Movie News: Fast, Furious, French?

TV's low rated but quite excellent Friday Night Lights may be losing some of its hunkiest actors as the football stars leave for college or movie careers (paging Taylor Kitsch!) but it's been renewed for two seasons anyway, y'all. We hope this means more screen time for the show's sole gay character, Devin Corrigan (Stephanie Hunt) who gently crushed the crushing Landry (Jesse Plemons) earlier this season when she told him she was into girls. This show is adept at spinning drama from everyday conflicts and the formative growing pains of the high school years so point those cameras Devin's way, please.

Remember when James Franco told a reporter at the SAG Awards that it was easier to love Sean Penn onscreen in Milk than pretend to be high in The Pineapple Express… on account of he was in love with Sean Penn?! Well, his next film does not involve loving Sean Penn, just getting high again.

ShoWest wraps in Vegas with sneak peeks at Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes, Woody Allen's Whatever Works (apparently Woody is really into threesomes now), Pixar's Up and more…

The red band trailer for Sacha Baron Cohen's Brüno which was posted on Towleroad yesterday. Here it is again if you missed it!

Learn raunchy French phrases from The Pineapple Express DVD, improve your weekend.

Speaking of the French… Notorious Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg has just received the French Legion of Honour. His filmography is undervalued stateside where his taste for body horror and preference for sexually charged genre films makes people highly uncomfortable… but the French love him. So should you. After all, he brought us Debbie Harry (as an actress!) living in "a highly excited state of stimulation" in Videodrome (1983), got Jeff Goldblum naked and delivering his best performance in The Fly (1986), gave Jeremy Irons his ideal screen partner (Jeremy Irons!) in the incestuous twin gynecologists classic Dead Ringers (1988), threw Holly Hunter, Rosanna Arquette, James Spader and Elias Koteas into mangled cars and compromising positions in the polysexual Crash (1996… i.e. the good one, not the one that stole Brokeback's Oscar) and recently gifted the great Viggo Mortensen with two of his three best roles (A History of Violence and Eastern Promises). He's deserving of honors. Vive la France.

Cronenberg also announced this week that he will be making a sequel to his Russian mafia thriller Eastern Promises (2007). The screenplay has yet to be written. Its biggest hurdle will undoubtedly be finding a way to top Viggo Mortensen's famous naked steam room death match in the original.