TBTS TalkRoach™: Gossip That Refuses to Die (Week Ending July 9, 2011)

(The Brown Tweed Society’s TalkRoach™ highlights mundane, ridiculous, and outright unbelievable pop culture stories that should have fizzled after a day—or should never have been news in the first place—but have somehow survived.)

1.  Arrested Development Movie:

AD actor Jeffrey Tambor “confirms” that a movie based on the critically acclaimed TV comedy will, in fact, be made.  Pardon me if I don’t get excited, since this promise has been made by half of the cast and the show’s creator, Mitch Hurwitz.  I refuse to let Lucy swipe the football away from me again.  This will be news when the movie actually premiers in theaters.

That's his name. Sorry your mind wasn't blown.

2.  Natalie Portman’s Baby’s Name Revealed:

Unless a child were raised in perfect, hermetic captivity, his/her name will be known at some point, which makes the “reveal” of said name a little anti-climactic, really.  So it is with Natalie Portman’s son, Aleph.  That name may sound odd to the casual reader, until you realize that she is Jewish, having been born in Israel, and “Aleph” or “Alef” means lots of things in Hebrew (the first letter of the alphabet, “oneness of God,” the element of air, etc.).  I sincerely doubt that Portman thought it a big deal either, since she probably didn’t put out a press release saying “Portman Baby Name…Revealed!”

3.  Old Video Game Being Made Into Movie:

Do you remember Space Invaders, that really old video game that bleeped and blooped until you somehow won (or lost)?  Well, that’s being made into a movie, just like every other pre-1990s game and cultural utterance (like this and this and this).  So far only the rights have been secured while producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura searches for a script.  That’s correct, no one even knows what this movie will even be about, just that an old-ass pixelated game with no real mythos behind it except for two paragraphs on the back of the box will somehow get turned into a movie with a script that involves either aliens attacking the earth or aliens attacking a human space outpost, both of which have been done about a thousand times.

4.  Some Lady Got Acquitted, and People Think She Shouldn’t Have:

I didn’t follow any of the story until this week, but judging from Facebook, y’all really disagreed with the Casey Anthony verdict.  I’m glad I knew very little of this.

Thanks, entertainment media, for elevating the naming of a celebrity’s child to comic book cover importance!