How many years has the Farrelly Brothers’ Three Stooges movie been in preparation? Since at least 2004, which is when the New Yorker‘s Ian Parker wrote about the project as well as the Farrelly’s hope that they might get Russell Crowe to portray Moe. The project is cursed. The only thing that can save it is Mel Gibson signing on.

On 12.2.09 Cinematical‘s Monika Bartyzel, following-up on a Variety announcement, reported that Paul Thomas Anderson and Philip Seymour Hoffman would be teaming up for a new flick “about a man who creates his own religion.” The feature would cost in the vicinity of $35 million with Hoffman playing “the Master,” an L. Ron Hubbardish figure “who starts a faith-based organization in the 1950s. He teams up with a twentysomething drifter named Freddie who becomes his lieutenant until the kid finds himself questioning the faith he’s gotten himself involved in.”

In its announcement story, Variety wrote that “the drama does not so much scrutinize self-started churches like Scientology or the Mormons, as much as it explores the need to believe in a higher power, the choice of which one to embrace and the point at which a belief system graduates into a religion.”

That’s a smokescreen statement. I was sent a copy of PTA’s untitled script yesterday and while I haven’t read all of it, it sure reads like a Scientology critique to me. I’m particularly thinking of a line near the end in which Hoffman’s “Master” presents a contact that he wants Freddie to sign that stipulates he “will serve the Cause above all other laws and regulations in this or any other neighboring galaxy for three billion years.” That sounds kinda Hubbardy…no?

I know Steven Soderbergh‘s forthcoming virus movie, called Contagion, is going to thrill and enthrall because there’s nothing better than when a idiosyncratic high-integrity helmer goes down the primal popcorn route. Except I really don’t want to see a virus movie about pale-faced people staggering around with their noses bleeding and sores on their cheeks. I don’t want that stuff in my head. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, “Go sell virus someplace else — we’re all stocked up here.” (The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez has the scoop.)

We’re all expecting the humor is be sharp and bee-stingy during Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin‘s hosting of the 3.7 Oscar Awards. But it’s highly unusual for an official Oscar poster to sell the hosts rather than the event itself…no? Hasn’t every previous poster just settled on some new rendering of the classic iconography?

An iPhone repair site called iResQ has posted photos of a possibly authentic representation of the forthcoming iPhone 4G. The big news is that it’s about 1/4 inch taller than the iPhone 3G . The 4G is supposed to come out sometime this summer. I may not be able to get it because of the terms of my AT&T contract. Everyone really despises AT&T, and with good reason.

Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling conducted an intelligent and intriguing discussion last night with Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow at the Lobero theatre. You can’t hear him as clearly as Bigelow on my video clip, but that’s okay. The Loveless, Near Dark and Blue Steel weren’t right for me. Like many others I got on the Bigelow boat with Point Break, and it was clear sailing until September ’08 when I first saw The Hurt Locker, at which point she entered my all-time pantheon.

Here are Kris Tapley‘s impressions of same.

Rich Juzwiak of fourfour.com has compiled all the famous bathroom-mirror-shock scenes into one YouTube clip. He misses, of course, the seminal grandaddy of mirror-scare scenes from Roman Polanski‘s Repulsion (1965) — i.e., the moment when Catherine Denueve closes her bedroom closet door and the mirror catches a guy standing behind her.

The Repulsion moment happens around 1.35.

I guess Juzwiak didn’t use it because…what, it didn’t take place in a bathroom? The man is handicapped. His montage is a perfect distillation of the myopic mentality of film nerds for whom the term “older film” is something made in the early ’80s.

Stephen Colbert‘s latest Sarah Palin riff (which aired last night) concluded with a blunt but stirring punchline. (It took him a while to get there.) More crackling is the argument about Palin on Joy Behar‘s CNN show between the disapproving Ron Reagan Jr. and the Medusa-haired Pamela Geller of AtlasShrugs.com.

Eight years ago Newark Star-Ledger film critic Stephen J. Whitty asked Harrison Ford about Marshall Fine’s notion that stinking rich film stars should consider using their power and freedom to make small personal indie-style films, and “he thought I was crazy,” Whitty reports.

“Ford isn’t just an actor but a movie star, too — not just a celebrity but a commodity. He’s extremely aware of how long he chased success in Hollywood, acutely conscious of the business of the show business he’s in. And he’s at peace with that. [During our interview to promote Kathryn Bigelow‘s K9], “the words ‘money’, ‘business’, ‘job’ and ‘earning a living’ tunred up often in his answers. The words ‘art’, ‘craft’, ‘calling’ or ‘profession’ weren’t mentioned once.

“Take, for example, the question of low-budget, independent films. Most big-name actors say they’d love to do one, if the right part came along. A few — Jennifer Aniston, Matt Damon, Samuel L. Jackson — have actually gone ahead and taken the chance. So if some bright young kid with a digicam came up to Ford with a semi-improvised script and an idea for a fast and dirty 14-day-shoot…

“The hypothetical wasn’t even finished before Ford’s mouth twisted a little in impatience.

“‘You’ve created a scenario that’s very easy for me to say no to,’ he said. ‘This is a business for me. I have things to do with my time when I’m not earning a living, and I do pretty much tend to practice this as a job. If I’m going to take on a challenge I want it to be something where I can devote a certain period of time, make my nut and then go home.'”

Everyone wants health care reform but the Democrats “couldn’t sell it,” Bill Maher said to Jay Leno last Friday night. They’re so impotent in their unwillingness to wield power that “they couldn’t sell a cub scout to a pedophile,” he said.

Ed Luce‘s Financial Times assessment of the Obama administration’s failure says it’s basically caught in a campaign mode, and that the principal bad guys behind this emphasis are Obama’s four most trusted aides — chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, senior adviser David Axelrod, spokesperson Robert Gibbs and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.

A HuffPost summary states that “if current trends continue, this once mesmerizing Camelot-ish operation will be be seen in the history books as the presidential administration that — to distort slightly and inversely paraphrase Churchill — never have so many talented people managed to achieve so little with so much.”

“Just over a year into his tenure, America’s 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington’s ways. What went wrong?

“Those around [Obama] have a…specific diagnosis, and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

“Barring Richard Nixon‘s White House, few can think of an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle.

“‘It is a very tightly knit group,’ says a prominent Obama backer who has visited the White House more than 40 times in the past year. ‘This is a kind of ‘we few’ group…that achieved the improbable in the most unlikely election victory anyone can remember and, unsurprisingly, their bond is very deep.’

“John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, the most influential think-tank in Mr Obama’s Washington, says that while he believes Mr. Obama does hear a range of views, including dissenting advice, problems can arise from the narrow composition of the group itself.”