Film

Budgets must be tight at The Hobbit. Why else would they want a tiny, wee actor like James McAvoy to play the lead role of Bilbo Baggins unless they wanted to save on the special effects?

The annoying Scottish star has been heavily linked to be the star of the heavily-anticipated movie, which will be directed by Guillermo Del Toro and produced by Peter Jackson.

And, you have to say, he would be perfect as a hobbit. Well, he’s already about 3ft tall.

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Some things just has ‘box office gold’ stamped all over it - and now that list also apparently includes ‘two and a half hours of four ropey-looking middle-aged women screeching’.

You guessed it - Sex And The City is number one at the weekend box office this week, edging Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull into second place. Which, we think, makes overlong dull-as-cocks shoe-based babbling the new man-eating ants. Or something. Oh, we don’t care.

Anyway, Sex And The City is the weekend box office number one and, while it didn’t break any traditional records as such, it is thought to hold the prize for the amount of times that the three men who were henpecked into seeing it managed to murmur “kill me” to themselves during its duration.

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The most enduring scene from Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince is undoubtedly when Harry leans against a wall and looks a bit blank for a while.

Which is why we’re so thrilled that the scene looks set to make it to the forthcoming movie adaptation of Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, judging by the newly-released images from the film. It’s been captured perfectly - Harry Potter is there, the wall is there and - best of all - the blank look is there! Let’s hope the filmmakers do as much justice to the Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince scene where Ron Weasley scratches his cheek briefly! We’re so excited!

Oh, we’re just kidding - about the wall-standing, thing, that is, not about not being excited about Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince. Although we’re not. However, photos from the movie are starting to crop up all over the internet.

Cinematical has the wall-leaning shot and one of Zack from Saved By The Bell talking to Liam Gallagher, while BlogHogwarts has shots of Harry Potter looking in a drawer, holding a book and sitting around a table, with a shot of Liam Gallagher looking all ticked off at Zack from Saved By The Bell. It looks epic.

Seriously, never mind the kerfuffle about Harry Potter kissing a girl in the last film - Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince looks set to have all the controversial book-holding, drawer-looking, wall-leaning action you could ever wish for! Fasten your seatbelts everyone!

More Harry Potter images after the jump…

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Remember the courtyard square from the Back To The Future films? Sure you do. It was the courtyard. You know - the one shaped like a square. From the Back To The Future films.

Well, it looks like remembering it is all you’ll be able to do, as the courtyard square from the Back To The Future films is just one of the many movie milestones that has been eaten up by a blazing fire raging its way through Universal Studios, Los Angeles.

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Forget your Fellinis, Godards, Spielbergs and David Leans, this article is dedicated to those directors who have really scraped the cinematic barrel to deliver us some of the worst movies imaginable.

Except they’re not the ones behind Jaws: The Revenge, the 1976 version of King Kong or Flashdance - no, these are ‘name’ directors, the ones who have by now been cemented as the worst of their kind.

The difference is that most of those mentioned below have arguably, at one time or another, had a good movie in them - it was the films that followed that secured their reputations for being among the worst famous directors ever.

Read and weep boys…

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Beverly Hills Cop 3 left all manner of questions unanswered - ranging from “A big wheel? Huh?” to “Deary piss, why hasn’t this film ended yet?”

So praise be that Eddie Murphy has finally decided to go and make the long-anticipated but massively unwanted Beverly Hills Cop 4. We haven’t been this excited by anything Eddie Murphy’s done since every single lunatic decision about his personal life that he’s made in the last decade.

However, it’s been 14 years since the last Beverly Hills Cop movie was released, so Beverly Hills Cop 4 will need to reflect where Eddie Murphy’s career has taken him in the meantime. In short, all the characters in Beverly Hills Cop 4 will be played by Eddie Murphy and they’ll all wear female fat suits and the whole thing will be set inside Eddie Murphy’s head and there’ll be a talking raccoon in there somewhere as well. Oh, and it’ll be crap.

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A lot of fuss has been made about the upcoming GI Joe movie - the most high-profile film about a man with no testicles and swivelly eyes since whatever Orlando Bloom was in last.

However, is GI Joe actually going to be any good? Hardly, because a) it’s got Dennis Quaid in it, b) it’s got The Rock in it, c) it’s got Brendan Fraser in it, d) it’s got Sienna Miller in it, e) it’s got Sienna Miller in it, f) it’s got Sienna Miller in it, and g) it’s got Sienna Miller in it.

However, if anything’s going to give Sienna Miller the fame she’s missed since her boyfriend was caught nuts-deep in childcare worker, it’ll be GI Joe. Not because GI Joe is going to be a good movie, but because Sienna Miller gets to dress up like a sub-Beckinsdale bondage fetishist and stagger about covered in blood in it. The girl knows how to spend the rest of her swamped by stinky boys in comic book conventions, that’s for sure.

If you do want to see on-set pictures of Sienna Miller dressed as The Baroness for the new GI Joe movie, the Daily Mail has a bunch of them. Remember, though, don’t get too excited - it’s still Sienna Miller we’re talking about here.

Apparently, not everyone is looking forward to seeing the new adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

Well, for starters, there is a deformed bloke in a village in Peru who keeps getting rocks thrown at him and being called ‘Gollum’ who wishes they would forget the whole idea. Saying that, he still has the entire Lord of The Rings trilogy on DVD – gold edition, too.

Then there’s our housemate Steve, who is just odd. And then there is Tolkien’s 83-year-old son Christopher, who just doesn’t like people enjoying themselves.

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It’s been 19 years since the fedora-wearing, wise-cracking, whip-snapping Indiana Jones last graced our screens, and so his return comes with as much trepidation as it does excitement.

It also makes Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull a hard film to write a review for - it’s not often that a beloved franchise from your childhood gets a sequel made this long after its original trilogy was closed.

Let’s not forget how the Star Wars prequels were wasted opportunities.

So does Indy 4 shine like the Ark of the Covenant? Or does it stink like a 700-year-old knight?

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“There can only be one.” God, we should be so lucky.

Clearly, Hollywood producers were not paying attention when these words were famously uttered in Highlander – a 1986 film starring Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery, just in case you weren’t sure. How else can you explain the three shitty sequels, the two turgid TV series, the endless crap novels and the pointless cartoons that have followed it?

And, more importantly, how else do you explain why they are already planning another film?

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So far it’s fair to say that this year’s Cannes Film Festival has been all over the shop.

The bulk of the chatter has been about what Angelina Jolie is keeping in her guts and the festival’s biggest two movies - Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull and Vicky Cristina Barcelona - are only gaining interest because people either like a) watching iconic action stars try to recapture past glories or b) watching Scarlett Johansson get off with Penelope Cruz.

And since Sean Penn is the festival’s jury president this year, everything else is probably going to be a barrage of humourless hand-wringing about starving Albanians. And if the thought of that has put you off, we’ve found a way to enjoy the Cannes Film Festival from home.

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It’s the summer! And the summer means giant, all-conquering weekend box office monoliths, right?

Well, not really. In fact, the way things are shaping up, 2008 might just be the summer of hopelessly underperforming would-be blockbusters. Let’s hope so, because that’d amuse us a bit more.

Why all the doom and gloom? Because The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, this summer’s third blockbuster and the sequel to the huge The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, has topped the weekend box office with a disappointing gross about $20 million shy of expectations. Indiana Jones, you’re next.

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