The dark sunglasses disguise his eyes while staring at your sandwich.

A few years ago, Russell Crowe took an Australian reporter on a brutal, 12-mile bike ride to punish her for writing an article making fun of him for eating three tacos and smoking cigarettes after working out with his personal trainer.   After a recent appearance at a charity cricket match in New Zealand, he’s going to need a lot more bicycles.  On the plus side, those little cycling hats with the upturned brims are a perfect place to hold your taco while you smoke a cigarette.

The 46-year-old seemed to have packed on the pounds when he appeared at a charity cricket match in Wellington, New Zealand, over the weekend. And as he took his place in the line-up at the match – in aid of victims of the recent earthquake in Christchurch – he was looking decidedly portly.

(*star donates his time for charity*)  THE PRESS: “Haha, look at the fattie!  Hey, fattie!  Look over here so we can take your fat picture!  Whoa, back up, lard ass, I’ve only got one camera!  Haha, look at him wheeze while he picks up that legless orphan, he’s all out of breath from the fatness!”

The actor has in the past confessed to gaining weight for roles, having put on over 60lb to play a CIA chief in the 2008 film Body Of Lies. He said at the time that he indulged in burgers for breakfast as well as cupcakes to pile on the pounds for the role.

CROWE: “Oi, Ridley, you said all CIA chiefs are super fat, right?”
RIDLEY SCOTT: “What?”
CROWE: (*mouth full of sausage roll*)

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"Baby, this is serious: when's lunch?"

For the unfamiliar, there’s this game we like to play.  We take a crappy movie we’re probably not going to see, and try piece together the plot using only exposition (NO ANALYSIS!) from the bored critics forced to suffer through it.  Usually the best targets are Nicholas Sparks-y type movies, with all their sea turtle nests and sailing scholarships to Stanford.  We haven’t had any of those in a while, but this weekend did see the release of Paul Haggis’ The Next Three Days, and what’s Paul Haggis if not a Hollywood Baby Boomer version of Nicholas Sparks?  You’d figure a movie from an Oscar-winning director starring an Oscar-winning actor would’ve gotten more attention than The Next Three Days, unless the studio really thought it sucked, and… well, let’s find out, shall we?

“Crowe plays John Brennan, a Pittsburgh community college literature teacher whose life is upended one morning when his wife, Lara (Elizabeth Banks), is arrested for the murder of her awful boss. The night before, Lara was ranting about how much she hated the soon-to-be-dead woman, so it’s tough to explain away the blood on her coat and her fingerprints at the scene.” -NY DailyNews

“There is just one “fateful” night where everything goes wrong. There’s a dinner, and Lara goes all postal about whether the friction at work is because her boss is a woman.” -LA Times

“Later, in the car, John and Lara enjoy an illicit moment of post-catfight sex. The next day, she’s charged with having murdered a co-worker just moments before arriving at the restaurant.” -Washington Post

“Flash forward to the cops breaking down the door to arrest Lara for the murder. Flash forward again to prison doors slamming. Flash forward yet again to the appeal being denied and her attorney saying to John, ‘Just look at the evidence.’” -LA Times

“But John, raising their 6-year-old son alone, hopes to win Lara an appeal even after three years. When her attorney tells him it’s hopeless, John devises a plan to bust Lara out himself.”  -NY Daily News

“John decides to plunge into the world of drug dealers and meth labs.” -Washington Post

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Paul Haggis has written a lot of movies, but is probably best known for his work on the consecutive Best Picture winners Million Dollar Baby (which he wrote) and Crash (wrote and directed).  You know those plot points that are patently unbelievable and cartoonishly depressing?  Yeah, the Academy calls that “drama.”

Anyway, this is the trailer for Haggis’ latest, The Next Three Days, starring Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks, opening November 19th.  They’re a cartoonishly happy family, until one day, (*RECORD SCRATCH*) a lesbian who looks like RuPaul arrests Elizabeth Banks for murder.  She goes to jail and has no hope of getting out, so she tries to kill herself.  That’s when Russell Crowe decides to break her out.  He goes to Liam Neeson for help, because although Liam Neeson doesn’t have money, what he does have is a particular set of skills.  Then the action scenes happen.  My guess?  Russell Crowe successfully breaks her out of jail, but in the third act they watch their son slowly succumb to Lou Gehrig’s disease.  So sad!  Can this win a DOUBLE OSCAR?

Robin Hood: Anatomy of a Clusterf*ck Or Origin Story? More like BORE-igin story.

Robin Hood is a disaster. True, you might not notice it right away. You might make it through 40, 50 minutes, an hour of it without realizing it.  But like the women I make sex to, by the time it ends, you will be angry and disappointed, I guarantee it. If you aren’t, you weren’t paying attention. But hopefully, by remembering what happened here, we can prevent future disasters.  NEVER AGAIN.

A few years back, Kelsey Grammer starred in a fact-based movie for HBO about the Bradley fighting vehicle. The gist of it was that Kelsey Grammer was overseeing a big defense contract to create this new military vehicle. It started out as a troop transport, but somewhere along the way, someone suggested that it should also have a big gun. So they gave it a big gun. Then someone else said it should be really fast, to do reconnaissance, so they tried to make it light and fast. Then someone else said that in addition to being light, it should have heavy armor to protect the passengers, so they gave it more armor. They kept trying to implement all these suggestions, and a billion dollars later, they had “a troop transport that can’t carry troops, a reconnaissance vehicle that’s too conspicuous to do reconnaissance, and a quasi-tank that has less armor than a snowblower, but carries enough ammo to take out half of D.C.”

Robin Hood is that vehicle.

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I’m not even getting cute with that headline, that’s the actual story.  It sounds like it was written by the Family Guy manatees, but Michael Jackson used to make prank phone calls to Russell Crowe.

The brooding hunk [say what now?] has revealed that after he shot to fame in police thriller L.A. Confidential, he gained a series of new celebrity friends. He became good pals with the late singing superstar and the pair shared a similar sense of humour so often played pranks on each other. Jackson would regularly phone Crowe and try to convince him he was in trouble, much to the actor’s amusement.

“A gruff voice would say something was wrong, then this tiny little voice said, ‘Don’t worry. This is Michael,’” Crowe told GQ magazine.

Crowe admits he hasn’t always been the victim of prank phone calls – he has also made some in the past. When he was shooting L.A. Confidential, the star would leave rude voice mails for James Ellroy, who wrote the book the movie was based on. During one message, Russell left a rhyme for James which said, “Woof-woof, hear the demon dog bark. He’s got a 12-inch wanger and it glows in the dark”. [Stuff via ScreenJunkies]

It’s unfortunate, all this time I thought that when Russell Crowe shouted “HERE’S JACKO” and fired a cell phone at my skull, it was because he was upset that the buffet ran out early.  Turns out he was just excited because Michael Jackson was on the phone.  You are a cool dude, Russell Crowe.  You relate well to people.  Don’t let anyone tell you different.  No one else could tell a story about a 90-pound Scientologist with a prosthetic nose and still come off the crazy one.  I wonder if it’s Russell Crowe who’s been prank calling me.  Sometimes I pick up the phone late at night and all I hear is thirty odd foot of grunts.