Movie Cricket

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a Disney marketing gimmick!

A gaggle of hundreds of helium-filled balloons rose above Sandy on Thursday, as the Megaplex 17 at Jordan Commons promoted the new Disney/Pixar movie "Up" — about a crotchety old man who takes his house airborne.

They're going to need a lot more balloons to get the multiplex off the ground.

(Photo by Leslie Sorensen-Means)

An artist, Jim Unwin, has created a web page dedicated to the Disney/Pixar movie "The Incredibles."

Actually, not the whole movie, but the design of the movie.

Actually, not the design of the whole movie, but the design of the chairs in the movie.

Unwin singles out 22 different styles of chairs used in "The Incredibles," from Dash's school to Edna Mode's house.

"I loved the depth of the world, the buildings, the gadgets and most of all I loved the chairs," Unwin writes.

Tough to disagree with him. These are some pretty cool chairs.

(HT: Movie City News)

A strange confluence of moviegoers hit the Megaplex 12 at the Gateway Tuesday night - as studios scheduled promo screenings for two widely different movies in neighboring theaters.

In theater 1, kids and families were gathered to see Disney/Pixar's "Up." Down the hall, in theater 3, horror freaks (and, yes, a small smattering of kids and familiies) awaied the PG-13 scary thriller "Drag Me to Hell."

One mom at the "Up" screening noticed a few college-age guys step into theater 1, notice the high population of children, and turn back to the hallway. There wasn't as much confusion in the "Drag Me to Hell" screening - most everybody who was there knew what they were in for.

The Cricket used to have a yardstick of sorts of a movie's quality, based on the 32-oz. cup of diet cola he bought at the concession stand.

It worked like this: If the need to urinate was more compelling than the movie, the movie wasn't very good.

This rule of thumb, or bladder, didn't last very long - as the Cricket switched to carrying his own water bottle into theaters (both to save money and eliminate caffeine and aspartame from his diet).

For some moviegoers, it can become a necessity to leave the theater to use the restroom - at the risk of missing something exciting. Now, a new web site helps out with that problem.

Runpee.com offers suggestions on the best times to go use the bathroom without missing out on important plot points. The site lists recommended potty-break times, and tells you what you missed while you were out.

This works better in some movies than in others. For example, each of the suggested break points in "Star Trek" has something viewers will want to see - and one tip on the site warns that one moment that looks like a good potty break (when Jim Kirk lands on the ice planet) in fact has a crucial scene viewers don't want to miss.

Austrian director Michael Haneke - won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival this weekend for his new drama "The White Ribbon."

The drama, set just before World War I in a rural German village where strange deaths occur, was well received at the festival. Haneke is best known in the States for such mind-twisting thrillers as "Cache," "Funny Games" and "The Piano Teacher" - the last title starring French actress Isabelle Huppert, who just happened to be president of the Cannes jury.

According to Roger Ebert and others, this year's festival was noted for dark and often ultra-violent material - from Lars Von Trier's controversial "Antichrist" to Quentin Tarantino's talk-heavy World War II yarn "Inglorious Basterds." (Both of those films won acting awards: "Antichrist" for Charlotte Gainsbourg's performance as a self-mutilating mom, and "Basterds" for Christoph Walz' turn as a mean Nazi.)