The Superbowl? Man plans, God laughs.

The weekend box office? Disney plans, Billy Ray Cyrus laughs -- all the way to the bank. The 3D concert film "Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour" grossed $29 million at 683 theaters, for a downright frightening $42,459 per-theater-average. As usual, the house that Walt built knows how to market a property like processed cheese (a decent description of Miley's music, incidentally) while increasing its value by making it look scarce. If you told a nine-year-old girl that she had only one week to see the Hannah Montana movie and that if she missed it she'd become a social leper, well, of course she'd sell her prized Zac Efron toilet plunger to see it. And of course Disney would then have to turn around Monday morning and announce "Engagement Extended Due to Overwhelming Demand". Are you listening, junior MBAs? Today's lesson is called "How to Print Money by Leveraging Pre-Pubescent Girls."

The film got decent reviews, though, and its success -- and that of U2 3D -- means we'll be seeing a lot more bulbous concert movies in the coming months. I'd love to see "Prince 3D" but we'd probably all have to wear protective raingear.

Coming in at #2 for the weekend, with less than half of the "Hannah Montana" gross, was the Jessica Alba J-horror remake "The Eye." Other newbies "Over Her Dead Body" and "Strange Wilderness" -- true first-quarter dogs -- failed to break $5 million apiece.

More grosses at the Box Office Mojo chart and Leonard Klady at Movie City News.

You may have missed this last week, but Pakistan has lifted a musty five-decade ban on India's movies being shown there legally. What this will do to the country's bootleg Bollywood DVD industry is unknown. It's also unclear whether this means the world has future Pakistan-India co-productions to look forward to. But I say give it a go, you crazy kids. If the world needs a 4-hour anti-imperialist cricket musical, aren't you two just the countries to make it happen?

(And yes, for now, this a post-Super Bowl-free zone.)

Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Fandom

Thankfully, it seems an end might be near for the writer's strike that's crippled an industry. But what if it didn't end? What if it just kept going ... and going ... and going? Well, those maniacs at Cracked asked readers to present their photo-shopped visions of the future; a future that could very well see a fictional film like the one above taking home the Oscar for best picture. There were several fan-made posters in competition, however it came down to a make- believe Brad Pitt movie eventually taking the prize. The name of said movie: The Script Reader With An Enormous C**k.

The posters are all pretty hilarious, especially the made-up quotes thrown around each one (I never knew Roger Ebert had such a vulgar vocabulary). My favorite fictional Ebert quote came on the poster for Gratuitous CG Frenzy, in which the quote was: "I don't know why the Empire State Building turned into a gigantic bear, but the fur was incredible." Other titles joining the pack include Uwe Boll's Pong, James Cameron's Exploring the Basement (in IMAX 3-D!), Not Another German Expressionism Movie (from the Wayans brothers), American Idol: The Movie, The Sims Movie (starring Ed Norton and Julia Roberts) and one called Old People Falling Down Stairs. I've provided a few of my personal favorites after the jump, but then head over to Cracked to see the rest.

[via The Movie Blog]

Continue reading The Writer's Strike Presents: The 2009 Oscar Nominees!

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LITTLE ROCK, Ark., Feb. 4, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Retro Television Network (RTN), which is owned and distributed by Equity Media Holdings Corporation (Nasdaq:EMDA), announced today that it will launch an RTN affiliate in Wichita/Hutchinson, KS. The network will begin airing in the second quarter of this year on KGPT, a Great Plains Television Network station.

Because it just needs to happen, the Coolidge is showing "Brokeback Mountain" tonight at 7pm. The layers of tragedy will, over time, accumulate around this imperfect movie and its great, deep performance -- and its greatish, deepish ones, too -- until everything about them assumes the impression of wisdom. We'll search this movie and Ennis Del Mar the way we might someone else's soul. We leave a little more devastated, a little more lost than we did the first time. You'll watch Heath Ledger and think the ache in his heart and in his bones seems realer, more contagious. Bad news has a way of doing that to an already iconic piece of acting. Have you seen "Rebel Without a Cause" lately? Of course, the Coolidge could just as easily have shown "Casanova" to remind us that the world has lost this happy, horny dude, too.

LONDON, Feb. 4, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Virgin Media (Nasdaq:VMED) will be announcing its Fourth Quarter 2007 results on Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 830am UK time, 330am ET. The company will host a conference call for analysts and investors to discuss these results on February 28, at 2pm UK time, 9am ET.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Feb. 4, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Enthusiastic indie-rock band AUDIOCRASH is releasing its debut, full-length artist album, Time Sensitive Material (Dirty Garage Records), on March 15th at SXSW. The band's sound is composed of infectious, highly memorable tunes and catchy hooks with a serious sentiment behind the lighthearted lyrics. The first single from the album, "Everyday," has lit-up the blogosphere with debate over whether it's a political song railing against an unjust war. One viewing of the song's music video might suggest the affirmative, if not for the band's insistence that the song is simply about strife and the daily sacrifices people make in order to get home to the ones they love.

Filed under: Horror, Deals, Universal, RumorMonger, Celebrities and Controversy

Multiple sources are reporting today that Universal has invited John Landis into the office for a couple of meetings about potentially directing The Wolf Man, probably at the behest of the film's creature effects maestro Rick Baker, who Landis worked with on the seminal modern werewolf picture, An American Werewolf in London, many full moons ago. There are reports that the studio was taken aback by the hissy fit that the usually compliant Harry Knowles went into over the studio's almost-sealed deal with Brett Ratner to take over the project that Mark Romanek has inconveniently exited, and so now they're keeping their options open by meeting with a whole host of potential candidates. I don't really buy that -- there's no way the Universal brass actually takes fanboy reaction that seriously, but nevertheless, here we are, and I'm left with one question: John Landis -- really?

Landis has been persona non grata in Hollywood for a long, long time -- being negligent enough to allow Jennifer Jason Leigh's dad to be decapitated on your movie set is a great way to have your phone calls go unreturned -- but he did get at least a couple of comeback opportunities in the 90s, most notably the chance to helm a third Beverly Hills Cop film, and he bungled that opportunity fabulously. BHCIII is one of the worst big-budget action-comedy films I've ever seen in my life, so lifeless and listless and such a franchise-killer that even Jerry Bruckheimer will tell you, if you ask, that he wouldn't be involved in a fourth one if they begged him. Landis's 1992 vampire film, Innocent Blood, was also a hokey disappointment. Still, some swear by the man who brought us Trading Places, Three Amigos and American Werewolf, and would be giddy at the thought of his return to the brass ring. Are you one of those people?

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I've been watching TMC's annual 31 Days of Oscar all weekend, and now I'm at "Brigadoon" (1954). It's like a CBS show about two modern American bachelors who wind up in a Scottish town stuck in the 18th century. Gene Kelly has a high time chasing Cyd Charisse. Van Johnson runs from her sister (Virginia Bosler). Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn would probably be in the remake (actually, "Wedding Crashers" pretty much is that remake).

Anyway, this a Vincente Minnelli picture, so naturally it belongs in a museum, despite the Lerner and Lowe plot, which for 1954 actually flirts with subversion (Lowe just wrote the music, actually). Anyway, the dialogue isn't bad, either: "When I look at'cha, I feel wee tadpoles jumping in me spine!," says Bosler, in one of the sillier examples. The musical numbers are absurdly fantastic -- obviously. Minnelli framed shots for the massive movie canvas. This movie's enchantment would be seriously diminished on an iThing, especially the hunt for Harry Beaton. It's all long and medium-long shots. Depth and scope are the real stars. Every scene with Kelly, Charisse, and her terrible accent floating across the village's hills and fields is like watching two people run around a painting. When I die, I want to go to the MGM sound stage in the sky.

Filed under: Critical Thought, Celebrities and Controversy, Fandom, Quentin Tarantino

In a new, in-depth interview with British magazine Sight & Sound, Quentin Tarantino, who I had the pleasure of meeting at this year's Sundance, goes into all his upcoming and most of his past projects, and gives a detailed update on exactly where he is with his next feature, a war movie called Inglorious Bastards. "I've got tons of material and a lot of stuff written but now I've figured out what to do, I gotta start from page one, square one," Tarantino says, seemingly putting to rest any notion that this thing will be going before the cameras in the next year or so. "I started just before I came on this trip and brought the stuff with me but I haven't had a chance to continue yet. But maybe on the flight back home I'll come back into it. I love writing in other countries." No further details about the plot or potential casting is given, just that quasi-confirmation that the film is in his cross-hairs at the moment.

Tarantino also talks at length about Grindhouse, admitting to being depressed and disappointed over how the film was received at the box office, but defending his longer, original cut of Death Proof as the definitive one and arguing that it stands on its own quite well. Tarantino also talks about the process of getting involved with the double feature in the first place, and reveals that he first wanted his contribution to be a Candyman-style horror film about the ghost of a slave that terrifies a group of white girls. "The first idea was a bunch of young college history students that were going through a tour of the plantations of the old South. And there's a ghost of an old slave that is part of negro folklore. Jody the Grinder actually went down and bested the devil, by f**king him. And so the devil put him on earth for all eternity to f**k white women."

So why didn't this idea make the cut? "I would probably have had Sam Jackson playing that part," Tarantino continues," and it was really good, but then I didn't have anywhere to go with it, because if you have a story about a killer slave with supermacho powers done in the style of a slasher film, then even if he's doing it today, and even if the white girls are innocent, how can you not be on the slave's side?" Tarantino goes into many other areas in the interview, talking about his writing process, the books he's reading, the British movies he'd like to make one day, and even his plans for eventual retirement.

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