Here’s Jeff Goldblum, looking mighty intense in front of the Apple Store on Fifth yesterday, toting a bottle of mineral water and yapping into a cell phone. The Roger Michell–directed Morning Glory is currently shooting; the movie (which costars Diane Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Harrison Ford) examines the comedic travails of TV execs as they try to revive a wilting morning show.

Yesterday’s scene involved Goldblum marching in front of FAO Schwarz—in about three long, gangly strides, past a gaggle of impossibly attractive extras—while carrying on a serious-looking phone call. Even when the DP yelled “cut,” Goldblum carried on talking to whoever was on the other end of the phone (his mom? thin air?), right through a dozen or so takes until shooting wrapped. Method acting? Just avoiding having to talk to the gathered throng? Jeff, call us.

“Do any of you know what a bed sausage is?” asked Rosa von Praunheim in sly, Teutonic tones at Anthology Film Archives this Saturday. The answer—it’s a wiener-shaped pillow for your head, of course—was part of the director’s “I’m a Tomato” performance, which wrapped up the venue’s retrospective of his work.

The provocateur and film director, who adopted a woman’s name to create such titles as 1971’s It Is Not the Homosexual That Is Perverse but the Society in Which He Lives, took the stage armed with a bag of poems, some plastic tomatoes, two drag queens and a gaggle of stuffed animals. He also treated the audience to a selection of clips from his oeuvre. It was the perfect Von Praunheimian primer. Read more »

Poor Wolverine. First, Roger Friedman downloads some half-assed copy from the Interwebs; now some pesky deadly virus of pandemic proportions has totally ruined the movie’s premiere in Mexico City. People is reporting that the film’s release has been postponed until further notice. According to the report, Hugh’s studio didn’t want to put him in harm’s way; he showed up to last night’s U.S. premiere in Arizona looking reassuringly healthy, all tanned and beefcakelike. Our colleagues over at HuffPo might beg to differ by suggesting he might get his tan out of a bottle. Whatever’s going on with this swine flu thing, it’s starting to get on our nerves. If it messes up superimportant things like movie premieres, then it’s definitely not kosher.

Last night came the word from Variety that Angelina Jolie has teamed up with Fox 2000 and best-selling crime writer Patricia Cornwell for a megadeal. Fox is acquiring the movie rights to Cornwell’s novels featuring the grizzly work of Dr. Kay Scarpetta, medical examiner. Given that Jolie is not opposed to sequels (Kung Fu Panda 2, Wanted 2, her seventh child), the actor will no doubt be pleased by the fact that there are 16 Scarpetta books. And even though the studio is planning some Bourne-like amalgam, this project could keep Angelina busy until she’s 60. Thank goodness for Brad’s Ben Button tech.

Some movie-marketing ploys may be effective; some may be undermining journalism. Not so Disney’s cunning efforts to get us to see Earth (reviewed by our own David Fear this week). Access Hollywood is reporting that, for every ticket sold to see the cuddly-but-wild-animal-infested movie, Mickey’s minions will plant a tree. We can’t decide whether this is laudable or just a cynical attempt to cash in on our collective carbon-footprint guilt. In any event, Mother Earth will be pleased. Disney, make mine an oak.

Oh look, it’s another trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (thanks, MTV blog). Looks like Warner Bros. is trying to keep Potter fans from baying for blood, given that the film was originally slated for release last November. “I cannot hope to destroy him alone” intones Dumbledore to a handsome and incredibly cheekboney Daniel Radcliffe, setting the tone for the hormonal scenes to follow: scenes like Harry on the verge of making out with Ginny Weasley, while her brother Ron is inexplicably caught between the vying attentions of Hermione and Lavender. (Ron, it’s going to end badly.) As the boys and girls get their respective grooves on, the Death Eaters swoop down to Trafalgar Square, watched by staid British office workers with cups of tea. The trailer also features some nifty footage of the Millennium Bridge being totally trashed by the aforementioned baddies; the actual bridge, a fine feat of botched British engineering, started wobbling and nearly collapsed three days after it opened. Epic fail.

What’s the weather like in L.A.? We checked in with David Lynch, habitual meteorologist. Imagine our surprise when, instead of his typical news of smog and sun, we found a link to his new animated video for Moby’s “Shot in the Back of the Head.” (You can download both the tune and vid for free.)  According to Moby’s blog, the musician sent Lynch his instrumental and the director “sat down and drew some animation that is very dark and beautiful.” Honestly, the video looks a lot like how you’d imagine the storyboards for Eraserhead must have looked; not only are there scenes of a guy tramping through an industrial wasteland, but when said guy gets his head blown off, his coif looks suspiciously like that of Jack Nance. The clip is essentially Eraserhead in three minutes and 16 seconds. Tell us the truth, David: Did you just tweet this one in?

Dear Lindsay: After reading in Us Weekly that you were lonely without Samantha, I went to L.A. this weekend to find you and cheer you up. (Okay, I gave up after one lesbian bar, but in my defense, it was full of distracting bikini-clad dancing women, and then my friend and I got cornered by this guy who told us all about the end of the world, which is apparently scheduled for December 21, 2012.) So I returned back East without you. In tears. Adding insult to injury: Monday’s heartrending online plea for love (via Funny or Die). I went looking for you, Lindsay. Where were you? And now today, I realize that you’ve just been toying with my emotions. WWD Fashion reports that your whole eHarmony thing was just a clever ploy to sell your Long Islandish leggings and self-tanning spray. I’m so totally over this online dating thing.

Who you gonna call…if Sigourney Weaver says no to reprising her role as Dana Barrett, cellist-next-door and vessel-for-demons in a planned third installment of Ghostbusters? According to the MTV movies blog, the rest of the original cast have already signed up; moviegoers will once again be subjected to Bill Murray ecto-plasming his masculine wiles over some poor dame who may or may not turn out to be Weaver. Given that he and his partners in slime have aged some 20-odd years since they first crossed streams, actor, writer and paranormal expert Dan Aykroyd has said that the cast will also include some fresher faces. He’s tight-lipped as to who those actors will be, although come to think of it, Zac Efron—or one of the many Efronites out there—would be about the right age to play Barrett’s now-grown tot, Oscar. Damn, we feel old.

Jai ho! Where's my color-coordinated entourage?

The Wrap is reporting (via Singapore’s The Straits Times) that a Bollywood version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is in the works, and Warner Bros. is not happy. It’s apparently threatened a lawsuit on anyone who dares risk their copyrighted wrath (does this mean that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story belongs to WB in perpetuity?). Personally, we’d like to see Button get the same treatment meted out by Bollywood to Harry Potter or Reservoir Dogs. Anyway, just imagine: a little dude with the CGI face of, say, Shahrukh Khan, flinging away his crutches for a dance number.

That’s not a reference to Australia or Nicole Kidman’s other recent career choices. Okay, fine, it is. Hollywood Reporter tells us that John Cameron Mitchell (of Shortbus and TONY guest-editorship fame) has signed on for a new project: the movie version of Broadway’s Rabbit Hole, a play that gave our critic middlebrow nausea. Kidman is slated to take the role originated by Cynthia Nixon, joining Aaron Eckhart, who will play her long-suffering hubby. Sorry, Cynthia, but mere Tony awards don’t guarantee Hollywood work. Meanwhile, unlike Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch (drag queens) and Shortbus (group sex), Rabbit Hole examines a bourgie couple struggling to cope with the death of their four-year-old son. Um, downer.

Not an April Fool’s joke: Variety sparks its bowl with word that James Franco has just been tapped to join the cast of medieval stoner flick Your Highness, joining his Pineapple Express costar Danny McBride. In Franco’s role in Milk, he blew his last unemployment check on a bag of sticky; before that, he portrayed the dealer in the aforementioned Pineapple Express. Franco also cowrote, directed and starred in Good Time Max, in which he can be seen wantonly mething. He’s currently shooting Howl, a biopic of Allen Ginsberg, Beat extraordinaire and renowned celebrator of the good herb. And now Your Highness, another David Gordon Green flick about green. James, are you holding?

What a perfect place to find Ondi Timoner. This Saturday at 3pm, she’ll be discussing her new movie, We Live in Public, a documentary about Josh Harris, the “Warhol of the Web,” at that apotheosis of all things shiny, new and dot-comy. According to our own Dave Fear, Timoner’s new flick is one of the must-sees in the “New Directors/New Films” program.  Harris was an Internet pioneer who essentially predicted the emergence of the Truman Show–esque world we live in…and then imploded.

Timoner will be sharing the stage with David Lee Miller, whose feature film My Suicide (which previewed at SXSW recently) looks at a kid with a particularly nihilistic class project idea. If that isn’t enough film geekiness for you, on April 10 (at 7pm), James Toback will be at the store talking about his soon-to-be-released doc about Mike Tyson—a mix of archival fight material and interview footage with the man himself. According to a recent New York Times interview, Tyson has a few regrets about sharing some of the more personal details of his days in rehab. A life lived in public indeed.

Apparently more unsafe than Jigsaw or Leatherface: Seriously, an NC-17? Sacha Baron Cohen’s summer flick, in case you’re wondering, has just been slapped with the MPAA’s harshest rating. (Cohen’s post-Borat mockumentary is seen through the eyes of a flamingly gay, Austrian fashionista.) According to The Wrap, Universal won’t release it until significant cuts have been made. Perhaps we’ll be denied scenes that played like gangbusters at SXSW: Bruno having sex with a cameraman; two guys making out over a baby. Our movie rating system is notoriously vague and more than a little corrupt, guaranteeing that a gazillion American adults can’t see a film that isn’t suitable, on some level, for kids. But really, people, I’m a grown-up. Waaaaaah!

Following hard on the Gawker dirt that Jennifer Aniston dumped John Mayer over his Twitter obsession, The Wrap brings us the nonnews that famous folks tweet to get all up close and personal with their fan base. Ashton Kutcher? Duh. David Lynch? A month ago, Lynch was outed by many as a regular poster of L.A. weather reports. Spookiest of all (either in person or on Twitter) is cwalken. Can it really be him? Turns out it’s not, per The Wrap. But the voice is uncanny: “I spoke to a lovely reporter today. I don’t know if she was who she says she was, but that’s fine. I secretly used an ironic tone.” That really does sound so awkward and Walkenish. Definitely a new kind of imitative writing: for people who hate books, magazines, blogs and paragraphs.

Want to get that much closer to Harvey Milk? In these troubled economic times, the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association is hoping to secure funding by auctioning off various items on eBay—such as Sean Penn’s denim outfit from his Oscar-winning role in Milk. Current bid is $810—can you top it? (And if so, why are you buying used clothes online?) According to the eBay fine print: “The outfit has been dry cleaned since its use in the film.” Aww. Where’s the fun in that?

Poor LiLo: Access Hollywood is now reporting that her latest movie, Labor Pains, is bypassing theaters altogether and going straight to cable. (Still, it’s better than going straight to YouTube.) In Labor Pains, Lohan plays a character who lies about being pregnant in order to keep her job. Meanwhile, according to Daily News’s Gatecrasher, Lohan herself is currently unemployed and having cash-flow problems. The movie’s lack of a theatrical release isn’t going to help pay her mortgage, let alone defray any speeding-ticket penalties. Good thing that pesky warrant is now behind her. Did we see this all coming? We’re not proud.

Anne Hathaway continues to build her impressively gay résumé: oblivious wife of homosexual cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, conquerer of high-camp fashion world in The Devil Wears Prada, engineer of sexual tension with Kate Hudson in the groom-optional Bride Wars. Now Variety is reporting that, following her musical outburst at this year’s Academy Awards with Oz boy Hugh Jackman, Harvey Weinstein has tapped Hathaway to play Judy Garland in both the movie and stage productions of the biography Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland by Gerald Clarke. We can’t wait to see her in her ruby slippers. And, as we all know from Rachel Getting Married, Hathaway’s already got the drug-addict thing down, so this latest part should be a total cakewalk.

Just joined the swelling ranks of the unemployed? Grant Wilfley Casting is reporting a need for “upscale New Yorkers for restaurant scenes” in the new Nancy Meyers film with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin. Sounds like you’d get a free meal. More excitingly, there’s The Baster, a soon-to-be-shot Jennifer Aniston flick about an unmarried 40-year-old who uses a turkey baster to get pregnant. (Jen, you need a new agent, like, now.) Filming begins in NYC on March 30 and will wrap sometime at the end of May. The Baster needs a “30-to-40-year-old homeless man for a subway scene with Jason Bateman” (note to homeless: need to be SAG). Also wanted: a “heavyset women who is able to ride a bike” and a “woman with animal-like facial features (e.g., round face, small eyes and upturned nose like a pig) who is comfortable having profanities shouted out at her in a comedic scene.” Sounds like work to us.

We at The Frame-Up can confirm the rumors: Angelina Jolie is hot. Also, she makes guns look hot. The BBC reported yesterday that the British TV commercial for the DVD of Wanted (or Curve the Bullet, as it should have been called) has been banned. After one viewer complained—one!—that it was unsuitable for children, some killjoy British watchdog committee (the ASA) put the kibosh on the ad. It decreed that the images contained therein, coupled with a husky voiceover, made using firearms “look sexy and glamorous.” The ad can’t be broadcast again in its current form. Here’s a full play-by-play of the ruling.

Duh. Jolie could make vacuuming look sexy and glamorous, but does that mean that British children would all start frenetically cleaning floors? Of course she makes guns look sexy; why else watch Wanted, a film in which the safety of the world is in the hands of a clan of weavers? There’d better bloody well be a girl and a gun. Universal Pictures disputed the charges. It stuck to its guns (sorry) and argued that a hot, seductive, practically naked Jolie didn’t glamorize those sleek, shiny guns. It lost.