Odds and ends for a lazy Thursday:
  •  The latest word on the street about the celluloid rumor mill that is Grind House (or is it just Grind now? It's so hard to keep track of this damn movie.) is that John Connor's dad Michael Biehn has joined the cast, as has the witchy Rose McGowan. Whether either is actually in the film is, as usual, another story entirely.
  • Just in case you didn't know, Natalie Portman went to college. Harvard, actually - or hadn't you heard? In case you were wondering, going to college is great because you, like, make friends there. And they're, like, "always doing different, interesting things," and you can "remember how to be a person by being around them."  Not only did Natalie drop that bit of brilliance in an interview recently, but she also asserted than any actor who works for pay is "no different to a prostitute" - she only takes roles based on "artistic merit." Man alive. I'm not sure what's most disturbing about this whole thing: how pretentious it makes Portman sound, or the implication that she did the Star Wars prequels for artistic reasons.
  • According to news reports, 10 additional minutes of Johnny Depp's work in Platoon have been recovered and added to the forthcoming 20th anniversary edition (due out in May). While it's unclear whether Depp's footage actually appears in a longer cut of the movie or as an extra, you Depp maniacs are finally going to get to see what he was actually doing - pre-Jump Street, even! - before Oliver Stone cut him almost entirely out of the movie.