Here is the latest trailer for “Tower Heist,” the new Eddie Murphy/Ben Stiller movie that Universal will offer to home viewers for $59.99, while the Hollywood film is still in theaters.

It’s part of an unusual experiment in digital distribution.

It does look funny, but does it look $60 funny?

That’s what Universal will try charging in a test this fall, three weeks after it opens “Tower Heist.”

[UPDATE: No, it won't: The studio has killed the plan after protests from theater owners.]

If you live in Atlanta, Georgia, or Portland, Oregon, you’ll be able to watch the new Eddie Murphy/Ben Stiller movie in your house for $59.99 — while the movie is still in theaters and months before it would normally be available for video-on-demand rentals.

It’s one in a series of experiments Hollywood has embarked on as it tries to play with the traditional “windows” that govern when a distribution outlet gets a movie and how much consumers need to pay to see it.

The idea, theoretically, is that consumers will pay a big premium to see a big movie — or at least one with big expectations — in their house instead of going to a theater. The earlier version of this test involved “meh” movies that had already left the theaters, but wouldn’t normally be available on VOD for a while.

That one cost $30, but at least there was some logic to it – it could end up being cheaper than a traditional movie night for two after you factor in parking, gas, etc.

But painting a $60 movie as a bargain is going to be awfully tough, no matter what math you use. And the fact that it represents a premium for a “collapsed” window won’t mean much for regular people. Even regular people with really nice home theaters and/or expensive babysitters.

Instead it seems as though Universal — and parent company Comcast, which is handling the cable delivery for the movie — is really trying to ensure that almost no one will pay up, and thus not ruffle movie exhibitors’ feathers. Except if that’s the case, then why bother doing it at all?

FoxPop, a technology that makes its debut next month, works like a specialized Twitter feed, offering up a string of trivia, photos and shopping suggestions during selected movies.

Users can run the application on their computers or their iPhones or iPod touches. It syncs with the movie, displaying material that is supposed to be relevant to what is happening on-screen at that moment.

FoxPop is to make its debut Dec. 1 with the home-video release of “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian,” this year’s sequel to the 2006 Ben Stiller comedy. Fox hired a marketing company to write a string of informational tidbits and quizzes about the movie’s stars, props and setting, which is filled with artworks and artifacts from the museum’s archives.

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One way to fix that: Turn the entire homepage into a giant ad. Like this one for Fox’s newest iteration of “Night At The Museum” (click to enlarge):

Web sites like News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace have been turning their homepages into giant ads for quite some time, and in some cases it’s been very effective. But as far as I know, this is the first time a search engine has tried it. I’ve got a query (get it?) into the Ask folks and will report back when I hear from them.

UPDATE: Ask spokesguy Nicholas Graham tells me that this isn’t the first time the search engine has offered up its homepage for takeovers. Ask has done it a couple times for charitable causes and it did the same thing last November for “Quantum of Solace,” the most recent James Bond flick. In the case of both that movie and the new “Night at the Museum,” Ask doesn’t get paid for the ad–instead, it gets an in-kind payment via mentions in the films.

Here’s a screenshot of the last takeover Ask did, in April, for Autism Speaks. In that case, the takeover ads also featured hot spots (the boxed question marks) that turned into questions when users moused over them (click to enlarge).

Some interviews will be quite serious (Eve Ensler, talking about the dire situation in the Congo) and some possibly funny (Mark Cuban, who simply defies definition).

But this picture that Twitter founder and CEO Evan Williams posted today on his Flickr page is easily the most unusual bit of research I have come across.

Here it is, aptly titled, “This doesn’t seem awkward at all”:

Taken at Time magazine’s Time 100 fete in New York recently, where the pair were among this year’s honorees, Williams and fellow Twitter founder Biz Stone were looking, well, I could not say at first just what the microblogging potentates were looking like.

That is, until I compared the photo with the one below of Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller, who played supermodels Hansel and Derek in the nearly perfect movie, “Zoolander.”

Is it the “Blue Steel” pose?

How lucky that All Things Digital readers can see the pair strut their stuff onstage in real-time (how Twittery of us!), starting next Tuesday night in posts and videos, in the opening night interview Walt Mossberg and I will conduct with Williams and Stone.

In their honor we’ve already tweeted–in fewer than 140 characters each–their bios thusly for our program–I hope they appreciate our editorial license with their short and sweet lives:

Williams was raised on a farm in Nebraska, dropped out of college, was co-founder of Pyra Labs, which created Blogger and sold to Google.

Stone helped found things besides Twitter: Xanga, Blogger and Odeo. He worked for Google with Blogger. He once won a debate at Oxford Union.

You can also see the rest of the D7 speaker list and click to more bios here.

[Photo of Williams and Stone courtesy of Evan Williams on Flickr.]

The video speaks for itself, but it has DeGeneres trying out a thing called a Hawaii chair:

And this is a different kind of funny–warning, it is a aimed directly at teenage boys, including using one to guide the proceedings–from the MTV Movie Awards this week. It features Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black and Ben Stiller trying to make a viral video for their upcoming movie, “Tropic Thunder.”

Here’s the video: