Being a "Jackass" Pays at Box Office
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Johnny Knoxville and his sadomasochistic buddies took over the North American box office this past weekend with "Jackass: Number Two." The sequel to the 2002 hit earned about $28.1 million to claim the number one spot. Jet Li's "Fearless" settled for s...
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Everyone has revenge fantasies now and then. Writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes' "Mean Creek" offers a decent lesson about the dangers of acting on those impulses.
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James Early shows how earnings can deceive.
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Tycho:  Heavenly Sword is, as you will soon discover, the very definition of a rental title.  Clocking in at somewhere between five and six hours (depending on your appetite for overwrought cinemas) it's a decent game saddled by impossible expectations.  It has silly ideas and grandeur in close proximity to one another.   It tries hard.  And it's not bad, by any means.  But it's not excellent, and perhaps unfairly it had this onus placed upon it.  I've said that Lair is not the Playstation 3, and nor is Heavenly Sword, but taken together one must come to the unmistakable conclusion that the Playstation 3 is a game console and not the supernatural artifact they have presented it as.  That however many processors and however many gigs of space are not especially relevant when put in the service of middling entertainment.    It has a decent combat system, and using this combat system you will progress from locked room to cramped, locked room until you come face to face with some jeering asshole.  You might kill them either because of the jeering or because you think that death might cull their interminable monologues.  There's a mean snake bitch and a pervert and an oaf.  Oh!  And en evil king.  The only thing running through my head during the lavish and no doubt expensive mo-capped cutscenes was that these kings and bitches and so forth should form a band.  It never seems to know if it wants to be a hilarious comic circus or a stark medieval saga.  Play it, and you'll know what I mean.     There are successes, though:  Kai, the mostly deranged sidekick, charms from the outset.  Her feral animations and nuanced delivery really make her stand out against this batch of also-rans.  Any object that can be thrown can also be thrown and then guided in slow motion, including corpses, which is something you must see to believe.  We didn't even have a target; we would just throw bodies so that they flew like Superman head-first into gongs.  This is something you can do for a half an hour - or more - without tiring of it.  This guided firing is called "Aftertouch," and it's about fifty percent of the game.  One wonders what the game's length would actually be if you didn't play half of it in slow-motion.        Some measure of your enjoyment will be bound up in whether or not you "buy" the story that they are telling.  I've heard it described as epic, when it's pretty rudimentary fantasy-by-numbers bullshit, so who knows.  It's all a matter of perspective:  are we judging it against only PS3 games?  If so, things are shaping up!  If you own more than one console - or a personal computer - your standards for grand storytelling were recently adjusted upward.
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"Nothing exceeds like excess." Perhaps Universal Home Entertainment should pay attention to this odd bit of dialogue, spoken by Michelle Pfeiffer's coked-up character in the movie "Scarface." When it comes to DVD releases of that rags-to-gangster-riches epic starring Al Pacino as drug dealer Tony...
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Damn those movie critics - and I make that statement fully understanding the irony behind it. Every now and then, for whatever reason, it seems as if critics get together in a secret clubhouse and decide to tear a picture to shreds.
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[Hollywood News]: Washington, Nov 5: He is one guy who loves to take a dig at others and having a laugh about it later on. So, it comes as no surprise that Elton John is now producing a half-hour comedy for
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Straight-to-internet release bypasses cinemas The world's first "studio-backed broadband film" - Jackass 2.5 - will later this month premiere online, bypassing a traditional cinema release.â¦
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This story can make you money -- if it's true.
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Mike Elgan reports on a device that lets you rat out fellow movie-goers for being annoying.
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Between new releases "Jackass Number Two," the sure winner at the weekend box office, and "Jet Li's
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They are running for the hills but the end of the trail is Little Big Horn, where Custer made his last stand, and lost his life. Of course the Indians didn't do too well either. AP: "Girding for a potential threat from Apple Inc., online DVD rental service Netflix Inc. is lifting its limits on how long most subscribers can watch movies and television shows over high-speed Internet connections." Please oh Netflix strategy gods, get a copy of Marketing Warfare and read it. Netflix owns what used to be a great hill, for some it might still be one, the movies-by-mail hill. They obviously feel they need to be in the Internet movie business, and in that they have a huge head start that they aren't using. They are being too damned fair to their competitors.  Give the users the ability to grant other sites access to their movie ratings. Build Netflix into the social network of movies. You're already there, but you need to make every other social network connect up to Netflix. You need to be the hub for movie-watching on the net. You're lucky that so far that's what you are. But soon you will have to fight for that too, and then it will be too late to try to force your competitors to connect to your site. They will have data that you want. Then the nature of the negotiating will change. Right now you have the data. Use that power! Make the users everyone think of Netflix as the place on the Net for Flix.
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To be blunt: Stop being stupid, and you'll make more money.
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Bam Margera has done some crazy stunts in MTV's "Jackass" and its movie spin-offs. His newest: turning the planning of his wedding into a reality show.
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Why do producers blow up money on films like Dil Bechara Pyaar Ka Maara?
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Torture, it seems, doesn&#39;t pay at  movie theater box offices like it used to.
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The next batch of painful Jackass stunts is coming to a computer screen near you.