Dane Cook by John Shearer/ WireImage.com
[Editor's Note: It is April 1, so all of the following could turn out to be untrue. Carry on!]Comedian Dane Cook has been voted the "unfunniest" comic by a Boston radio poll modeled after the NCAA's March Madness brackets.Cook "won" over comedy punching bags like Paula Poundstone, Sinbad, Jeff Foxworthy and Carlos Mencia. The poll, which aired on WBCN's Toucher & Rich Show, is obviously not science. But was there any truth to the results? Cook is a wildly popular performer whose albums have cracked the Billboard Top 10 — a rarity for a comedy album. His rabid online audience floods both his website and MySpace page. Critics say he steals jokes. And his movie career (Employee of the Month, Good Luck Chuck) — well, it hasn't exactly set the world on fire.Nevertheless, I have to confess a weakness for his Car Alarm and Nothing Fights routines (warning: clips do contain a few naughty words), but I get why he can annoy.What do you think? Does Cook deserve so much derision? ...
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Dave Chappelle by Stephen Lovekin/WireImage.com
According to the New York Post, the former heard that the latter was going to try to break his record for the most consecutive hours spent performing stand-up, so on Sunday, he broke his own damn record by doing a six-hour-and-12-minute set at Hollywood's Laugh Factory. Among his jokes, the paper says, was an explanation of a recent trip to Ecuador: He had to go so he could return to the States speaking the language properly. — Ben Katner
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Forget my crack about the slashed Metamucil budget. Per Variety, Jim Broadbent will play a Yale professor in the fourth Indiana Jones film, which Steven Spielberg began lensing Monday in New Mexico, but will also shoot in, among other global sites, New Haven, Connecticut.... Kate Hudson will star opposite Dane Cook in Bachelor No. 2, a rom-com about a man hired to take other men's exes out on horrific dates, thus sending them back to their former fellas.... HBO Films is adapting the British play My Zinc Bed, with Uma Thurman, Jonathan Pryce and Paddy Considine all on board.... DreamWorks and Universal are turning the graphic novel Cowboys & Aliens into a live-action feature.
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Paula Zahn courtesy CNN
CNN is planning to cancel the low-rated Paula Zahn Now, says Variety, perhaps filling the 8 pm time slot with a news program anchored by NBC's Campbell Brown, if a deal can be worked out.... The 41st Annual Country Music Association Awards will air Nov. 7 on ABC.... DVD release dates have been set for Taxi Driver: Limited Collector's Edition (Aug. 14) and Dane Cook: The Lost Pilots (featuring two never-aired comedy pilots starring you-know-who, Aug. 21).
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Dane Cook is looking likely to land the lead in Bachelor No. 2, about a creep who gets paid to take girls out on dates that are so bad, they go running back to their exes.... David E. Kelley has scored frequent collaborator Thomas Schlamme (The West Wing) to direct the pilot for his ABC drama, Life on Mars.... Deadwood's John Hawkes has been cast as the brother of a baseball great turned substitute PE teacher in the Will Ferrell-produced HBO pilot East Bound and Down.
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Elvis Presley's three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show are chronicled in a three-disc DVD set due for release on Nov. 21.... BET is in talks to air syndicated episodes of HBO's The Wire, starting with Season 1 and unspooling perhaps as soon as 1Q 2007.... Dane Cook — my current fave to play Fletch on the big screen (see related blog entry), and Jessica Simpson's apparent fave to play footsie (per the New York Post) — is taking his Tourgasm act to Las Vegas on Nov. 17.... Fox News Channel celebrates its 10th anniversary with Thank You America!, a two-hour special airing Sunday at 8 pm/ET and hosted by Chris Wallace and Martha MacCallum.
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Lips. Yes, her lips. As I took in a Wednesday screening of Jessica's new feature folly, Employee of the Month, I found myself positively transfixed by her large, plump, round and seemingly enhanced lips. And not in a good way, really. Employee of the Month is a cute and sometimes clever comedy, starring Dane Cook — now my No. 1 pick to fill Chevy Chase's tennis shoes in any new Fletch film — and Dax Shepard as bitter rival workers at Super Club (a badly "disguised" Costco superstore). But when J-Simp, the shared object of their affections, is on the screen, all you see are yes, those, but also her lips. I know there were reports in the celeb glossies months ago about Jessica possibly having had some "work" done on her pucker, and if true, it apparently was done mere seconds before she shot her scenes for EOTM. I plead ignorance about all things collagen and Botox, but whatever JS might (or might not) have had done seems to have affected her line delivery, as words aren't s...
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Per Variety, Close to Home's Kimberly Elise has scored the female lead opposite Terrence Howard in the inner-city sports drama P.D.R.... A big-screen adaptation of the video game Cold Fear is in the works.... Dane Cook is developing and will star in Dad Knap, about a man who abducts his dad in order to get some quality father-son time.... Danny DeVito and Matthew Broderick are neighbors at war over holiday decorations in the comedy All Lit Up.... Per Reuters, George Lopez and Maggie Q have joined Balls of Fury, a comedy set in the world of clandestine Ping-Pong tournaments.
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HBO has inked a long-term, multiproject deal with comedian Dane Cook — the first partnership of its kind for the cable outlet. Among the projects on the docket are a concert film, a scripted series and a special titled "I Hosted the Saturday Night Live Episode Featuring the Chronicles of Narnia Rap."
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Paramount has purchased "an original and very moving love story" from Serendipity scribe Marc Klein to serve as a starring vehicle for Tom Cruise.... Also per Variety, Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant have been tapped to star in the romantic comedy Music and Lyrics By.... Dane Cook is in final talks to play Steve Carell's brother in Dan in Real Life, about a widower who unwittingly falls for his brother's girlfriend.... In book deals, Paramount has bought The Spellman Files, about a family of private investigators, while Warner Bros. has snatched up David Ignatius' espionage thriller Penetration, which Ridley Scott will direct.
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