People truly underestimate the PR value of a pleasant-looking mugshot. For instance, this is Armie Hammer, star of The Social Network and J. Edgar, taken after an arrest in November (for some reason the mugshot only surfaced recently). No one seemed to care much about it, which I think would have to be different if he’d looked like this:

Lesson? Always smile for your mugshot.

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Vulture recently did an interview with Kevin Smith, in which he’s his charming, insightful, and funny self (I don’t understand why that so rarely comes through in his movies).  He discusses the disappointment of Zack and Miri (which, to be fair, sucked), smoking weed to cope, and taking a hiatus from the internet.  The whole thing’s worth a read, but here’s a snip:

“Opening on Halloween wasn’t great. We never really nailed our marketing campaign … I mean, having “porno” in the title in some weird way hurt. And that shocked me because I was like, “I thought that was our edge, for heaven’s sake.” But apparently not. I mean, it was what it was. But we should have done better. Because that, to me, was like the most mainstream flick that I could write.

“And so, yeah, that was tough, but something good came out of it, and that was that I became a habitual f-cking weed smoker, for a long period of time. They always tell you, “you don’t get anything done.” And, you know, I was more productive in six months … and maybe I’m giving credit to weed, but the fact of the matter is I stayed off the Internet for six months because after our opening I was like, “I can’t show my face on the Internet!” Because the Internet is like high school, and having Zach and Miri open to ten million is the equivalent of wearing a really gay-ass-looking shirt on the first day of school, and everyone’s talking about it for the next few months. So rather then go back to school, I quit school for a few months.”

It’s true, Kevin normally avoids the gay ass shirt ridicule, but only because he wears the same goddamned outfit every day.  You just know that coat smells like loneliness and Febreze.

Pineapple Express/Eastbound & Down director David Gordon Green recently let it slip that he’d cast my Columbia classmate James Franco in his next movie, a “medieval stoner comedy” called Your Highness.  (GET IT???)

“It’s a medieval movie, so we want a bunch of Ray Harryhausen ‘Clash of the Titans’ effects. We’ve been watching ‘Beastmaster’ and ‘Yor, the Hunter From the Future.’ We want to make a movie on a big scale, but utilizing pre-CGI effects like matte painting, animatronics, and puppets. It’s about a prince who smokes weed and fights dragons.” [ThePlaylist]

I’d love to rip them for making Pineapple Express over again, but that actually sounds kind of awesome.  In this month’s Playboy interview, Seth Rogen again says that James Franco actually doesn’t smoke weed, which I’ve heard from a couple different sources now.  But I still have a hard time believing this happened sober.  In related news, Ray Harryhausen is my German sh-t porn name.

According to sources who actually watched this festival of mediocrity and shameless whoring, Seth Rogen and James Franco came out and smoked a joint on live TV, and in response, MTV’s cameras pulled back to a super-duper wide angle shot until they left the stage.

But that didn’t stop them (or me) from posting the non-wide angle video online. (If you’re a child or just have the mind of one, you can watch a bootleg of the original telecast after the jump.  My favorite part is the guy trying to zoom in on the TV screen.  See? These are the kind of people who watch the MTV movie awards).

"Kids, don’t really smoke fake weed like this," Rogen told the crowd at the Gibson Amphitheatre.
Despite Rogen’s claim, the sweet scent wafting through the Gibson Amphitheatre suggested the herb was real. [NYDailyNews]

Everyone knows James Franco has the best fake weed around.  But it’s a little hypocritical of MTV to censor something like this.  You can’t act like you’ve got the children’s interests in mind at an event you invited Zac Efron to.  That guy can turn kids gay through the radio.