Mission: Hollywood - nothing to see here, please move along.

It should come as no surprise that the hype surrounding the first released pictures of Suri Cruise should happen to fall at the end of the summer when our memories of Tom’s Mission: Implausible franchise ho-hum have faded, but still before the holiday movie hype can begin. Because - aside from the ballyhooed baby pics - it sure feels like there’s a seriously big nothing going on out on the Left Coast. Join us then, in today’s Mission: Hollywood in which we reach deeply into nothingness and fail to come up with a suitable ending for our metaphor.

“Now wait a minute. Why didn’t they think I was real?

Well, what would give them that idea?

You’ve gotta be kidding me. What were you thinking?

We’ll have to fix it. No, just shut up and get my agent on the phone. And this diaper isn’t gonna change itself, you know.”

And by the way, what could character actor Brian Dennehy possibly have to do with Suri, Tom and Katie? You should probably just follow this link to find out. It’s caused us to feel a little woozy.

According to Fangoria.com, the search is on for writers to craft a prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 horro-splatto-Russell-fest The Thing. We approach this news cautiously, like a baby dear who isn’t certain that a nice tasty shrubbery isn’t going to spring open and chew our head off, because we’d be delighted to revisit this, one of our all-time favorites. But without Kurt? And no doubt laden with CGI effects? Not so much.

Thanks to the fine folks at Popwatch, we were recently reminded of what the Bradys’ poor, misunderstood Cousin Oliver grew up into. But still we wonder how life might have been had we gone on, not knowing.

And do you suppose Barry Williams has anything to say regarding the impact that his generously be-follicled former costar had on the show? Yes. Yes, he has.

The good news: this dude totally tricked out his car with scenes from The Matrix.

The bad news: the car only takes you about a third as far as you need to go. Then it runs out of gas, starts acting really strangely and generally craps out on you.

The Guardian limps along its inevitable path to a lackluster opening, poor-to-scathing reviews, failure-reason finger-pointing and then, mercifully, silence. Kevin Costner has imprinted his hands, feet, face and dignity into the cement in front of Hollywood’s Grauman’s Chinese Theater. He told the crowd “I feel so lucky…” but then we noticed that we had a bit of hangnail and we stopped paying attention. And costar Ashton Kutcher, taking a break from planning/not planning/perhaps planning his future family, is offering a dollar to a Katrina charity for each of the first 50,000 people who add him as a friend on his MySpace page (via JoBlo). Sure, it’s a great charity, but you’ll have to live with yourself knowing you begged Ashton Kutcher to be your friend. Instead, you can be Burbanked’s friend and we promise not to make you feel good about it.

And finally, take a look at this short on YouTube in which an extremely talented computer animator has re-imagined Charlie Chaplin into a number of Spielbergian scenarios. A fun bit of pointlessness, not without its charms.

Wow. Oscar season really can’t get here fast enough.