While conducting interviews at the VMAs yesterday, the nearby booth advertising Rock Band 2 was the cacophonous bane of our existence — though no one was more unhappy to see it than director Brett Ratner. As you may recall, the Defamer-beloved auteur (and big penis enthusiast) aspires to direct a film adaptation based on Rock Band's rival video game franchise, Guitar Hero. Since the idea continues to boggle our minds, we knew we had to venture a question, even if the resulting Defamer-on-Ratner interaction threatened to spin the world off its axis. Fortunately, the Rush Hour 3 helmer was every bit the gentleman. We blame the heatstroke. [MTV]

(Video after the jump)

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Art-eschewing, mainstream-tentpole- project-maker Brett Ratner's love for the video game sensation known as the Guitar Hero knows no bounds. His obsession with the instrument sim and its groupie-nailing expansion packs stems back to his formative years at NYU film school, when he'd busk in Washington Square Park, playing as many Police songs as he could using the four notes he was capable of eliciting from a harmonica. The first time he picked up Hero, it gave him the same quaternary musical thrill ("Smoke on the Water," for example, became a four-colour kaleidoscopic "red red blue/green green blue blue/red red green/ yelllooowww"), and he since has gone about incorporating the game into many of his smaller projects—everything from Miley Cyrus videos to Mariah Carey videos. But an actual Guitar Hero movie? He'd love a crack, he told MTV Multiplayer:

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· With New Line but a shadowy shingle of its former self, Billion Dollar Director Brett Ratner is packing up the Rat Entertainment boxes and moving onto the Paramount lot to marinate in soulmentor Bob Evans's pungent creative vapors. He pledges to no one in particular, "I will not be pitching art films. I want to make mainstream tentpole projects." [Variety]
· The End of Ideas: King of All Media Edition: Howard Stern is producing a remake of Rock 'n' Roll High School to be written by Alex "Bill & Ted" Winters. [Variety]
· Discovery Channel is launching a reality show that will attempt to execute many of Leonardo Da Vinci's conceptualized inventions, either sending contestants soaring on the winds of 16th Century innovation, or plunging to their bat-winged-flying-contraption deaths. [THR]
· The Dark Knight nudges Warner Bros. profits overseas past the $1 billion mark. [THR]
· Sam Raimi will direct The Transplants for Disney, details of which they're staying vague about save that it's a "four-quadrant ensemble superhero story with a comedic bent," each a vaguely horrifying ethnic stereotype. [THR]

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After the unfortunate reception for The Love Guru, it's just too easy to write off New Line's prospective Austin Powers revival (which Mike Myers is reportedly working on for New Line with former series collaborator Mike McCullers) as yet another ill-advised folly belching the black smoke of Myers's career. In fact, taken as merely a part of the larger phenomenon we at Defamer like to call The End of Ideas, the Powers franchise is but a speck of the shit on Hollywood's collective bathroom wall — a tableau diligently studied today by the haz-mat crew at Entertainment Weekly.

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Brett Ratner gets a lot of shit here at Defamer. We've called him "annoying," "a hack," even... gasp... "a bad director." But one thing we won't do is say the guy doesn't appreciate fine literature. Why, according to Page Six, Ratner was the biggest star at an LA book signing the other night. Of course, that book was The Big Penis Book. And Taschen, the publisher, says it's "profusely illustrated with over 400 historic photos of spectacular male endowments."

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Is it possible that one of Hollywood's biggest comedic stars — who has had handlers and publicists coddling him with tales of his own greatness for years — has actually developed some self-awareness? Shocking as it may seem, it sounds like that's what's going on with Eddie Murphy. For example, why is he making a fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie? Not because of something so crass as money, but because "the third Beverly Hills Cop was horrible! I didn't want to leave it like that. The first two were cool and the third one was shitty. [Let's] get the franchise fixed again, clean up this old mess and do a good movie."

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It looks like there's nothing anybody can do to stop a fourth installment of the Beverly Hills Cop franchise, which Paramount is reportedly pushing to a 2010 release date and which should finally fulfil that looooong-standing global demand for an Eddie Murphy/Brett Ratner collaboration. But as hammy, craven and sadistic as the project seems at a glance, and although it's likely bound for a dispiriting PG-13 script, we find our tortured souls compelled to give this one a chance; follow the jump for a half-dozen reasons why we could think of worse news to wake up to on a Thursday. Feel free to add your own; we need all the reassurance we can get.

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Meet Andy Fiscella. Andy owns the Lohan- and Dunst-infested Crown Bar, as well as the Dime and Winston's. Andy's likes include: brown corduroys, Brett Ratner, and knocking on wood for good luck. Andy's dislikes include: Britney Spears, grade-school bullies, and anyone who would dare compare him to Troy Duffy. Which, of course, means he also dislikes us. You see, like Duffy, the rags-to-riches-to-rags former bartender who penned Boondock Saints only to wind up screwed over by Darth Weinstein, has an eerily similar trajectory as Andy — though Fiscella's inevitable downfall still lies on the horizon. In a Metromix profile on the poor man's Brent Bolthouse, we're given the chance to dive inside of a "hot spot" club owner's mind grapes. And predictably, they're rotten, sour, and likely to cause you to vomit.

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A funny thing happened to Brett Ratner on the way to reviving Smell-o-Vision for a generation deprived of the aromatic arts: He tried filming Anton Yelchin and Olivia Thirlby fucking in a tree. In Central Park! Never one to do anything the easy way, Ratner bravely faced down layers of Gotham bureaucracy in the pursuit of his six-minute segment of the forthcoming omnibus film New York, I Love You:

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Army Archerd surprises us every couple of months or so with a scoop worthy of his 55-year reputation as "Hollywood's Original Blogger," or whatever Variety is calling him these days. Today, for example, the veteran gadfly brings word of a cinematic revival so towering, so ahead-of-its-time, so... smelly it could only emerge from the smoldering cerebrum of Brett Ratner:

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