Uh oh, trendy hipster movie alert. Twee darlings Ryan Gosling (Lars and the Painfully Whimsical Script) and Michelle Williams (Dudes Doin' It, Wyoming Edition) are set to costar as wistful lovers in a movie melancholicly titled Blue Valentine. Imagine the twinkly music and the shaky-cam shots of mournful streets blurring into focus and, perhaps, the voiceover! [Variety]

Ohh dear. Are you sitting down? Can I get you some tea? Here, have one of these cookies. OK, hon, I have some bad news. You know how much you wanted David E. Kelley to have a new show about lawyers on TV? And remember how it looked like his Kristin Chenoweth show, delightfully titled Legally Mad, was going to be that show? Well, love, unfortunately... Oh, this is so hard. Wait, what's that? The idea of another one of Kelley's aggressively quirky horrid lawyer shows on the air makes you want to burn the Earth down? Oh, well. Me too. So, fuck it. It didn't get picked up. Neither did Lauren Graham's sitcom. Yeah. Drink? [Variety]

Still have a hankering for the heady days of Hawaii Five-O and Magnum P.I.? You know, butt-kickin' crime-fightin' in the balmy bliss of America's most beautiful colony. Well, Jerry Bruckheimer has heard your late night whimpering and is coming to your aid. His Honolulu set procedural Cooler Kings has been greenlit by A&E. The show is about a group of Igloo salesmen who decide to solve mysteries on their lunch breaks. Right? [Variety]

Speaking of A&E, Kevin Costner would like to take that wolf up on its offer of a second dance and head back into the West...ern genre. He's in talks with the net to produce, definitely, and act in and direct, maybe, something about the post-Civil War wild wild West. Sort of like that TNT series from a while back except, we'd imagine, with less Skeet Ulrich. [THR]

Simon Baker the Mentalist will soon be dealing with a mental case. He's playing a lawyer out to expose Casey Affleck as the small town sheriff turned horrid murderer that he is in Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. The Winterbottom factor makes me intrigued, though the presence of Jessica Alba as a hooker and Kate Hudson as a schoolteacher girlfriend gives me pause. [THR]

Oh, cute. Dermot Mulroney is directing a movie. He was so good on The Practice. [THR]

The trailer above is just a sampling of the vaguely lesbionic tussling that can be found in Polanski's short film Greed, which is exclusively showing over at Dazed Digital. The project is the latest work from artist Francesco Vezzoli, who's known for creating trailers, premieres, and now a perfume ad for products that don't actually exist (you may remember his fake coming attraction for a Caligula remake starring Courtney Love, Benicio del Toro, and Helen Mirren). Finally, we've found a plausible explanation of the trailer for Crank 2: High Voltage!

• Francesco Vezzoli's Greed Online Premiere [Dazed Digital via E!]

If you're not familiar with Michelle Williams's tiny indie film Wendy and Lucy, let us summarize: Wendy (Michelle Williams), an impoverished young woman, drives to Alaska with her dog. The car breaks down. Not a whole lot else happens. So when we saw HuffPo blogger Michelle Renee title her newest post, "I Feel Like the Real Life Wendy and Lucy Story," we chuckled to ourselves. "You mean, nothing happens in your life, too?" we wondered. Well, actually, Renee's story is WAY, WAY DIFFERENT:

If the movie plot seems like an unrealistic one, I can tell you it isn't. My life seems like the real life Wendy story as written in my debut book, Held Hostage, which is not just about the crime that devastated my and my young daughter's life. Although a large portion of this true crime release focuses on the violent kidnapping, 14 hour hostage ordeal and my being forced by three masked gunmen (also gang members) to rob a bank to save our life, the aftermath and an incredible road trip from San Diego to Anchorage Alaska is written about in "such rich detail you feel as though you are in the car with her and her four legged companion" as one reviewer wrote.

I don't know what sparked "Wendy" to head for the majestic landscape of Alaksa but what sparked my needing to get out of Dodge was the threat of retaliation looming over our heads after the grand jury proceedings.

We're pretty sure we don't remember that part from Wendy and Lucy...deleted scenes, maybe? Though our favorite part of Renee's HuffPo entry are the random tags:

Broken Open, Dogs, Healing, Held Hostae, Michelle Renee, Michelle Williams, Movies, Movies And Entertainment, Pets, Scared, Wendy And Lucy, Entertainment News

It's a give-and-take, HuffPo bloggers: sure, you might not get pay or health care—but at least Arianna gives you a "scared" tag.

• I Feel Like the Real Life Wendy and Lucy Story [HuffPo]

fiveinchtaint's new line beats the original, "We're So Trendy It Pains Us."

1. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Period. When we called our shot for Brad Pitt as the likely winner in a crowded Best Actor field, we hadn't yet seen Hoffman as Caden Cotard, a Schenectady, N.Y., regional theater director at odds with his painter wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and his own chronically afflicted body. When Adele and his young daughter leave him for new, famous lives in Berlin, Caden spends the next 30 years funneling a Macarthur "genius" grant into staging his masterpiece: A city within a city, populated by himself, his doppelganger (Tom Noonan), his doppelganger's doppelganger and those of the people closest to him. Yet nobody and nothing is as close to Caden as his own admitted psychosis, the layers of which collapse onto and into each other in scene after scene.

Sounds great, right? Except, well, it is. Portraying a man vexed by doctors, lovers, work and ultimately himself (aging decades in the process), Hoffman digs into an adventure of suffering as ludicrous as it is bittersweet. In one crucial scene when the hunt for his estranged daughter takes him to Berlin, what little interaction they have both validates and fetishizes his paranoia — just one of dozens of metaphysical stunts that make Hoffman's performance thrilling and really kind of inspiring. He not only gets but owns all this mindbending melancholy, and for the maybe first time ever, we felt like we had a guide in our tumble down the Kaufman rabbit hole.

2. Six extraordinary roles for women. Starting with Samantha Morton as Caden's theater receptionist-turned-lover-turned-right-hand Hazel (and then Emily Watson as the woman who depicts her in his play), Synecdoche features enough dynamic parts for actresses to fill its own Oscar category. Michelle Williams and Dianne Wiest contribute brilliant turns as Caden's second wife and fourth doppelganger, respectively, but Hope Davis walks away with her scenes as arguably the world's worst couples therapist:

3. Charlie Kaufman gets to be Charlie Kaufman. Like director and former collaborator Michel Gondry, whose screenwriting debut Science of Sleep found a grandly ambitious balance of theory and technique that slipped through the twee seams of their Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman and his vision seem more potent and personal on their own. (Don't get us started about his overrated work with Spike Jonze.) It's another nifty trick under the circumstances; as Manohla Dargis alludes to in her fantastic NYT review, an opus about failure is itself a staggering creative success that took decidedly less than a lifetime to make. And for better or worse, it can happen to you. Maybe not the part about bedding Michelle Williams, but that never ends well anyway.

4. Hazel lives in a house on fire. Why? Kaufman professes not to know, but it makes already great scenes (and a classic, climactic bit of dark humor) altogether memorable.

5. Adele Lack's paintings. The square-inch canvases on display through the weekend at the Montalban Gallery are too absurdly small to require the paint-spattered basement workshop where Keener's character composes them, but we think their clues to Caden's past, present and future symbolize the rewards viewers earn for accepting an artist's challenge. Sound familiar? Like so much of the rest of Synecdoche, New York, it really is your life. We'd sincerely hate to see you miss it.

The pair boarded a private jet bound for Oregon yesterday along with the Brokeback Mountain actress's two-year-old daughter Matilda.

The trio were seen strolling together outside the airport, Williams at one point breaking into a broad smile.

Williams and Jonze, who previously dated Drew Barrymore, first met in 2006 when she auditioned for his film adaptation of the Maurice Sendak children's book Where The Wild Things Are.

She was offered a part, but later withdrew from the film.

We hate to scrutinize for meaning in the spilled tea-leaves of Williams's personal life, but this would make the second tortured Warner Bros. villain to romance the Brokeback Mountain star—Jonze of course being famously at odds with the studio over his vision on a $70 million children's book adaption that is rumored to be quickly swirling down a monster-fur-clogged drain. But Max eventually found his way safely back home, and we're confident this bedtime story will have a happy ending, too.

[Photo credit: Exposurephotos.com]

• Pictured: Heath Ledger's ex fiancée Michelle Williams with new love Spike Jonze [Daily Mail]

• Courtenay Semel, lesbian daughter of Yahoo's CEO was dating heiress Casey Johnson until a drunken hookup with Tila Tequila at some party. Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson totally giggled. [P6]
• The Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie twin pictures supposedly just sold for around $15 million, and not to People or OK! but to Hello!. [Mail]
• Heath Ledger's ex-wife Michelle Williams has taken up with director Spike Jonze. [Mail]
• Chace Crawford's close friend/roomate Ed Westwick is into girls! He holds their hands and everything. [R&M]
• Paris Hilton is not about to watch that ad where John McCain tries to use video of her to bludgeon Barack Obama because, really, that would mean getting up to speed on so, so many different things. Reading=ughs. [E!]
• Katie Holmes is into firefighters, and/or free press, and/or potential Scientology recruits. [E!]
• Whether she was in a swimming pool with him in Mexico or not, Britney Spears is not officially dating that former Israeli soldier guy, her manager would like everyone to know. And the guy is not a bodyguard, he's a "staff photographer." Yes, point out that he's a photographer, why don't you, since we know Britney is totally not into those. [Showbiz Spy]
• Spears' dad, meanwhile, retains control over her money and "personal affairs" until December 31. "Miss Spears was reluctant to agree to the extension of her conservatorship." [ET]

CY: Have you ever come across any celebrities that have crossed over like a Heath Ledger for example and asked them how they are?

JVP: Very good question. Yes I have. Yes Heath Ledger has appeared to me. Two weeks after he died I was shaving and right behind on the right side in the mirror his face appeared and he said to me in my head that I screwed up. Now he knew me. We didn't know each other directly, but we had mutual friends and he knew what I did. He said I screwed up. Then he thought about his daughter and that was it. Then the next thing I heard about Michelle [Williams], his ex, at their apartment in Brooklyn she's been haunted by him twice. Once she was awakened at 3:00 AM by furniture moving and another time at 4:00 AM in the morning. She said she knew it was him. There was a shadowy figure at the end of her bed. She knows it's him. I do get a sense that he is restless right now and really wants to speak with her. Actually as I speak I am working on doing a reading for her.

Right. We see Van Praagh working up to a hot interdimensional three-way, with the celebrity medium polishing his best Aussie accent, packing an overnight bag to Brooklyn and coaxing Williams closer and closer for carnal affirmation from the Other Side. "Heath's right here, Michelle... We shaved together ... He asked us to call a sitter ... and go upstairs ... Heath's not wearing underwear, Michelle ..." On and on, right down to the furniture moving again and the customary, "Heath needs a cigarette." It's so touching we could almost cry.

• James Van Praagh [CYInterview]

WHAT'S NEW: Baby Mama and Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay will duel for the top spot, with the latter film predicted to ride its franchise basis all the way to No. 1. Its R-rating won't help against the PG-13 Tina Fey vehicle, however, which could lure its core female demographic to an opening take of $13 million. Harold and Kumar's estimates are all over the place — from $11 million to $16.6 million — so wager now for Monday morning bragging rights. Also opening: Errol Morris's Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure; the Burt Reynolds gambling drama Deal; and French legend Claude Lelouch's suspenser Roman de Gare.

THE BIG LOSER: Talk about dump-and-run: A-listers Hugh Jackman, Ewan McGregor, and Michelle Williams are hiding in plain sight in the "thriller" Deception, which we didn't even know existed until Variety revealed Fox was throwing it on 2,000 screens this weekend. And the critics love it almost as much as last week's Pacino-Bomb 88 Minutes; with 6% favorable ratings currently at Rotten Tomatoes, the film "was made to be forgotten," writes Onion AV Clubber Scott Tobias.

THE UNDERDOG: We're of two minds about Helen Hunt's directorial debut Then She Found Me. Yes, the sex in the film is quite terrible, and yes, the story lapses perhaps too eagerly at times into rom-com convention. (First mistake: casting Colin Firth.) But! Hunt's story of an adopted, baby-craving New Yorker (Hunt) whose husband leaves just as her birth mother (Bette Midler) reenters her life has way more going for it than we'd thought — Midler, for starters, whose meddling, mendacious mommy is one of her most modulated performances in years. Paired with Hunt, their timing, vulnerability and overall chemistry are as worthy as any of the Fey/Poehler maternity schtick anchoring Baby Mama.

FOR SHUT-INS: You'd be crazy to stay indoors this weekend, but still: New DVD's include Cloverfield, Charlie Wilson's War, The Savages and the most heavily anticipated TV revival of at least the last seven days, Laverne & Shirley: The Complete Fourth Season.

So are you with Team H&K or Baby Mama in the Battle of the Middling Spring Comedies? Will you roll the dice on Deception? Will you trust us on Bette Midler? Go ahead: Now tell us how to spend our weekend.

"The photogs had befriended Heath and invited him up to...party, never disclosing their true intentions. As Heath allegedly did coke, the photogs secretly videotaped the whole thing. When Heath realized what was happening, he went ballistic."

In light of rumors that scenes from The Dark Knight may be cut or altered due to screener audiences' discomfort while watching overly dark Ledger moments, coupled with the fact that Michelle Williams is due to promote her upcoming film Deception later this month, a lawsuit claiming Ledger's innocence is well-timed. So it's difficult to figure out if Jane Doe is acting out of good will in order to clean the late actor's record, or if she's simply a scorned ex looking to damage the rep of her former boyfriend's agency. Either way, the video (viewable here) does little to convince us that Ledger was actually using drugs the night he lost out on a SAG award for Brokeback Mountain in 2006. If the suit does see the light of day, we can at least take comfort in the plausibility that Ledger was simply blowing off steam with a cocktail, rather than rails, on that night.

• LAWSUIT OVER HEATH LEDGER AND ALLEGED COKE [TMZ]

"A series of documents filed in Manhattan Surrogate's Court revealed that the actor had less than $145,000 in New York assets at the time, including a $25,000 Toyota Prius and $20,000 in furniture and fixtures."

Both the Daily Mail and the NY Daily News are quick to speculate that Ledger most likely had trust funds, not to mention properties in Australia, but one of his priciest assets included the Brooklyn townhouse he'd shared with Michelle, originally bought in 2005 for $3.6 million. So why the (relatively) paltry sum given by the courts? As an estates specialist told the News, trusts and "jointly held assets" aren't included in Surrogate's Court findings. In the meantime, his father Kit has assured the press that Matilda and Michelle "will be taken care of," though the How factor is currently missing in the equation.

• FAMILY FEUD ERUPTS OVER HEATH LEDGER'S WILL AFTER DAUGHTER MATILDA IS LEFT OUT [Daily Mail]
• HEATH LEDGER ASSETS GIVEN TO PARENTS, SIBLINGS [NYDN]

We combed through the lengthy story so you don't have to; here are the takeaways.

· The day after the 2006 Oscars, for which he was nominated for Brokeback Mountain, he told a British filmmaking friend, "'I'll never make another good film again.'" According to the friend, "If this was what happened when you made a good film, he didn't think it was worth it. He found the whole thing absolutely harrowing. I think that after the Oscars, there was a kind of corner turned—and not a very good one."
· According to the magazine: "Todd Haynes remembers how the actor would lean on his fiancée when they were shooting [I'm Not There] in late summer 2006. 'The night before we were going to shoot a scene, he started to have a real panic about it,' says Haynes. "He had to call Michelle in New York, who talked him through relaxation methods to try to get him asleep. He said he was just curled up in a corner holding one of Matilda's stuffed animals, and he slept about an hour and came on set.'"
· After spending a night last summer partying at New York's Beatrice Inn with a friend named Nathan, Ledger and his friend invited two women back to Heath's new apartment on 421 Broome. "Nathan said, 'Heath can't see [the drugs here].' He was making an effort to protect him, and Heath was obviously in a vulnerable state. He said, 'Heath cannot see this stuff, he had problems, he's sober now.'"
· According to the article's author Chris Norris, "[Ledger] might have been better off if he had behaved more horribly, if he weren't so widely adored. An addict's best hope for recovery is being an intolerable asshole when he's using. And to say the least, few remember that kind of Ledger."

• ANALYZING THE DOUBLE LIFE OF HEATH LEDGER [NYM]

[Image via Splash]

UPDATE: Michelle Williams's publicist refutes Us's Ledger rehab story, after the jump.

The actor, who is godfather to Ledger's two-year-old daughter Matilda, has been devastated by last week's news. Says one Gyllenhaal friend, "Jake is taking this harder than most people." [...]

This has had a strong personal effect on [Jake]," says a set source. The insider adds that Gyllenhaal left the set immediately after learning of Ledger's Jan. 22 death - but he flew back on a commercial flight to shoot an additional scene on Thursday.

"He was there, but he wasn't with us. It was obviously a major trauma," says the movie source. "These guys were very close. [Jake] was sitting in the director's chair staring off into space."

Not depressed enough yet? Well perhaps Us Weekly's new cover, "Heath Ledger's Secret Struggles," will sweep the remaining crumbs of hope from your overtaxed hearts. According to their reports, Michelle Williams drove Ledger to Promises shortly after the 2006 Oscars, insisting he seek help with various drug addictions. He refused to leave the car, pledging instead that he'd sort though his dependency issues on his own. Their lead besotted with grief, shooting on Williams's current project Blue Valentine has been "postponed until further notice," says a ThinkFilm rep.

UPDATE: Williams's rep responds to the Us story:

"Much of the tabloid reporting is inaccurate," Mara Buxbaum tells CelebTV.com. "This fabricated story of Michelle Williams attempting to bring Heath Ledger to rehab is just one lie among many. The speculation is heinous. Let this family grieve privately."

• Jake Is Taking Heath's Death 'Harder Than Most' [People]
• EXCLUSIVE: Heath Ledger Refused to Get Out of Car to Enter Rehab in 2006 [Usmagazine.com]
• Heath's ex too 'Blue' to do next movie [NY Daily News]

• Heidi Montag's song 'Touch Me' is online and it makes you realize how talented Britney Spears is. [P*r*z, sorry!]
  
• Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling were spotted sharing a "cozy cigarette" outside a restaurant, which means they must be doing it. [Page Six]
  
• 'Full House' castmembers John Stamos and Bob Saget reunited with the Olsen twins for a night of drinking, which is weird. [Page Six]

• Michelle Williams is rumored to be joining her estranged husband Heath Ledger in leaving her giant Brooklyn house behind in favor of Manhattan. Time to call up Celebrity Movers! [Page Six]
  
• Heiress-model Lydia Hearst and heir-nonmodel Cisco Adler got matching skeleton key tattoos to "symbolize a new way of life." An even retardeder one? [Gatecrasher, 2nd item]
  
• Looks like Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal are still in some sort of top-secret fake relationship. [TMZ]