Here’s the trailer for Act of Valor, from 300 and Man of Steel co-writer Kurt Vonstad and directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh. It’s a Navy SEAL movie, but the twist is that it stars actual active-duty SEALs (don’t they have to be undercover or something?). It looks like a 90-minute military recruitment video, albeit a really pretty one. I just don’t understand why all military recruitment stuff has to have such crappy music. “Yasseaah, I’m a-emo underbite singin’ ’bout duty…”

Universal drops plan to release Tower Heist early on VOD. No joke, this plan involved offering Tower Heist on VOD for $60 three weeks after its theatrical opening, and it was only dropped when theater chains threatened not to show the movie.  I think the FBI should revive the plan, because anyone who’d pay $60 to watch a Brett Ratner movie should be on the watch list. |Variety|

Ben Stiller to star in Rentaghost. From the writers of Night at the Museum, “Stiller will play Fred Mumford, a fellow who, though a slacker in life, has become determined to make something of himself as a newly deceased ghost. He winds up setting up a afterlife temp service, getting ghosts to rent themselves out for use by the living.”  Hey, ghost, can you wank dismissively for me? Thanks. |ComingSoon|

Don Johnson in Tarantino’s Django Unchained. No word yet on what part he’ll play. I actually heard about this last week from a friend but didn’t post it because it was a secondhand rumor and I couldn’t confirm. That was stupid of me, clearly. I also heard he was talking about banging hookers with Costner on the set of Tin Cup, but that’s between you and me.|Variety|

New photo from the set of American Reunion (trailer hits tomorrow). Chris Klein wants to score coke so bad. “I. Am. Gonna. Walk. Through. The rain drops.” |via USA Today|

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According to some reports, the trailer for Brett Ratner’s film, Tower Heist, allegedly contained “jokes.” One such “joke” involved Eddie Murphy’s character being reunited with an old schoolmate played by Ben Stiller, saying, “Oh I remember you! You the little seizure boy! Used to have them seizures all the time!”

Actor Greg Grunberg (best known for his portrayal of Who and Never Heard of Him in The Wankening), who has an epileptic son, apparently saw the trailer and took offense. Or at least, did whatever it’s called where you ignore context to advance your own agenda. Grunberg tweeted:

“TERRIBLY OFFENSIVE TRAILER for #TowerHeist – Making fun @ people w/ seizures is NOT FUNNY & WRONG! “Seizure Boy!” REALLY? #Boycott RT.”

And clearly, this gentleman is an authority on what’s funny. OBVIOUSLY the subtext of the “joke” was “HAHA, AREN’T EPILEPTIC KIDS ASSHOLES?”, and not “Look what an insensitive prick this character is.” Luckily, Brett Ratner is a slovenly, crumb-covered bastion of integrity, and he stood behind the line one hundred per– wait, what’s that? He immediately issued an apology and offered to pull the line from the commercials?

TalkAboutIt.org, an organization that Grunberg founded which is devoted to raising awareness about epilepsy, said in a post on its website over the weekend that Ratner had issued an apology to the actor.
“I am so sorry you are offended. … I sincerely feel bad,” Ratner wrote to Grunberg.
The organization added that Ratner has asked Universal Studios to change the movie’s marketing campaign by removing the offensive jokes from planned television spots.
After receiving the apology from Ratner, Grunberg tweeted the news with a message to the director.
“THANKS @BrettRatner for ur SINCERE APOLOGY to the Epilepsy Community! I’m lifting my personal boycott of ur hilarious film #TowerHeist RT,” he wrote. [THR]

While my blood pressure rises, let’s see if I can recap: Greg Grunberg says a joke he misunderstood is “NOT FUNNY & WRONG” and calls for a boycott. Brett Ratner says “I’m so sorry! Let’s pretend the joke isn’t in my movie even though it totally still is! Will that help?” And then Greg Grunberg is all like, “PERFECT. A token PR movie is exactly what I was after! Have I mentioned you’re hilarious?”

And people say Hollywood is full of phonies.

After a few week’s hiatus, This Week in Posters is back, bringing you the latest in movie-related graphic design fun. Incredibly, I think this week’s batch may include more diagonal godd*mned horizon lines than Danny Boyle’s last three movies combined. As illustrated most bluntly by this poster for Battleship, which is perhaps the laziest piece of marketing material since anything that references “Got Milk.” Look out, Green Lantern! They took yerr jizz fogz! And hey, doesn’t this movie have

All I have to say to that is…

“Prepare to fire the marketing department.”

“Uh, which people in the marketing department, sir?”

“…All of them.”

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Going against his normal strategy of staying attached to a project just long enough to impress people at a Jonas Brothers concert, Brett Ratner has actually directed a movie. Tower Heist stars Ben Stiller as the manager of a luxury apartment complex, where in the penthouse lives a rich investor played by Alan Alda. When Stiller and the rest of the apartment staff discover that Alda is a scam artist who’s lost all their money in a Ponzi scheme (TOPICAL!), he leads the plucky crew of knockaround schlubs that includes Precious and Casey Affleck in a heist to steal back their money (because Jamaican house cleaners always have plenty of disposable income to invest with Wall Street guys, didn’t you know?). The story of a dorky Jewish guy proving how down with the brother man he is really spoke to Ratner, but to give it the full nachos-stained crotch fondle, he brought on Eddie Murphy as the criminal consultant to give it that quintessential Brett Ratner scene, an interracial buddy duo arguing in a car. Will they argue about the radio? Soul food? Boxing? I can’t wait to find out!

"HEY I SEE A TRANNY PULL OVER!"

And there’s really loud music playing over the whole thing, because Brett Ratner movies are essentially the conversation you have at a club, where the content doesn’t matter as long as there’s enough background noise to convince stupid people they’re having fun. NTZ NTZ NTZ NTZ NTZ NTZ…

[via Yahoo, opens November 4th]

I feel like I’m sweating red bulls and fondling my crotch to the beat of house music today, because Brett Ratner’s hot new project just got more hotter.  Ya boy Alfred Itchcock’s Tower Heist just added Eddie Murphy to the cast.  The Rat Man production will hopefully continue Murphy’s string of hits that now includes, Norbit, Imagine That, and the incomparable Meet Dave, and will give him someone with whom to swap tranny stories on set.

Eddie Murphy is set to join Ben Stiller and Alan Alda in Tower Heist, the Brett Ratner-directed caper film for Universal Pictures. Murphy has been mentioned as a possible participant going back to the film’s original configuration as an African American version of Ocean’s Eleven, when it was called Trump Heist. Trump was dropped as was that casting equation, and now, the storyline deals with operations and maintenance workers in a luxury Manhattan high-rise whose pension funds were looted by a Bernie Madoff-like  Wall Street crook, who is living high style in a penthouse apartment, under house arrest. Led by an overworked building manager (Stiller), the workers use their knowledge of the inner workings of the building to rip him off. [Deadline]

It’s strange to say it, but it’s looking like a Brett Ratner project might actually get made. After years of lazily smoking pot and eating nachos and playing XBox, it’s nice to see Brett Ratner finally digging right in there and grabbing a project by the short and curlies.  When you get that creative itch, you’ve just gotta scratch it.