It looks as if a movie adaptation of the massively popular TV series Friends could soon be hitting cinema screens.

According to the Daily Mail, the cast feel compelled to reprise their roles after the recent success of the Sex and the City movie, despite David Schwimmer previously claiming he would rather not play Ross again.

Schwimmer will be joined by Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow to begin filming “within the next 18 months”, says an insider.

“Jennifer, Courteney and the rest of the cast are keen to reprise their roles, under the right circumstances,” said a source.

“The box office success of Sex And The City has really got their wheels spinning about how a Friends film could be just as big, if done right.”

However, it has also been suggested that Jennifer Aniston was initially not as keen as other cast members to return, but the source noted the “huge payday” may have changed her mind.

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I read this this morning, and was laughing sooooo hard. So I thought I’d share.

“I SEE YOU EYEIN’ MAH LEMON DRANK!”

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, The Happening, is not merely bad. It is an astonishment, so idiotic in conception and inept in execution that, after seeing it, one almost wonders whether it was real or imagined. It’s the kind of movie you want to laugh about with friends, swapping favorite moments of inanity: “Do you remember the part when Mark Wahlberg … ?” “God, yes. And what about that scene where the wind … ?”

The problem, of course, is that to have such a conversation, you’d normally have to see the movie, which I believe is an unreasonably high price to pay just to make fun of it. So rather than write a conventional review explaining why you should or shouldn’t see The Happening (trust me, you shouldn’t), I’m offering an alternative: A dozen and a half of the most mind-bendingly ridiculous elements of the film, which will enable you to marvel at its anti-genius without sacrificing (and I don’t use that term lightly) 90 minutes of your life. As this is intended to be an alternative to seeing the actual film it is, of course, overflowing with spoilers. Those who still intend to see the film despite my warnings should probably stop reading now; those looking for a more typical review should stop by www.rottentomatoes.com and take their pick. For the rest, onward:

1. The single most absurd element of The Happening, the wellspring from which all other absurdities flow, is its conceit: Across the Northeastern United States, people are succumbing to a toxic airborne agent that makes them commit suicide, often gruesomely. At first it hits major population centers, followed by smaller towns, and on down to groups of even just a handful of people. Initially, it’s assumed to be some kind of terrorist attack. But as we learn pretty early in the film, it’s not. It’s trees. Yes, the trees (and perhaps some bushes and grass, too, the movie’s never too clear on this point) have tired of humankind’s ecological despoilment and are emitting a complicated aerial neurotoxin that makes us kill ourselves en masse. I bet you wish you were the one who came up with this blockbuster idea.

2. A bad plot can be only so bad without a bad performance at the center of it, and star Mark Wahlberg delivers. As science teacher Elliot Moore, he is not merely unpersuasive, but dim, whiny, indecisive, and self-pitying. Given the amorphous nature of the threat–the villain, after all, is foliage–the movie needed its star to bring some energy, some empathy, some heroism, some something to the proceedings. Not happening. From the start, Wahlberg looks like he wants to tear off his sweater vest and launch into a Departed-style tirade of obscene invective that never comes.

3. John Leguizamo plays Julian, the Minority Best Friend, so it’s easy to guess what will become of him in a high-body-count movie. Less easy to guess is that, in the midst of this deadly crisis, he will dump his 8-year-old daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) on Elliot and his wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel, whose luminous blue orbs are the best thing in the film), in order to drive to another state looking for his own wife. This is especially odd given that Julian has made it clear that he dislikes Alma and wants to keep Jess away from her, and everyone in the film has made a point of very clearly enunciating that Elliot and Alma have serious problems in their marriage. (Yeah, this whole part was BULLSHIT)

4. The biggest problem, it is ultimately revealed, is that Alma had a dessert date with a male colleague named “Joey,” who has since pestered her on her cell phone. At first it seems that “dessert” may be a euphemism, or was perhaps a prelude to a greater indiscretion. But no: This tiramisu was just tiramisu and, as such, a marital misdemeanor by most reckonings. That does not spare us from the tearful, guilt-ridden apology, however.

5. But enough about the boring interpersonal melodrama: On to the boring arboreal genocide! Each time the airborne toxin strikes, everyone ceases what they were doing and freezes in their tracks for a moment. It took several such episodes before I stopped anticipating that they’d commence tapping their feet in unison, as in the beginning of a big musical ensemble number.

6-18 after the jump!! (more…)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has become the most mistake-ridden movie of the year - after cinema-goers spotted over 40 bloopers in the new film.

Observant visitors to website MovieMistakes.com have noted a variety of continuity errors and historical inaccuracies in the fourth installment of the adventure franchise, which include the explorer’s shirt appearing tucked and untucked in a single scene and an American flag with an incorrect number of stars.

But website owner Jon Sandys admits he isn’t surprised.

He says, “Any film set in the past always has a potential extra set of problems on top of regular continuity mistakes.

“In addition, there are so many Indiana Jones fans that this movie’s going to be scrutinised a lot more closely than some others.”

Action movie Iron Man is the second most error-filled movie, with 15 reports of mistakes listed.

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Back after 19 years, the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise has hit gold!

Since opening Thursday, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has raked in an estimated $311 million around the world Reuters reported on Monday.

It marked the second biggest Memorial Day weekend opening in history, behind only Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End which made $153 million domestically from Thursday to Monday last year.

“Adults really drove this opening. This is one of their favorite franchises and they couldn’t wait to take their kids with them,” Rob Moore, president of Paramount Worldwide Distribution told the Reuters.

The first three Indiana Jones flicks pulled in $1.2 billion worldwide.

Crystal Skull, directed by Steven Spielberg, stars Harrison Ford as a whip-cracking archaeologist.

Ford revealed Tom Selleck was originally cast in the role of Indiana Jones.

“He was cast but he had a previous contract for Magnum P.I.,” Ford, 65, told Extra in an interview Monday.

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull so far has banked $126 million since opening on Thursday, according to box office estimates. The long-awaited sequel, reuniting the dream team of producer George Lucas, director Steven Spielberg, and star Harrison Ford, made about $25 million in its first day, then over a three-day period tallied an additional $101 million. That’s the biggest movie debut of 2008 so far. Also, after just four days, Crystal Skull is already at No. 3 for total 2008 box office, behind Iron Man (No. 1) and Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! (No. 2).

I went and saw this yesterday, with my oldest son.  We waited in line for 2 hours before getting to see it!  I grew up with Indiana Jones, so it was worth the wait, for me.

I want to keep talking about it - but I don’t want to ruin it for everyone…if you’ve seen Indiana Jones 4 - click on more! (more…)

The fortunes of Hollywood actor Tom Cruise have suffered a blow with the news that his next big film has been postponed until 2009.

The release of Valkyrie, which tells the story of the 1944 assassination plot against Hitler, was first postponed from this summer to the autumn and is now not expected to appear until next year.

“We were originally expecting the film to be released in June,” said a senior executive at one of Britain’s leading cinema chains.

“I know there have been all sorts of problems with this production and we will not be screening it at all this year.”

The film is not only a blow to Cruise as an actor but in his more recent incarnation as a movie mogul at United Artists (UA), the studio which made the film.

One critic in Hollywood has declared “Valkyrie is dead”, with another arguing that the film’s problems could also wreck the revival of UA.

Cruise, whose earlier career saw hit after hit with Top Gun, Rain Man and Jerry Maguire, is a stakeholder in UA, which was originally founded by Charlie Chaplin and other stars.

It has since passed through several different owners until Cruise relaunched it as a major studio in 2006.

Cruise, who is married to the actress Katie Holmes, has a minority stake with his business partner Paula Wagner, but the pair have almost total control over which films are made.

UA’s first major film, Lions for Lambs, a story about the Iraq war with Cruise and Meryl Streep starring and Robert Redford directing, flopped.

Valkyrie has been directed by Bryan Singer, who is best known for The Usual Suspects and X-Men. The new film, which was mostly shot last year at a cost of £45m, has so far left test audiences unimpressed.

The quality of Cruise’s German accent was widely commented on. The film has also had to have reshoots after footage was damaged in labs.

Cruise plays the German officer Claus von Stauffenberg, who led the plot. Other German parts are played by British actors, including Bill Nighy and Kenneth Branagh.

A flop would not be good news either for Branagh, who directed three films last year – The Magic Flute, As You Like It and Sleuth – all of which had mixed reviews.

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Now comes the part where Indiana Jones dangles over the snake pit of public opinion.

Actually, a handful of Web reviewers have already struck at the film “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” despite an intense effort by the director Steven Spielberg, the executive producer George Lucas and Paramount Pictures to keep this highly anticipated sequel out of sight until Sunday, May 18.

On that day, this fourth Indiana Jones movie is scheduled to make its debut at the Cannes Film Festival with an afternoon press screening, and another one at night.

At about the same time, the picture, which opens in theaters on the following Thursday, is expected to be screened for the news media and industry insiders at multiple showings in Manhattan and Los Angeles, while other screenings are scheduled around the world.

Mr. Spielberg is unusually fastidious when it comes to protecting his films from advance word that can diminish excitement or muddy a message planted by months of carefully orchestrated publicity and expensive promotions (including, in this case, a February cover article in Vanity Fair, complete with Annie Leibovitz photos of the cast, and leather bullwhips delivered weeks ago to newsrooms).

Mr. Spielberg customarily avoids leaky test screenings. Even Marvin Levy, his publicist of more than 30 years, said he had not yet seen the new movie.

Still, there it was, at 6:42 a.m. on Thursday: a harshly critical review on aintitcoolnews.com, from a poster who identified himself as “ShogunMaster.” Rife with details from the film, the review said, “This is the Indiana Movie that you were dreading.”

By that afternoon two other less critical, but less than sparkling, reviews also appeared on the Web site.

The man who posted as ShogunMaster, reached via the Web site, said he is a theater executive who saw the film at an exhibitors’ screening this week. He spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal from the studio.

Paramount had shown the film to a handful of theater company executives at its Los Angeles lot and elsewhere.

Movie studios increasingly tend to protect their biggest bets from advance showings. Two years ago, for instance, Sony Pictures screened “The Da Vinci Code” for critics at the Cannes Film Festival only two days before its opening in the United States. But exhibitors’ screenings can open a window for determined reviewers.

Such screenings are required in about two dozen states that have laws against blind-bidding, a practice in which theater owners were once asked to bid on films they had not seen.

As a practical matter, there is little or no actual bidding in the contemporary theater business, which relies instead on negotiations between distributors and theater owners. But distributors continue to hold screenings for theater company executives in the weeks before a film’s release, whether as a courtesy or as a way to avoid conflict with a patchwork of state laws.

Theater executives may have an incentive to play down a movie’s prospects after such a screening, to get better terms. In any case, many fans will most likely flock to “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” if only to make their own judgments about Mr. Spielberg’s decision to revisit the franchise fully 19 years after its last installment. Still, bad notices could keep the more ambivalent moviegoers from attending and thwart a truly huge box office haul.

According to Mr. Levy, who spoke by telephone on Thursday, Mr. Spielberg has kept a watchful eye on virtually every aspect of the film’s marketing campaign. “He gets involved with everything,” Mr. Levy said. “Every TV spot, every line in every ad, every advertising concept.” (Among the marketing tie-ins were Indiana Jones fedoras, available at Blockbuster stores.)

The current campaign has been engineered to create excitement around the opening date, May 22 — some billboards feature the date, in flame-colored letters, and little else — without telling too much about the film. Last year the movie’s producers went so far as to file a lawsuit against a bit player who had publicly discussed the film’s plot, which involves the exploits of an aging archaeological adventurer, still played by Harrison Ford, now 65.

The campaign has been effective so far. Fandango, which sells film tickets online, said this week that it was “seeing brisk advance ticket sales” to “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” identified as the summer’s most anticipated film in a poll Fandango conducted of moviegoers.

But a better gauge of success is likely to be the extent of online sales in the few days after the film screens at Cannes — and after many reviewers have weighed in.

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