The Mirren-Hopkins-Hitchcock Dream, and 5 Other Stories You'll Be Talking About Today

Happy Thursday! Also in today's edition of The Broadsheet: Tom Cruise tries (sort of) to talk up Top Gun 2... Ryan Seacrest may land on Today... There is a movie in the Oscar hunt called The Woman in a Septic Tank... and more.

· The biopic-y Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho may have a clumsy working title and a tortured history, but the long-suffering Anthony Hopkins project reportedly has a new studio in Fox Searchlight, a new director in Sacha Gervasi, and -- I can't even believe I'm writing this -- new interest from Helen Mirren in playing Hitchcock's wife Alma. To repeat: Hopkins and Mirren may play the Hitchcocks. I mean! Maybe Alison Brie can play Janet Leigh. [THR]

· And now imagine Ryan Seacrest co-hosting Today. It could happen -- if Matt Lauer decides to leave the show in 2012. Can Seacrest and Ann Curry even be in the same room without setting off some kind of blistering, blood-red, category-5 cultural cyclone across the land? Do we really want to find out? [WSJ via Deadline]

· Tom Cruise isn't doing a very convincing job of taking Top Gun 2 seriously: "I said to Tony I want to make another movie with him. He and I haven't made a film since Days of Thunder. Tony and I and Jerry, we never thought that we would do it again. Then they started to come to us with these ideas of where it is now. I thought, 'Wow, that would be... what we could do now.'" [MTV]

· Melancholia's sound designer opens up about that ending: "It's the loudest thing I have ever mixed. I wanted it to struggle and fight with the Wagner piece, so it tries to drown the Wagner piece. I know it's a little messy, but I wanted it to be very overwhelming and I think I succeeded with that." And how. I recommend sitting as close to the screen as possible for maximum effect. [NYT]

· Your mileage may vary, but The Woman in a Septic Tank sounds like exactly the kind of foreign-language Oscar entry we need to spice up this year's race. [THR]

· Going a bit off topic, is this not one of the most effective political advertisements you've seen to date in the 2012 presidential race? Well, besides any of Herman Cain's, I guess. [via Andrew Sullivan]