Sorry, but some things you don't need to know.

Like whether I'm Irish or just pale. Bald or simply holy. For that matter, you also don't need to know what my politics are. Or how my knees look in shorts. (Unless you want to e-mail me at kwilliamson@daintyknees.org, in which case we can exchange photos.)

Why? Because it doesn't have anything to do with the few hundred words currently in front of you.

Similar logic holds true for Hollywood, where industries founded on smoke and mirrors are drowning in information overload, brought on by a bombardment of bloggers who update their denizens daily about Lindsay Lohan's choice of panties and whether or not a focus group from the San Fernando Valley gave a collective hairy thumbs-up to the latest effort from the Rob Schneider pantheon.

This blitzkrieg of backstage buzz brings us to the situation now faced by Steve Carell, the star of The Office and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, who finds himself, according to the L.A. Times, unexpectedly toplining the most expensive comedy in history. (As opposed to the Screech sex tape, history's most inexpensive comedy.)

The movie is Evan Almighty, a spinoff of Bruce Almighty, which jettisons Jim Carrey in favour of rising star Carell (who had a minor, if memorable, role in the first movie) as a politician commanded by God (reprised by Morgan Freeman) to construct a modern-day ark.

Sounds simple until you factor in the cost of ambitious special effects and the logistics of wrangling animals for Carell's cruise-ship-sized ark -- something the producers apparently didn't do, with the Times speculating the final pricetag could be as much as US$250 million, including marketing costs.

And Carell, white-hot thanks to the low-budget hits Virgin and Little Miss Sunshine, has reason to worry. Films rarely recover from the toxicity of negative press (witness All The King's Men) -- or the whiff of excess that comes with bloated budgets (witness Superman Returns).

Which, if you're the executive in charge means you have little to laugh at.

But will anyone else? We won't know that until next summer when the movie's released, but the best indicator of quality remains printed on cheap paper -- namely, the script, something that an arkful of cash can neither save nor sink.

And isn't that what you really should want to know?

IN BRIEF: Director Todd Phillips (School for Scoundrels) tells the Sun he's just about done penning Old School Dos, the sequel to his miniature classic Old School. Phillips won't divulge plot details, except to reveal Jeremy Piven won't be back, but Perrey Reeves, who played Will Ferrell's wife in Old School (and Piven's wife in TV's Entourage), can look forward to an expanded role. After penning the script, all he has to do then is convince Ferrell, Luke Wilson and Vince Vaughn to agree to sign on. Easy, right? ... Add Helen Mirren, who stars in The Queen, to the list of probable Oscar nominees, along with Peter O'Toole for Venus and, of course, Jack Nicholson for The Departed ... Want to see a hotter-than-hot Rose McGowan mowing down zombies with a machine-gun leg? Check out the raucous, deliriously B-grade trailer for Grindhouse, the latest joint venture from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, now online at www.themoviebox.net