If you just happen to have watched adult film clips on the Internet lately — “Teens Love to Experiment,” “2 Glamorous Women and One Lucky Guy,” perhaps? — you might have stumbled across a very unusual advertisement: a trailer for the new movie “Middle Men.” Hollywood has cooked up all sorts of unusual marketing buys in recent years — giant billboards that envelop skyscrapers, newspaper ads that look lik ... Jump to full article >>

Avatar, James Cameron’s 3D spectacular, had its world premiere in London. Stand by for the official verdict from the Guardian, but the shock of the night is that everyone else seems to have loved it A fortnight ago it all looked so different. An early review of selected footage from James Cameron’s space opera, posted anonymously on Gawker, comprehensively panned what had been hailed as a game-changingly ambitious and successful fora ... Jump to full article >>

Call us geeks, but we’re more interested in who might win Nobel prizes next month instead of which Hollywood type may score an Oscar come spring. That’s one reason we pay close attention to the Lasker Awards for biomedical research, which often serve as a warm-up for the Nobels. This year’s winners, just unveiled, are John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka for work important to the understanding of stem cells; a trio of scientists i ... Jump to full article >>

Ever wonder what movie actors are really smoking and snorting when they do a line of coke or lift a joint to their lips? Turns out that many cocaine look-alikes are ingredients you might use in a cake, like powdered sugar, powdered milk and baking soda, while herbal tobacco fills in for genuine cannabis. Though the fakes are legal and don’t provide a high, sometimes they can make the actors feel a little buzzed. On Showtime’s “Wee ... Jump to full article >>

James Dean lit up onscreen. So did Humphrey Bogart, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman and Mickey Rourke. We saw these icons smoking in their movies, and they looked cool. And it’s not just the men. Rita Hayworth was a glamorous smoker. And Uma Thurman looked pretty sexy taking a drag in “Pulp Fiction.” These stars weren’t cool because they smoked, but it certainly added a little something to the characters they portrayed. Acco ... Jump to full article >>