Yahoo just broke the first full-length trailer for I Am Number Four, the Spielberg/Michael Bay produced aliens-in-high-school movie directed by DJ Caruso, who seems to have completely lost his mind after Salton Sea (which was awesome).  It stars Alex Prettyfur as an alien on the run who hides out in high school (a la 21 Jump Street), where he falls in love with Dianna Agron (the hot one from Glee).  Timothy Olyphant plays his guardian, a role he won after Sharlto Copley wanted to wear alien ears.

The project is based on a young adult novel by James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) and Jobie Hughes. Seeking to capitalize on Twilight fever, Dreamworks bought the rights before the book was finished (a la Robopocalypse and Amp), which concerns a good alien on the run from bad aliens who’ve chased him to Earth.  At least it’s just his hands that sparkle this time. I can only imagine the thought process behind this one.  “Hmm, let’s see, we’ve got Cowboys vs. Aliens, aliens vs. Battleships, aliens vs. Michelle Rodriguez… why not aliens in high school?  C’mon, greenlight this and let’s do some blow.”

Dramatically adjusting your hoodie is the new looking like you have heartburn.

Dreamworks has just released the first trailer for the Michael Bay-and-Steven-Spielberg-produced, DJ Caruso-directed, aliens-in-high-school movie, I Am Number Four, based on the forthcoming book series from James Frey (the Million Little Pieces guy) and Jobie Hughes.  It stars Timothy Olyphant, Teresa Palmer, Dianna Agron, Kevin Durand, and Alex Pettyfer, whom I have renamed Alex Pretty Fur.  If you’ll remember, this is the film Sharlto Copley dropped out of in a dispute over alien ears.  Anyway, here’s the rundown:

In the film, an extraordinary young man, John Smith, is a fugitive on the run from ruthless enemies sent to destroy him. Changing his identity, moving from town to town with his guardian Henri, John is always the new kid with no ties to his past. In the small Ohio town he now calls home, John encounters unexpected, life-changing events — his first love, powerful new abilities and a connection to the others who share his incredible destiny.

His incredible destiny?  MIND BULLETS!  (*tries to bend spoon, poops pants*)

Meanwhile, in an incredible exclusive, I was able to obtain this footage of director DJ Caruso directing the action on set:

Hold on, I’m receiving a message in my earpiece. …Okay, I’m being told that this is actually DJ Kitty, not DJ Caruso. We apologize for the error.

Sorry, that was just my Tourette’s acting up.  CLITORIS! BOOGERS!  Nonetheless, this story IS an exclusive (and keep in mind, my last two exclusives have since been confirmed by the trades).  Variety today reports that the awesome Timothy Olyphant will be replacing the similarly legit Sharlto Copley in I Am Number Four, the Michael Bay-produced, DJ Caruso-directed, aliens-in-high-school movie.  This was Variety‘s official (read: not true) reason for the switch:

“Scheduling conflicts with his upcoming press obligations for Fox’s ‘The A-Team.’”

Right, as if Dreamworks wouldn’t have known his press obligations from the beginning.  Luckily, the real story is much funnier.  The real story, and I promise I’m not making this up, is that Sharlto Copley wanted wear a prosthetic nose and fake ears like Spock and look like an alien in the movie, while director DJ Caruso was adamant that the aliens were supposed to look just like regular humans, hence why they’re able to fit in.  This was apparently such a sticking point that neither would budge, and Copley left the project.  Haha, I love you, Hollywood egos.  What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall during that argument.

“But you said I got ta be da alien!”

“Nuh uh! You got ta be da alien last time!”

“I hate you!  I’m not guh be your friend no more!”

*grabs juice box, storms out*

*Michael Bay blows up a frog with a fire cracker*

Electronic Arts is teaming up with director D.J. Caruso to adapt their video game, Dead Space into a movie.  D.J. Caruso last did Eagle Eye and if you need an idea how crappy that was, just watch the alternate ending after the jump.  Here’s the game synopsis. 

“Dead Space” is set in the 26th century in deep space, where an engineer who responds to a distress signal from a mining ship finds the vessel infested with monstrous creatures called Necromorphs. The creatures are human corpses, reanimated by an alien virus. [Variety]

It’s just Event Horizon with a reductive explanation for the plot. And that explanation is “GRR, ZOMBIE VIRUS!”  In space, no one can hear you make derisive fart noises with your mouth.

UPDATE: This comment was too good not to include. RoboPanda says: “I accept your challenge. A headstrong, hot (but not too hot) 30-something career woman gets cheated on by her hot boyfriend and realizes she’s been in love with her hot coworker with whom she’s had an unexplained rivalry throughout the first two acts. Also, they’re all zombies. 40 Dresses Later in theaters this Secretary’s Day.”

Heroes star Masi Oka has signed on to exec produce The Defenders, a movie based on an idea he pitched himself, about MMORPGS.  I have no idea what that means.  (*grabs nerd by collar, demands answers*)  Okay, I’m told it stands for massively multiplayer online role-playing games.  Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Star Trek, Transformers) will produce, with DJ Caruso (Eagle Eye) in talks to direct and Gary Whitta (The Book of Eli) writing the script.

The story centers on a group of mostly teenagers from around the world who are involved in a multiplayer video game, each unaware of who they really are behind the cover of their consoles and avatars. They are forced to come together for a real adventure, becoming inadvertent heroes in the process.  DreamWorks will develop a video game simultaneously with the feature.  Oka came up with idea while playing MMORPGs.
“You can be whoever you want to be,” he said. “The question came to me: What if you had to live up to the person you created in the virtual world?” [THR]

So basically, how this went down was, Masi Oka was like, “I have an idea for a movie.”

And the other guys were like, “What’s it about?”

And Masi Oka was like, “It’s about guys playing video games.  I got the idea while I was playing a video game.”

And then the other guys were like, “Hmm, I like that idea.  Can it also be a video game?”

And then Masi Oka was like, “Yes, that’s a great idea.  I like playing video games.”    Because Hollywood is a glamorous place, you see.

^{Hello, puberty?  I thought you’d never call!}

Shia LaBeouf, who just found out he won’t face DUI charges, also has a movie opening today.  The reviews are out, and the critics… well, you can read all about it below.  I actually like LaBeouf as an actor, but his agent seems to be grooming him as the next Brendan Fraser.

“Eagle Eye” is yet another action movie aimed at people unfamiliar with the tremendous strides made in special effects over the last 15 years. People of, say, seven or so. –Kurt Loder [with the sexy sub-headline “Shia LaBeouf pinned down by pyro”]

THE WORD ‘preposterous’ is too moderate to describe Eagle Eye. This film contains not a single plausible moment after the opening sequence, and that’s borderline. It’s not an assault on intelligence. It’s an assault on consciousness. – Roger Ebert

Finally, an action-adventure thriller that feels as if it were created, directed and acted, soup to nuts [wha??], by a computer program. See, everyone complains about humans in movies but no one does anything about it, so it fell to “Eagle Eye” to make everything laughably, ridiculously fake. –NYDailyNews

…the execution redefines ludicrous.  What might have been a zeitgeist-fueled paranoid thriller along the lines of “The Conversation” or “Three Days of the Condor” winds up an unintentionally hilarious exercise in the suspension of disbelief, peppered with confusingly edited car chases. – MSNBC

Anyone who prefers such fusty notions as coherent plot or character development, however, can go eat cobwebs. -Winnipeg Sun [I only included this one because I liked the folksy Canuck-isms]

Upon hearing of such poor reviews, Samurai Code required LaBeouf to amputate his pinky in penance.  Like a true action movie hero, he did it by crashing the shit out of his car.  What?  Too soon?

The makers of the D.J. Caruso-directed Shia LaBeouf-starrer Disturbia called Hitchcock’s Rear Window everything from an “homage” to “an inspiration” to a “jumping off point”.  Meanwhile, the LA Times called Disturbia “an uncredited remake of Rear Window“, which was more than enough reason to sue for the lawyers of the people who still owned the rights.

“Obviously, Rear Window was a big inspiration,” Caruso told the Los Angeles Daily News last year. “I embraced it instead of running away from it. But I didn’t want it to be a remake because that would be silly. You can’t remake Rear Window.”

That would be silly.  Especially the part where you have to pay some asshole money.

With a $20 million budget, Disturbia was considered a modest hit last year, taking in $80.2 million at the U.S. box office. None of which was shared with the estate of the late Sheldon Abend, who bought the rights to Cornell Woolrich’s 1942 story It Had to Be Murder after the author died in 1968, according to the lawsuit. [E!]

The original Rear Window came out in 1954, by the way.  So basically, this guy bought the rights to a movie that had already been made 14 years prior.  Now the rights are 40 years old and his heirs are still trying to collect on it.  This is a tough one.  On one hand, Hollywood should stop being thieving dicks (see also: Lord of the Rings).  On the other, I hate anyone who inherits anything.   Clearly, the only way to resolve this is with a dismissive wanking motion.

DJ Caruso, who’s not an actual DJ, but rather the director of Eagle Eye, revealed that he’ll be adapting a comic book called Y: The Last Man. He wants Shia LaBeouf for the lead and a release in 2010, and hopes to turn it into a trilogy.  All the fanboys say Y: the Last Man is a great comic book. I wouldn’t know because I prefer books without pictures in them and thumbing my nose at the peasantry.

Y: The Last Man is my favorite comic book series of all time. Shia would play Yorick Brown, a young amateur escape artist, and his Capuchin monkey [Shia playing both the hero and a monkey? I smell Oscar - Ed.], Ampersand, who instantly become the last two men on Earth after something mysterious simultaneously kills every mammal possessing a Y chromosome – including embryos, fertilized eggs, and even sperm. Society is plunged into chaos as infrastructures collapse and the surviving women everywhere try to cope with the loss of the men. Yorick goes on a mission to find his girlfriend Beth, who was on vacation in Australia. [/film]

Wait, so this dude finds out he’s living out the plot of countless pornos and his first thought is to go to Australia to meet up with his girlfriend?  I have a new name for this comic book, World’s Hugest Pussy.

After the jump I’ve got the teaser trailer for Eagle Eye, which premiered last night before Indy.  The thrilling thrill-a-minute thriller stars Shia Lebeouf, Billy Bob Thornton, Michelle Monaghan, and Rosario Dawson, and comes from director DJ Caruso.

Caruso previously directed Disturbia, which I never saw, and Salton Sea, which was awesome.  It had Vincent D’Onofrio wearing a pig nose while reenacting the Kennedy assassination using pigeons and a bb gun.  That’s way more creative than I was as a kid.  Mostly I just rubbed my G.I. Joes together and made sounds like they were having sex.  I knew they were both boys, but I had no choice because it’s not like I had Barbies lying around.  What do I look like, some kind of fag?

JustJared (whose website never ceases to remind me of It’s Pat) has some new pictures of Shia LeBeouf on the set of Eagle Eye, from Salton Sea director DJ Caruso.

Eagle Eye centers around a young slacker (LaBeouf) who returns home after the mysterious death of his successful twin brother. Said slacker and a single mother (Michelle Monaghan) find out that they have been framed as terrorists, and they are coerced into becoming members of a cell tasked to assassinate a politician. Son and single mom must find a way to escape the cell and extricate themselves.

It’s cute, him trying to look all grown up with his pea coat, cigarette, gun, and facial hair.  The only "I’m a real adult!" thing missing is a cell phone in a little holster.  A holster for your cell phone says, "I’m important! I’m makin’ deals so fast I don’t have time to reach into my pockets!  Bang bang, I have a mortgage!"