• I’m skeptical about James Franco portraying Allen Ginsberg in the courtroom-set biopic Howl (can anyone but David Cross be cast after I’m Not There?), but now that Paul Rudd, Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker, Alan Alda and David Straithairn are also aboard, it could at least be a decent ensemble piece.
• Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, U2 and now … Blue Man Group? The painted trio is the latest group to be given a 3-D concert film. I wonder if David Cross just blue himself in the hopes of getting a part in it.
• New Line has acquired an upcoming novel from Richard Doetsch about a man accused of killing his wife and his trip back in time — in one-hour increments — to save her. Titled The Thirteenth Hour, Variety says it’s being described as The Bourne Identity meets The Time Traveler’s Wife, but obviously it’s more like The Fugitive meets Memento (meets — hopefully — David Cross).
• New Line is also making a romantic comedy that’s an obvious cross between Slap Shot and The Devil Wears Prada. And, not obviously, it’s based on a true story.

• Variety says Hellboy 2 “did hellacious business in debuting to an estimated $35.9 million.” This seems to be a compliment. Meanwhile, Meet Dave bombed, and Journey to the Center of the Earth made a very respectable $20 mil on just 854 3D screens.
• Richard Linklater, Mike White and Jack Black will collaborate on a sequel to School of Rock, and it’s got what’s destined to rival Babe 2: Pig in the City for mockable sequel titles: School of Rock 2: America Rocks. Where’s the exclamation point?
  
• Terribly Happy, a Danish crime film, took the top prize at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival over the weekend. Man on Wire took the documentary prize, and there was also a “special mention” for Bigger, Stronger, Faster.

James Cameron is the sort of director who can make a movie just to prove a point. And he’s going to do so by making a straight drama that will be shot and exhibited in 3D — or as he calls it, in stereo (short for stereoscopic) — just to let the industry know that 3D is not only for special effects and animated pictures. He discusses the project in an interview with Variety:

I plan to shoot a small dramatic film in 3-D, just to prove this point, after “Avatar.” In “Avatar,” there are a number of scenes that are straight dramatic scenes, no action, no effects. They play very well, and in fact seem to be enhanced by the stereo viewing experience. So I think this can work for the full length of a dramatic feature. However, filmmakers and studios will have to weigh the added cost of shooting in 3-D against the increased marketing value for that type of film.

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• Disney unveiled its through-2012 animation slate this week, with projects including “a sequel to Cars [and] an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story,” and a commitment to releasing nothing but digital 3D.
• Blair Witch Project star and Beautiful Losers co-director Joshua Leonard will direct Danny Huston and possibly 50 Cent in Spectacular Regret, a Crash-esque drama about “four Angelenos struggling to overcome past events.”
• Chloe Sevigny and Zooey Deschanel will star together in Divorce Ranch, a period indie written and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and “set in Nevada just after WWII, when a quickie divorce could be granted after residency was established.”

• With his retro football rom-com Leatherheads is expected to top the weekend box office, George Clooney is finally speaking out about the fact that the WGA’s decision to exclude him from screenplay credit on the film pushed the actor/director to go financial core, or give up his rights as a voting member in order to pay fewer dues. The complexities of the story, outlined here, offer a pretty interesting glimpse into the intricacies of WGA policy.
• Are you ready for designer, non-disposable 3D glasses? Are we sure this didn’t already happen in the 80s, or am I once again conflating the events of Back to the Future 2 with the events of recent cultural history?
• Speaking of the relics of two-decade-old futurism, Bob Weinstein has bought the remake rights to Short Circuit.

• Who knows whether or not anyone had to use their AK, but according to a “well-placed” WGA strike insider, “Friday was a good day.” The labor dispute is by no means over, but both sides are apparently circling a decision on streaming residuals that no one, as of yet, seems to have a major problem with.
• That Hannah Montana 3D concert film made ridiculous money over the weekend––$42,460 at each of its 683 locations––thus robbing Titanic of the record for best Super Bowl box office of all time.
• Each of the five Best Picture nominees have enjoyed a significant bump at the box office since the noms were announced two weeks ago, but No Country For Old Men “seemingly affirmed its status as Oscar frontrunner” by nabbing the Producers Guild prize over the weekend. 

While I should have been a good cineaste and watched some Oscar-worthy documentaries or some Sundance-originating indies, I saw two mainstream movies this week. One was this past weekend’s box office winner, Beowulf; the other was Enchanted, which will surely be the Thanksgiving weekend champion. I found neither of them to be very remarkable in terms of storytelling, but each does have some significance to cinema, and each is noteworthy for its respective blurring of animation and live-action.

Obviously, Beowulf is animated. It is so far considered eligible for the Animated Feature Oscar, and aside from its few bits of photorealism, it looks like a cartoon (or a video game). But because the movie was made with real-life actors, who were “performance-captured”, there is still that link to live-action filmmaking. And there was hardly much reason, in my opinion, why it necessarily had to be made as an animated film. Meanwhile, Enchanted is primarily live-action, but it does have some bookending animated sequences, which figure into the gimmicky plot of a 2-D Disney Princess who magically finds herself in the 3-dimensional world of New York City. But it probably could have been fine as a completely animated film — maybe it could have been the Wizard of Oz of computer animation (as in 2-D to 3-D animation rather than black and white to color film). As it is, the “real-life” parts of Enchanted seem too artificial anyway.

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• Sony’s making a sequel to The Pink Panther. Yeah, the Steve Martin one. The one that was delayed for a year and only barely made back its production costs at the domestic box office. Judging by the cast they’ve put together (which includes Aishwarya Rai, Jean Reno and John Cleese), the studio seems to be banking on international appeal to put the franchise in the black.
• Brian Lowry reviews NY77, a documentary about the emergence of punk, hip-hop and “a sexually-permissive club scene” in New York in the late 70s. The film, which was produced by Nanette Burstein and premieres on VH1 this weekend, “methodically recreates the period’s vibe — with Geraldo Rivera recalling how at Studio 54, it was ‘absolutely appropriate’ to have sex in the bathroom stalls. (Today, sadly, he can only approximate that experience via his appearances on Fox News.)”
• Motion capture effects house Mova demonstrated a new 3-D technology at SIGGRAPH this week, aimed at creating life-like models of actors’ faces. According to Mova founder Steve Perlman, the future of 3-D won’t involve plastic glasses, but will be “more like theater in the round, where you can either walk around the scene or move into the scene itself.”
• Tom Hanks and Nia Vardalos are among the complaintants in a lawsuit filed against financing company Gold Circle Films. Hanks and crew claim Gold Circle “cheated” them out of profits on My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Variety’s Janet Shprintz notes that while Wedding is “one of the most successful indie films of all time”, it’s also “spawned an extraordinary amount of litigation” — this is the third lawsuit involving Vardalos alone.