If you didn’t already know, action star Wesley Snipes (Blade, Blade II, Blade: Trinity, Passenger 57, Murder at 1600) is in a whole lotta trouble for not paying income taxes on about US$58M, spanning several years. His lawyers are saying that he should simply have to pay up what he owes instead of having a trial since, that he was poorly advised by his co-defendants, and that he had no intention of defrauding.

Snipes’ case is apparently one of the biggest in US tax history and if he does go to trial, he could go away for quite some time. That means, no more Blade sequels, no more movies for years. Well I loved Blade and hope he pays his dues and avoids jail time. (Since Blade: Trinity, the man has been doing a lot of straight-to-video work, but he’ll appear in in the zombie flick Gallowwalker in 2009, which has already completed production.)

MeeVee has an interesting breakdown of some of the celebrities that are endorsing various U.S. presidential candidates in both parties. Hulk Hogan is endorsing Barack Obama, but Nature Boy Rick Flair is endorsing Mike Huckabee.

According to the breakdown, it seems that Obama has the vast majority of celebrity endorsements, mostly from actors/ actresses and a few others in the entertainment business. Someone commented to me last week that Hollywood really wants a Democrat back in power, though he didn’t say why he thought that. That their endorsements lie with Obama rather than, say, Hillary Clinton, says loads. She does, however, have the backing of a few celebrities – mostly non-actors – including Barbra Streisand, Martha Stewart and Magic Johnson.
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Frankie Muniz is all grown up now (turned 22 in December) and is in his third year as a professional race car driver. Says Muniz,

I don’t want to sound conceited, but I don’t think there has been an actor or celebrity-turned-racecar driver that has made it as high up on the racecar circuit as I have.

Well I thought Paul Newman had, but I could be wrong. Muniz also says that he wants to race seven-time world champion Michael Schumacher, and feels he can compete. Good luck, Frankie.

Despite what he says in the video clip below, Muniz hasn’t given up acting. He’ll be in Division III, Extreme Movie, and The Legend of Secret Pass this year. He currently appears in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

If you have blue eyes, you’re related to Frank Sinatra, Angelina Jolie, Cameron Diaz, Stephen Hawking, Marie Curie and anyone else with blue eyes. At least, that’s the finding of a group of researchers, who say that humans all originally had brown eyes.

Blue eyes supposed originated due to a mutation from around the Black Sea area during the Neolithic period (6,000 – 10,000 years ago). There’s an OCA2 gene that gets turned off. It stops producing melanin and results in blue eyes. (But if the adjacent OCA gene also gets turned off, you become albino.) According to the research, blue eyes are genetic inheritance, so that would imply that all blue-eyed humans, no matter their race, are linked to the same ancestor.

American Pie star Jason Biggs has asked girlfriend/ actress Jenny Mollen to marry him. She joked that he’d asked her repeatedly, and he admitted to having asked her the first night they met. First night?

Biggs will be in three films this year: Over Her Dead Body (which opens tomorrow, Feb 1st), My Best Friend’s Girl, and Lower Learning.

Mollen is also in My Best Friend’s Girl, and will be in Off the Ledge.

Heath Ledger wasn’t doing drugs at the SAG party of 2006. Or so the video that Entertainment Tonight supposedly paid US$200,000 for proves. There’s some speculation that the allegations of him being videotaped doing drugs were rumors started to help ratings in TV Sweeps week, which is coming up. What’s really weird, though, is what Ledger says (or so it seems) in the video: “I used to smoke five joints a day for 20 years.” It makes no sense. I doubt he started when he was barely in grade school.

No sh*t, Sherlock dept: A friend of Jake Gyllenhaal says that he is taking Heath Ledger’s death harder than most people. Uh, duh. Maybe that’s because he was actually a close friend, unlike a lot of other stars that were asked about Ledger? It takes more than a week to get over someone you cared about. Sometimes years or decades. Should he have been partying and making out with someone instead, like Mary-Kate Olsen was supposedly doing?

On top of Ledger’s death, Gyllenhaal also has to deal with criticism about his relationship with Reese Witherspoon – from his mother (Naomi Foner) and ex Kirsten Dunst, no less.

Katie Holmes is said to have walked out of a Scientology meeting out of embarrassment about husband Tom Cruise’s video mess, and apparently because of Mad Money, which he supposedly told her to make and which dropped to 10th in the box office receipts for last weekend. So maybe she’s not such a Stepford Wife after all. [Cele|bitchy, Woman's Day]

Has Eddie Murphy found someone else already, so soon after splitting with Tracey Edmonds? Rumor is that they split because Edmonds, a producer, wouldn’t sign a prenuptial agreement. [Hollywood Rag]

Yet another large retailer, Woolworth’s (UK), has stopped stocking HD-DVD videos and players. The company stated that the ability of Sony Playstation 3 to play Blu-ray discs helped sell larger quantities of discs over HD DVD. [Computerworld]

Untraceable: Released Jan 25th, 2008
Runtime: 100 minutes.
Diane Lane, Colin Hanks, Mary Beth Hurt, Joseph Cross, Billy Burke, Peter Lewis, Jesse Tyler Ferguson.
Director: Gregory Hoblit.
Writers: Robert Fyvolent, Mark Brinker, Allison Burnett.
Plot outline: In this cyberthriller, a serial killer uses an untraceable website and custom-built contraptions to kill his victims, using the penchant of far too many human beings to watch snuff or snuff-like footage. Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) is the FBI agent who finds the website.
MPAA Rating: R for grisly violence and torture.
Official trailer:

The Good

Diane Lane (Unfaithful, Under the Tuscan Sun, Must Love Dogs) does shine sometimes in this cyberthriller, but it’s not until about the last half-hour – which is the best part, as is to be excpected of any thriller. Untraceable picks up and actually gets edge of the seat exciting. And horrific. Really horrific. So is it thriller or horror? Not sure.

I’m not going to reveal who the killer is but I will say that he was not only cast very well but probably directed well, too. At least in terms of his very creepy facial gestures.

The slow unravelling of the killer’s motivation is part of what eventually drives the movie forwards. But I think they reveal it a bit too soon and it kills the interest level a bit. But in the last 30 minutes or so, the “edge of the seat” stuff begins, with multiple twists and turns.
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Rambo 4 just opened last weekend and already Sylvester Stallone – who’ll be 62 in July – is talking about doing a fifth Rambo movie. But given that it debuted at #2 in box office receipts last weekend, I’m not surprised. There’s obviously still a market for his brand of justice. (Apparently Rambo 4 has a new record for most screen deaths: 236. He also wrote, directed and produced this one.)

The man is still fit and studio execs want to do this project before Stallone is too old to cope. He’s also currently attached (acting, directing, producing) to Notorious, a TV movie scheduled to air March 9th. (Though I suppose it might depend on the current strike.) For 2009, he’s writing, directing and producing Poe, about the influential and troubled legendary American writer Edgar Allen Poe.