It’s been a while since we’ve had any concrete and/or plausible film-related rumors on Natalie. However, Variety — a generally reliable source for film news — reports Natalie Portman and Brad Pitt are attached to an upcoming rom-com with a title… of sanity-defying length. From Variety:

Paramount Pictures has attached Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman to star in a film based on the new Leanne Shapton book Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. The book was just published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. Paramount won an auction for the book rights Tuesday night, with Pitt’s Plan B producing with Portman’s Handsomecharlie Films banner. Portman brought the book to Pitt, whose company is Par-based.

The book takes the form of Sotheby’s-like estate auction catalog, with 325 entries and photographs depicting items that reveal the private moments and the rise and fall of a four-year relationship between the fictitious couple Hal Morris (a 40ish photographer) and Lenore Doolan, (a New York Times food columnist in her late 20s). The project will be developed as a romantic comedy, with Pitt to play Morris, and Portman to play Doolan.

Yesterday, DazedDigital.com premiered Francesco Vezzoli’s “Greed” faux perfume commercial starring Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams on their website. Please visit DazedDigital.com for the clip or check out our 66 medium-res screen captures of Natalie’s performance at our gallery!

New Photo Albums:

• Unsorted Work > Francesco Vezzoli’s “Greed” Faux Perfume Ad Screen Captures

Some new promotional stills for Francesco Vezzoli’s upcoming faux commercial for “Greed” perfume, starring Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams, have surfaced online, of which eight have been added to the gallery for your viewing pleasure. Natalie looks absolutely amazing here! The project is furthermore featured in the current, February 2009 issue of Interview (US); check back with us for scans!

Updated Photo Albums:

• Francesco Vezzoli “Greed” Perfume Faux Commercial Promotional Stills

Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of Natalie news to cover today, save for this small 17 Photos of Isabel-related mention. Several news sources are reporting of recent paparazzi footage of Natalie at LAX airport. While we will not be posting any photos here, the fact that she is indeed in Los Angeles, CA could indicate that filming for 17 Photos of Isabel has wrapped at last in New York. Interesting. We’ll keep you posted!

Finally, Portman Source wishes everyone a Happy New Year 2009! Stay safe, y’all, and stay tuned to Portman Source for huge photo updates in coming weeks.

Four updates in one day! Here’s our fourth and final Natalie news update, which should bring us up-to-date with the latest happenings in Nat-land. Enjoy!

In mid-October, Just Jared reported Natalie Portman was in Paris, France to shoot an unknown perfume commercial. In all likelihood, this shoot was for Natalie’s latest project — a Francesco Vezzoli faux “Greed” perfume commercial, co-starring actress Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain) and directed by the critically acclaimed Roman Polanski (The Pianist). The commercial will debut at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome, Italy in February 2009, however the first medium-res photos have already surfaced. From NYMag.com:

Francesco Vezzoli, the Italian video artist known for his lavish parodies, has a new project: a faux perfume ad starring Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams, filmed by Roman Polanski. It’ll debut in February at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome.

“Lately the art world has become a place where there is a lot of effort to create desire, so I thought Greed”—the name of the scent—“was an appropriate theme,” Vezzoli says. He recruited Portman and Williams because they’re “two A-list celebrities who have never endorsed a perfume,” he explains. “Natalie plays the good girl and Michelle plays the greedy one, and they start having a catfight over the perfume. They bite each other, pull each other’s hair, throw themselves on the floor, and all of that is filmed by Polanski in his epitomizing style.”

The commercial is currently featured in the December 2008 issue of Italian magazine Panorama First, featuring photos from the production of the commercial — a preview of the breathtakingly gorgeous cover at our gallery. If anyone is able to send in scans of this issue, please do so! Thank you.

New Photo Albums:

• Magazines in 2008 > ‘Panorama First’ (It) December 2008 Cover
• Unsorted Productions > Francesco Vezzoli “Greed” Faux Perfume Ad Stills

Here’s our third news catch-up of the day. Kicking things off with the upcoming Don Roos dramedy, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, according to the Internet Movie Database, the film has been renamed to 17 Photos of Isabel, which seems to be the title they’ll be sticking with for the time being. Personally, I preferred the previous title, but oh well.

In other news, it would seem actress Lisa Kudrow (of Friends fame) is the latest addition to the cast of 17 Photos of Isabel. Kudrow has been photographed shooting scenes with co-stars Natalie Portman, Scott Cohen and Charlie Tahan on the New York set of the film, which brings us…

… to the latest media from the set. The gallery has been updated with medium- and hi-res footage from three new days of filming: December 6, December 18 and December 22 respectively. The December 18 set of photos is particularly stunning, but all are definitely worth a look if you share an interest in the film. Enjoy!

New Photo Albums:

• On Set ‘17 Photos of Isabel’ in New York on Dec 6
• On Set ‘17 Photos of Isabel’ in New York on Dec 18
• On Set ‘17 Photos of Isabel’ in New York on Dec 22

Time to begin updating with some of the latest news we’ve missed during my absence! Kicking off today’s news and media updates is Jim Sheridan’s Afghanistan War drama, Brothers, which according to some sources was originally slated for a December 2008 U.S. release. Well, December is almost at an end, and no sign of a premiere. So what’s going on with Brothers?

In a recent interview with Herald.ie, director Sheridan gave us some insight into the upcoming theatrical release of the film, which currently looks to be sometime in August 2009. Damn! From Herald.ie:

But Sheridan, who is renowned for making off-beat movies, looks set to score another critical hit in 2009. He revealed how he has just completed filming on a big-budget film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire. A remake of Susanne Bier’s acclaimed Danish flick Brothers, it tells the story of a man, played by Maguire, who is sent to fight in Afghanistan while his black-sheep brother (Gyllenhaal) cares for his wife and child. It co-stars big names including Natalie Portman and Sam Shepard.

Sheridan continued: “We were in Santa Fe in New Mexico filming it for more than five months and we had a fabulous time. It’s a great town and was good fun to make. I think that we’re going to release that in August of next year.“

Meanwhile, the film’s Internet Movie Database page has been updated with new release date info: while the December 2008 U.S. premiere date estimate has been replaced with the rather generous timeframe of “2009″, according to the site, Brothers has a UK premiere date of February 27 2009, while countries such as The Netherlands and Denmark will have to settle for a late Fall ‘09 release. Honestly, though, how likely they are really to release Brothers in the UK 5-6 months before the U.S. premiere?… I remain skeptical. Sorry, guys! I wish I had better news to offer.

E! Online reports that Té Casan, with which Natalie launched her vegan shoe collection earlier this year, is closed for business. From E! Online:

The critter-free line of footwear, announced by the longtime vegetarian back in January, was launched in February of this year to the delight of animal-loving fashionistas but not so much to the credit-crunched masses—each pair retailed on average for $200.

However, Portman’s line didn’t fail on its own merits, instead was a casualty of the folding of its parent company, Té Casan, which closed up shop for good last month.