Ok, there is a lot of stuff going around the net about this one, since the first thing anyone thinks when they hear that Sopranos producer Brad Grey got Sopranos creator David Chase a directing gig is: Sopranos movie.

Well, that isn’t the case. Only because it has been announced as “not The Sopranos movie.” On a side note, The Sopranos movie does NOT have to go to Warners/HBO, so this could have been The Sopranos movie, but isn’t.

How do we know? Official press-release, bitches (after the jump)!

This is a interesting little tidbit, and if it is true, Lindsay Lohan has been blacklisted, in a way, from further film roles.

We jumped on the sotry like everyone else: Lohan was cast in Manson Girls as Nancy Pitman, a surfer chick who became enthralled with Manson’s Family. However, according to this newest item, she has been UN-ATTACHED because other actresses refused to co-star with her.

The dirt from the source, after the jump.

A UK-based company called Velvet Octopus is ready to begin production on a sequel to 2001 cult hit Donnie Darko, of Jake Gyllenhaal fame. Jake will not be returning, but Daviegh Chase, who played Donnie’s younger sister Samantha in the film, will be returning to star in the “sequel.”

The second film picks up seven years after the first film (and the ill-fated jet engine incident), with Samantha Darko and her friend Corey on a road trip to Los Angeles when they start having weird visions.

This seems like a really bad idea. Velvet Octopus would like to make it known that they have “spoken” to Richard Kelly, the director of the first film, but that he is not involved in any official way. That makes us thing: bring on the suck.

Cast, details and when this shit-storm starts to go down, after the jump.

It was a black list screenplay. Every year, agents and Hollywood insiders compile a list of the most talked about screenplays currently making the round in LaLaLand. The list has included films like Juno and Lars and the Real Girl, films that always turn into good indies if not Juno-sized indies.

At the top of last year’s list, Recount has been made with an all star cast including Kevin Spacey, Laura Dern and Tom Wilkinson and Dennis Leary. It covers the 2000 election recount in Florida, and will air on HBO Mary 25th.

Cut inside to see the trailer!

Want to see the first seven minutes of Speed Racer?

After the cut, we’ll embed the flash and link you towards where you can watch it in fantastic seizure-starting HD.

Once again, we could report on this story so much easier if we actually owned an Xbox 360, but – since that’s not happening in the next month or so – we usually get by on the kindness of Xbox-owning strangers. That’s why we know about BioShock, one of the best reviewed games lat year, pre-Halo 3 and GTA IV.

BioShock takes place in an underwater art deco civilization where your hero must kill little girls to suck the “Adam” out of them. There’s also a gene splicing plot, some mutants and giant guys in diving suits with drills for hands.

And now it’s got a director.

We have to say that we’re guilty as everyone else: We didn’t watch How I Met Your Mother until Britney Spears made her cameo.

We can’t really explain why, since Neil Patrick Harris, Allison Hannigan, Jason Segel and Bob Saget are all on it, and we love those guys.

In the back of our mind, we just feel like 3-camera sitcoms with laugh tracks are dead, and should be used sparingly. The “used sparingly” part is what makes us think we should at least watch HIMYM (Him-Yim, guys). Though it would be kicking House of Payne off our TV watching schedules.

Want to see a clip of Britney’s return? Click “Read More…” and watch that sh*t before someone pulls it off of YouTube for (no joke) the thirds time today!

This isn’t our first set of pictures from the various New York sets of Duplicity, the new Tony Gilroy movie where they play corporate spies who have had an affair in the past and decide to join forces to pull off a long con job.

But the Julia Roberts scene filmed in Columbus Circle at night was lit so well that even the telephoto paparazzi lens picks up Julia’s light halo. And Clive Owen’s Central Park bench sitting got some golden hour light that also looks good just as-is.

In a world of color correction, these images go to show just how much a good light design can do, even for leaked pictures of your stars.

As for how the movie is going, we’ve had friends become extras in Mid-Town restaurants, acquaintances run into Clive down at Grand Central Station, and still no reports of action in any sense of the word.

A bit talky, probably. But well-lit.

Last time we checked in with When In Rome, starring Kristen Bell, Josh Duhamel, Will Arnett, Jon Heder, Anjelica Huston, Dax Shepard, Danny DeVito, and Alexis Dziena, we learned that when Bell’s character throws coins into an Italian fountain wishing for love a lot of different dudes fall in love with her.

We know a bit about romantic comedies and casting, so our money is on Josh Duhamel showing her the “true meaning of love.”

On thing is for damn sure, it isn’t going to be Dax Shepard. At least not in that Abercrombie model getup.

UPDATE!:

So, there are also these pictures of Kristen Bell running through Edward’s restaurant on West Broadway, these pictures of Kristen in a yellow outfit, a picture of Kristen with a dog, Josh Duhamel laughing and Dax Shepard entertianing a resting Kristen Bell. Enough for ya?

What do Heroes, ER, Brothers & Sisters, Dirty Sexy Money, House, Bones, CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, NCIS and My Name Is Earl all have in common? They are all still in production despite the usually-horrible summer TV season already upon us (NBC’s All American Summer, anyone?).

This is because of the Writer’s Strike, though if you talk to anyone in production, they will call it “the new method of television production,” or some such thing.

When the WGA took to the streets and effectively shut down TV, most programs got a two-month hiatus smack-dab in the middle of their seasons. After the strike, most abruptly halted shows went back into production with an abbreviated episode order. Some, like House, were forced to move whole plot lines into next season.

But now that production has resumed and finales have been filmed, what are some of TV’s most consistent shows doing still shooting episodes? And why is Heroes in production even though they (wisely) decided to prematurely end Season 2?

It’s all part of the reactionary system of television production, which is going to make itself known to the world during next week’s upfronts…

We still haven’t gotten around to catching up with episodes one through whatever-episode-is-on-now of Gossip Girl. It has reached that watershed point where we need to start caring about it, not watch it but keep it on notice or completely ignore it.

Option three is going to be difficult, so it’s down to options one and two.

Either way, Gossip Girl has some new gossip surrounding the next season: it will be a 24-episode extended season to make up for the episodes lost during the Writer’s Strike.

Not that it’s official. Nothing is official until next week’s upfronts, where our various prophecies will come true.

Ryan Seacrest apparently fills in for Larry King from time to time. We wouldn’t know, we haven’t watched Larry King in a long time. The last time we thought we were watching Larry King, it was actually the original Universal Mummy movie. The black and white one.

Regardless, with Seacrest’s occasional forays behind the desk of King seem to be all he needs to kick up some rumor dust about his candidacy to replace Larry around the end of this year.

Details after the jump.

The Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull press package has finally been distributed! Get ready for a steady stream of promotional shots, though none of them show anything we haven’t known about before.

UPDATE: Yes, it is weird of us to debate skull mythology rather than show you all the pictures. Luckily, you have Coming Soon for that.

One of the curious additions was a very detailed history of The Crystal Skulls. 13 Skulls? Two of them have names? Continued tests? Atlantis? The crazy backstory begins here and continues below the jump…

n 1924, the famed British banker-turned-adventurer F.A. Mitchell-Hedges led an expedition deep into the Central American jungles of British Honduras (now Belize). His mission: to find evidence of the lost continent of Atlantis. But it was Mitchell-Hedges’ adopted daughter, Anna, who made a find for which this quest was to become famous. On Anna’s 17th birthday, as Mitchell-Hedges and his crew were excavating the ancient ruins of a Mayan temple at Lubaantun, Anna spied an object glinting in the soil under a collapsed altar: a beautiful sculpted human skull carved with uncanny craftsmanship out of a single block of translucent quartz crystal.

Entertainment Weekly scored the first look at Josh Brolin as George W Bush and Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, the roles they were given for Oliver Stone’s Bush II movie: W.

We were a little skeptical when Brolin was announced as W, because he was alos being looked at for a role in Terminator 4 (which we never really heard about again) and he had just come off No Country For Old Men, American Gangster and In The Valley of Elah – all movies where he appears to look nothing like President George W Bush.

This EW cover shut us up rightly. If they can make Banks and Brolin look this good, then James Cromwell as HW Bush and Ellen Burstyn as Barbara are going to look amazing, because those actors already kind of look the part already.