· A limited supply of advance tickets for This Is It, aka the Michael Jackson pseudo-concert documentary, sold out in two hours Sunday at L.A. Live. A hearty crowd of fans had waited upwards of three days in some cases to get their hands on 3,000 ducats for the film's Oct. 27 sneak previews; the city's new Regal Stadium Cinemas will open that night with the film on all 14 screens. Let the black market commence! [AP]
More Weinstein Co. headaches, Vin Diesel once again plots world conquest, and more Hollywood Ink after the jump.
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It was another dreadful couple of days at the box office, as moviegoers -- faced with bleak options like Surrogates, Pandorum and Fame -- chose to instead spend their weekends doing more productive things like cleaning out their garages, or enrolling in online correspondence beauty schools. (Or in our case, both!) Let's peek through our fingers at the damage, shall we?
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Filmmaker and fugitive Roman Polanski was arrested Saturday in Switzerland, where the director had arrived to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Zurich Film Festival. He never made it out of the airport: Observing the worldwide arrest warrant in effect since Polanski fled sentencing for unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old in 1978, Swiss police met his flight and took him into custody, where he awaits possible extradition back to the United States.
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Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs rained on Surrogates Friday for the weekend's box-office lead, though neither Sony nor Disney are gloating too much about being at the top of another sluggish frame at the movies. Meatballs' $5.5 million narrowly edged Surrogates' anemic $5 million, and the hemorrhaging worsened on down the line for second-week slumpers like The Informant, Jennifer's Body and Love Happens. At least there was good news for the troubled MGM, whose relatively mini-budgeted Fame took in $3.5 million for third place and stands to turn a tidy theatrical profit en route to DVD. Baby steps, gang! Check out Friday's top 10 after the jump.
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Love (or something) was in the air this week at Movieline, where unlikely romances, friendships and other high-profile pairings bloomed full and bright. And those are just the highlight we remember. Check out the rest after the jump, and have a great weekend!
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· We have the first official casualty of the TV fall season: The Beautiful Life, the Ashton Kutcher-produced drama about we-have-no-f*cking-idea-but-probably-something-involving-attractive-people, has been canceled by The CW mid-way through shooting its seventh episode. @aplusk has yet to weigh in with how badly the network screwed over what could have been the Hill Street Blues of modeling.
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Congratulations are in order to the writers of this week's five best comments, who have each earned themselves a Photoshopped cigarette plucked straight from the ad campaign of Californication! First, though, a Surgeon General's warning: The tar levels in such a cigarette can only be traced through Adobe Illustrator, and though these sticks are addictive, they make your computer run awfully slow when you smoke 'em. So who are our winners?
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This one goes out to anyone who was at TIFF: We're not sure whether to thank The Playlist or send them a bouquet of dead rats for identifying the song that played before every single screening at the festival, accompanied by a slide show of pairs of people in an audience reacting in unison to a movie (who were all racially segregated, for some reason). Anyway, the Coldplay knockoff song is by a Toronto band called Pilot Speed, and it's called "Light You Up." (We couldn't have come up with better names for a Toronto-based Coldplay knockoff band and song if we tried.) And we finally know what the singer is saying when he goes, "YOU ROFIN RAFFF WHEN ARFEN SREN..." The lyrics are on the YouTube page. [YouTube via ThePlaylist]
If The Devil Wears Prada and/or its deformed stepchild Confessions of a Shopaholic is your idea of a movie about fashion, then don't see Coco Before Chanel. You'll be sorely disappointed. Where those movies are unapologetic, orgiastic celebrations of the fashion world's outrageous hedonism, Coco (which opens today in New York and Los Angeles) is a paring down, a much-needed trimming of the superficial fat of fashion film. In fact it's less of a fashion flick than a historic sojourn to the roots of style, born in the ardent vision of a dogged opportunist. And if the movie takes itself a bit too somberly because of that, it's still a far more important view of fashion than the typical stylistas-on-steroids treatment doled out by movies and television.
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· Collider's got the first still from Paul, the upcoming Simon Pegg/Nick Frost reunion directed by Greg Mottola.
· It's the end of the line for Randy Quaid and his wife Evi, as they were nabbed (and not without a fight!) by authorities.
· Michael Ausiello's got a blind item to tease you: What TV couple in the midst of a torrid affair is comprised of actors who hate each other offscreen? All of them!
· Edward Norton might have channeled his Leaves of Grass weed grower during a Toronto interview with MTV: "We're in Canada and the hydroponic stuff up here is just thorough!"
· Not only is Dimension readying a very remake and sequel-heavy slate, but they've announced that Neve Campbell will be returning after all to Scream 4.
Bad news out of the Nevada desert: The CineVegas Film Festival is taking a year's hiatus until 2011. "Given the current economic climate and the pressures it has created, we made the difficult decision to put CineVegas on hiatus for the coming year. CineVegas has become such a well-respected film festival, and rather than allow the economy to affect its level of quality we have opted to put the event on hold," fest president Robin Greenspun said in a statement. The previously annual event had developed into one of the best-regarded regional festivals in the country under the leadership of artistic director Trevor Groth (also Sundance's new director of programming, which can't help matters), Greenspun, and chairman/chief mascot Dennis Hopper; Movieline will always have the misty, black-and-white memories of last June's fest. It will be missed.
It's been a rough year for MGM! Though the studio's releasing Fame this weekend, that's its first theatrical film since the underperforming Pink Panther 2...which came out in February. Not so surprisingly, that kind of distribution strategy hasn't been good for its cashflow, and Nikki Finke reports that the studio is desperate for some quick money so it won't lose the rights to guaranteed cash cows like The Hobbit and the James Bond franchise. Who cares about those -- we're worried about Hot Tub Time Machine! [Deadline.com]
You may not know it, but life is pretty hard for critics, junketeers and other species of the film-journalism biosphere. Take Roger Moore, the Orlando Sentinel reviewer/reporter who simply wanted to get a look at Universal's new Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant in advance of today's Florida press day with star John C. Reilly. When that plan was scuttled by studio reps -- just the latest indignity in what appears to be a gravely abusive relationship with Moore -- the critic experienced a bloggy meltdown that even he couldn't justify leaving on the Web.
But! An attentive Movieline tipster found it and passed it along. As corrosive rants of entitlement go, it really is kind of unprecedented -- all the way down to its unfortunate public-execution metaphors. Have a glimpse for yourself after the jump.
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Dick Durock, who played the Swamp Thing in Swamp Thing (1982), The Return of Swamp Thing (1989) and Swamp Thing the TV series from the early '90s, died in Oak Park, CA last week at age 72. The six-foot-fiver from South Bend Indiana was a former Marine who found regular work as a Hollywood stuntman and working actor, but it was his role as mossy beast to Adrienne Barbeau's beauty for which he'll be most remembered. As for Mr. Thing, he lives on -- Akiva Goldsman is adapting Alan Moore's reimagining for the big screen.
· Warner Bros. is attempting once again to revive its enduring property A Star is Born, which has supported three previous versions with leading-lady showcases including Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand. Word that Will Fetters has been assigned the umpteenth crack at a reboot will no doubt stimulate a whole new round of murmurs in Beyonce Knowles's camp; she's been a rumored front-runner for the pop-ingenue melodrama for years. And anyway, let's face it: You're happy for Garland and Streisand, but Beyonce would have the best Star is Born incarnation of ALL TIME. [THR]
Paul Dano meets Tom Cruise in Wichita, ABC surges big-time, and more Hollywood Ink after the jump.
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