This month’s Scholastic Math Magazine features the always purdy Natalie Portman as its cover girl.

A refreshing antidote to all those Jessicas, Portman promotes the wonders of — get this, girls — thinking!

“Sure, you need to use math daily for knowing how much tip to leave at a restaurant or how much flour you need to make double the amount of cookies in a recipe, but it is the less obviously practical parts of math that are most fun for me — like considering the principles of infinity. It made me excited about life to consider the limitlessness of the mind and what we can do with it.”

DreamWorks, Paramount Update
DreamWorks is working through tension with parent company Paramount Pictures with the latter reporting boxoffice receipts for DreamWorks under the newly-created DreamWorks-Paramount banner, Variety is reporting. The move, Var says, “could help pave the way for a scenario in which DreamWorks becomes more of an autonomous production company.” Read the rest of the story here.

‘Brothers’ Love Triangle Set
Natalie Portman will join Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brothers for director Jim Sheridan, Variety reports. It’s a love triangle based on the 2004 Danish pic by Susanne Bier starring Connie Nielsen.

Diesel, Walker Back in Drivers’ Seats
Universal is back on track with its Fast and the Furious installment with a reteaming of the first pic’s original stars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker back on board to star in a fourth film. You may remember that the pic helped boost their respective careers and in turn ditched they franchise. They’re back now but obviously THR has already forgotten who Diesel is: on the trade paper’s site, a pic of Chris Daughtry is identified as Diesel. Guess it was the bald head that got the editors confused.

- CHRIS GARDNER

Tom Cruise and Ben Stiller ARE The Hardy Boys, er, Men. Cruise and Stiller will star in a comedy based on the mystery series. Stiller will produce, Shawn Levy will direct and get this:

Cruise and Stiller have been friends for years–an alliance that grew out of Cruise’s admiration for Stiller’s penchant for doing Cruise impersonations.

“I love it when you do me.” Does that sound as Brokeback to you as it does to us?

Red Envelope, the production arm of Netflix, will produce a doc. about ancient but game Tony Bennett, EP’ed by Clint Eastwood, who’ll also show up in the film. Netflix plans a theatrical release, a tv airing, and a live event for the film. Why?

“Tony Bennett has been at the enter of the culture for more than 60 years,” said Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos. “There are not that many people on the planet who can talk about Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy in the first person.”

In fact, no one can talk about them in the first person, because (a) one can only refer to oneself in the first person and (b) they’re dead.

CBS hired former NBC drama excec. Chris Castalloas to oversee reality programming. Sounds nonsensical, but he’d worked with Glen Maynard, exec. vp of alternative programing before, and Hollywood is all about who you know.

Second Life creator Philip Rosedale tells all. Five gigabytes of code!

Sony has acquired all media rights for Afterworld, a futuristic animated episodic drama. Right now it’s on Bud.TV, but soon it will be a game, a tv series, a web series, a cell phone series and a breakfast treat.

Goldwyn will distribute Goya’s Ghosts, Milos Forman’s
film about the Spanish artist. Natalie Portman stars as his muse.

ShoWest honors Bruce Joel Rubin as screenwriter of the year next month in Las Vegas. Rubin won an Oscar for Ghost.