The Farrellys have been trying to get this thing off the ground for about ten years, hopping between Warner Bros. and Columbia before finally landing on MGM. Penn and Del Toro were always part of the dream cast, but Carrey is a late edition. Funny that the one confirmed comedian is the last, and most surprising, addition to the crew.

Variety remembers that Del Toro displayed 'comic chops' in that movie Snatch, but Guy Ritchie gangster zingers aren't exactly the same thing as heavily-orchestrated socko ballets of physical comedy. Nor are witty, homo-positive Oscar acceptance speeches. Let's hope their rehearsal process is long and fruitful.

Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan are teeming up as a mismatched duo in the wacky comedy A Couple of Cops. It's being directed-for-hire by flailing "indie" comedian Kevin Smith. [Variety] Meanwhile Leonardo DiCaprio is is starring in a sci-fi written and directed by Christopher Nolan. [Variety] And, yay for some of you!, Megan Fox continues to get movie roles. [Variety] Oh. Heh. Mickey Rourke will be starring in an S&M film. [Variety]

A biopic about failed car maker John Z. DeLorean is in the works. No word yet on whether or not the film will incorporate the happy accident that his automobiles can be fashioned into time machines. [Variety] Scott Rudin, perhaps still reeling from his Harvey Weinstein/The Reader flame-out, has gone and struck a deal with Weinstein's former company, Miramax. He'll be producing a Patrick Marber (Closer) adaptation of Zoe Heller's novel The Believers. This is the third outing together for Rudin and Marber. [Variety]

Oh hellll no. A movie version of the Ramona Quimby books? Starring Ginnifer Goodwin, Bridget Moynahan, and [shudder] John Corbett? Ugh. Well, Goodwin as Aunt Bea sounds fine. But Moynahan as Ramona's mom? Sigh. Really, the only acceptable screen version of Ramona stars Sarah Polley. [THR] The View rambler Sherri Shepherd has landed a Lifetime comedy pilot. Terrific. [THR]

Ben Silverman's former production hut Reveille has a new head of reality programming. Noah Oppenheim was a producer at the Today Show before he was brought on as a development VP. Currently, the company's, um, largest reality show is probably The Biggest Loser. [THR]

Genius director Alexander Payne is going a bit Charlie Kaufman-esque with a film called Downsizing, about a man (Paul Giamatti) who decides to shrink himself to preserve his health. Reese Witherspoon meets cute with him along the way, and Sascha Baron Cohen plays a strange, tiny foreigner. Sounds twee. And wee! [Variety]

Keira Knightley will be starring in a movie version of Kazuo Ishiguro's sci-fi chamber piece Never Let Me Go—a scary and ponderous book—to be directed by Mark Romanek, who did scary and ponderous before, to middling effect, with One Hour Photo. Knightley, in my estimation, is actually pretty decent casting. [EW]

Arrested Development smirker Jason Bateman has just signed on to the Jason Reitman comedy Up in the Air (based on snark-defender Walter Kirn's novel), about a man (George Clooney) who is obsessed with frequent flier miles. Sounds zany!!!!! [Variety]

Young Loren Dean, who had some coulda-been-big opportunities in the 90's movies like Mumford and Gattaca, never quite made it. Ah well. He'll be starring alongside the inexplicably-made-it Hillary Swank in her exoneration pic Betty Anne Waters, currently filming in Ann Arbor. Pack a sweater, Loren. [THR]

Stars of old and relatively new will be joining the basically useless Entourage next season. Jami Gertz, who commingled with your Jason Patric vampire sex fantasies in The Lost Boys (or maybe your Bill Paxton/tornado fantasies in Twister), will play the wife of Gary Cole's sadsack agent character. And the delightful Autumn Reeser from The OC will play a junior agent at Miller/Gold. Good news for them, bad news for us that there's to be another season of all that limp bro blustering. [THR]

Ah even more sorta-forgotten actors getting brief glimmers of hope only to have most of it dashed. Still, good for you Julie Bowen, Scott Wolf, Jonathan Silverman, and Sabrina's Aunt Zelda (and Kate's mom from Lost), Beth Broderick. You'll all be heroes for at least a week. [THR]

Following in that vein, Kim Raver (Lipstick Jungle) and Alyssa Milano (Gold Rush: A Real Life Alaskan Adventure) have also landed pilot roles. Raver in Shonda Rhimes' already-annoying TV news drama Inside the Box, Milano in an "Untitled Ricky Blitt comedy" about a telemarketer. [THR]

Jim Carrey will play the Devil who tempts die-hard Washington Senators fan Joe Boyd, who's sick of watching the Yankees win all the damn time, to sell him his soul in exchange for a victorious season. Carrey in that role makes sense. But Boyd, who magically becomes slugger Joe Hardy and helps the Senators win, will oddly, and sort of annoyingly, be played by noted rap video star Jake Gyllenhaal. His hip-hop career aside, Gyllenhaal's biggest brush with the musical was his disastrous (on purpose, I guess) "And I Am Telling You" warble when he hosted Saturday Night Live a while back. There's been nothing announced about the musical's most important part, the sexy vamp Lola (she gets what she wants) that the Devil uses to tempt Joe. May we suggest not Anne Hathaway. [Variety]

Will Ferrell and the always-hilarious Mark Wahlberg have been cast in The B Team, an action comedy directed by longtime Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay. The producers are working hard to nail down that title, as an adaptation of 80's wacka-wacka fest The A-Team is already in the works. [Variety]

In his continued efforts to one day assemble the world's absolute sexiest film cast, which could make the universe wink out of existence like a hard-bodied Large Hadron Collider, Woody Allen has nabbed Antonio Banderas to be in his next film, which already stars Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Slumdog Millionaire beauty Freida Pinto, and, um, Sir Anthony Hopkins. The film shoots in London and, every night, in the little smut movie house in Allen's head. [Variety]

The sometimes likable, other times irksome Seth Green has been cast in Robert Zemeckis' latest weirdo performance-capture movie, called Mars Needs Moms. He joins his Austin Powers mother Mindy Sterling, as well as Joan Cusack and Dan Fogler, the dude from Balls of Fury (and from the musical 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, for which he won a Tony). [THR]

In TV, Brittany Snow has been cast as a young Lily van der Woodsen in that new Gossip Girl spin-off. Funny, we thought Snow's movie career was burgeoning. Also in television: Respectable actors Denis O'Hare and David Morse have been cast in TV pilots, and Jessica Capshaw now has a gig as a lesbian love interest on Grey's Anatomy. [EW, THR, EW]

Ain't It Cool News broke the stunning casting revelation this afternoon, noting few details besides Schwarzenegger's commitment to a one-day shoot and that "it seems that the Gov and Sly's character Barney Ross have some history back when the Gov was shooting Conan the Barbarian!" (Harry Knowles's exclamation point, not ours.) Add this to our already-robust interest in seeing the film, along with the governor's inevitable Charlie Rose appearance thanking Stallone for inviting him back in front of the camera at a time when only his dogs trusted him.

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  AICN Exclusive: Arnold Schwarzeneggar [sic] joins the cast of 'THE EXPENDABLES'!
  [AICN]

Well, that's if this suspicious Craigslist posting is to be believed. The whole post (below) seems like a crude, racist joke ("straw chewing"? "they bidness"?), but that Cop Bar link does in fact take you to something tangible, albeit cheaply made and embarrassingly wannabe (though of what, exactly, we're not sure). Still, if this ghetto fabulous (are we using that term anymore?) new iteration, presumably not at all sanctioned by Bravo, does make it to air (or to internet), we'll probably watch it. Because we're weak-willed. And we'll watch anything.

The three stars reportedly filmed their appearances today, all of which are featured in a bootlegged Hollywood movie that the Dunder-Mifflin staff attempts to watch during the workday. Few other details are known beyond the high likelihood that ABC's counterattack will still probably win Feb. 1 on the sure-fire appeal of its 2008 hit Inbred Obstacle Course All-Stars: Breasts Edition. Expect guest-star firings by Ben Silverman just for the sake of it.

• Jessica Alba Comes to 'The Office'! [E!]

Yes the heiress and tabloid magnet blonde lady is joining Rampling, Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle!), Rome actor Ciaran Hinds, and Allison Janney for the film which is "part sequel, part variation" to the 1998 original. I guess it's sort of fitting, given that Hilton herself is banal, ugly, sad, and, ultimately, strangely beautiful. No word yet on who Hilton will be playing, though the production is currently filming in San Juan, Puerto Rico so we hope that maybe she's playing a young tourist who gets sold into white slavery and shipped off somewhere on a boat and she spends most of the time crying but eventually learns to oddly love her captors and then at the end, over a montage of lovely images of sad yet hopeful people, she delivers a haunting closing monologue about the transience of all things.

Jackson won't likely make the trip to Germany, however, where Cheung shall make her diva descent shortly for the role of Madame Mimieux, the French cinema proprietor who, according to the Playlist, "takes in the protagonist Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) when she is homeless and being sought by the Nazis." A man whose Asian-film fetish defers only to his taste for toes, Tarantino will work around the minor French/Chinese ethnicity-disconnect problem later just for the chance to work with Cheung — and potentially finish the movie someday after first and second choices Nastassja Kinski and Isabelle Huppert reportedly bowed out of the same role.

Meanwhile, Jackson's narration will come much later, a small part whose expository whimsy served as rich consolation yesterday from old pal Tarantino after the indignity of Jackson's attachment to... we can't even say it. That's what friends are for, we guess.

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He'll once again Keith Richards it up in another, the fourth, Pirates of the Caribbean movie (to be titled Pirates of the Caribbean: We're All Pulling For This Orlando Bloom Kid, For Some Inexplicable Reason) and then he'll go on to play the Mad Hatter in an Alice In Wonderland movie and Tonto in the Lone Ranger film. He's also been cast as the wicked, brooding, vampiric Barnabas Collins in a movie version of the 1960's Gothic horror campfest TV show Dark Shadows.

He's got one film slated, Shantaram, in which he'll actually play, y'know, a real person, but director Mira Nair has had years of trouble trying to get the India-set behemoth off the ground. In the meantime he'll continue disappearing further and further down the proverbial rabbit hole, increasingly becoming the Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro of faux-outre mainstream cinema. They play cops and crooks, he plays fops and kooks.

We know this is sacrilege to some, but anyone who thought that Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Depp's Willy Wonka were "warped" or "twisted" or "subversive" should take off their Vans and put on some grownup shoes. Pirates was fun for a while, but the third one played like a drunken Wagner dream ballet and Depp just seemed so tired. He must be! We'd love to see him put on a pair of normal pants and say interesting lines to other adults saying lines about adult things. Just once? Please? Because he's so talented. And this just seems like a silly waste.

Joan Allen
The Steppenwolf Theatre alum has done such fine work in The Crucible, Nixon, and The Upside of Anger that we're not really sure why she isn't in every other prestige drama, a la Laura Linney. Yes her reps were clever to get her on board the Bourne movies, as those were kicky good fun and she did actually get to act a bit. But why God why is she next starring in a movie called Death Race alongside such notables as Jason Statham and Tyrese? And then, after that, she's doing a tiny movie called Good Sharma. At least she's got that Lasse Hallström movie coming up. Though, regrettably, it's called Hachiko: A Dog's Story. Oh, and she's coming to Broadway soon. Maybe that's the beginning of a renaissance, Joan! In the meantime, get better people.

Who do you think? Anyone else who's perpetually denied golden opportunities or makes terrible choices, seemingly on the advice of representation?