When you’re director Jodie Foster and you really want to make your mark after not directing a film in nearly 15 years (the family dramedy Home For the Holidays), of course the first project you think of is a black comedy about a man who wears a beaver puppet on his hand. That’s a given. Then you go get your unlikeliest of unlikely pals, Mel Gibson, with whom you starred in the really awful movie Maverick, and you get him to play the beaver puppet guy. And then you decide to play his wife. And while it may seem out of character for a woman who’s made big box office playing the protective-mom-on-a-mission-of-vengeance to jump into the idiosyncratic comedy end of the pool, it’s nice to see Foster finally getting any movie made after the decade-long stall of Flora Plum. And what do you bet that she’s the one woman Mel Gibson will obey? The movie’s in pre-production now. Puppet show happens in 2011.

He complains about his career in the press from time to time, that Rupert Everett. And while it’s both entertaining and somewhat annoying to hear celebrities grouse as though they have to work at Taco Bell, Everett remains one of our more appealing gay actors – that charm and that accent never fail to win us over. And now, in between popular St. Trinian’s projects in which he does full-on boarding school headmistress drag, the My Best Friend’s Wedding alum will co-star in the film Wild Target. It’s a British action-comedy about a hitman wishing for retirement but finding no rest forthcoming, and it features the hilarious Bill Nighy (Pirates of the Carribean) alongside Emily Blunt, Martin Freeman and a breaking-out-of-Ron-Weasley-mode Rupert Grint (a casting move that ought to guarantee a U.S. release). Directed by Jonathan Lynn (My Cousin Vinny), the film has already wrapped and should, fingers-crossed, hit its target on these shores sometime in 2010.

Banned, groundbreaking, controversial, gay-before-it-was-OK author William S. Burroughs was both revered and reviled. Even his fictionalized persona in David Cronenberg’s hallucinatory film version of Burroughs’s even-more-hallucinatory novel Naked Lunch caused consternation. If you encountered the legendarily heroin-addicted writer, you came away with an opinion about him. And in the new documentary, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, the opinions fly free from cultural figures and friends of Burroughs like John Waters (who describes him as the man who first talked about things no one was supposed to talk about), Gus Van Sant, Laurie Anderson, Peter Weller, Iggy Pop, Jello Biafra and the band Sonic Youth. There’s even an interview with the firearms-obsessed Burroughs’s gun dealer (the writer infamously and “accidentally” shot and killed his young wife in 1951) and a man with the world’s largest collection of poisonous snakes. Sounds fascinating already, and it doesn’t even have distribution yet. So be on the lookout for this one at a film festival near you.

Spin-off Alice-in-prison show The Farm? Nope. Feature-length movie? Maybe, maybe not. Cheap, fast and exploitive reality series? Oh yeah! That’s big news for fans of the – still hurts to say it – cancelled L Word. Creator Ilene Chaiken is developing a reality version of the hit drama for Showtime, in which several stylish Los Angeles lesbians will get into all manner of “unscripted” hijinks and wear really expensive outfits doing so. Fans are already as divided about the new project as they were about the original series, with those who prefer to watch wacky, soapy trash most likely coming out the ultimate victors over viewers who crave solid, true, integrity-rich stories about actual lesbian lives. But that’s reality television. If it were something to take seriously it would be a little-seen documentary at a queer film festival. Now, producers, please start the hunt for real-life approximations of Dawn Denbo and Jenny Schecter. We’re counting on you.

The fallout from Mamma Mia! continues, and this time Michael Stipe, Tom Hanks and Barry Manilow are hatching a plan to woo you back into theaters to sing along with 35-year-old songs you only pretend not to love. Stipe and Hanks’s production companies are joining forces to produce a musical film based on Manilow’s biggest hits – and it’s coming soon. No title, no cast, no release date, no nothing just yet, but the plot idea involves a group of Manilow fans who go to Las Vegas and find themselves swept up in a tuneful whirl of non-stop Barry action. Note to the producers: If it winds up set in the 1970s, shoehorn in some of Manilow’s TV commercial jingles from the era. Because who wouldn’t want to hear Meryl Streep sing the KFC “get a bucket of chicken” song?

Everyone knows that life is a banquet and that most poor suckers are starving to death. And they know this because of the hilarious, beloved movie Auntie Mame. And they know that Mame is – and will always be –forever associated with the late, great Rosalind Russell. But let’s say that someone really, really cool wanted to remake the movie in an aggressively hip, modern way. Let’s say it was Tilda Swinton, someone so talented and idiosyncratic and worshipped by gays already that she is known on the funny fashion-attack Web site GoFugYourself by one all-caps name: SWINTON. Let’s say that it happens like that. It’d be OK – right? Because that’s her plan. And right now it’s just that, a plan. But this is a woman generally to be trusted, so Romeo votes that we all extend that trust. Besides, it’s a better plan than the recently announced Yellow Submarine remake. Way better.

Sometimes you just want the comfort of the familiar. You want to sit down in a cushy art-house theater on a rainy Sunday afternoon, and you want to see an old-school French director make a movie with Catherine Deneuve in it, one where you can marvel at her legendary face and manner, the grand dame doing her thing. You’ll soon get your chance when acclaimed filmmaker Andre Techine, the gay creator of modern queer-themed greatness like The Witnesses and Wild Reeds, reunites with Deneuve (together they’ve already worked on the art-house hits Thieves and My Favorite Season) for The Girl on The Train. Deneuve plays the once-radical, now-settled-down mother of a young woman who lies about being the victim of a hate crime. Melodrama ensues. Already released in France, expect the train to pull into its American stop sometime in the coming year.

Every single media outlet in the U.S. has weighed in on the perceived appropriateness and/or WTF-ness of Ellen DeGeneres replacing Paula Abdul as a permanent judge on “American Idol.” Romeo is all for this new development if for no other reason than Ellen can probably help bring cooler choreography for those frequently tragic results-show group-sing numbers. But so far very few pundits have addressed the burning issue of what this all means for the gays. For example: Would Adam Lambert have won with Ellen’s official judge support behind him? Will we witness the welcome death of the endlessly hilarious (to them anyway) gay-baiting jokes between Simon and Seacrest? And will there finally be a softly butch, Tracy Chapman-esque, female singer-songwriter who makes it to the top 10 thanks to “velvet mafia” cheerleading? No matter what happens, suddenly the show seems like must-watch TV again.