A nifty gadget for Muppet lovers ...

and if you're not one of those, really, what the heck is wrong with you? And besides, mighty Mr. Adam Jones had the game-winning RBI for the American League in last night's All-Star game (surely an omen of the Baltimore Orioles surging in the season's second half) and I'm going to see the movie based on my favorite Harry Potter book as early as tomorrow morning, so all is right with the world, right?

Well, not exactly ... there still is evil out there, and in my book almost all of it is embodied in Renee Zellweger. I've just never, ever liked her. And I can't see anything good coming from the news that she'll be starring in a new Bridget Jones flick.

I'll admit that this dude both read and enjoyed both of Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones" books, the first one much more than the second. As for the movies, the first one was OK and the second was pure rubbish, so I can't even imagine how bad a third one - not based on any book at all - will turn out to be.

In even worse news (remember, there's Muppets coming to lighten things up), Stephen Chow has now completely exited Michel Gondry's "Green Hornet." If you've been following this rather sad saga from the beginning, you know that Chow was originally set to both play the Green Hornet's martial arts expert sidekick AND direct the movie, but a while back he was replaced as director by Michel Gondry.

Fair enough that. I still think Gondry can have a lot of fun with this, with Seth Rogen set to star and a script from Rogen and creative partner Evan Goldberg, but without Chow it's just gonna lose that extra bit of craziness that would have made this remarkable. Is Jackie Chan available? (Hopefully not!)

Oh well, there's got to be some good news out there, right? Actually, yes, especially if you love baseball (and again, if you don't why the heck not?)

Billy Bob Thornton has signed on to be a producer for a flick based on the Buzz Bissinger book "Three Nights in August," which is about a three-game series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs in 2003 - as told from the perspective of Cardinals manager Tony La Russa (no word on this yet, but I could certainly see Billy Bob playing La Russa, too.)

Now I haven't read the source material for this, but I did read another of Bissinger's books, "Friday Night Lights," and it's a simply fantastic look at the obsession with high school football in Texas (and, of course, sort of the inspiration for TV's best drama, soon to enter its fourth season.) And any flick that offers this intense of a look at America's great sport and into the mind of Tony La Russa can only be a good thing in my book.

And finally, as promised, Muppets, Muppets, Muppets ... 101 of them in all. I can't take any credit for this except in the delivery of it, but if you indeed click on the link below, I defy to both not smile or waste at least a minor chunk of your work day. What is it? A guide to the 101 Muppets of Sesame Street. 'Nuff said.

Enjoy.

And with that, have a perfectly passable Wednesday, and if you've seen "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," please feel free to tell me if it's any good or not. Peace out.

What - if anything - to watch this weekend?

Actually, the best thing I could find out there this morning is that Lauren Graham is returning to primetime TV in something that's at least called a "comedy," part of ABC's big buy back into the sitcom game.

Graham, a k a Lorelai Gilmore the elder, will play a female talk show host who urges her viewers to just "Let It Go," but finds she can't follow her own advice after being dumped by her boyfriend. Sounds like a big ball of meh, but I was a big enough "Gilmore Girls" fan that I'll give it at least few episodes next fall.

But here today it's all about the movie weekend, which doesn't look great, but for a January weekend in Hollywood's silly season it certainly could be a lot worse. Is there really anything new out there worth watching this weekend (at least in wide-release world, which my little corner of the world is part of)? Here, in order of how much I want to see them, is the breakdown, and if you've seen any of these and want to offer a word of warning, please feel free to do so.

1. "Taken"
I saw Pierre Morel's "District B13" a few months ago on DVD, and it was pretty sensational. Morel's futuristic vision of Paris was a trip, and stuntman-turned-actor Cyril Raffaeli had the chops to keep up with the simply frenetic action. It shows the full potential of the new French action wave, but I can't shake the feeling that "Taken" will be - at best - a pale knockoff.

For one thing, rather than looking forward, Morel's new flick actually came out a year ago in France and - according to The New Yorker, at least - employs tired torture sequences that we've seen far too many times before. Even so, I'm willing to give it a chance because Liam Neeson (as a retired CIA agent, of course) is just cool and it will hopefully be a fun ride, not just yet another movie about all the evil things that happen when Americans venture overseas (I haven't been to Paris in years, but I'm fairly certain it really isn't all that dangerous a place.) Here's the trailer.



2. "The Uninvited"
I'm fairly certain I haven't seen any horror movies that are remakes of Asian flicks since "The Ring," but with Elizabeth Banks and David Strathairn somehow in this one I just might give it a chance. I actually have seen Kim Jee-woon's original South Korean flick, "A Tale of Two Sisters," and that one is as simply bizarre as it is creepy.

I can't imagine this version helmed by first-time feature directors and brothers Thomas and Charles Guard will be anywhere near as good, but I think I just might find out as a pre-Super Bowl matinee. Enjoy the trailer.



3. "New in Town"
Just when I think my rather extreme dislike of Renee Zellweger is unfair, she once again turns up in something like this, which just looks like the most familiar, fish-out-of-water tripe. And frankly, I've been to Minnesota several times now, and while I will concede some of those folks do talk kinda funny, so do a lot of the people down here in my adopted home of Macon, GA. Is that really enough to make the basis of a feature film? Apparently so, but not enough to make me watch it. Here's the trailer.



So there you have it. I could also, I suppose, get caught up on the prestige pics by seeing either "Revolutionary Road" or "The Reader," but after sitting through (and almost completely enjoying) Jonathan Demme's thoroughly dysfunctional "Rachel Getting Married," I think I'm just in the mood for some entertainment for the masses. Have a perfectly pleasant weekend, and as I said, if you've seen any of these and want to share your opinion, please don't hesitate to do so.

No more movies with George Clooney in the lead?

Granted, the question above is pretty ridiculous, but the rather sorry performance of Clooney's "Leatherheads" brought to mind an even sillier statement allegedly made (but of course denied!) last October by the president of production at Warner Bros.

You may remember that, after the twin tankings of Jodie Foster's "The Brave One" and Nicole Kidman's "The Invasion," Jeff Robinov was quoted, first by Nikki Finke, as saying "we are no longer doing movies with women in the lead." Though I can certainly understand what put him in such a foul mood, that statement was just as stupid then as it is now.

But a look at the box office numbers brings up a valid question. In it's opening weekend, Clooney's flick took in a rather paltry $13.5 million, and didn't even manage to win the weekend, finishing second to "21" with $15.1 million (and really just a hair above "Nim's Island.")

Now, let's flash back to "The Brave One" which, for the record, was easily one of the worst movies I saw in all of 2007. In its opening weekend, Jodie Foster's super-silly revenge flick took in $13,471,488, virtually identical to the take of "Leatherheads." It would go on to compile a $36,793,804 domestic box office total, which at this point would have to be considered a good outcome for Clooney's flick.

So, I offer you all that to ask you this: Will there be any similar hand-wringing over this latest failure? Will any studio executive be quoted as saying they won't "even look at a script with a Clooney lead"?

Of course not, but that's just the kind of double standard that's enough to set me off on a Monday morning with less than a full cup of coffee in my system. But why did Clooney's movie fare so poorly?

Well, in its favor, it had three fairly bankable stars in Clooney, Renee Zellweger and John Krasinski, and of course everyone in America loves football, right? Plus, despite the fact it had sat on the shelf for years before Clooney scooped it up, reliable Sports Illustrated scribe Rick Reilly contributed to the script (along with first-time screenwriter Duncan Brantley.)

So, what happened? You can chalk this one up as a "victory" for critics if you want to. From all the reviews I read, director Clooney and his writers played it too safe both in terms of humor and on-field action, and therefore didn't come up with enough to keep audiences entertained. Older moviegoers (of which, it's rather sad to report, I am apparently one) still listen to critics, and therefore just stayed home.

Or something like that anyway. Personally, I'm just looking forward to a good movie of any kind this year, no matter who's in the lead role. I'm tentatively putting my money on "Street Kings" this week, but not with terribly high hopes.

Casting W's cabinet

Now that Oliver Stone has cast the first family - plus his mommy and daddy - for "W," it's now time to fill out the cabinet and staff, where things could get much more interesting.

The roster so far: Josh Brolin is W, Elizabeth Banks is Laura Bush, Ellyn Burstyn gets the rather ignominious honor of playing Barbara Bush, and James Cromwell (hearty huzzah!) is W's daddy. The news today is that, since Stone clearly likes insanely beautiful women, Thandie Newton will play Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and Ioan Gruffudd will play W's brother in (making other people take up) arms, Tony Blair.

Which means there are still plenty of juicy roles to fill, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove. For Cheney you could certainly do worse than Jason Alexander, but I've got an even more solid TV choice to play Karl Rove.

Remember that "Halloween" episode of "The Office" in which Dwight was so proud of his Sith Lord costume? If there was a better dead ringer for Karl Rove, I haven't seen it, so I'm officially on the Rainn Wilson bandwagon.

And in slightly more serious "Office" news, the show does indeed return beginning this Thursday, so set your DVR. And, even better, NBC announced at its recent upfront that "The Office" will get 28 episodes next year, with the first four being hourlong specials, and then a spinoff to premiere after the Super Bowl. Bring it all on!

"Blindness" trailer

I'm fairly confident that we'll have some great movies before October this year, but if not Fernando Meirelles will be back to hopefully save the day.

"Blindness," Meirelles' follow-up to "The Constant Gardener" and the perfect "Cidade de Deus," is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by José Saramago and is about a city that is struck by a mysterious plague of, well, blindness. As you can see from what I believe is the first trailer below, it stars Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo (double huzzah!) and Gael Garcia Bernal (and, though she's not in the trailer, the lovely Alice Braga too.) Enjoy, and have a perfectly bearable Monday. Peace out.

"Bee Movie": Much abuzz about nothing

I apologize for that not-terribly-clever headline, but I offer it to kind of prove a point: It's about as funny as most of what you'll encounter in Jerry Seinfeld's "Bee Movie."

Which is a real shame, 'cause for the first fifteen minutes or so it's thoroughly charming and, more importantly, funny. Life in the hive, dominated by the leviathan Honex corporation (producing, of course, honey), makes for a rapid succession of very funny jokes about the life span of bees, working for your whole life, etc. With a lot more focus this could have been a kind of bee "Office Space," but alas it was not to be.

Because this flick thinks it has to be a lot more than that, our hero, Barry B. Benson (voiced with less than his usual smugness by Mr. Seinfeld) has to leave the hive, and that's where things fall apart. As my mind often does when movies start to lose its attention, I drifted to other movies I've had a beef with, in this case Tim Burton's thoroughly unnecessary "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," but in reverse. What they both lacked after brilliant openings, as "Bee Movie" left the factory and Burton's "Charlie" went into it, was almost any sense of wonder at all.

Now, I understand that (with big help from Larry David and others) Mr. Seinfeld created a sitcom that was "about nothing," and managed to make a very funny one at that. To make an entertaining 90-minute animated movie about nothing, which he tried to do here, would be no mean feat, but despite being intermittently funny throughout it really doesn't even come close.

What's the big drama once our hero Barry leaves the hive? A lawsuit, and believe it or not, it's even less compelling on screen than you could possibly imagine it would be, despite the best efforts of John Goodman as the opposing attorney. Barry, of course, also meets and becomes smitten with a florist voiced by Renee Zellweger, who I'll return to later with, I'm warning you now, some venom.

First, a word about the overall look of "Bee Movie" which, again outside of the hive, is just depressingly generic. If you've seen Miyazaki's "Kiki's Delivery Service" (and if you haven't, why not), try not to think too much about young Kiki soaring over Miyazaki's majestic landscapes of Europe as you watch Barry and the "pollen jockeys" flying over the CGI, paint-by-numbers version of what is somehow supposed to be New York City in "Bee Movie."

What this newfangled animation does to scenery, however, is far less destructive than what it does to people, specifically poor Ms. Zellweger as the florist Vanessa. As animators try to make their human characters more real, it just gets more and more perverse, in this case turning Vanessa's face into what Ms. Zellweger's looks like each time directly after she's sucked off the pounds put on for a "Bridget Jones" movie. Not pretty. It doesn't help that Vanessa's voice and mannerisms just make you want to choke her and end it all.

So, as you can tell, I really didn't care too much at all for "Bee Movie," but before I go I'd like to offer a special note of encouragement to the very young lady who, as her mother informed us before the movie started, was enjoying (or not) her first moviegoing experience with this one. Take heart, young one, because there are much better flicks than "Bee Movie" out there for you to behold. For a start, have your mom rent "Ratatouille" next Tuesday to see what a wonder great animation can really be, though you might want to have her fast-forward through the rather scary opening sequence.

As for me, there's a hopefully much better movie in my immediate future, with a screening of Ridley Scott's "American Gangster" at noon. Peace out.