Here's a first glimpse at Jim Carrey on the set of I Love You Phillip Morris (from the team who wrote Bad Santa, the movie is based on a true gay prison love story and was pitched as Catch Me If You Can meets Brokeback Mountain), in which Carrey's character appears to have been vomited upon by a Versace Medusa logo. It also features him grabbing a generous handful of actor Rodrigo Santoro, who was required to butch things up significantly since playing 300's chainmail-swimwear-fetishist Xerxes.

· Jason Reitman will direct Jim Carrey in Pierre Pierre for Fox Atomic, a "politically incorrect story centers on a self-indulgent French nihilist who transports a stolen painting from Paris to London." The challenging role will require Carrey to stretch as never before, with several scenes written to be spoken through the ass in fluent French. [Variety]
· Seth Rogen, meanwhile, is attached to Warner Bros.'s Observe and Report, about "a deluded, self-important head of mall security who squares off in a turf war against the local cops." We don't know why. We just think he can do this. [Variety]

Got an extra six grand lying around with nothing to consume? Well, the folks at Guernsey's Auction House will be happy to solve your fiscal problem. What could possibly be more fulfilling than spending those benjamins on a previously worn wife-beater with holes in it, coupled with silk purple and maroon pants? Not buying it? Well, what if we told you said ensemble was worn by Jim Carrey in the legendary bird-calling scene from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. And if you roll higher than that, say with 100 grand taking up space in your wife's shoe closet, get your ass to Vegas on March 15th because Michael Keaton's likely-sweat-drenched Batman Returns costume awaits. What else will the Pugliese Pop Culture Collection feature? More offerings, prices and images follow after the jump.

Forbes.com has curated yet another multimedia gallery of famous faces and their estimated earning potentials, but in a less-charitable twist on their favorite theme, these are The Most Overpaid Celebrities, and some of them may surprise you: everyone from Nicole Kidman, whose The Golden Compass vastly overestimated audience's interest in backyard polar bear fighting, to Will Smith, whose three-tiered template to conquering Hollywood—FX, creatures, and love—we thought was as close as anyone has come to movie-stardom code-cracking.

Editing a website is hard! Thankfully, like everyone else in my horrid generation, I can still rely on my parents. Not for financial support, but for story ideas.

Released from the burden of having to count paycheck zeros, Carrey now has time to concentrate on matters more weighty, like campaigning on behalf of Burmese political prisoners:

Jim Carrey, once the best-remunerated butt-ventriloquist and Method urinator of his Hollywood generation, has just signed a deal for new comedy Yes Man that's so financially risky that the project's failure could result in the actor having to sell his 10,000-square-foot ski chalet on the Sultan of Brunei's favorite indoor, manmade mountain. Carrey, reports DHD's Nikki Finke, will be getting his entire reward on the back end:

With the possibility of a disastrous™ writers strike (or, a little later down the line, a combined writers/actors/directors one) looming, THR notes that agents are sweating through their Armani as they try to panic-book clients into any movie that might provide a pre-labor-Armageddon commission. (One needs to look no further than the Reporter's singling out of Jim Carrey, who's collecting roles like a homeless man whose next meal is dependent upon his ability to accumulate a shopping cart full of "good enough" aluminum cans, to see how dire the situation is becoming.) Now that much of the top-flight talent is either booked or sitting the next few months out, the THR piece offers some big names who are still looking for jobs:

· Disney becomes the first major studio to kowtow to the anti-smoking lobby's crusade against the innocence-corrupting depiction of smoking in films, banning the super-fun, status-conferring activity of enjoying a delicious cigarette from its family films bearing their flagship brand. They'll also "discourage" their Touchstone and Miramax productions from showing the act unless, of course, shooting an actor languidly puffing away on a sexy-stick somehow enhances the vaguely dangerous appeal of their character . [THR]
· As previously rumored, Jim Carrey signs on to star in the Warner Bros. comedy Yes Man, the story of a guy who "aims to change his life by saying yes to absolutely everything that comes his way" (we've already burned off the easy joke about how he's choosing his roles these days), which he hopes to shoot before disappearing into the parts of nearly every character in A Christmas Carol. [Variety]
· Because we must: Variety dares to ask, "Could Lindsay Lohan's troubles affect career?" [Variety]
· Woo-hoo, indeed: Fox has won back the URL thesimpsonsmovie.com from a cybersquatter who was using the address to drive visitors to a site "that included sexually explicit depictions of several characters from The Simpsons," a decision which now forces fans to find graphic images of Chief-Wiggum-on-Comic-Book-Guy action on their own. [THR]
· Beware, comic fans, for the TV networks and studios have colonized this year's Comic-Con. Telling quote from a Warner Bros. TV marketing exec: "It's not just about fans of comicbooks. There are fans there of all kinds of entertainment. And these are people who communicate what they like through blogs and the Internet." [Variety]

In the high-concept spirit of Liar, Liar (and in the even higher-concept spirit of a recent career cold streak in which he can no longer turn down any paycheck offered him), Jim Carrey is attached to Yes Man, the story of a guy who agrees to "every thing that comes his way." [MTV Movies Blog]

· Casting genius or casting insanity? You make the call*: Jim Carrey will play Scrooge and all three ghosts in a 3-D/motion-capture Robert Zemeckis reimagination of A Christmas Carol for Disney. [*And we bet we know what you're going to say!] [Variety]
· Some more details about Cloverfield, the supertopsecret Paramount/JJ Abrams project introduced to the world by means of a mysterious trailer playing before Transformers. [THR]
· After making meaningless Tuesday box office history, Transformers took in $29.1 million on Wednesday to claim a record of somewhat greater import: The Biggest Fourth of July Ever. [Variety]
· The folks at Nielsen continue to measure summer TV ratings, even on nights when virtually no one is watching. [THR]
· Paramount tries to save Angelina Jolie box office failure A Mighty Heart by cutting its number of screens in half, hoping that this will somehow help the movie build word-of-mouth and extend its run in some markets. [Variety]

· After a summerlong run of sequel-clogged weekends where the eventual winner of the box office battle was all too obvious, the outcome of the upcoming Die Hard vs. Ratatouille fight seems up for grabs. We're not betting against Pixar, even though we'll probably wind up watching John McClane blow shit up. [Variety]
· Oh yeah Die Hard made $9.1 million on Wednesday, its first official day of release. Is that a lot? We're not good with midweek box office record data. [THR]
· Universal signs up erstwhile Biggest Comedy Star In the World Jim Carrey for Sober Buddies, one of those magical projects with a title so concise that we don't have to waste any time explaining it. (OK, OK, Carrey is a Sober Buddy who falls off the wagon while helping an alcoholic pal on a business trip in Vegas. Hilarity ensues, etc etc.) [Variety]
· 3.2 million viewers tuned in to CNN to for Larry King's post-jail interview with Paris Hilton. While this was King's highest rated show since 2005, consider that three times more people watched So You Think You Can Dance on Wednesday night if you'd like to feel a little better about the public's TV-watching taste levels. [THR]
· We would never ask you to start thinking about the Oscars in late June. That's just sick, really. [Variety]

· CAA takes the first steps in building ice-cold new client's Jim Carrey confidence back up, working to book him in the easy comedy gig Me Time, in which he'd play a put-upon, Mr. Mom-style househusband. [Variety]
· Newly minted Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson is in talks for her next acting gig, the ensemble Winged Creatures, which already has a cast including Forest Whitaker, Guy Pearce, Jackie Earle Haley, and Dakota Fanning, with whom Hudson is expected to have daily diva confrontations that even her Dreamgirls experience with Beyonce won't have prepared her for. [THR]
· Helen Mirren takes some time off from demanding, Oscar-worthy performances to go slumming in National Treasure: The Book of Secrets as the MILF who gave birth to Nicolas Cage. [Variety]
· The world needs more movies inspired by guys named Tebucky. [THR]
· Variety salutes Scary Hollywood Lawyers! All your favorites are here: Bert Fields! Marty Singer! That Skip Guy! [Variety]

To date, we've found the marketing push for the upcoming Jim Carrey vehicle The Number 23 somewhat inscrutable, with the few commercials we've seen leading us to blindly guess that the film is some kind of thriller/documentary hybrid detailing how the mysterious reappearance of the accursed, titular number in Carrey's life is somehow to blame for his recent career deceleration. Slate's Kim Masters now reports that the campaign has taken a new and annoying turn by peppering media types with e-mails noting the supposedly heebeejee-inducing reoccurrence of [actual number deleted for concerns that reading it here again could plunge you into depths of madness] in actual news items:

Perhaps there is no better illustration of the career-related problems currently plaguing Jim Carrey than the cover of Vanity Fair's Hollywood Issue. It features a dapper quartet consisting of Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Chris Rock and Jack Black, all actors who have managed, through a combination of talent and a reluctance to take improvisational leaks on set, to squeak by Carrey on their way to the top of the big screen funnyman heap. Radar now notes that the notoriously erratic comedian is shopping around a new project—a self-help guide entitled Be Ready to Be OK:

In a brief preview of an article to appear in the upcoming Resurrection Issue of Radar (much more background info on that here for the curious), Ben "The Gatecrasher" Widdicombe assembles a variety of anecdotes, that when taken together, seem to add up to the shocking revelation that serial studio dumpee Jim Carrey might be somewhat difficult to work with: Tales of unbidden urination, tantrum-having, and fun-list-deletion follow:

Jim Carrey's recent preemptive dumping of A Little Game Without Consequence had us crippled with worry that we might never again see the unemployed megastar's name on the marquee of our local theater, but today's Variety allays those admittedly hysterical fears that a couple of big-budget plug-pullings might drive the actor into an early retirement: Carrey will work again! Probably, in late 2008! As Paramount promised at the time it decided to put Ripley's Believe It Or Not on a shelf until it could figure out how much money they wanted to spend on an already expensive movie that could spiral out of financial control each time director Tim Burton decided to indulge one of the actor's requests to "try that take again, but this time, can I do it while riding on the shoulders of a twenty-foot-tall, solid gold robot? I really think that's what my performance needs here," it's revived the project, adding a writer amenable to Carrey's helpful creative input:

Today's Page Six puzzles through how floundering megastar Jim Carrey and multimedia-brand-in-decline Jennifer Lopez squeezed onto the guest list for last month's Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes Billion Year Commitment Ceremony Spectacular, connecting the dots first through evil agenting monolith CAA, then through a possible interest in discovering how some time in the sauna with a fistful of vitamins can help one's career or family-building ambitions. Says Page Six:

• The Most Absurd Deleted Scenes of All Time [Cracked.com]

Today's LAT details the budgetary problems affecting Bruce Almighty sequel Evan Almighty, which threaten to saddle the movie with the unwanted distinction of becoming the most expensive comedy in history. According to the Times, even without Bruce star Jim Carrey and his massive salary, the Evan production could reach a $175 million budget, as uncooperative weather during shooting, the logistics involved in scheduling predatory animal actors so that they don't accidentally devour their tasty, lower-billed co-stars during their downtime, and the expense of convincingly staging Biblical disasters have all driven costs heavenward. Still, Universal executives Marc Shmuger and David Linde think they've got everything under control: