Heath Ledger set a new standard in the portrayal of screen villains with his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight. Is Cher up to following that act?

Christopher Nolan wants her to play Catwoman in the next installment, according to the London Telegraph.

If true, that would be an interesting choice. Cher, 62 would follow on the heels of Michelle Pfieffer, who played Catwoman in Batman Returns in 1992. Eartha Kitt and Lee Meriwether purred through the role in the campy Batman television series in the 1960s.

My personal favorite Catwoman is Halle Berry, who played the role in the awful 2004 Catwoman movie. Berry's performance, generally speaking, was as bad as the movie, but the girl knows how to strut in a cat suit.

But back to Cher. The Telegraph quotes a studio executive as saying Nolan wants her to play Catwoman as "a vamp in her twilight years." He goes on to call it the "absolute opposite" of the way Pfieffer and Berry portrayed her.

The working title for the film supposed is The Caped Crusader. Shooting is to begin in Vancouver early next year.

        

On the strength of two songs (I'm Not A M****F***** Gentleman and Mind Playin Tricks On Me), the Geto Boys is one of my favorite rap groups ever, which I just realized (after checking Wikipedia) has absolutely nothing to do with Ghostface Killah — so scratch that. Still, it makes my point: I like a hip hop (much of it), but I still can be rather clueless.

I vaguely knew that comic book imagery (along with a lot of other pop culture references) figures into hip hop, and I might've even known at some point about Ghostface Killah's fascination with the Iron Man comic books. So the rapper's cameo in the Iron Man movie makes perfect sense (even though I didn't know about it until I saw it on Hollywood Elsewhere just now).

Anyway, before I make a fool of myself any further, here is a fun outtake from the movie. And I ...<< MORE >>

Isaac Hayes and Bernie Mac, who died one day apart, are to appear in Soul Men, a music-filled comedy directed by Malcolm D. Lee that's scheduled for release in November. The deaths of two of the movie's stars so close together is a huge and very sad coincidence.

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A strong Wednesday opening for Pineapple Express had Hollywood prognosticators predicting an end to The Dark Knight's box office reign, but Batman has trounced the stoner comedy to score its fourth straight win. Fueled by the late Heath Ledger's powerhouse performance as the Joker, The Dark Knight's domestic gross now ranks No. 3 behind that of Titanic and Star Wars on the (not adjusted for inflation) list of top grossing movies of all time.

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For a while, I thought I was the only person who had a problem with the way Batman talks in The Dark Knight. Then, a week ago, I stumbled upon this AP story that surveyed what some critics have been saying about it. One reviewer, for example, said Christian Bales sounds like "a 10-year-old putting on an `adult' voice to make prank phone calls....Bale affects an eerie rasp, somewhat akin to Brenda Vaccaro doing a Miles Davis impression."

I thought that was pretty funny. Then I came across this YouTube video, which I'll let speak for itself.

        

I have for some time wondered what Woody Allen sees in Scarlett Johanssen. After decades of fruitful long-term collaboration with the likes of Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow and Judy Davis, he has made three of his last four films with Johansson, an actress of limited range (and who doesn't even bring a large, enthusiastic fan base to the table as compensation for her lack of talent).

I suspect this photo explains exactly what Allen sees in her. Eeew.

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Here's the new trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which introduces us to the evil Lord Voldemort as a fresh-faced lad. It makes its theatrical debut Friday in front of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Warrier. The movie opens in November.


You can see the trailer in HD at Moviefone.
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Remember Josh Brolin's recent arrest in Shreveport, La., at the wrap party for W., Oliver Stone's upcoming movie about the country's 43rd President? Judging from the boozing, bruising young Dubya portrayed in the first half of this trailer, you have to wonder if Brolin had trouble getting out of character.
 
The trailer's structure suggests the movie starkly contrasts Bush's dissolute early years with his later life as a governor of Texas and President.

The movie is scheduled to open in October.
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The Guardian digs into the archives to reprint one of the most peculiar pieces of entertainment journalism I've read in a long while. It's a 1993 interview with Spike Lee in which the author, Howard Jacobson, explores the subjects of race, sex, interracial sex and antisemitism.

I say that Jacobson explores them because it's clear Lee isn't particularly interested in discussing them. The reader learns a great deal about what Jacobson thinks, very little about Lee.

I've encountered Lee a few times, so I understand how that happened. I was guilty once of doing the same thing. But what's odd — and what really makes me feel embarrassed for Jacobson — is how uncomfortable he is about the encounter. He's uncomfortable for several reasons, not the least of which is that Lee is...pardon the expression, a black man:

How do you talk to a black man? How do you talk to a politicised black man? How do you talk to a politicised black man if you're a politicised Jew? Actually, I'm not a politicised Jew, but I am when I'm talking to a politicised black man. The method I hit on is to swear. Street-talk. I say 'sh*t' three times before he's had the chance to sit down. Soon I'll be dropping in 'motherfu**er'. Spike'll like that.

I can only assume that Jacobson was very young in 1993 and had lived a very sheltered life. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I'm sure he's met other black people since then and would be much more at ease if he were interviewing Lee today.

        

At the Death House Door is a powerful documentary about the death penalty that debuted at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March. The most moving section of the movie focuses on Carroll Pickett, a Presbyterian minister who served as chaplain, ministering to death row inmates, for 15 years at the state prison in Huntsville, but the film never would've happened without the work of two Chicago Tribune investigative reporters.

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It's been a while since I've done a formal animated review. Sorry. But it's time to correct that. Here's my take on The Dark Knight, to be followed shortly by a comment on Heath Ledger and why this movie is being treated like the Second Coming.


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Spike Lee often gets tagged an incendiary political filmmaker, apparently by people who've never seen Crooklyn, Girl 6, The Original Kings of Comedy, Summer of Sam, She's Gotta Have It and Inside Man, his last movie. Judging from the trailer, Lee's next movie — The Miracle of St. Ann — may hew as closely to the mainstream as Inside Man, which is the highest movie of his career. But it looks like he's following that September release with a film that'll remind people how he got the "incendiary" tag in the first place.

He's on track to film L.A. Riots, about the disturbance that broke out in Los Angeles in 1992 after the Rodney King verdict.

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Maybe Josh Brolin is a method actor. Maybe he's so deep into character (he's starring in Oliver Stone's W as George W. Bush who, as we all know, used to have an alcohol problem) that he got carried away.

Who knows?

What we do know is that Brolin, Jeffrey Wright and  five other people involved with the production were arrested night at the Stray Cat Bar in Shreveport, La. Wright, who has played Martin Luther King and Jean-Michel Basquiat in previous movies, portrays Colin Powell in the film.

Details are sketchy, but the Shreveport Times reports that police were called to deal with a rowdy patron. "As more officers arrived," the paper says, "several other patrons at the bar, including Brolin and fellow actor Jeffrey Wright, tried to impede the officers."

In all, 10 police offers were involved. Brolin, et al., were charged with misdemeanors.

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I've seen all of Guillermo del Toro's movies (well, ok, I only caught part of Mimic on TV) and I've interviewed him twice, but this short interview from ComicMix.com contains a tidbit I didn't know: As an inside joke, he plants a reference to one of his earlier films in each of his movies.

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I got an email yesterday touting MovieMaker magazine's new "future of moviemaking" issue that began by hyping 3-D. Nothing unusual about that. Hollywood has been loudly beating the drums about the glorious 3-d future for quite some time. Dreamworks Animation even announced that all of its movies, starting with next year's Monsters vs. Aliens, would be 3-D from now on.

Thing is, that email arrived within minutes of my having finished an article on Portfolio.com about how the slow roll-out of digital-projection screens is putting that bright future on hold.

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It's been a while since we've heard anything about the love birds Robert Rodriguez and Rose McGowen, but People reports that they're still together — "hookedupandlaidup," a friend of mine calls it — and she is starring in three of his upcoming movies.

The couple announced their engagement last October. They fell in love during filming of Planet Terror, Rodriguez' portion of the Grindhouse double feature done with Quentin Tarantino.

The upcoming movies in which McGowan will star are Barbarella, Red Sonja and Woman in Chains!

So much for McGowan's supposed desire — she told me in an interview last year — to star in a Jane Austen movie. Those three, coming after her machine gun-legged heroine in Planet Terror, should put her squarely in the exploitation camp for a long time to come.

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I avoid giving ink to TMZ generally — I even stopped visiting the site because of my disgust over its Britney Spears harassment — but I can't resist making note of this. Verne Troyer, who played Mini Me in the Austin Powers movies and appears in Mike Myers' The Love Guru, reportedly is suing TMZ and other outlets for publishing portions of a sex tape Troyer made with his girlfriend. The $20 million lawsuit names TMZ and Kevin Blatt, the man who distributed Paris Hilton's One Night in Paris tape, according to MSNBC.com.


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I had to miss tonight's screening of Wall*E, so I consoled myself by watching this video of a violin-playing robot created by Toyota. The company plans to mass market it and a line of domestic helper robots in 2010. The second half of the video shows a mobility robot that's sort of like a really advanced motorized wheelchair. I'm more intrigued by what Toyota calls it's robot "mobility suit," or robotic walker, which isn't included here. A person sits in a chair that's integrated into the robot's body and the robot can carry you up stairs, from room to room...who knows, maybe to the supermarket and back.

Here's  a video overview of some of the robots. I like the one that shows a little guy — not the mobility suit robot — taking a tumble while trying to climb stairs.

Guess they still need to iron out the kinks.

I've got another video and photos of some of Wall*E's relatives after the jump.

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Looks like trouble is in store for Bruce Wayne. The story arc in Batman comics has been leading to a planned fate "worse than death," according to Grant Morrison, who writes the comic. "This is the end of Bruce Wayne as Batman," Morrison told i09.com in April. But it looks like Wayne will get a temporary reprieve, thanks to honchos at Warner Bros., which owns D.C. Comics.
 
Warners, not coincidentally, is set to release The Dark Knight July 18th. The last thing they want is for something catasclymic to happen to the comics character now, when a reader backlash could effect the movie's bottom line...

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The word "goofy" has attached itself to the work of M. Night Shyamalan with a tenacity that won't quit. My Unca Erk used it as far back as 2002 to describe Signs, which he liked. "With Unbreakable and now this, goofiness has become as pronounced an element of the Shyamalan style as his fascination with the supernatural and the afterlife," he wrote in the Houston Chronicle.

Two years later, the word cropped up again in Unca Erk's review of The Village, this time in the lead: "An element of goofiness resides in much of M. Night Shyamalan's work, sitting cheek-to-jowl with the intensely personal concerns his films explore."

We won't even discuss Lady in the Water, which Unca Erk didn't write about but which I'm sure he would've found by far the goofiest.

Shyamalan's new movie is The Happening, which stars Mark Wahlberg, John Leguizamo...

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