While Karina (and indieWIRE) sits off to the side celebrating the recent indie box office record-breaker, most of the interweb is talking about the weekend’s mainstream achievements. Well, actually people are mostly focusing on just the shocking success of Friday the 13th, which I believe broke records for its franchise, its genre, its rating and for President’s Day weekend (though not for the month of February). As for the other monumental marker, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, I’ve seen maybe two bloggers comment on how it’s just passed $100 million. How is this a remarkable feat? Well, not only does this make Paul Blart the highest grossing January opener ever, but the oft-derided comedy is also the first film to debut in January to reach the $100 million point (not counting the special edition re-release of Star Wars, that is).

As this is a holiday and most of the web cinephiles are celebrating appropriately by watching North by Northwest or Point Break, there isn’t much else being written about, so here are some noteworthy quotes and links regarding the stunning box office figures:

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• Peter Jackson, Frank Walsh and Philippa Boyens will collaborate with director Guillermo Del Toro on the screenplays for the latter’s two Hobbit movies. The original plan was to hire outside hands to produce a script, but in order to make the first film’s 2011 release date, Del Toro and Jackson apparently concurred that they needed a team of “people intimate with Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth.”
• Eon, the company that produces movies based on James Bond novels, has declined to buy the rights to the latest 007 book, Devil May Care. The book is set in 1967, and Eon is determined to keep this new wave of Bond films as contemporary as possible.
• Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, the team responsible for the script for Michael Bay’s remake of The Birds, have now been hired to write a do-over of Poltergeist.
• Kirk Kerkorian, who has already owned MGM three times and was responsible for extending the film studio brand into Las Vegas, is rumored to have made an offer to buy the company for a fourth time for a low-ball bid of $3 billion.

Forget Iron Man, Batman, Superman, and all the other average joe male superheroes. Comic-Con is all about the Barbie. Mattel’s booth has one glass display case tucked away in the corner, far away from their massive replica of Castle Grayskull, and it’s an entire homage to Barbie. You’ve got Barbie as Supergirl, Barbie as Wonder Woman, Barbie as Batgirl, Barbie as Catwoman, Barbie as Trixie from Speed Racer and… Barbie as Tippi Hedren from The Birds? Nothing really says “comic book fan” like a Barbie action figure dressed up as the star of a 1963 Hitchcock film, complete with a trio of attacking ravens. I totally want one. Photo evidence after the jump.

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The most notable DVD release of the week* has to be the first season of Mad Men, which hits the street tomorrow just in time for newbies to get caught up on the AMC series before season two premieres in late July (it’s been available on iTunes for quite some time). I went on YouTube looking for clips from my favorite episodes and found the above fan vid, which focuses on Betty Draper (January Jones), the miserable model-turned-housewife of mysterious ad man Don Draper. I love it, if for no other reason than that it really draws out the way the show takes mid-century cinematic archetypes and weds them to real-seeming, endlessly multi-faceted characterizations.

This clip specifically highlights Mad Men’s Hitchcock allusions: the slate-gray, Madeline Elster-esque suit that Betty wears to therapy; Don’s spying, here symbolized by his employment of a home movie camera like something out of a cross between Peeping Tom and Rear Window; and my favorite, Betty’s fateful encounter with a flock of birds.

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M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening is as bad as we feared (or hoped?). Shyamalan, and the studios who have dared to work with him, would like to paint him as a first-bill auteur, a director of genius and vision who’s name atop the poster puts butts in seats. Alas, things do not looks good for ol’ Manoj. In this episode of FilmCouch we compare The Happening with two classics by directors whose names do sell movies, and who have influenced Shyamalan’s career: Spielberg and Hitchcock. Duel, Spielberg’s first film, is a lost gem, and a must-see for anyone hoping to populate their film with a faceless evil. And of course, we look at Hitchcock’s The Birds, the genesis of the spooky nature-turns-on-man sub-genre.

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)

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The Happening, The Birds, Duel, Shyamalan, Spielberg, Hitchcock

• “Once Upon A Time in America, Dead Man, L’Argent, Ivan the Terrible, Crash—these are some of my favorites in the BFI series of monographs,” Girish writes. “Are there others in the series you particularly like and would recommend?” I read tons of these in grad school; my favorites included Groundhog’s Day, Independence Day, Salmon Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz, and Camille Paglia on The Birds.
• Jeff Wells, after trisecting Gus Van Sant’s career, worries which version of the filmmaker showed up to make Milk.  “If Van Sant who made Drugstore Cowboy is making Milk, terrific. If a blend of that Van Sant along with the guy who made Elephant is directing Milk, beautiful. But if the Finding Forrester Van Sant is anywhere near the Milk set, watch out.”
• On a recent press tour for Smart People, Sarah Jessica Parker was reluctant to speak about the Sex and the City movie at all, but she did try to assuage worries that, content wise, the film is going to be more TBS than HBO. “I don’t think we have any interest in doing some homogenized, conventional version, in order to appeal.  We don’t think mass.” Via Michael Musto.

I’m finishing up an entry this morning on David Fincher’s music videos for the Close-Up Blogathon. While I’m working on that, here’s a round-up of some of my favorite entries from other bloggers thus-far. There’s a full list of all entries at The House Next Door, which you should definitely check out–I don’t know how it happens, but somehow some of these blogathons manage to attract a median level of insight and writing that’s miles ahead of the average film journal or magazine.

• Hannah Frank on the problem of the close-up in animation: “[A]nimation confounds the whole notion of this blog-a-thon. There’s just not anything to be close to. And worse, when an animated film tries to get close, when it copies the patter of its live-action counterpart, it feels static and dull.”
• “I am in love with Cabiria, a woman who does not exist,” Steven Boone confesses. “How did this happen?” He offers a list of “clues.” Number 4: “Whenever Fellini wants to give us a cheat-sheet glimpse into Cabiria’s heart, he goes to a medium close-up. Only at the very end does he unleash one of the deadliest tight close-ups in cinema.”
• “In the Godardian spirit of making a movie as a critique/analysis of other movies,” Jim Emerson offers “a free-association visual essay/commentary on close-ups (with inserts, jump cuts, switchbacks, flashbacks, flash-forwards…) that got synapses firing in my brain as I flipped through shots in my memory — and my DVD collection.” Thanks to Jim for posting a Marlene Dietrich screencap that I’m going to use in my own Blogathon entry.
• Maul of America looks at a rare (for Hitchcock) bit of “gratuitous gore” in The Birds, and Camille Paglia’s theory that the film ultimately illustrates “a war between nature and culture, with the irrational and primitive vanquishing human illusions.”

• David Benioff will adapt Charles Cross’ Kurt Cobain bio Heavier Than Heaven for a pic for Universal. Courtney Love and her lawyer, Howard Weitzman, will executive produce. Nikki Finke quickly railed against Love’s involvement, saying that Universal cannot “expect truthfulness” from a biopic with the backing of Cobain’s controversial widow. “This movie is gonna get crucified by critics, audiences and Nirvana fans just by involving Courtney,” Finke predicts, implying that only a Courtney-bashing Cobain biopic could give the fans the “truthfulness” they apparently require.
• Michael Bay’s production company has been working on a remake of The Birds for at least two and a half years; Naomi Watts has been attached for at least a year. So I guess the kernel of news in this story is the fact that Martin Campbell will direct, and Universal has no plans to rush the film into production before the various labor strikes commence.
• Roger Ebert will be present to accept a tribute at the Gotham Awards in Brooklyn next month. It will mark his second public appearance since falling ill in mid-2006, after his own Overlooked Film Festival earlier this year (although I did see him in screening-hopping in Toronto).