Sometimes a flurry of things happen that don’t need to be vetted, explained or generally mocked by us, but nonetheless are somewhat interesting. The Dregs is what we do to balance that out.

Electronic Arts is making a video game tentatively titled Dante’s Inferno, which will be based on the epic poem, but will most likely become an action-packed horror game with people pushing boulders up hills endlessly. What’s een weirder is that there was a bidding war over the property despite the fact the game hasn’t been made yet. The winner of the bidding war for little more than a title? Universal for an option fee against seven-figures outright purchase.

Zach & Miri had a up-and-down weekend with a slow-starter Friday that built into a more solid Saturday and Sunday. It ended up failing to dethrone High School Musical 3, but ended up placing second for the weekend.

Netflix finally launched their “Watch Now” feature for Macs. Just load more movies, and we’re all over this.

John Woo’s Chinese epic Red Cliff Part I has set advance sale records in Japan, while Quantum Of Solace has begun setting records in the UK, where it’s already showing, those European bastards.

Sacha Baron Cohen brought filming of his new docu-comedy Bruno to a pro Proposition 8 rally in California. Proposition 8 would overturn the California Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year to legalize same-sex marriage, and we know Bruno loves being gay, so I imagine something interesting came of that.

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The only thing worse than Jury Duty is being the chihuahua that had to be held by George Lopez at the red carpet premiere for Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

I’m still stuck in the Supreme Court Building. I’ve returned from a hasty KFC lunch which I was granted after being booted off one jury.

Though when they asked me to clarify my job, people seemed to perk up at “I blog.” A very nice Jewish man asked me if I was a political blogger, since the TVs in here are silently watching the government pony up tax dollars to bail out financial institutions. I told him yes, because I doubt that he’s checking the B&U when he gets home.

But, for those of you that are checking up on the world of film, how about another round of news?

Would it be stupid for George Clooney not to return to County General for ER’s final season? The producers seem to be rounding up ex-cast members.

I tried to ignore it, but the masses have spoken: David Hasselhoff will star in Beverly Hills Ninja 2, a sequel to the Chris Farley comedy. It sounds like a stupid idea and a movie we won’t see, but when a certain amount of people ask me about anything, best to say something to everyone.

Fox Searchlight has decided to shift the release of Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s latest that follows an illiterate Indian street kid from Mumbai who is a contestant on Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Hindi version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. The film is told through flashbacks and actually has little to do with Millionaire, but has been getting a surprising amount of award buzz since premiereing at Telluride. The film was supposed to bow into the box office on November 28th against Milk and The Road, but Searchlight has pushed the date forward to November 19th, possibly to spread the studio over more of November so Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler shines for the studio in December.

Someone tell UGO that their site is blocked from official buildings in Kings County and I can’t get proper photos of the new (and cool-looking) posters for Frank Miller’s The Spirit. I had to steal this look from /Film, but you can see them HERE.

Universal Pictures has cast Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Jason Bateman and Faizon Love in Couples Retreat, a Favreau-scripted, Peter Billingsley-directed comedy. Yes, that’s a Vaughn/Favreau reunion. The plot appearently revolves around a three couples who follow a fourth to a resort where couples therapy isn’t optional. Or something like that. You could also know what I know by CLICKING HERE and reading the dry-as-bones Hollywood Reporter.

If How To Lose Friends and Alienate People looks good to you beyond Megan Fox, you might want to check out THIS EXTENED CLIP from the MGM pic where Simon Pegg plays Sidney Young, a smalltime, bumbling, British celebrity journalist who is hired by an upscale magazine in New York City. You can guess from the title that things don’t work out well for him.

DHD was paying attention when we weren’t concerning Universal’s mysterious choice not to co-finance the Tin-Tin movies, to be directed by Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg. Seems like a sure thing, right?

The decision was quietly made a few weeks ago. So now DreamWorks will look only to owner Paramount for the rest of the moolah in the same way the two shared financing on Dreamgirls and Transformers. Unfortunately, Paramount is presently without an overall financing deal to mitigate risk, but is arranging it on a film-by-film basis. I say Tintin — to be played by Love Actually’s Thomas Sangster — sounds like an expensive but safe bet, considering that the beloved Belgian boy is a worldwide phenomenon, and that the two great filmmakers are directing and producing even though also participating as huge first-dollar-gross players.

I don’t think Universal knows anything we don’t, but I do think that whomever made this call might find themselves without a job in a few years.

Thanks to BWE, I now know the #1 rule of staying in Florence, which really makes me wish I wasn’t in Brooklyn:

Time to go get kicked off another jury! This time, maybe I’ll mumble a lot and roll up my sleeves to show off my tattoos.

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Dave here, using the state-provided wireless connection in the Central Jury Room in the Kings County Supreme Court building.

Would it surprise you to learn that blogging isn’t really a recognized profession around here. I’ve had to answer a few questions about my employment so far and amongst the everyday Joes who have real jobs that really benefit people on a personal basis (dude I went through security with was a janitor!), my “profession” has been raising some eyebrows. Good news: the State pays me my $40-a-day!

Since I’m still waiting to be further questioned, I thought I’d drop some stories on you, just to keep y’all busy on this autumn Friday.

News for those who are fans of Sherlock Holmes: The newest Guy Richie film where Robert Downey Jr plays the Greatest Detective has finally cast it’s Watson. And it’s Jude Law.

You might remember that JJ Abrams told the online media that he had written a part in his new Star Trek film for Captain Kirk, but ended up cutting the cameo because he couldn’t reconcile it with the film’s plot. If you don’t remember, CLICK HERE for a sec. We’ll the Shat has something to say to that, namely: “Maybe you wrote it, but it never presented itself to me…[I] wouldn’t have wanted to do a cameo, because that you would have clipped that out.” Also, Will isn’t buying the whole “plot” thing: “If you make another one maybe you can think of ways of bringing Captain Kirk back to life. I brought him back to life in one of my books, very easily.”

Nothing like a good resurrection, eh? You can see Shatner’s video blog where he makes the above statements by CLICKING HERE. I wanted to, but my janitor friend was watching my YouTube over my shoulder, and it was weird smelling.

I hope he didn’t just see me write that…

UPDATED: I have returned after watching a hilarious video about the history of the jury as well as a Diane Sawyer video instructing me about how real courts are nothing like the courts we see on TV. This was accompanied by several ridiculous clips from movies where people confess to the crime at the end of the trail. Diane Sawyer assured me this wouldn’t happen today.

The guy at the podium told us we’d all be here until 5PM or we won’t receive credit for our once-in-four-years responsibility.

What a day this is going to be.

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[ED: For our header image before our rant this afternoon, we bring you the new teaser posters for Baz Lurhmann’s Australia. The best we could do was to track them back to MovieCityNews]

There are lots of things happen in movies Paul W.S. Anderson left the video game adaptation Spy Hunter that was supposed to star the rock and left the project in mortal peril, according to Latino Review.

But we can only cover certain thing in their entirety, and other stories, like the Cohen broths hiring Tony-nom Michael Stuhlberg and Richard Kind to be in their new black comedy (titled A Serious Man) about a mid-western professor whose wife leaves him to live with his “socially inept” brother are best described in a few lines (like we just did)

But other film debate catches our eyes from time to time, because we spend most of the day reading things on the internet. Like Warner Bros still can’t figure out what to do with their DC superhero properties now that The Dark Knight has proved they can be profitable. They claim to be turning their wheels on Wonder Woman (once with Joss Whedon, now free-floating), The Flash, Green Arrow (who actually has a super-cool movie prepped for him called SuperMax), and Green Lantern (once rumored to be played by the rapper Common). They literally have no idea how to get these things cranked out faster, and they bitched about it in Variety earlier.

We’ve also been following The Venture Bros Season 3, which just got a cool “directors commentary” added to it on the Adult Swim site, for those of you confused by some of the events in last week’s pre-penultimate episode, ORB.

/Film is cutting its way through the internet nothing by writing on the “appropriation” of black themes in Tropic Thunder while covering the under-the-radar auction of one of #3 in the original 5 Tim Burton Batmobiles.

Meanwhile, with news that Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander (who wrote Ed Wood, Man on the Moon, and – um – Look Who’s Talking?) have been signed on to write a Goosebumps movie for producer Neal Moritz (probably still smarting from Evan Almighty) has FirstShowing.net pleading: “Please Tell me I’m Not The Only Goosebumps fan left.”

To which we reply: we still have our Goosebumps fan club hat we got at some Scholastic Books event before Harry Potter was even scribbled on a napkin by JK Rowling. We even still have most of the books, and some of them – like Ghost Beach – still kinda hold up in a pulpy way.

Here we are reading the odd articles of the net while important people like Guillermo Del Toro work on the Hobbit script.

Sometimes, you don’t want to have perspective.

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Somedays, you can’t escape the blood!

A photo from Mirrors that previews Amy Smart’s, um, big mouth!
Whoever is on Alan Ball’s True Blood Poster has a Keira Knightley nose!
Get another look at some new Twilight stills before Comic Con!
There’s something slippery on the Midnight Meat Train in this 2-minute clip!

You can tell we’re excited through the miracle of punctuation!

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The above picture is from the making out scene in Lindsay Lohan’s new film Labor Pains, and you can see more of it on Hollywood Tuna.

Superhero Hype! has a set report from some lucky guy who got to be an extra on those WWII scenes in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He confirms that it was, indeed, supposed to be Omaha Beach and has some tidbits about the atmosphere of the set. All and all, a pretty damn complete set report.

DListed has declared John Mayer and Jennifer Aniston have “gone public” by attending a humanitarian event in Los Angeles with Courtney Cox and David Arquette. Quite the double date!

It’s Friday the 13th, so why not check out this first look at the new Jason Voorhee’s mask via MTV:

The video of an office worker going ballistic that made the rounds on the internet last week (if you haven’t seen it, it’s on the other side of the link) turned out to be a viral video for Wanted? That makes NOOOO sense, and Jossip agrees with us.

MySpace is getting a redesign next Wednesday, but instead of making it less of a coding shit-show, they sent out their marketing president Jeff Berman to talk up “brand-takeovers,” or when a site is completely over-run by ads for a film or TV show. Um, maybe they should work on getting the CSS out of the “About Me” section. Blow hards.

Obama’s Baby Mama is just the latest. Gawker has a list of Fox News’ 5 worst Obama slurs, and though it’s sort of out of our league we wanted to bring it up. Because some people still consider Fox News to be a news channel.

Firstshowing.net has a review from someone who has the script for the Harold Ramis/Judd Apatow comedy Year One. The film recently wrapped shooting with Jack Black and Michael Cera. The spy’s verdict: “Biblical blasphemy has never been so funny.”

CBS has all of the original Star Trek episodes online! There goes our weekend!

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Holy movie deal, Batman! We’ve fallen a little behind on all the different films being pushed into various degrees of pre-production this week. Stars have also been attached to projects and directors are signing deals to shoot.

Heaven forbid you not know what’s coming! Let’s go!

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