Mission: Hollywood – just get over it.

The Hollywood threat “you’ll never work in this town again” is just a bit more antiquated than, say, Costner’s status as a viable leading man. In this day and age, the resilience of Tinseltown’s showbiz players is on daily display as they nobly shoulder the betrayals, outrages and routine backstabbings, and then simply return to making plans for lunch.

And the absurdly simple reasoning behind this, of course, is money and power and money. Why let today’s indiscretion by an A-list star conflict with his potential earning power tomorrow? Why condemn the moral ambiguities of this director or that – after all, he could win you an Oscar someday, right?

That’s why, in today’s Mission: Hollywood, we’re taking a look at some recent examples of tolerance, forgiveness and goodwill – murkily filtered through Hollywood’s mangled, rusty sieve of morality:

It was announced earlier this week that Christopher Nolan’s Batman sequel The Dark Knight will include the Joker to be played by Heath Ledger. As perhaps we should expect by now, the initial fanboy reaction has been rather lopsided into the negative, evidenced by this kind of thing.

To which we’d humbly suggest to anyone pained by this casting decision: “trust the filmmakers” and “shut your whining cakeholes”. Hasn’t Christopher Nolan earned a little bit of respect for his casting and directorial decisions here? Doesn’t an Oscar nomination and fairly widespread acclaim elevate Ledger above A Knight’s Tale status? And isn’t it possible that the filmmakers might have something a little more original, a little more interesting planned for a role that has traditionally been a silly excuse for over-the-top scene chewery?

Something’s really wrong in the delicate Hollywood continuum when news of Jennifer Lopez’s exit from the increasingly troubled big screen adaptation of the 80s soaper Dallas comes across as displaying uncharacteristically good sense. We can maybe accept the rotten movie choices of Travolta and Luke Wilson – but what’s up with Shirley Maclaine still hanging onto this crapfest-in-the-making? Shouldn’t she perhaps know better by now?

Hollywood will likely make Mel Gibson the “get over it” poster boy, and already the rumor mill has cranked noisily to life to make it happen. How else can we explain this bit from Moviehole.net in which it’s speculated that Gibson could be returning to the too-old-for-this-you-know Lethal Weapon franchise? We find this appalling, with the way that he said and did those awful…er… what? A loud action movie with familiar characters and one-liners? Wow! Hey, what were we talking about again?

Richard Donner shows us the benefits of never getting over it as a decades-long struggle to restore his directorial vision to Superman II comes to an end. Warner Bros. will release a new, restored version of the film on DVD in November, and Donner couldn’t be more Zod-like in his mustache-twisting thirst for vindication. When asked how Supes fans will know which 70% of the new DVD version was his original footage, Donner snarkily claims, “The good stuff is mine.” Related: a fascinating, wildly comprehensive account of the Superman II botchery from Wikipedia.

It sure sounds like Shannen Doherty is trying too hard to cut the “exhausted”, stick-like legs out from under Lindsay Lohan. We shouldn’t be surprised, however. If you’re fighting the downward slide of your own Hollywood relevance, the best way to deal with your terror of oblivion is naturally to attack someone else younger and more tabloid-hott than you.

X-Men: The Last Stand will be receiving the DVD red carpet treatment including a host of special features and three Never! Before! Seen! alternate endings. We suppose that we should take our own advice and simply get over it, but we can’t help but wonder if any of the alternate endings will, you know, “be satisfying” or “make sense”. Never mind; we’d have a better chance at hoping for this.