He hasn't been in much lately, save for Tim & Eric's Billion-Dollar Movie, but with a lot in the pipeline as an actor and producer (Dog Fight, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters), it seemed like as good of a time as any for Will Ferrell to remind us he exists. First there were the hyper-local Old Milwaukee beer commercials, and then Ferrell showed up at New Orleans Arena on '80s Night this week to introduce the players before the home team Hornets took on the visiting Chicago Bulls (who would go on to win by 23). 

For a while there, Dan Rush’s screen adaptation of Raymond Carver’s Why Don’t You Dance? was kicking around Hollywood, garnering good word of mouth but not much steam. In today’s fickle independent film market, that’s not enough to get a movie made. But once Will Ferrell lent his star power to the project by agreeing to star in the film, it was all systems go, and Rush was on his way to getting his first film made. In Everything Must Go, Will Ferrell plays Nick Halsey, a downbeat alcoholic who loses his job and returns home to find his worldly possessions scattered across the front lawn—his fed-up wife has cut him off and kicked him out.

The Brooklyn boys are coming back strong. After releasing the single “Make Some Noise” from Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 2 yesterday, the Beasties have followed up with the trailer for their new 30-minute short film, Fight For Your Right Revisted, directed by Adam Yauch. Namedropping is distasteful, but what the hell: Seth Rogen, Will Ferrell, Danny McBride, Jack Black, and Rainn Wilson are all a part of the cast.

● Kim Kardashian revealed to Piers Morgan that she helps fund a church set up by her mother, Kris Jenner. It was only a matter of time before a Church of Kardashian found it's place on earth: Idol worship, meet idle worship. [DailyMail] ● Wait, actually, Jennifer Aniston is not adopting a child from Mexico. Star Magazine must be so embarrassed for getting that one wrong. [People] ● Will Ferrell is off to Dunder-Mifflin to help ease the loss of Office boss-man Steve Carell. His character, a visiting branch manager, will be around for four episodes, including one after Carell's exit from the show. [EW]

For those waiting for an Y Tu Mama Tambien sequel—Mexico’s most masturbated-to actors enjoined again on a life journey filled with homoerotic possibility—well, tough luck. But for those just as happy to see Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal once more share the screen, I’ve got good news: it’s just been announced that the duo have been cast alongside Will Ferrell in a Spanish-language telenovela-style comedy called Casa de mi Padre directed by former SNL writer Matt Piedmont. I like this move already by virtue of all parties involved.

Not long ago I wrote about the trailer for the forthcoming Devil. I didn’t address how audiences in a New York City theater booed the name of producer M. Night Shyamalan when it appeared on screen (that hadn’t happened yet), but rather how utterly cheap the movie is. To whit, it mostly takes place in an elevator. This is the most transparent movie-on-a-budget gambit I’ve seen poised for a major release in a long time. And yet, it only took a week or so for me to come across another: I give you The Virginity Hit.

Yesterday we attempted to solve the admittedly self-generated mystery of whether Will Smith was on Twitter (we concluded that he wasn't). Not only did this minor obsession lead to a Will Smith dream last night (we were on the set of his Spike Jonze-directed video, while Will hugged us the entire time), but today, Smith popped up again with the announcement the he's decided his next film will be Men in Black 3D. Naturally, we checked fake Will Smith's Twitter page to see if he was committed enough to tweet the news. He wasn't, but what we found was far more intriguing: "on the phone with @willferrell he told me to tell ya'll he just signed up on twitter. Follow him ya'll." Aaaaah!

Raymond Carver is generally acknowledged as the one of the most important fiction writers of the latter half of the twentieth century: he played a significant role in the revitalizing the short story in the 80’s and was affiliated—along with Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, et al—with the successful literary movement commonly dubbed “dirty realism”. Yet despite all this, I'm (cynically?) inclined to think that he's best known to the contemporary culture mob as the author whose work provided the inspiration for Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. Although the film combined numerous short stories and transplanted them to Los Angeles, what it (mostly) got right was the strain of drunken, blue-collar miserablism that runs through Carver’s oeuvre. It can be rather grim stuff, and is not the kind of material you’d expect to be turned into, say, a Will Ferrell vehicle. Yet, as Deadline Hollywood reports, that’s exactly what’s happening.

● The end of the world won’t be coming in 2012; it’s happening September 2011, when Oprah goes off the air. [WSJ] ● Mariah Carey’s demand to be surrounded by 20 white kittens and 100 white doves for the Westfield Christmas Lighting ceremony was denied, although she will be chauffeured in a Rolls Royce and escorted by 80 security guards. [DailyMail] ● Pamela Anderson finally had "the talk" with her kids. No, not the sex talk, the "your father and I made a sex tape" talk, telling her sons that: “Mommy and Daddy were massively in love, we videotaped everything and you’re probably going hear about [it] at school.” [RadarOnline]

In 2005 when YouTube came through the door like Eric B for Pres, pulled their Yankee cap low, and politely declared “respect me in this bitch” the online universe (or, “the game” if we were to continue with our hip hop intro) was changed forever. The initial populist inclinations of the site were informed by the founder’s longtime experience in the space (they founded the blog PayPal) and never gave nor received handjobs from the Entertainment Industry. Music Videos went up. Movie Trailers went up. And, more importantly, their audience did as well. Then Google bought them. Then Hulu did it right. And YouTube has been on its knees out left courting Hollywood heavyweights ever since. So why did Will Ferrell and Adam McKay decide that it was time?