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From Variety:

MGM and the Farrelly brothers are closing in on their cast for “The Three Stooges.”

Studio has set Sean Penn to play Larry, and negotiations are underway with Jim Carrey to play Curly, with the actor already making plans to gain 40 pounds to approximate the physical dimensions of Jerome “Curly” Howard.

The studio is zeroing in on Benicio Del Toro to play Moe.

What? What? WHAT???

For some reason, the notion of the recently Oscar-enriched Penn playing Larry puts me in mind of a Woody Allen short story, where a serious-but-struggling writer is commissioned to write a novelisation of a Three Stooges flick:

Calmly and for no apparent reason, the dark-haired man took the nose of the bald man in his right hand and slowly twisted it in a long, counterclockwise circle. A horrible grinding sound broke the silence of the Great Plains. ‘We suffer,’ the dark-haired man said. ‘O woe to the random violence of human existence.’

Meanwhile Larry, the third man, had wandered into the house and had somehow managed to get his head caught inside an earthenware jar. Everything was suddenly terrifying and black as Larry groped blindly around the room.

He wondered if there was a god or any purpose at all to life or any design behind the universe when suddenly the dark-haired man entered and, finding a large polo mallet, began to break the jar off his companion’s head. With pent-up fury that masked years of angst over the empty absurdity of man’s fate, the one named Moe smashed the crockery.

That’s it. I’m off to watch You Nazty Spy! before I go to bed…