9 Movie

The Southern California caucus is in substantial agreement with the national consensus through most of the Top 10 albums this week. Both welcome the Janet Jackson-led "Nutty Professor" soundtrack and the newly introspective Everclear, with the rock trio gaining a two-position advantage in the Southland. On the singles chart, Lil' Zane, Son by Four and Somethin' for the People all made the area Top 10 without hitting pay dirt nationally.

The Writers Guild of America has managed to stall an effort by some of its striking members to return to work, but solidarity among film and TV writers is showing some strain. With the strike by 9,000 movie and TV writers in its eighth week, guild officials have been approached by several splinter groups proposing various plans for settling the dispute.

The televised Olympic Games from Sydney, Australia, hurt movie attendance as the Keanu Reeves thriller "The Watcher" topped the charts for the second week with a paltry $5.8 million. The Jamie Foxx action film "Bait" debuted in second place with $5.5 million. The only big winner at the box office was Cameron Crowe's rock-themed coming-of-age film "Almost Famous," which took in $2.3 million on only 131 screens for a strong per-screen average of $17,669.

TLC is plotting a comeback. The surviving members of one of the best-selling girl groups of all time are planning their first new album in 10 years, according to the BBC. Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas and Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins announced their potential return at the 2012 Mobo Awards in Liverpool on Saturday. They were there to accept the award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. The new  album would be the first since 2002's “3D,” which was released six months after the group's third member, spitfire Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, died in a car crash in Honduras.

The Civil Wars have pulled the plug on the rest of their tour. The Grammy-winning folk duo, who were in the middle of a European tour, announced they have canceled all of their upcoming live gigs due to "internal dischord. " “We sincerely apologize for the canceling of all of our tour dates. It is something we deeply regret,” Joy White and John Paul Williams wrote in a statement posted on their Facebook page Tuesday afternoon . “However, due to internal discord and irreconcilable differences of ambition we are unable to continue as a touring entity at this time.” White and Williams nixed their current European tour, as well as next year's scheduled trek to Australia and New Zealand.

The story of Tom Hanks' "Cloud Atlas" this weekend isn't its dismal box office. With the movie's complicated premise(s), extended length/reduced number of play times, and its not-quite-bankable-anymore stars , the Warner Bros release was always in for a rough ride. When the film received a number of high-profile unfavorable reviews, you knew the car would be skidding off a cliff. The more interesting question than how it performed is the film itself: what it means and, really, what it means that it was made.

Dutch actress Sylvia Kristel, who starred as a sexually liberated housewife in the 1970s erotic movie "Emmanuelle," has died of cancer at age 60 . "Emmanuelle," the story of a sexually adventurous young model and her husband on a trip to Thailand, became as big a worldwide sensation in the 1970s as E.L. James' "Fifty Shades of Grey" has in recent months. The softcore French film was that country's highest-grossing release of 1974 and became so popular with female French moviegoers that Columbia Pictures decided to distribute the movie in the U.S. "Emmanuelle" ultimately grossed $100 million worldwide, according to the Internet Movie Database -- an exceptional sum for any film of its day and very rare for one with an X rating.  The French picture spawned seven film sequels -- four of them starring Kristel -- and TV movie spinoffs.