Now that news has broken that Sean Penn is taking time off to focus on his family for a while, that leaves the Farrelly Brothers' highly anticipated (by me, anyway) Three Stooges movie down a Stooge. They still have a Moe in Benicio del Toro, and a Curly in Jim Carrey, but the whiny, red-headed, curly-haired Larry is back to square one. While some sites have been suggesting everyone from Robert Downey Jr. to Matt Damon to fill the role, we can think of only one man who deserves it as much as Penn: Mel Gibson.

Tags: Mel Gibson, Sean Penn, Three Stooges

The Three Stooges are dead... long live the Three Stooges! After a feature film re-introducing the characters was announced a couple of years back by the Farrelly Brothers, the project fell into limbo, and the movie's high-profile cast -- Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Jim Carrey as Larry, Moe and Curly, respectively -- drifted away. Now, it's set up at a new studio, but it still needs a new batch of Stooges! Since we want to see this thing get made, for good or ill, we picked our brains to come up with actors in that general age range who could play the roles, then tried to come up with some younger alternatives, since the movie supposedly starts out showing them all as kids. Hey, the younger they are, the more hits they can take, and the more sequels they can make -- assuming this movie isn't a terrible, terrible idea. (It might be.)

Tags: casting, Kevin Spacey, Three Stooges, Three Stooges movie

Talk about your perfect match. The Farrelly Brothers, masters of slapstick and gross-out (mostly gross-out) humor, have written an origin story for the Three Stooges, stars of film shorts and features from the 1930s through the 1960s. Everyone knows the personas of bowl-cut boss Moe, curly-haired commentator Larry and cue-balled imbecile Curly (heck, they may even know the personas of later Stooges Shemp, Joe and Curly Joe), but nobody knows where the heck they came from. Well, if MGM gets the rights back from Warner Bros., they could have a movie on screens by November 20, 2009. Let us give thanks!

Tags: Dumb and Dumber, Farrelly Brothers, Kingpin, MGM, Stuck On You, There's Something About Mary, Three Stooges, WB