Okay, Okay, Peter Jackson Has Excellent Taste in Actors

Ryan Gosling Joins Lovely Bones: Ryan Gosling will play the murdered girl’s father in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, joining the already-cast Rachel Weisz. We’re throwing up our hands; Jackson seems determined to make a really good movie and damn the box-office consequences. God bless him. [Variety]

Abraham, Baker, Finneran Join MTC: Theresa Rebeck’s stamp-collecting drama (really!) Mauritius pastes more stars into its scrapbook, with F. Murray Abraham, Dylan Baker, and Katie Finneran joining Allison Pill and Bobby Cannavale. Manhattan Theater Club produces show, opening in September. [Playbill]

Company a Great Performance: Those of us who never managed to see Company despite hearing over and over again how great it was are in luck! Though the show closes Sunday, it’s being filmed for PBS’s Great Performances series. [Variety]

Lil Wayne Goes Online: Rapper Lil Wayne, annoyed that his planned album The Carter 3 leaked online, pledges to release all leaked tracks as a mix tape and release new version of album in 2008. Wayne also announces online reality show, The Search for the Next Hit!, auditioning aspiring rappers and singers nationwide for Next.TV. [Billboard]

Mos Def a Zero: Rapper-actor Mos Def will star in and produce Bobby Zero, romantic drama about a satirist who gives up his art to work in advertising. You know, like a once-incisive rapper who drifts away from music, lured by the easy paychecks of Hollywood. [Variety]

Crowe Joins DiCaprio: Russell Crowe will co-star with Leonardo DiCaprio in Body of Lies, Ridley Scott anti-terror espionage picture based on novel by David Ignatius. William Monahan wrote the screenplay, about a CIA plot to trap an Al Qaeda leader by planting rumors he’s working with the Americans. [Variety]

Iraq War Book to Film: The Long Road Home, journalist Martha Raddatz’s account of the 2004 battle in Iraq that killed anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan’s son, has been optioned by Mike Medevoy’s Phoenix Pictures. [PW]

Wes Anderson, Coens Picked for NYFF: The New York Film Festival will open in September with Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, starring Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody, and will feature the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, their Cormac McCarthy adaptation starring Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem. [NYT]

Starbucks Promotes Doc: Coffee chain Starbucks will promote Paramount’s global-warming documentary Arctic Tale. Pic will be advertised in Starbucks stores across the country; in return, film’s lead characters, a walrus and a polar bear, will be digitally manipulated to occasionally warm up with a venti skim latte. [HR]