• Jonah Hill is barely recognizable. Gone is the jew-fro, the skater shorts and the rub-me-please belly. Is Jonah Hill ready for his Paris Match close-up? I personally preferred him as fat because fat and funny go super well together (except that in this case we would laugh with Jonah Hill, not at Jonah Hill).

    Does this new skinniness affect his bankability? I wonder what Judd Apatow thinks of the new Jonah. And how will this affect the roles he will be offered in the future? Yes, I know, by now you're probably incensed that I would write this since yes, shedding weight in order to live a long and healthful life is a no-brainer--agreed. But I will miss you, Seth:

  • Who is Zach Galifianakis? Does he work at that Greek restaurant out in Long Island City which I used to patronize until I had bad swordfish? Galifianakis: that's Greek, isn't it? Thus my inferring that he might work in one of those multi-purpose restaurants in the surroundings of Manhattan.

    No, Zach Galifianakis is a certified funny man who most recently shot up to stardom thanks to the Superbad movies. He played the sheltered, live-in son who desperately wants to make friends but plays hard-to-get at the same time. In other words, a very tortured individual and one of the rare--if not the only one--thespians alive nowadays who sports a very respectable beard (he probably belongs to one of those beard societies).

  • Rainn Wilson, a.k.a Dwight Schrute from The Office, gets two thumbs up from me for his funny and acerbic tweets. He recently commented the return to the tweetosphere of Ricky Gervais, who headlined the original Office series in England. Gervais is back to tweeting with a vengeance. None of the Screen Comment team of fact-checkers could figure out why Gervais retired his Twitter account, or why he came back for that matter, but here's what Gervais has been tweeting:

  • In this week's Chicago Tribune is an article by film critic Michael Phillips about the demise of the small-town movie theatre. Converting the projectors to digital costs money and mom-and-pop theatre owners just don't have the fund since they've often been running on fumes. The problem is a lack of incentive, of course. The cost of creating a 35 mm print is about 12 times higher for the studios

  • This week the Press Play blog's Serena Bramble and Simon Abrams are presenting the first chapter in a video-essay series on Roman Polanski's movies, called, unsurprisingly, Life’s work: the films of Roman Polanski, curated by Indiewire and Salon contributor Matt Zoller Seitz. Any doubt you may have on the producers' intentions will vanish as soon as you learn the first chapter’s title: Roman Polanski is God

  • In the epic saga of Netflix v. pay TV there is some light at the end of the tunnel for the familiar red envelope company. As first reported on Gizmodo, Dreamworks Animation studios have granted Netflix the rights to stream their catalog. That’s really good news for Netflix--they beat out HBO in competing for fresh studio content--as it gives them new credibility and legitimizes them, and it’s good for the consumers, as there will now be a little bit more movies to choose from—if Shrek and Madagascar is your thing. What hasn’t been made public yet is how quickly movies would be available for streaming. No word about this on the Netflix blog as of the writing of this article.

  • I was skimming through the evening's tweets when I came across this one. Couldn't help a couple guffaws--or three. I don't think I've ever seen Paz De La Huerta (The limits of control, Enter the void) not naked on screen. Some actresses just pick and choose roles like that. But I digress. I just read that The Artist, by French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, took home the Audience Awards at the 59th San Sebastian Festival