UK rag The Sun assembles shots of all five Academy Award nominees for Best Actress, topless. Yes, even Meryl Streep.
Wow, Helen Mirren was quite the dish, wasn’t she? I’m kidding, of course. She’s still a dish.
Author: David Medsker (Page 34 of 65)
Based on Sunday’s estimates, courtesy of boxofficemojo.com:
1) Epic Movie: $19.2 million (Will Harris, What’s All This, Then?)
Kal Pann walks into a White Castle, and says, “I feel like I’ve been here before!” Jesus.
2) Smokin’ Aces: $14.2 million (Will Harris, What’s All This, Then?)
At least they had the balls to keep Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” in the movie, even if they pulled it out of the trailer. The movie blows either way, though we did like the dead-guy-as-hand-puppet bit.
3) Night at the Museum: $9.4 million, $216.7 million to date (Will Harris, What’s All This, Then?)\
In its sixth week of release, we officially call a moratorium on bothering to come up with anything snappy to say about a movie that doesn’t deserve the effort wasted on it the first five times.
4) Catch and Release: $8 million
Reel Times’ Mark Pfeiffer said this movie was so bad that it could kill Jennifer Garner’s career entirely. Yikes.
5) Stomp the Yard: $7.8 million, $50.6 million to date (owner: Bill Clark, A Don’t Call Me Shirley Joint)
Such an innocuous little pick-up for Bill…and he won the league because of it.
6) Dreamgirls: $6.6 million, $86.6 million to date (Bill Clark: A Don’t Call Me Shirley Joint)
Totally and inexplicably hosed out of a nom for Best Picture. That’s all we have to say on the matter.
7) The Pursuit of Happyness: $5 million, $152.9 million to date (Bill Clark: A Don’t Call Me Shirley Joint)
This movie’s a week older than “Night at the Museum.” Next.
8) Pan’s Labyrinth: $4.5 million, $16.2 million to date (Mark Pfeiffer, Reel Times)
Ah, red wine. Drink it, then beat someone’s face to a bloody pulp with the base of the bottle.
9) The Queen: $4 million, $41.2 million to date: $5.9 million (Jason Zingale, Seven Strangers Productions)
Does anyone else think this year’s Academy Awards show is going to be the most predictable, dullest show ever? Is there even any debate over who’s going to win?
10) The Hitcher: $3.5 million, $13.3 million to date (Bill Clark, Don’t Call Me Shirley)
Might we be witnessing the end of the torture-chic, ‘all horror, all the time’ movement? One can only hope.
15) Blood and Chocolate: $2.1 million
Very good, moviegoing public, you got one right. However, you still get 20 rosaries for the success of “Epic Movie.”
Final standings, fall season
1) A Don’t Call Me Shirley Joint: $370.3 million
2) What’s All This, Then?: $324.2 million
3) Reel Times Pictures $316.8 million
4) TSSU Productions: $288.2 million
5) Punch and Pie Pictures: $278.0 million
6) Seven Strangers Productions: $216.9 million
7) Scary Clown Studios: $196.7 million
8) Nights and Weekends: $181.5 million
The Fantasy Moguls League begins anew starting this week, with new studio head Kevin “Chrysler K-Carr” Carr stepping in for TSSU Productions. COFCA Death Squad, rise!
Now that, I did not see coming. Gray, last season’s Bluetoothed leader of the Overseers, is none other than Graham Bauer. I turned my head doglike when I heard Jack mention a brother, and within a matter of seconds, they do the Big Reveal. Brother hates brother! Son hates father! Brother had a fling with brother’s wife before being betrothed (more on that later)! It’s like “24” has suddenly turned into “Rome.”
The general storyline didn’t move much – the President deals with the aftermath of the bomb, while southern Californians run for their lives – but some pretty colors have replaced the shades of gray. The tastefully coiffed Hamir Al-Assad gave CTU the name of a Russian contact named Gradenko (while Police fans everywhere laughed out loud), and a cursory search of Gradenko’s call history pulled up none other than Jack’s father who, we discover, hasn’t spoken to his son in over nine years. Well, he hasn’t spoken to Jack, anyway. Whether he’s in direct contact with Gray has yet to be determined. Meanwhile, Abel pays a visit to Cain for info about their father, exchanges a longing look with Heidi Petrelli (yep, that’s Rena Sofer playing Gray’s wife)…and then ties his brother up in a chair in order to “extract” information from him. I don’t remember the exact exchange, but it was something like:
Jack: Don’t make me hurt you.
Gray: You’re already hurting me.
Jack: Trust me, I’m not.
Sweeeet.
Meanwhile, over at the local Minority Round-Up, Sandra Palmer’s boyfriend Walid is coerced into cooperating with the authorities (i.e. wear a two-way transmitter) after a tip he provided to the Feds revealed that there were four other suitcase nukes. The Feds do a good dog and pony show in order to give Walid some street cred, beating him up in the bathroom (and giving him the transmitter at the same time), and Walid bravely chats up one of the men he suspects has terrorist ties. Walid goes fishing for links to Fayed, but the man doesn’t bite. Still, the man welcomes Walid to meet the other men in his group, men who don’t trust Walid at all. The whole setup screams “dead informant.”
Which is why I think Walid knows more than he’s letting on.
The scene where Walid is talking with the man who calls him brother (IMDb isn’t giving up his name yet) is shot very carefully. They show you Walid talking to the man, and they show the man answering Walid’s questions, and they show you the security feed that’s taping them. But they never show the two men in the same shot. Walid tells the man, rather convincingly for a reluctant stool pigeon, that the Feds found Fayed’s name in his wallet, and asks if he knows who Fayed is. The man says no, but still invites him to meet the others. What Walid just did is a dead giveaway that he’s a mole, which is why I think there was some non-verbal communication between Walid and the man that we, and the security cameras, didn’t see. Ten bucks says he mouthed the word “No” to the man after he asks about Fayed. The man takes the cue, and brings Walid into the group, knowing that they can blow so much smoke in the Feds’ faces through Walid’s transmitter that the government won’t have a chance to find the bombs before it’s too late. (The one pushy Fed chortles about how it usually takes weeks to get an informant into a situation like that. Methinks that’s about to bite him in the ass.) As an added bonus, this makes for two great subplots. Sandra Palmer spends the whole show defending her boyfriend’s innocence only to discover that he’s guilty, and Wayne has to deal with the fallout of his sister’s lack of judgment, much like David Palmer had to deal with the evil machinations of Lady MacBeth when she denied that elderly politician his meds and he subsequently died.
Let’s get back to Gray’s family for a second. Is there anyone who doesn’t think that Josh Bauer is Jack’s son and not Gray’s? That would certainly explain the bad blood between the two brothers and the awkward conversation between Jack and Josh, not to mention Heidi Petrelli’s frosty but heated look at Jack. I remember a shot from the pre-season clips that showed Jack embracing a brunette. Mystery solved. The show is getting back on track. Whew.
Oh, and IMDb accidentally revealed that Old Yeller is slated to return next week. Good dog. (Actually, they have him listed for tonight’s show, too. Did anyone see him?)
Based on Sunday’s estimates, courtesy of boxofficemojo.com:
1) Stomp the Yard: $13.3 million, $41.5 million to date (owner: Bill Clark, A Don’t Call Me Shirley Joint)
Bill Clark’s whites-of-their-eyes strategy pays off in spades, owning four of the top five movies in the second to last week os the season and vaulting into first place after spending the bulk of the year in seventh.
2) Night at the Museum: $13 million, $205.8 million to date (Will Harris, What’s All This, Then?)\
Will rides Ben Stiller’s unfunniness into fourth place, knocking Punch and Pie and their can’t-miss “Charlotte’s Web” into a measly fifth place. Dakota Fanning is already plotting to have Will’s entire family erased from history.
3) Dreamgirls: $8.7 million, $78.1 million to date (Bill Clark: A Don’t Call Me Shirley Joint)
And I’m telling you that Bill’s not leaving the top five.
4) The Hitcher: $8.2 million (Bill Clark, Don’t Call Me Shirley)
Even he will tell you that he feels guilty about this one. Was that CGI rabbit the worst looking special effect in years or what?
5) The Pursuit of Happyness: $6.7 million, $146.5 million to date (Bill Clark: A Don’t Call Me Shirley Joint)
The public’s thirst for syrup and mush, it appears, is endless. And Bill is only happy to capitalize on it.
6) Freedom Writers: $5.5 million, $26.8 million to date
I like hanky panky. Nothing like a good Swank-y.
7) Pan’s Labyrinth: $4.7 million, $10.1 million to date (Mark Pfeiffer, Reel Times)
When they say ‘don’t eat the fruit,’ and you see a hideous beast sitting next to a pile of dead children’s clothes, don’t eat the fruit.
8) The Queen: $3.7 million, $35.8 million to date: $5.9 million (Jason Zingale, Seven Strangers Productions)
Slowly, quietly, “The Queen” is outselling third round picks like “Deck the Halls,” and is about to overtake first round pick “Stranger than Fiction.” Helen Mirren: a bigger box office draw than Will Ferrell?
9) Children of Men: $3.7 million, $27.4 million to date (David Medsker, Scary Clown Studios)
Our favorite bit: the over-the-counter suicide drug. “Because only you know when the time is right.” Heh heh, suicide is funny.
10) Arthur and the Invisibles: $3.1 million, $9.2 million to date
Props for putting Mirwais’ “Disco Science” in an animated movie.
Current standings:
1) A Don’t Call Me Shirley Joint: $339.8 million
2) Reel Times Pictures $301.3 million
3) TSSU Productions: $283.9 million
4) What’s All This, Then?: $278.9 million
5) Punch and Pie Pictures: $274.4 million
6) Seven Strangers Productions: $211.5 million
7) Scary Clown Studios: $190.4 million
8) Nights and Weekends: $178.2 million
This week, the final week of the season: What’s All This attempts a left field sneak attack with “Epic Movie” and “Smokin’ Aces,” while Nights and Weekends and Scary Clown prepare for next season.
The last ten minutes of the tonight’s episode of “24” almost completely erase the lazy conveniences of the season’s first three hours and 50 minutes. This, quite simply, is how last night’s show should have ended, and I can’t imagine that it would have been any more difficult to manufacture the conflict (another phrase patent pending by the former Eli Cash) that delayed the plot up to this point after the bomb went off than it would have been to do so beforehand. Picture the first two hours of “24” ending with the death of Curtis (more on that later) and the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles: wouldn’t that have been spectacular? You bet your ass it would have. And if a simple caveman like me can see that, why couldn’t the producers?
Once again, Fox gives us an empty promise with the whole “something will happen that will change everything” tease from last night. Curtis was as good as bagged and tagged from his first minute onscreen this season, and it had nothing to do with the “Simpsons”-esque eye darting he did every time Hamir Al-Assad’s name came up: It was because the two words preceding his name in the credits were “Guest Starring.” In the “24” universe, that’s code for “short life expectancy.” If you need any clarification, you can ask Kal Penn, who was also quickly dispatched after taking Aaron Burr, Mrs. Burr and Baby Ben McKenzie hostage. And speaking of that whole ordeal: is there really a chance in hell that her case falls into Bauer’s hands that quickly? I have to think that the local police probably get calls like that by the ton – especially if terror attacks are occurring that frequently – and they wouldn’t dare to burden the Feds with every call that came in to their 911 call center. That was a stretch of Elastigirl proportions.
So we learn that “visitor” is code for weapon, and we learn from the illegally detained but nonetheless traitorous foreigners (as tempting as it is to offer some personal political commentary on that subplot, I will refrain) that there are in fact five visitors waiting to make their formal introduction. Here’s the part that I’m confused about, though: as the master bomb maker was connecting the suitcase nuke to the detonator, the Feds came in, guns a-blazing. Fayed ordered him to set off the weapon at once, which he did, and that was cool. But wouldn’t that mean that Fayed was killed in the blast? I could swear that the scenes for next week’s episode showed him with the other four “visitors,” threatening to detonate all of them within the hour. If that’s true, then I have two questions: how was he able to escape the blast radius, and how is he going to set off the other four bombs? He just waited four hours for the first detonator. Where does he think he’s going to get four more detonators in an hour’s time?
I will give them credit for the dynamic they’ve set up between Wayne Palmer and the Biscuit. The Biscuit clearly does not see eye to eye with Palmer on, well, anything, but he is much more diplomatic and cooperative than previous “24” White House chicken hawks have been…which means that he is probably the least trustworthy of them all (notice how he intervened between President Palmer and his recently fabricated “sister”). I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Lastly, we must discuss the ridiculous ad promoting the fact that these first four episodes of “24” will be available on DVD on Tuesday. Who on earth absolutely must own the first four episodes of “24” right this very second? Never mind the fact that the episodes weren’t that good: are we really so consumed by instant gratification that we can’t wait until the entire season is released on DVD next year? More importantly, aren’t our landfills overflowing as it is? “The Simpsons” joked about this years ago, when they did a pan across a landfill to an empty space, where there was a sign that said, “Reserved for DVDs.” That’s not a joke, my friends: that is prophecy.
FOLLOW US!
CATEGORIES
© 2026 Premium Hollywood
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑