Sometimes the news writes your story for you. With the WGA Strike going on and no new scripts being written, The Bad and Ugly is pitching news stories as films.

Ideas go to the highest bidder!

The Story: 41-year-old Arkansas resident Michelle Duggar is pregnant with her 18th child, adding to her already large family of seven sisters and ten brothers. Also, all their names start with the letter J (monogram once, use 18 times): Joshua, 20; Jana, 18; John-David, 18; Jill, 16; Jessa, 15; Jinger, 14; Joseph, 13; Josiah, 11; Joy-Anna, 10; Jeremiah, 9; Jedidiah, 9; Jason, 7; James, 6; Justin, 5; Jackson, 3; Johannah, 2; and Jennifer, 9 months.

It’s the Planet Duggar Pitch, after the jump!

We’ve been doing Brief Absurdity since the site’s launch and we think this is pretty much the most absurd clip ever. It looks like it was made way back before you couldn’t do shit like this to dogs without getting fined, sued or protested.

As a result, nothing like this clip will ever exist again.

Try not to think too much, this clip is safe for work (or wherever), but needs no synopsis.

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…

From the villain banker stroking a dead rat to the “Self Destruct” option on the fort. From the “Bond girl’s” non-joke name to the stabbing/screwing device, this VH1 sponsored short “Homeless James Bond” should get its own show.

But we might only be saying that because Viacom picked up The Hills for another craptacular season.

Call us internet geeks (please, call us internet geeks instead of the things you want to call us), but sometimes we spend late nights watching online fan films.

Fan films are truly labors of love, because they are dealing with copyrighted material that cannot be used for profit. The only reasons to do a fan film are 1) You’re a fan with an awesome story and a love of the world or 2) You’re a filmmaker ready to show your stuff with an awesome story and a love of the world.

“Awesome story” and “love of the world” are what separates the good fan films from the shitty ones.

And, oh are there shitty ones.

We’ve selected five of our all-time favorite fan films to highlight here today. We did not exhaust ourselves with research here, not because we didn’t want to, but because 4 out of 5 fan films are Star Wars-based and who wants to take the time to watch all those?

We have 5 fan films, one of them is full length and they are NOT all Star Wars based.

Make the jump with us by clicking “Read More…”

22-year old college student Masha Markova was lucky enough to attend a celebrity birthday party at a club called 1Oak. Masha took off her $11K mink coat and put it on the seat next to her, then sat down.A pile of coats ended up being the only thing between her and Lindsay Lohan.

Lohan, celeb B-days, overpriced furs, this girl has it made!

Then, after the party was over, she noticed her coat was missing. Masha reported the missing coat to the 1Oak management, who said they would keep an eye out for it.

Then, Masha was flipping through OK! Magazine when she spotted the left-hand picture above.

Yup. Lindsay took her coat.

Details on this absurdity after the cut.

Yes, there was a “concept art” image of Aaron Eckhart as Two-Face being passed around late last night that has subsequently been pulled by Warner Brothers across the net.

No, we cannot covertly tell you where it is right now like we do with leaked trailers.
Leaked trailers are just things made for public consumption that they get ahold of too early. What Two-Face looks like is one of those surprises that make the difference between you walking into The Dark Knight expecting everything and you walking into The Dark Knight to get your socks blown off.

We will say this about the still-searchable Two-Face concept art: it looks much different from the blurry photograph above of what is supposed to be the Two-Face toy.

That’s not the end of our (or anyone else’s) speculation. Click “Read More…” for - um - More.

No, this is not about the television series Bones (sorry Dave’s Mom). It’s about the rumor that The Lovely Bones is running into production troubles and – as a result – has been pushed back to the fall.

We reported on this on Thursday and again on Friday when we were told by Dreamworks sources to look for Bones in the fall of 2009, not in March like everyone expected.

Now, Dreamworks has told Coming Soon that they never planned to release The Lovely Bones in March ’09:

Turns out, the movie was never scheduled for March 13 at all, there has not been a delay or “rift,” and a fall 2009 launch was always the plan. DreamWorks chief Stacey Snider cleared up the issue by telling ComingSoon.net, “It was a very smooth shoot with no dissent, and all heaven sequences requiring sets or Art Dept involvement were completed on schedule in March. The only shooting remaining involves blue-screen VFX elements, which will be shot in June.”

What’s the best thing about getting Hi-Res trailers as downloads? Going frame-by-frame through some awesome visuals.

Beware the spoilers, boys and girls, there are brief glimpses in the Dark Knight trailer of plot details.

That we will point out and explain BELOW THE CUT!

We’re pretty sure we can’t jinx anything by writing something on our little blog, so here it goes: let’s assume that everyone is right about Iron Man raking in the millions, launching the summer movie scene and firmly establishing Marvel as a movie studio as well as one of the big two comic producers.

What does this mean for Marvel?

Marvel’s deal with Paramount caps off at 10 films, but only two of those films must be released through Paramount. Iron Man counts as film one and The Incredible Hulk is not involved in the deal, so Marvel must make one more movie for Paramount to distribute. After that, Paramount can distribute 8 more Marvel flicks, but only if Marvel chooses to bring them to Paramount.

Think about it like this: one more Marvel movie and Marvel becomes a free agent.

Sort of. The deal with Paramount outlines that if a “Captain America” or “Nick Fury” movie is made, Paramount gets those offered to them first as the second picture in the two-picture locked deal. Also, any sequels to Paramount-released films must also find their way through the studio.

The only problem is that Marvel isn’t producing movies fast enough. No one knew that they would be able to open something as wide as Iron Man with such good tracking numbers, and Marvel must be scrambling right now to name its next property.

Because of the impending SAG strike (negotiations ended today between SAG and the AMPTP), Marvel has hesitated to announce a production date for a 2009 release, meaning that there may be absolutely NO MARVEL MOVIES IN 2009 (obviously, Marvel is not heading production on the Wolverine prequel).

If Marvel can’t get production off the ground for their next project because of an actor’s strike, you can kiss “Captain America,” “Ant Man,” “Thor,” “The Avengers,” “Nick Fury” goodbye until 2010.

Marvel only has the means to make about 2 movies per year while still keeping their TLC attitude towards their properties, so if Iron Man does well, expect an announcement on Monday from Mravel that will include the following points:

- Their stock will go up.

- They will announce their official weekend earnings.

- They will greenlight Iron Man 2 for 2010

- They will announce their next property to hit development.

Don’t expect Captain America to be the announced property, even though it would be badass. Iron Man is going t do well internationally, and Captain America isn’t exactly international fare.

We suggest jumping off the cliff headfirst and introducing Captain America as the origin story for an Avengers movie, but that’s a lot of cash to risk, especially after Justice League crashed and burned so early on.

We received an e-mail with this video in it, telling us that there was no way that “the MSM” would pick it up.

MSM is the internet newspeak acronym for Mainstream Media, and despite the fact that this is on top of some social networking sites such as Digg, we feel that the e-mailer might be right.

After the jump we have (we’re not kidding) a Clinton advisor calling the people of Indiana “Worthless White Ni**ers.”

We know this has nothing to do with entertainment news or celebrity gossip, but we’ll stop looking for Brief Absurdity headlines for today in lieu of posting this.

Why aren’t you playing Grand Theft Auto IV right now? It has so may unique features to simulate Liberty City, from it’s own Flickr to it’s own Craigslist (craplist!) to the ability to go online and kill people in the multiplayer ‘verse.

Here’s the embarrassing thing: GTA’s faux-celebrity journalism following coke heiress Chloe Parker (Paris Hilton, anyone?) is a pitch perfect combo of TMZ and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

And it’s pretty complete, making us drool over the Xbox 360 we haven’t bought yet, even though Halo was enough. Now, we have no excuse.

In honor of the 25th Anniversary of the release of Return of the Jedi, comedy group Runaway Box and Lando remind us about the native teddy bears of Endor.

Ok, our good friend David Jr has compiled his footage form the crazy Dark Knight Viral that took place on Monday in New York.

Some observations from Dave’s neck of the woods during the scavenger hunt:

1) It was unsupervised until we got to the theater, so it was literally hundreds of people, some in Joker make-up dashing through mid-town to honking cabs and dumbfounded city officials.

2) I saw a kid puking because he ran so much. I caught up with him later in line for the trailer and he told me that he had eaten pate (goose liver or something, right?) on a school trip before playing. What kind of school serves pate?

3) At one point, I was weaving through parked traffic, heading north on 8th avenue and ahead of me was a father pulling his 11 year-old son in between a truck and a taxi. Son: “I don’t think this is safe.”

4) The viral campaign was made for idiots. False info was spread pretty fast in the scramble. The worst one I heard about was a goon who, when asked what was going on by a passerby said: “I’m a bomb specialist. Run,” then took off towards the next clue. For shame.

At the end of the trailer, after abandoning our phones, there was a raffle for a roll of 35mm film. It was described as “maybe what you just saw, maybe not” and was given to a player who obviously didn’t have a 35mm projector back in Queens.

Luckily, someone has threaded the film, and given us our first look at the “Jokerized” trailer: The Dork Knight.

Pretty cool.