Good Deeds opens in theaters February 24th.

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Tyler Perry kicks off 2012 with the romantic dramedy Good Deeds.  Wesley’s world is turned upside down when he meets Lindsey (Thandie Newton), a down-on-her-luck single mother who works on the cleaning crew in his office building.   Wesley offers to help Lindsey, and soon sees his world and heart open to new possibilities.  The cast includes Phylicia Rashad as matriarch Wilimena Deeds, Beverly Johnson, Rebecca Romijn (X-Men), Brian White, and Eddie Cibrian.

Good Deeds opens in theaters nationwide February 24, 2012

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In an interview with Pride magazine, Newton is very outspoken in her disappointment with the lack of diversity at Vogue and beyond.

“Don’t get me started on black people being on the cover of big magazines. It’s so preposterous. I mean, I’ve been on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar four times; I’ve been on the cover of InStyle four times, but Vogue, not once.”

Does she have a legitimate beef? Read the full story at HuffPoBlackvoices.

-After months of speculation, it looks like Will Smith will definitely be suiting up again as the anti-Superman Hancock.  Two writers have been hired to write the sequel to Smith’s 2008 blockbuster hit under the close supervision of the Fresh Prince and his director Peter Berg, who will likely be helming the second installment as well.  The writers in question are Adam Fierro and Glenn Mazzara, veterans of FX’s stellar cop series The Shield.  While a production start date has yet to be announced, expect to see Hancock 2 in theaters by 2011.

-Blake Lively graduates from Gossip Girl to a role in Ben Affleck’s next directorial effort, The Town.  Joining a cast that includes Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall and the director himself, Lively plays the ex-girlfriend of Affleck’s character, a Boston crook trying to stay one step ahead of the FBI.

-Speaking of Mad Men, Hamm’s co-star, the bodacious Christina Hendricks, just landed a role in Katherine Heigl’s next romantic comedy, Life as We Know It, which follows a single gal (Heigl) and guy (Josh Duhamel a.k.a. Mr. Fergie) who unexpectedly become parents when their mutual best friends die and award them custody of their young daughter.  Hendricks is stuck in the standard “best friend” role, but here’s hoping it leads to bigger and better parts in the future.

-The new thriller Vanishing on Seventh Street is staffing up with cast that includes Thandie Newtown, Hayden Christensen and John Leguizamo.  The film takes place in a city where citizens are mysterious disappearing through supernatural events.  A group of five residents-including a nurse (Newton), a subway operator (Leguizamo) and a reporter (Christensen)-try to get to the bottom of the mystery before they vanish themselves.

-Universal abandoned its plans to make a big-screen version of the Xbox hit Halo, but the studio is forging ahead with another planned video game adaptation, Bioshock, based on the Take-Two Interactive first-person shooter.  Pirates of the Caribbean mastermind Gore Verbinski was originally set to direct, but opted to produce the movie instead.  The assignment has now gone to Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who proved his action chops 28 Weeks Later.

-A&E shed some light on its planned reality series Jackson Family Dynasty, which follows the remaining members of the Jackson Five in the wake of their brother’s untimely death.  Although production started relatively recently, the network still plans to get the series on the air before the end of the year.

-Only weeks after being kicked off American Idol, Paula Abdul has found a new gig…on VH1.  The singer-turned-semi-professional talent judge will be the host of the re-launched VH1 Divas franchise, which has been off the air for the past four years.  Leona Lewis, Miley Cyrus and former Idols Jordin Sparks and Kelly Clarkson are among the announced singers appearing on early episodes.

VIA EMPIRE:

We’ve been teased before with teasers, but a full trailer for Roland Emmerich’s latest disaster CG-fest, 2012, has just gone up at Yahoo (with a little intro from the director).

It’s nothing to do with Arthur C. Clark or Stanley Kubrick, but instead based on a Mayan prophecy that the world will end at the 2012 solstice. Hey, that means we’ll miss Batman 3! But it truly does look spectacular: we’ve got avalanches, floods, an eclipse, mass suicides, forest fires, what looks like a meteor strike, earthquake, and an airlifted giraffe. And is that LA falling into the ocean? Bill Hicks would be delighted!

Whether that spectacle translates into a decent story is another matter. Emmerich’s CV has often made for great trailers and so-so movies: ID4, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow… And let’s just forget the Apocalypto-lite 10,000 Years B.C. Please.

John Cusack is on hand though, which bodes well, and the cast is pretty strong: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt, Woody Harrelson, and Danny Glover as the US President.

Let’s hope it’s a disaster epic, rather than an epic disaster. Find out in November.

Here’s what little I was able to piece together after a single viewing of this loud, obnoxious retread of Ritchie’s earlier movies, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Okay, so there’s this London crime lord (Tom Wilkinson) eager to do a deal with some shady Eastern European types. But he needs some capital in order to convince them he’s on the up and up. Enter a pair of low-rent gangsters (300′s Gerard Butler and The Wire’s Idris Elba, talking in his native accent for once) who are deep in debt the big boss and end up stealing the cash from the aforementioned Europeans with the help of a hot-to-trot accountant (Thandie Newton). The crooks then pass this cash onto Wilkinson, who has already pissed off his prospective business partners by losing a valuable painting they loaned him. This priceless artwork was stolen by his own good-for-nothing son (Toby Kebbell), who moonlights as a rock star under the guidance of a pair of American producers/promoters (Jeremy Piven and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges).

Did you get all that? No? That’s okay, Ritchie doesn’t really care that much about the plot anyway. His main interest is trying to reignite his stalled career by cribbing shamelessly from Tarantino, Danny Boyle and many other, far more talented filmmakers. RocknRolla does have one inspired chase sequence, in which Bulter flees a pair of unstoppable Eastern European strongmen, but it’s surrounded by a lot of flash and noise that turns the film into an endurance test rather than a piece of escapist entertainment.