pesky waiting. You hear about a film, you get excited, and then you wait. And then you wait more. Once you hit that 365-day mark, it's no longer just an exercise of patience, but trying to come to terms with the fact that you might never see the movie at all, or might never see the movie again. It seemed that this is what would happen with Chapter 27, which premiered back in January of 2007, but now, finally, the film is going into limited release this week.

To refresh your memory: this is the film about John Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman, and details the days that lead up to the infamous day. It's got Lindsay Lohan pre-clean up, and Jared Leto all body-morphed. In an interview with New York Daily News, Leto talks about morphing into the pudgy killer, and his take on the role.

I must have had too many cups of coffee when I agreed to take on a Cinematical Seven covering the hunks of sports films. (Erik had the easy job, picking the Hottest Sports Girls.) Trying to pick the studs is like having hundreds of 4-star, wonderful movies thrown on your desk and being asked to pick the 7 best. Yeah, right! No problem! To make the task easier, I decided to pick a range of sports, and never double up on one particular type. That cut out a whole slew of possibilities, and what I came up with is what you see below.

What have I learned from picking the Seven Sexy Sporting Studs from cinema? The best of the best (pun intended) were in the '80s and '90s. I also learned that you should never share the list with a friend beforehand -- they'll remind you who you're forgetting, and that's why you'll find one tie down below. Enjoy!

The Eight Men Out Team

The only thing I knew when I took on this assignment was that Eight Men Out was going to be featured. Bull Durham is great and all, but this is the baseball movie. It's John Sayles, and it has the best baseball team to ever make it on the screen. They might have let their morals loosen a little, but they still kept their looks. Foolishly, I tried to pick between John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, D.B. Sweeney, and David Strathairn. Forget that! I'm taking the easy way out. Cusack's Buck Weaver was super cute as a "future jailbird," Charlie was always tasty in those days, and it's beyond me why women weren't falling all over David Strathairn the minute he jumped into film with Return of the Secaucus Seven, or any of the bigger movies that were soon to come. And Sweeney was cute, too, in that dorky way.

Nirvana held on to its legacy for about a decade, but little by little their power and mystery is being stripped away. When I first started hearing their music in movies and television, it didn't bother me nearly as much as I expected it to. "All Apologies" was used brilliantly in a late episode of Six Feet Under. "Something in the Way" was put to good use for an effective scene in Jarhead. But then, it all started to fall apart. "Breed" used in Shoot 'Em Up and a baseball video game? Eight Nirvana songs used, badly, on Cold Case? Just how much heroin money does Courtney Love need? Lately, several films have dealt with the life of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. Gus van Sant gave us the staggeringly boring Last Days. I'm eager to see the new documentary Kurt Cobain: About a Son. And Variety has just announced a big-screen adaptation of what many consider the definitive Cobain biography -- Charles Cross' excellent Heavier Than Heaven.

Apparently, "the producers and studio would not address whether they had locked down music rights, or the nature of the story they are trying to tell." Cobain's widow Courtney Love is listed as an executive producer, so I'd imagine they'll have pretty unlimited access to Nirvana's vaults. No director has been announced, but David Benioff will write the script. That makes me a little more comfortable with the idea, because I think he's a fantastic writer. Benioff adapted his novel The 25th Hour for Spike Lee, and that's one of my favorite films of the decade. Still, the whole thing fills me with unease. So much of this could go very wrong and further tarnish the Nirvana legacy. I wonder what they're going to do about Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl? Won't it be a little odd to see those two portrayed by actors? And since their relationship with producer Love is so strained, what if she paints them in a negative light? Ewan McGregor was rumored to play Cobain at the beginning of the year (I could see that), and something tells me Jared Leto is calling his agent as we speak. Ugh. Who would you cast?

Jared Leto has come a long way since his stint as Jordan Catalano. While he probably could've rode the girl-admiration train for a while, he's been all over the map with his film choices -- he's ran, fought as a soldier and an Angel Face, loved mentally-troubled women, got slashed by a Huey Lewis-loving psycho, been an addict, traversed the Sunset Strip, menaced with cornrows and even threw on the weight to embody Mark David Chapman. Now he's getting a bit fantastical to even out the reality a bit with writer/director Jaco van Dormael's first English-language feature, Mr. Nobody. And, his co-star is none other than recent Away From Her director Sarah Polley.

The romantic drama is being described as a "multilayered love story inspired by the 'butterfly effect.'" No, not the questionable film, but what it was based on -- the part of chaos theory that claims that the mere movement of a butterfly's wings can cause atmospheric changes that start a chain of events that have large and far-reaching results. Leto is playing nemo Nobody, a 120-year-old man, and the last mortal, living amongst immortals in the not-so-distant future. Nobody spends his time reliving both "real and imaginary years of marriage." Whatever that means. Production begins next week, and will shoot in Brussels, Montreal and Berlin. Being in that stage where we only have the smallest bit of information, anything could be possible, but regardless, it's sounding like a pretty intriguing notion. That, and I'd like to see what Polley can pull out of Leto.

Leave it to Hollywood to change the basis of a storyline to glam things up a bit. Last year, Martha Fischer reviewed Lonely Hearts for the Tribeca Film Festival. The story is based on the Lonely Hearts Killers -- a murderous and far-from-glamorous duo/couple from the late 1940's. He was a balding, toupee-wearing man with a large scar on the top of his head, she was a 200+ pound woman who had spent her life lonely and ridiculed. That obviously doesn't make for sexy cinema, so the leads were cast with Jared Leto as Raymond Fernandez and Salma Hayek as Martha Beck.

It's actually interesting that the story was so sauced up, since the screenwriter and director is Todd Robinson -- the grandson of Detective Elmer C. Robinson, who was one of the detectives in the case. I guess familial ties can't also ensure accuracy. Now the film, which follows predecessors like The Honeymoon Killers and Deep Crimson, has found itself a U.S. distributor in Roadside Attractions and Samuel Goldwyn films. Beyond Leto and Hayek, there's John Travolta without the Hogs as Detective Robinson, James Gandolfini as his partner, Charles Hildebrandt, Scott Caan as another detective and Laura Dern as a co-worker who is having an affair with Robinson. As Martha described in her review, the story focuses on both sides of the story -- the couple who kill and the police duo who hunt them down. You won't have to wait too long to see the film for yourself, as the plan is to release it next month, on April 13.

I hate to borrow material from another film critic, but a colleague of mine offered the following words after we finished watching Chapter 27: "It's like a feature-length version of De Niro's 'You talkin' to me' speech from Taxi Driver -- only without Scorsese, Schrader or De Niro." I repeat that sentence because it perfectly encapsulates my own opinion on the deadly dull and seriously dreary Chapter 27, a movie that promises to offer some insight into why Mark David Chapman, on one chilly night in 1980, shot the beloved John Lennon to death. But after 90-some minutes of J.P. Schaefer's writing/directing debut, I was no closer to understanding Chapman's motivations than I was 90 minutes earlier. I know it has something to do with J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, but any other specifics are lost beneath waves of babble, tedium and pretense.

Lead actor Jared Leto earned himself a producer's credit on Chapter 27, and it's blatantly obvious from the first few frames of the flick that the young actor really, ahem, beefed up for the role. And Leto wants you to know it, which is why we see Chapman parading around in his tighty-whities for two or three scenes. Jared might as well look directly into the camera lens and scream "Look how much weight I gained for this role!" To make matters worse, Leto (who, to be fair, has done some excellent work in movies like Panic Room, American Psycho and Requiem for a Dream) opts to brandish a rather nasally high-pitched squeak of a voice, which makes Chapter 27 feel like a straight-faced parody of Capote. And I don't think that's what Leto and Company were going for.

Karina Longworth, the Editor Emeritus of Cinematical, is taking advantage of her mostly-meaningless title to post a diary of her experiences at Sundance. Your new editor wants her to do this every day, but in case she, uh, doesn't, it's because her real job got in the way.

Reading Eugene Hernandez' blog whilst waiting the for the cab to arrive to take me to La Gaurdia this morning, I learned that David Poland and Jeffrey Wells have declared that Sundance 2007, which officially begins tonight, is, in fact, already over. You see, they arrived in Park City a good 48 hours ahead of me, took turns inserting their thermometers in the rectum of the festival, and rushed to their computers to report the reading: cold. In fact, according to Wells, EVERYONE is saying that this year's line-up looks "flat, so-so, nothing to write home about material...a couple of almost-but-not-quite- as-good-as-Half Nelson flicks, and apparently nothing even close to a Little Miss Sunshine-type breakout waiting to happen."

Though tempted to reach for my phone to cancel the car -- a Sundance without a Sunshine is no Sundance for me! -- my more rational self prevailed. Instead, actually invigorated by the prospect of attending a film festival in which an over-hyped (and over-priced) Vacation retread steals headlines (and potential aquisition dollars) from ten or twelve films more deserving of market share, I zipped up my laptop and went downstairs. I went to the airport, got on the plane, and landed a little while ago. I even had my first Chik-fil-a in the Cincinatti airport during my layover. It was good. I ate too many waffle fries, though.

I used to like Lindsay Lohan. Sometimes, I wonder if my praise was her kiss of death, as I have a tendency to be attracted to doomed things. Just when I started to describe her as real and talented, she became a wild party girl choosing crappy roles. Although she was better-received for her role in A Prairie Home Companion, it's still the first film after Herbie Fully Loaded. And, let's not forget the recent letter she wrote about Robert Altman in all of its "adequite" goodness, which reminds me of a time when a certain Avril Lavigne called David Bowie "B-OW-EE."

And now, I am tense with anxiety as I gear up to share a new rumor floating around the film world. Lindsay Lohan might produce and star in a movie about Stevie Nicks. While anything is possible, especially since they have similar features, and she could potentially shock the pants off me with a great performance, the thought of her trying to embody the lady wrapped in black chiffon seems comparable to Rob Schneider taking on the role of Robert Plant. To me, Nicks just has that aura of strength and power. Whether smiling or scowling, there's that interesting sense of something boiling under the surface. Lohan's smile and look seem too linked to Disney films and "innocence."

What might be more promising is the rumor attached to it -- that Jared Leto would co-star. This could just be wishful thinking stemming from the rumors of a Leto-Lohan tryst, but it's not a stretch to see him as Lindsey Buckingham. He has done a good job of morphing into different roles, and has vocal talents. Furthermore, he and Lohan worked together in the upcoming Chapter 27. But could Lohan BE Stevie Nicks, or would it just be her with bleached hair?

Not content with rumors of romantic entanglement with Lindsay Lohan, Jared Leto managed to get gout while effectuating what all the sources are calling a "dramatic weight loss," from his fattified role in the movie about the killing of John Lennon, Chapter 27.

Gout is an incredibly painful form of arthritis where crystals (crystals?!) form inside a joint, and crunch up against each other everytime the joint is moved. This then causes further nastiness like swelling in the surrounding tissues and, probably, incredible grouchiness in the victim. Leto, frontman for the, um, totally awesome band 30 Seconds to Mars, is not the only important historical figure to suffer from the disease. He joins the ranks of other eminent men like Ben Franklin, Karl Marx, Benjamin Disraeli, Pablo Neruda and Alexander Hamilton in coping with his crystally joints.

To be fair, and to add context, Mr. Leto was quite excellent (and extremely skinny) in Requiem for a Dream. And we do actually quite love him in roles like his in American Psycho and Fight Club (where he was the "something beautiful" Ed Norton destroyed). But he will perpetually hold a little heart-throb place in my heart as Jordan Catalano.

Of course, he didn't look all that gouty last night, when he rolled up in a biodiesel powered army vehicle (all the bling of a hummer, with less environmental guilt) ...