What pair do you want to see this weekend? Scully and Mulder, or Ferrell and Reilly?

Those paranormal-attracting ex-FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, played by Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, are back in "The X-Files: I Want to Believe." Those hoping for an extension of the TV series' complex mythology will be disappointed - this is a straight-up thriller, much like a "stand-alone" episode of the show. It's still a gripping and entertaining return to form for series creator Chris Carter, who directed and co-wrote the film.

The team that made "Talladega Nights" - Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly and director Adam McKay - reunite for "Step Brothers," but the results aren't quite as funny this time. Ferrell and Reilly play stay-at-home slackers whose parents (Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins) get married. There are laughs to be had, but the movie runs out of gas well before the closing credits.

Two art-house films vie for "best of the week" honors.

"Encounters at the End of the World" is Werner Herzog's new documentary, in which he visits Antarctica. As he has done with the documentary "Grizzly Man" and his narrative epic "Fitzcarraldo," Herzog finds the line between unforgivable nature and people crazy enough to put themselves out there. The results here are fascinating, the images gorgeous.

"Blind Mountain" is a harrowing drama by Chinese director Li Jang, in which a young college grad (Huang Li) is kidnapped and forced into a marriage to a villager in a remote province. It's a harrowing drama that exposes the ugliness of China's sex-slave trade.

The last movie of the week is "The Wackness," a hit at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, which stars Josh Peck (formerly of Nickelodeon's "Drake & Josh") as a pot-dealing high-schooler who trades marijuana for therapy sessions with a shrink (played by Ben Kingsley). In spite of solid performances by Kingsley and Olivia Thirlby ("Juno"), the movie is an apathetic snooze.

If you haven't already made plans to get to Bicknell, Utah, this weekend, you should.

The Bicknell International Film Festival - billed as "the world's smallest international film festival" and celebrating its 13th edition Friday and Saturday - could be the most fun you can have in a small Utah town. It's bad movies, plus a parade, plus parties, all in a single weekend in the gorgeous Capitol Reef area.

This year's theme is B-grade Westerns. It opens Friday night at Bicknell's Wayne Theatre with Howard Hughes' infamous "The Outlaw," starring the full-figured Jane Russell in all her buxom glory (pictured). That follows the annual parade from Torrey to Bicknell, "the world's fastest parade" because it reaches speeds of 55 mph on the highway between the two towns.

Saturday's events include the annual staples - a morning swap meet in Torrey, the "Mutton 'n' Taters" fund-raiser for the Teasdale Volunteer Fire Department, and a panel discussion. The Saturday movies are "The Master Gunfighter," starring Tom McLaughlin ("Billy Jack"), and "The Terror of Tiny Town," a Western with an all-dwarf cast.

What's not to love?

Leo G. Carroll will be over a barrel about this: MTV is going to remake "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."

According to this Variety report, producer Lou Adler (who made the 1975 original cult classic) is teaming up with BermanBraun and Fox Television Studios for the made-for-TV remake - and Adler hopes to have it on TV by Halloween 2009.

As someone who grew up on "Rocky Horror" - seeing it as a teen in Spokane, in college in Seattle and for several years in the cast that re-enacted the movie at the Tower Theatre in Salt Lake City - the Cricket is perturbed, to put it mildly, by this announcement.

How many ways can they screw this up? Clean up the sexual content? Set the music to a hip-hop beat? Cast Ashley Tisdale and Zac Efron as the virginal Brad and Janet? Bring back some original cast member - say, Tim Curry or Barry Bostwick - as the no-necked narrator?

As Rocky himself sang, "All I know, is I'm at the start of a pretty big downer."

Who would have the cojones to think themselves the television heirs of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert? Apparently, it's not what you know, but who you know - or who your ancestors are.

Disney announced that the new hosts of the retooled "At the Movies" will be Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz.

Lyons reviews movies for the cable channel E!, and is the son of critic Jeffrey Lyons, who followed Siskel and Ebert when they left PBS - and now co-hosts a rival movie-review show with British bombshell Alison Bailes.

Mankiewicz is a host on Turner Classics Movies, and has a long Hollywood heritage: his grandfather, Herman Mankiewicz, won an Oscar with Orson Welles for the screenplay of "Citizen Kane"; his great-uncle Joseph won Oscars for directing and writing "A Letter to Three Wives" and "All About Eve"; and his cousin Tom is a screenwriter whose credits include "Superman" and three James Bond movies ("Diamonds Are Forever," "Live and Let Die," "The Man With the Golden Gun").

So all the world's media is poring over the signs and omens left behind by the humongous box-office numbers posted by "The Dark Knight."

The weekend numbers were actually higher than the estimates printed Sunday: $158.3 million, stomping the old record set by "Spider-Man 3."

Those kind of numbers mean "The Dark Knight" isn't just a movie, but a pop-culture phenomenon - which means it's fair game for media observers to comment upon. And that's what your friendly neighborhood Culture Vulture did in print today.

And, as if we didn't have enough print about the movie, there's this report that Batman himself, actor Christian Bale, was arrested in London over allegations of assaulting his mother and sister.

The weird part of the story, as Jeffrey Wells notes in Hollywood Elsewhere, is that the alleged incident happened Sunday night - but the cops waited until Tuesday "didn't question the actor Monday because they didn't want to interfere with the premiere of the movie." Once again, "The Dark Knight" causes someone to misplace their priorities in a major way.

Only 30 percent of the movie reviews printed in the nation's top newspapers are written by women, according to a study by Dr. Martha Lauzen.

Lauzen found that of the 100 biggest papers (by circulation), 47 of them had no reviews written by female writers in the fall of 2007. Only 12 percent of those 100 papers had no reviews written by male writers.

It's particularly sad, though, that (according to the Association of Women Film Journalists), those numbers are actually more equal than women's participation in the movie industry (15 percent of all directors, writers, producers, editors and cinematographers working on the top 250 films of 2007) or as characters (only 28 percent of all characters in the top 100 films of 2002).

Wave your thumbs goodbye to "Ebert & Roeper," the syndicated TV show that featured dueling movie critics Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper.

Ebert, in a statement posted today on his web site, said that Disney - which produces "Ebert & Roeper" and "Siskel & Ebert" before it (when Ebert partnered with Gene Siskel, who died in 1999) - "has decided to take the program ... in a new direction. I will no longer be associated with it."

Ebert hasn't been on the air in two years, as he has recovered from mouth surgery in June 2006 that robbed him of his speech, and Roeper has soldiered on with guest critics in the other balcony seat - notably the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips. (The show airs in Utah on KSL, Ch. 5, Saturdays at 6:30 p.m.)

Ebert's statement follows Roeper's announcement that he is leaving the show after eight years. "Several months ago, Disney offered to extend my contract, which expires at the conclusion of the 2007-08 season. I opted to wait. Much transpired after that behind the scenes, but an agreement was never reached, and we are all moving on," Roeper said in a statement.

Roeper's last show for Disney will air in mid-August. He hints at launching a new show, and promises more details later.

But what of those famous thumbs? The trademark for the "Two Thumbs Up" phrase is held by Ebert and by Siskel's widow, Marlene Iglitzen, and Ebert vows the thumbs will return. "We are discussing possibilities, and plan to continue the show's tradition."

Entertainment Weekly reports, in its big preview of San Diego's Comic-Con this weekend, that director J.J. Abrams won't be showing much footage of his much-anticipated "Star Trek" reboot (set for a big release May 9, 2009).

"Hopefully when [fans] eventually do see more, it will be that much more exciting,'' Abrams told the magazine.

But Trekkies won't be going home empty-handed. Paramount will distribute four posters of the new "Star Trek," one each for stars Chris Pine (as Capt. James T. Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Mr. Spock), Zoe Saldana (Lt. Uhura) and Eric Bana (as the movie's villain).

Put together, the four posters form the Starfleet logo. But here's the catch: EW says fans will only receive one poster each.

So how does a true-blue Trekkie go about getting the complete set? Of course, they will begin with the lirpa - and should they survive the lirpa, combat will continue with the ahn'woon.

If you need this "Star Trek" reference explained to you, watch this clip:

If you saw the documentary "Crazy Love" at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival (or later in its brief theatrical run), you know two things: 1) Burt Pugach is a litigator of the first order; and 2) considering that he went to prison for hiring somebody to throw acid in the face of the woman who was resisting his advances, he's not glued together too well.

So it's not that surprising to hear, via Radar Online, that the 81-year-old Pugach is suing the documentary's director, Dan Klores, for $15 million over Klores' proposed narrative version of Pugach's story he's making for HBO.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Queens County (N.Y.) Supreme Court, claims Klores falsely enticed him and his wife Linda (yes, the woman he blinded - it's complicated) to sign over the rights to their bizarre story.

Besides the money sought in the lawsuit, Radar Online reports, Pugach wants HBO to air a never-released movie Pugach produced in 1958.

Batman is back, and America is ready.

"The Dark Knight" transcends all the expectations of summer-popcorn movies and comic-book conventions, becoming a relentlessly intense crime drama whose main character (Christian Bale) happens to wear a mask and cape. The stellar cast - with great performances by Maggie Gyllenhaal as Bruce Wayne's lost love, Aaron Eckhart as the idealistic D.A. Harvey Dent, Gary Oldman as the incorruptible Lt. Jim Gordon, and Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman returning - is topped by Heath Ledger's fearless portrayal of The Joker.

The other major studio opening comes under the heading of "counter-programming": "Mamma Mia!," the energetic but scattershot musical based on the music of ABBA. The movie is a mess, with sketchy plotting and stagebound numbers. But it's largely redeemed by Meryl Streep's dynamic central performance as Donna, the former wild child dealing with her daughter's impending wedding.

"Space Chimps" is rated G, which apparently stands for "gawdawful." This cheesy bit of candy-colored animated dreck focuses on trained chimpanzees sent into space to recover a lost probe - and encountering a strange planet. Maybe they should have let chimps write the screenplay.

On the art-house slate this weekend is "Savage Grace," a skeezy melodrama based on the real life of heiress Barbara Baekeland (played by Julianne Moore) and her disturbing relationship with her son Antone (Eddie Redmayne).

But the best indie movies this week are two documentaries: "Operation Filmmaker" follows an Iraqi film student who is taken from bombed-out Baghdad to work on a Hollywood production in Prague, where the limitations of do-gooderism soon become apparent; and "Up the Yangtze" chronicles two Chinese teens whose lives are altered by the rising waters of the Three Gorges Dam project.

The Palm Beach Post said "yes" to the more than 300 employees who applied for a buyout, according to the alt-weekly there, The Broward-Palm Beach New Times.

One of those, according to the New Times, is the paper's movie and theater critic, Hap Erstein. He makes 32 movie critics who have lost their jobs, in one way or another, since the beginning of 2006.

Labels: disappearing critics

You were going to attend Friday's 9:15 a.m. screening of "The Dark Knight," right?

And you wanted to see the movie in IMAX, right?

And you were going to get in line super-early, right?

And you were going to dress up as Batman, or maybe The Joker, right?

If you were already doing those things anyway, and you're doing them at the Megaplex 17 at Jordan Commons (9400 S. State, Sandy), then you can get free popcorn. That's the prize the Megaplex is giving out to the first 100 people in line - dressed as their favorite "Batman" character - at Friday's 9:15 a.m. IMAX screening of "The Dark Knight."

So, what do you do when you're no longer a "film critic"?

Mary F. Pols - who was film critic for the San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune and Contra Costa Times until she took a buyout in March - writes, on the web site of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, about the mental shift that comes about from no longer doing the job she loved.

I still wake every Tuesday with that familiar expectation that my day will end, as it did for nearly eight years, and as it does for most film critics, with a drive home from a screening, the fresh material of a new movie dancing in my head, with both the dread and adrenaline rush of Wednesday morning's deadline ahead of me. If it's Tuesday, this must be the multiplex. The job may be gone, but those circadian rhythms linger.

It's not all bad news, though. Pols has been on the book-tour circuit, flogging her critically acclaimed memoir, Accidentally on Purpose. She also notes the best benefit of quitting: "No more obligation to retain the absurdities that spring forth from George Lucas’s mind."

(Photo: Benet Pols)

Labels: disappearing critics