Box Office Estimates Box Office Hell Film Reviews MCN Critics Roundup Interviews DVD Reviews Posters du Jour Trailers Looking for reviews, interviews, film ratings and box office charts? You'll find it all at MCN Weekend.

-	Friday	Screens	Chg	Cume
Up	21.4	3766	..	21.4
Night at the Museum 2	7.1	4096	-54%	86.9
Drag Me to Hell	6.4	2508	.	6.4
Terminator Salvation	5.1	3602	-65%	79.6
Star Trek	3.6	3507	-39%	200.3

You'll find the full box office estimates on MCN Weekend.
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If you have children and don’t take them, you should be ashamed of yourself. If you see it without kids, you should love it anyway. It’ll help bring back all those wondrous childhood movie experiences, like The Wizard of Oz, The Red Balloon and the early Disney features (Dumbo, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio) that once made a kid‘s trip to the movie house so intoxicating and madly enchanting. And adventurous.

Voynaristic
More Than Skin Deep: Girls, Women and Career Choices
by Kim Voynar

As a society, we've become dependent on the contributions of women to the workplace in maintaining the machine of our economy, but we've not yet caught up with how to fully support working parents while also fulfilling the societal role of creating and nurturing the next generation. Is this part of what leads many women to gravitate toward jobs with more flexible, or less demanding work schedules and away from careers as directors, editors, and cinematographers? And does it hinder women from moving up the ladder into positions of greater importance that require the ability to dedicate yourself fully to your career? Most probably, yes.

Click Pix For More

The Ultimate DVD Geek
Marley & Me: The Bad Dog Edition
by Doug Pratt

The enormously popular 2008 family film, Marley & Me, depicts the full life of a family dog as the family grows up around him. In his younger years, he is especially rambunctious, which contributed to the film's superb marketing campaign that suggested the movie would be another Beethoven-style slapstick piece. Instead, the film is truly about the role a pet plays in the emotional adhesion of a family unit, and audiences, suckered in by the ad, were then solidly hooked by the movie's emotional payoff. Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, who make a terrific screen couple, star.

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MCN DVD Wrap
Powder Blue

All of their quietly desperate characters work the streets of a neon-noir Los Angeles that is closer to Charles Bukowski’s blueprint than the one used for Short Cuts or Crash, the films Powder Blue was intended to resemble. For the most obvious of reasons, however, the storyline involving Biel’s forlorn stripper and hospitalized child is the one that matters most.

She looks great, is a swell dancer and reads her lines capably. But the story is hardly worth the effort.

Also ... Of Time and the City, Wise Blood, Forever Strong, The Ramen Girl and more ...

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Wilmington on DVDs
Of Time and the City, El Dorado, Zabriskie Point... and more
by Michael Wilmington

Stretching back to the immediate post-war years, as the battered district tries to struggle back to normality, through the ‘50s of Davies’ movie-haunted childhood (the first film he saw, memorably, was “Singin’ in the Rain“), through the seedy, sweaty pro wrestling matches and immaculate Catholic church confessionals that tormented his adolescence with sexual longing and guilt,  through the ’60s live heyday of his fellow Liverpudlians, the Beatles ...

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Frenzy on the Wall
Getting Dragged to Hell
by Noah Forrest

If I had watched this film for the first time at home, even with the best sound system and a huge high-definition plasma, I think I would have been indifferent. Having that audience, sharing those sounds and sights, enhanced the quality of the picture like a baseball slugger taking performance-enhancing drugs. That visceral theater experience masked a lot of the flaws of the film that hit me as I was walking out of the theater because everything was moving so fast and so loudly, that I didn’t have time to catch my breath and think.

Real Life Meets Cinema: Issues Raised by Burma VJ Emphasized by Arrest of Activist
by Gary Dretzka

Only Satan’s flack could have brokered the news reports that have preceded the limited release of Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country. As if Anders Østergaard’s documentary on the 2007 Saffron Revolution weren’t compelling enough, Myanmar’s military junta decided this would be the perfect time to re-arrest the country’s foremost pro-democracy opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and force her to stand trial before a kangaroo court appointed by her enemies.

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Podcast: Judi Krant
by Noah Forrest

This week Noah talks with Judi Krant, director of the film Made in China which won the Grand Jury Prize at SXSW. They talk about the difficulty of shooting in Shanghai, the relationship between art and commerce, the greatness of Sidney Lumet and the whimsy of Michel Gondry.

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Canadian Cinema Ordered To Pay $10,000 For Invasion Of Privacy In Bag Search

Makeup Guy Greg Nicotero On Drag Me To Hell's Grue And Boogie Nights' Diggler

Tintin To Be Released In Parts Of The World That Have Heard Of Him Two Months Before The States

Steve Martin Talks Banjo (audio)

500 Successful Actors Support Proposed SAG Pact

Transformers 2 Writers On Post-Strike Imprisonment By Michael Bay To Type Script

Village Voice Media Takes On Craigslist's Swipe At Their Adult Services Till

Red Band-Trailering The Hangover

Spinal Tap, Still Smelling The Glove After 25 Years

"Ken Loach took it upon himself publicly to endorse the boycott of the entire Edinburgh Film Festival to make his views doubly clear. It's a shame because clearly some Israelis obviously like Ken."
Jewish Director Hands Back Edinburgh Prize In Loach Row

What Do Your Movie Posters Say About You?

Let Your Mobile Do The Walking
Leading Yellow Pages Publisher R.H. Donnelley Files For Bankruptcy

Teasing Toy Story 3

Forbes Measures Sony Pictures Classics' Shoestring

All The Stars Were Shining Bright And Then He Sentenced Me
Phil Spector Gets 19-To-Life For Murder

Promo'ing Pelham, Tony Scott Lips Name Scott Free Colleauge For Alien Prequel Director

Docter Is In: Pete's Up For 20Q

Beats Set For 3 Doc & Fiction Projects

Coltish, Bolting Kidman Replaced By Hot Fuzz's Lucy Punch In New Woody Allen

"39 minutes. 18 killings. 3 lines of dialogue... Bresson with guns"
On Alan Clarke's Terse, Elemental Masterpiece, Elephant

The Bowery's Guerilla Amato Opera Company Closing After 60 Years

World's Largest Swine Processor Alleges Pig Business Doc Is Defamatory

Danny Leigh Sez "You Can Count Me Out Of Del Toro's Vision Of The Future"

A Journo Dad Wonders If Pixar Should Just Make Pics For Grown-Ups

Hugh Hudson On His Malick-ized DVD Recut Of Maligned Revolution

The Unlikely Run Of Valentino

Virgin Not Impressed By Playboy

Errol Morris On What Happens When You Descend Into "Uncanny Valley"

Artist Lou Romano Shows Off A Lot Of Conceptual Art From Up (spoilers; also video)

The Top 10 Voices Of Pixar

Admire The Steve McQueen Auction Collection

Thursday's "Discreet" Meeting Of Newspaper-Owning Cabal Near O'Hare Likely Violated Antitrust Laws

Pete Howell On Film's New Fall Guy: Women

Real Talk: Bailes Out And Lyons Sacked

Trailering Halloween II

Leonard Maltin Cruises With Princess

"Call it IMAX Lite, IMAX Junior, MiniMAX or IMAX 2.0. Or call the old format 'IMAX Classic.' Hey, that worked for Coke."
It's Not The Movies That Got Small, It's The IMAX: Ebert Weighs In On Corporate Shrinkage

Jonnie Rosenbaum Wrestles With Video Art ("whatever that means")

"My reaction could not have been any more different. Far from wanting answers, there seemed to be an honesty that was beyond anything the Dane had done before. So much so that when I met with the director at the famous Hotel du Cap I felt an urge to give him a hug. I told him this and before we said anything else I found myself standing on a wooden veranda of a hut overlooking the vast expanse of water, hugging a man I'd only been introduced to 45 seconds before but had spent years admiring from afar."
Kaleem Aftab's Kiss-Kiss To Trier's Chop-Chop; He's Also One Of The Few Journos Who Knows How To Spell "Clitoridectomy"

Dreamworks Animation Bucks Studio Trend, Will Push Out More Product

Previewing The Sunday Mag: "The Making of Zach Galifianakis"

"Sorry, We've Been Outsourced. This Issue Made In India"
Connecticut Alt-Weeklies' Joke Works Up To WTF

Edward J. Lakso, 76, TV Veteran, Composer, Co-Wrote And Scored Russ Meyer's The Immoral Mr. Teas And "Watergate: The Musical," Starring Gene Barry

Blockbuster's Revival Plan Includes Selling Sunglasses From Top Gun And Men In Black

Back To The Drawing Board: Toback Writing Life Of DeLorean For Ratner

180 Rotten Tomatoes Commenters Couldn't Be Bored With Armond White's Down-With-Up Refizzle
"These maudlin scenes, they’re not emotionally pure like Chaplin; they preen. Critics who forget that movies should be about people defend this reduction of human experience. It’s part of their Pixar-corporate allegiance. Apparently, they would pass this on to their children, the way autoworkers once instilled union loyalty."
With - Mr. White's Wank-From-The-Heart, Trashing Corporations And Workers In One Incoherent Blurt

Trailering Bela Tarr's Man From London

Guardian House Crab Bergan Sez The Second Coming Of 3D Is Overrated

10 Golden Rules For Making The Ideal H'wd Franchise

"How are you guys doin'? I'm just having a coffee."
David Lynch Chats Up His Music Faves Au Revoir Simone

"Oscar night at my house is called Passover."
Bob Hope Gets First Class Stamp

Can You Recognize A Movie In 4 Frames?

Sale Of Derelict Withnail & I Farmhouse Falls Through

Novelist Richard Ford On Nobody's Everyman

Russian Cinema Admissions Fall 11%

140-Year-Old Virginia Weekly First Published By A Former Confederate Army Officer Folds

French Actor, Theater And Film Director Roger Planchon, Was 77

Lionsgate Looses 49% Of TV Guide Investment For $123 Million

What Became Of French Director Gilles Mimouni After L'Appartement?

Cabal Of Newspaper Owners Meeting In O'Hare Boonies To Plan Ways To Charge For Online Content

Time Warner Outlines Plans To Turn AOL Into Freestanding Money Pit By End Of 2009

Murdoch Enters WSJ-Sponsored Digital Conference D7 To The Strains Of "Stayin' Alive" (video)

Jonas Mekas' Threatened Film-Makers' Cooperative Gets A Swell New Home Further Uptown For A Buck
And - Times Predictably Goes Again For Bear-Hug With Issue-Driven Babbitry, Quoting Groups That Want Smoking Banished From Screens But Not Anyone Who Makes Films (Or Incidentally, Art)

On The Greatness Of Art: Errol Morris Begins An Extended Divagation On Forged Vermeers

On The Sales Status Of The Cinemas Redstone's Offloading In Blighty

Hangover Likely No Headache For WB?

Trailering Del Toro's "The Strain" Trilogy
And - Showreeling Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans ("This video has been removed by the user.")