Welcome back to Defamer Attractions, your one and only guide to everything new, noteworthy and potentially noxious at the movies. This week sees Oliver Stone officially establish the land-speed record for producing an Oscar contender, joined by skull-cracking Mark Wahlberg, sex-driving Seth Green and our diva-coloured underdog. As always, someone's gotta lose; we'll call our shot there, too, along with cherry-picking through a new crop of DVD's. As always, our opinions are our own, but we have little doubt they would look great on you. Try them on after the jump.

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· In their highly anticipated return to rumours of reuniting, Martin Scorsese is attached to direct Robert De Niro in I Heard You Paint Houses, based on the story of a mob hit man reputedly linked to the death of Jimmy Hoffa. Steven Zaillian will adapt the source book. [Variety]
· With the Jetsons movie permanently stalled and Huckleberry Hound resting snugly on the bottom of the Hanna-Barbera remake barrel, Warner Bros. has defaulted to Yogi Bear as its live-action/animation hybrid to make entire generations cringe in 2010. [THR]

After the jump: Kung Fu Panda reups in 3D, Fringe reups in 2D, and crisis! grips! Bollywood!

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As if suffering through Righteous Kill and a stultifying Letterman Top 10 weren't career punishment enough for Robert De Niro, the actor has found himself the subject of just-leaked phone calls between Quentin Tarantino and Harvey Weinstein during the making of Jackie Brown — and the conversation paints the supposedly money-grubbing De Niro in a light more unflattering than the entirety of Rocky & Bullwinkle:

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Robert De Niro has been picking up work where he can — a speaking engagement here, a morning-show gig there — so we were more than little surprised last week when we heard he'd backed out of the thriller Edge of Darkness, currently shooting in Boston. That's not the De Niro who jumped to ostensibly greener pastures at Endeavor a while back, and it's definitely not the consummate professional whom producers brought aboard to make alpha-male magic with Mel Gibson and director Martin Campbell. But a report today out of Massachusetts offers no fewer than four scenarios making the rounds — chief among them being a sort of fantastically Kubrickesque golf-course torture:

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Clearly exhausted from their earlier morning-show rendezvous with Brian Williams, Righteous Kill co-stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino last night indulged David Letterman with one final on-camera tryst before returning to the anonymity of their respective solo careers. And what a fitting send-off, with the pair teaming up on the "Top 10 Reasons I Like Being an Actor" — a droll bit of thanksgiving that still won't make us forget Heat, but may yet be proven our lone cultural reward for tolerating the existence of Righteous Kill at all. See what kind of magic is possible when less than 12 producers are involved? Next time, guys, next time. [CBS]

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The marketing squad behind Robert De Niro's latest film may not have an especially well-developed touch with movie posters, but you can't say it isn't getting its money's worth with the brilliant new cross-promotion, "Righteous Kill Tuna — Only at Nobu!" While the summer's blockbuster superhero crop nickel-and-dimed their way through Happy Meals and Whoppers, De Niro and restaurant's London outposts ventured waaay outside the box recently with high-priced helpings of the rare Atlantic bluefin tuna — a species that activists contend has been overfished to the point of near-extinction and which Nobu should apparently know better than to serve:

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Our visit to the multiplex last weekend went well enough for the most part; we liked The House Bunny just fine, and the Babylon A.D. trailer looked suitably career-ending for our tastes. It wasn't until we exited the theatre that our nerves deadened and our hearts sank: There, in a lobby dotted with orphaned popcorn kernels and bereft souls, we had a closer look at a poster for the upcoming Al Pacino/Robert De Niro cop flick Righteous Kill. And while it might seem too easy to write the film off as a gimmicky genre exercise at first blush, it would hardly be fair to do so without seeing it. That said, we noticed five things off the bat that not only implied an alarming sloppiness, but seemed to actively discourage our viewership. After the jump, our essential wake-up call for studios, poster designers and casual fans alike.

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It's time to break out your SAG vs AFTRA Celebrity Turf War Map™ for an update, albeit a bit of a confusing one: Robert De Niro is the latest star to come out in opposition of a SAG strike, asserting during a press conference Saturday at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival that Hollywood has suffered enough bloodshed this year in the bargaining trenches to implode once more over residuals:

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Reminding us of that time a grumpy Sean Connery asked for a commenter invite so he could take issue with our estimation of Harrison Ford, Kirk Douglas took to the LA Times letters section this weekend to protest the paper's recent treatment of "fallen" stars Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. And as far as we're concerned, his exquisitely articulated and defended point is the last word proving that the stars deserve better:

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If Robert De Niro's appearance at last night's Meryl Streep tribute in New York is any indication, all those haters who ridiculed the actor's agency switch last week might have another thing coming. To wit: De Niro killed. In a cruise-ship comic kind of way, perhaps, and filing through a fistful of index-carded one-liners, but still. This guy may yet pull down $20 million a picture if his timing keeps up, and he wasted no time soliciting his former co-star Streep to join him — if only someone at CAA would return his calls. Zing! Catch our exclusive video and a few more outtakes from De Niro's repertoire after the jump.

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