It’s not every actor who gets to slap Jennifer Lopez. But Micah Hauptman, who plays one of a gang of double-crossing thieves in the new Jason Statham vehicle, Parker, has to do just that. And he also gets scolded mightily by the steely British action star, for not following orders during a $1 million heist from a county fair.

“I’m the eternal screw-up,” Hauptman says, laughing. As for his big scene with J.Lo -- which comes after he and his partners (Michael Chiklis, Clifton Collins Jr. and Wendell Pierce) bring pepperoni pizza back to their hideout and find a revenge-bent Parker there to greet them – Hauptman says he approached the moment with dread.

“Of all the things I was most concerned about, that was the one that really had me worried,” the actor explains, on the phone from New York where Parker screened this week. “For a month and a half leading up to the shoot that day, nothing but anxiety …, And then when I actually had the day with Jennifer…. I talked to her beforehand. She’s lovely and so gracious and really committed to the work. I couldn’t believe how cool and how easygoing she was about it.”

It could be a silver linings paycheck.

Matthew Quick, author of the novel-turned-Oscar-nominated Silver Linings Playbook, has sold screen rights to his upcoming book, The Good Luck of Right Now, to DreamWorks. Michael Fleming broke the news on Deadline.com yesterday. Quick, who quit his job as a teacher at Haddonfield High to try his hand at a writing career, typed Silver Linings Playbook on his MacBook, camped out and jobless in his in-laws’ basement in central Massachusetts. It took him several years -- and several failed novels – but he found a publisher. The rest is history: filmmaker David O. Russell got his hands on the book and turned it into the Bradley Cooper-Jennifer Lawrence mood-swinging, Philly-centric gem currently playing in theaters and nominated for eight Academy Awards.

The Good Luck of Right Now traces the lives of four characters whose paths cross and who all have issues to deal with, emotionally, psychologically and relationshipally speaking. And one of the protagonists, caring for his dementia-stricken mom, writes letters to Richard Gere. Yes, Richard Gere. The Good Luck of Right Now is, like Silver Linings Playbook, set in and around Philadelphia. Publication is tentative for Spring, 2014. Quick also has a young adult novel, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock, coming in August. 

Christina Weiss Lurie has some big news, and it’s not about Chip Kelly moving here from Eugene. The co-owner of the Philadelphia Eagles has long been involved in movie-making – she executive produced Inside Job, the 2011 Academy Award documentary nominee. And this year, the documentary short Oscar contender,  “Inocente,” a 40-minute film about a homeless high school girl in San Diego, also bears Lurie's name. She executive produced the acclaimed film through Screen Pass Pictures, the non-profit she established with her ex, Jeffrey Lurie.

But now, having also worked in low-budget independents through her Vox3 Films, Lurie is setting her sites on bigger, more commercial ventures.

“I am trying to go Hollywood,” Lurie says with a laugh, reached on the phone the day the Oscar nominations were announced. “It’s always interesting to try to do new things, and... not that I’ve cornered the indie, small-budget film market, but I did that, and now I want to try something else.”

It took eleven years and several dog-eared editions of the Thomas Guide map books of Los Angeles, but Jim Pauley, a self-described lifelong Three Stooges fan, has pulled off a remarkable feat: In The Three Stooges: Hollywood Filming Locations (Santa Monica Press, $39.95), the Philadelphia-based author relentlessly traces the footsteps – and car chases and bike rides – that Larry, Moe and Curly took in close to 200 comedy shorts made in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. On Friday, Jan. 11, Pauley will screen and discuss five classic Stooges shorts, and sign copies of his book, as Secret Cinema presents a Stooges night at International House.

Pauley became addicted to the eye-poking, head-slapping, pratfalling and forever punning Stooges as a kid, rushing home from school to catch Sally Starr’s Popeye Theater on (then) WFIL-TV. The Popeye ‘toons were okay, but it was the Stooges who really got Pauley going. There’s a rare, heretofore unpublished photo of Starr with Larry (and her stunt double) in the book, a behind-the-scenes shot from 1965’s The Outlaws Is Coming! Fine, of course, was also a Philadelphian, born at 3^rd and South Streets, ne Louis Feinberg.

Pauley, who has addressed legions of Stooges fans at the Hollywood Heritage Museum and at the Stoogeum, the Ambler, PA., Stooges shrine,   says that the exhilaration he experienced as a boy watching the Three Stooges has been shared by kids ever since.

The Academy Award nominations are announced on Thursday, and it’s a good bet that when the best director nominees are read, the five names on the Directors Guild of America ‘s list – a list issued today, Tuesday – will match. In the past five years, 21 of the 25 DGA nominees have gone on to receive Oscar nods, thanks to the significant overlap between DGA and Academy membership.

Here’s the DGA best director nominee lineup:

Ben Affleck, Argo

Michael Haneke’s heartbreaking drama about an aging Paris couple, starring French New Wave icons Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, won the best film of 2012 prize – and Riva won best actress, and Haneke director – as the National Society of Film Critics convened Saturday at Lincoln Center in New York to consider the exceptionally strong year just past. Lincoln and The Master won two awards each. Here’s the complete list, with second and third choices listed in parentheses.

BEST PICTURE
Amour (The Master; Zero Dark Thirty)

BEST DIRECTOR
Michael Haneke –Amour (Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty; Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master)

Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Will Smith, Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, George Clooney, Sandra Bullock, Harrison Ford and Viola Davis are zipping up their spacesuits and getting ready to face alien armies, asteroids, elitist Earthlings and weird outer space stuff, as a squad of A-listers are set to top a wave of high-profile Hollywood science fiction flicks coming to screens in 2013. In addition to a couple of sci-fi franchise titles (notably Star Trek Into Darkness, the J.J. Abrams’ reboot sequel, coming May 17), the projects are:   

Oblivion (April 19) Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman star in Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski’s post-apocalyptic alien space war thriller.  

After Earth (June 7) Will Smith and son Jaden land on a planet that has been devoid of humans for more than 1,000 years. Malvern moviemaker M. Night Shyamalan is at the controls of this big-budget space adventure.

“It was great,” Judd Apatow says, “they literally let me edit the magazine. More so than one would expect. I was like, `This is a lot of work!’

If you haven’t seen the January issue of Vanity Fair yet – the one with three different covers (Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Kristen Wiig and Ben Stiller on one, Jim Carrey, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell  on one, Melissa McCarthy,  Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann and Megan Fox on the other), it’s a special all-comedy issue. And special all-comedy guy Apatow  -- taking time off from post-production on This Is 40 and exective-producing Lena Dunham’s HBO series, Girls – went at it. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter invited Apatow to do whatever he wanted, and Apatow did. There’s a story on seminal ‘60s comic duo (and future filmmakers) Mike Nichols and Elaine May; an interview (by Apatow) with Albert Brooks;  a how Zach Galifianakis writes jokes piece, and a homage to Canadian humor (“Of Moose and Men”), among many other illuminating, laugh-inducing features.

“I got to come up with the ideas for the articles, and I asked a lot of comedy people to write things,” Apatow says enthusiastically, on a recent roll-through through Philly. “So people like Lena Dunham and Chris Rock and Albert Brooks and Will Ferrell and a lot of people pitched in. It’s pretty great. I think it’s actually one of the best things I’ve ever done.”

Resonating Surfaces -- A Trilogy, from the Brussels-based artist and filmmaker Manon de Boer, is still ongoing -- and still fascinating -- running  through February 10 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Julien Levy Gallery, in the Perelman building. Presented on a rotating weekly schedule, the films are:

Sylvia Kristel -- Paris (2003), a Super-8 study of the ’70s softcore porn star, reflecting on her career and her personal life. (Kristel died in October, age 60.)

Resonating Surfaces (2005), shot in 16mm and focusing on Suely Rolnik, the Brazilian cultural critic, curator and psychoanalyst, investigates her sense memory connections to hometown São Paulo, and her relationship with her adopted city, Paris. There, in the '70s, she fell in with a crowd that included Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, founders of Schizoanalysis, the philosophical/psychoanalytical concept focusing on the role of social behavior in understanding personality. Ontological heterogeneity, anyone?