It’s Elvis all over again (hat tip: Elder of Zion).

The sad thing is, it almost makes perfect sense.

Looks like Chewbacca playing doctor with Princess Leia, but perhaps my eyes deceive me.

You won’t be surprised to learn that German’s Jewish community are not too happy with the idea.

Actually, horrified would be a more accurate term.

The news that Britney Spears may hit the silver screen as the star of a Holocaust-era romantic tragedy has raised eyebrows in Germany. The plot calls for the pop-star to travel back in time to a concentration camp — and the Central Council of Jews in Germany says the idea is “reprehensible.”

After the 2002 cinematic flop “Crossroads,” few would have been surprised if teen-talent-turned-adult-disaster Britney Spears never again appeared on the silver screen. According to reports this week, though, Spears is weighing a return to acting — and it is a comeback that Jews in Germany are viewing with extreme distaste.

Spears, who is currently in the process of successfully resuscitating her recently languishing music career with her global “Circus” tour, is reportedly reviewing a script for a film tentatively titled “The Yellow Star of Sophia and Eton.” The flick would see her playing a character named Sophia LaMont who travels back in time to fall in love with a Jewish concentration camp prisoner named Eton. In a tricky critique of ongoing anti-Semitism, the script concludes with the lovebirds travelling back to the present day before being killed by Nazis.

Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has said she is horrified at the prospect of Britney making a Holocaust film. “In films that deal with the Holocaust, the script should be carefully chosen and the cast picked with care,” Knobloch told the German tabloid Bild. “It is reprehensible to combine the issue of the Holocaust with Britney Spears in an attempt to secure financing for the film ‘The Yellow Star of Sophia and Eton.’ Ethical considerations should have priority.”

And let’s face it. Casting Britney Spears in any movie is unethical.

Update: It got worse.

Sex, drugs and rock’n'roll are no problem. But as Billy Bob Thornton has just discovered, no musician – however famous – can get away with coming to Canada and suggesting that the locals might be ever-so-slightly boring.

The Hollywood actor, who is trying to rebrand himself as a hillbilly singer, has cancelled a tour of Quebec and Ontario after saying in a radio interview that Canadian fans were like “mashed potatoes with no gravy”.

During a remarkably cantankerous audience with CBC, the national radio network, Thornton complained that local audiences were “very reserved” and consistently failed to behave in a suitably uproarious fashion when his band takes to the stage.

“It doesn’t matter what you say to them,” he complained. “It’s mashed potatoes with no gravy … We tend to play places where people throw things at each other. And here, they just sit there.”

The comments sparked public outrage when they were aired on Wednesday and Thornton and his band, the Boxmasters, were greeted with a chorus of boos when they arrived onstage in Toronto as the support act for Willie Nelson the following night. The Toronto Star reported that large sections of the audience shouted “here comes the gravy!” while unconfirmed reports suggested that several irate punters decided to take Thornton at his word and throw plastic cups at him.

On Friday, a large crowd in Montreal was gearing up for a similar performance when they were suddenly informed that the Boxmasters had cancelled their remaining Canadian dates. The news was greeted with wild applause.

A post on Nelson’s website initially said that “no reasons have been announced” for the withdrawal. But yesterday, Thornton’s publicist blamed flu, which he said had suddenly struck down the group’s guitarist and several crew members. The band will resume scheduled performances on 14 April, in the safety of their native USA.

It will take some time for Thornton to regain the affections of the Canadian people. The actor, who was once married to Angelina Jolie, launched his tirade against the country after becoming highly upset at the way his “electric hillbilly” band was introduced on CBC’s Q programme.

In the opening segment of the show, host Jian Ghomeshi had gently informed listeners that, in addition to being the Boxmasters’ lead singer and drummer, Thornton was an “Oscar-winning screenwriter-actor-director”.

That apparently contradicted Thornton’s wishes that his career outside of music never be mentioned during interviews he conducts with the band. In the remainder of the interview, he greeted most questions with either complete silence, or non sequiturs.

At one section of the appearance, Thornton complained that he had been forbidden from smoking in the radio station’s studios – a factor which some blamed for his apparent belligerence.

“I wasn’t fond of the whole image back in the day, the baggy pants, the shaved eyebrow and the hairdo, but I’ve had therapy since.”

- Rob Van Winkle aka Vanilla Ice

Easy for him to say. I’m still in therapy over the fact I own one of his albums.

"You sure you ain't one of us?"

Phoebe Snow is so often mistaken for African-American, she’s decided to get to the bottom of her ethnic roots. “I’m going to take a DNA test,” Snow, a Jew whose real name is Phoebe Ann Laub, told Page Six. Her decision comes after New Jersey’s (201) magazine feted the singer as one of Bergen County’s “black music-industry greats” along with Stevie Wonder, George Benson, Ben E. King, the Isley Brothers and Diddy. “I was peeing in my pants laughing. I was like, this is fantastic, to be in such great company,” said Snow, who had a smash hit with “Poetry Man” in 1974. “Believe me, people have been asking me about this since I started in the recording industry. My mom was the whitest, alabaster-skinned person you can imagine, but who knows what went on four generations ago? So this mitochondrial DNA test should settle it.” Oprah took the test and discovered she was linked to South Africa’s Zulu tribe.

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Story here.

P.S I think this is one of the signs of the apocalypse.

Now I know why he named his dog Hot Dog.

Just saying.

Thanks to Brian.

Less than a month after the death of Charlton Heston, another of Hollywood’s great over-actors is taking center stage in the retelling of the Passover story.

This week the Jewish Music Group is releasing “Exodus: An Oratorio In Three Parts,” a dramatic biblical reading by William Shatner accompanied by the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.The album is taken from recordings of back-to-back evening performances in April 2005 at the Robinson Center Music Hall in Little Rock.

In an exclusive interview Monday with JTA, Shatner credited David Itkin, the orchestra’s conductor, with writing the music and bringing together passages from the Bible and the Haggadah to produce the final text.

“It’s his creation,” Shatner said, adding that he thought so highly of the production that he made arrangements to have the two performances recorded.

“On the Saturday night that most of this record is taken from, my thrill was connecting with the audience the way we did,” the star of “StarTrek” and “Boston Legal” recalled.

“The actor, along with 350 voices in the choral group and 75 people in the orchestra, all combined to reach out to this audience of several thousand people. The magic of the CD is that you can hear the connection, especially at the end, between the audience and the actor.”

At first glance, the “Exodus” production sounds more like a project for Shatner’s best-known “Star Trek” co-star, Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy has long been known for mining his Jewish heritage, from basing Spock’s split-fingered Vulcan greeting on the ancient Israelite priestly blessing to drawing inspiration from Kabbalah for a book of semi-nude photographs.

But now, at the very end of the performance, it’s Shatner reciting the priestly blessing — to an enthusiastic ovation.

So does the “Exodus” reading, along with a film in the works titled “The Shiva Club,” point to some sort of later-in-life artistic engagement with his Jewish roots?

No, Shatner says, just a coincidence.

“My being Jewish does not inform the things I do, necessarily,” Shatner explained, speaking by phone during a lunch break from shooting an episode of “Boston Legal.”

” ‘Exodus’ is a wonderful piece, no matter what religion you are. ‘The Shiva Club,’ which is a movie I am attempting to make sometime soon, is about crashing a shiva, if you will. A couple of comics crash a shiva. I could have, I suppose, made it an Irish wake, but the shiva I was more familiar with.”

Just as Shatner says his religious background does not inform his art, he also insists that his turn as the narrator of “Exodus” has not led to any sort of personal transformation or alter his connection to the Passover holiday.

“I come from a Conservative Jewish home in Canada, which is pretty much like an Orthodox home here in the States. And we celebrated Passover every year and held a long seder,” Shatner said, adding that he continues to mark the holiday.

“My daughter makes a seder, but it’s a little more modern” — plenty of English, he explained — “and a little less time than the old-fashioned ones.”

A dramatic biblical reading by William Shatner accompanied by the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra? Oh, this is going to be good.

I wonder if it will be anything like his other forays into narrating with musical accompaniment?

Yeah, you know what’s coming folks..