Afterlife

MPAA rating: R for sequences of strong violence and language Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes Playing: In general release

In 1987, two Midwestern punk rockers moved to San Francisco. Their new neighbors in a ramshackle apartment building were a pair of aging alcoholics who spent their days drinking and arguing, their rants branching into such wildly baroque duets that the punks started recording them. In something of a pre-Internet viral sensation, their cassette tapes circulated hand-to-hand and inspired a cult following. In making "Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure," a documentary that tells the story of not just the tapes but their strange and increasingly sad afterlife, Australian filmmaker Matthew Bate faces the challenge not only of visualizing the audio artifacts but also of finding a way to position their makers and explain all that has transpired since the tapes were initially recorded.

After young Susie Salmon is murdered by the local pedophile in "The Lovely Bones," she ends up in a place easily mistaken for heaven, but what she discovers is that this magical terrain is actually an in-between state, "a place she's caught in until she can resolve the issues of her death," says co-writer Phillipa Boyens. "This in-between world is a 14-year-old's idea of what an ideal world can be." Boyens, along with Fran Walsh and director Peter Jackson, is part of the Oscar-winning troika that wrote Jackson's epic "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and now the three return, with Jackson directing, to bring to the big screen Alice Sebold's bestselling novel about Salmon, played by Saoirse Ronan ("Atonement")

It wasn't the sort of gag the Nu-Pike amusement park had in mind when it opened its Laff inthe Dark attraction. It was 1976, and a worker at the Long Beach entertainment center was moving a Day-Glo red figure when its arm fell off. An investigation found that the object, billed as a wax dummy, was actually the mummified remains of a human — an incompetent train robber named Elmer McCurdy (1880 - 1911), who had been killed by an Oklahoma posse. Authorities pieced together McCurdy's missing years — the ones following his death that is — and found that this King Tut of the Tumbleweeds had been a silent greeter for a Pawhuska, Okla., funeral home, a side-show attraction for innumerable carnivals across the nation and even a prop in a couple of exploitation films.

The gubernatorial candidacy of Antonio Villaraigosa, which had been the object of rampant speculation and punditry for more than a decade, was declared dead on Monday afternoon after a prolonged illness.

"Resident Evil" has found a new life overseas with "Afterlife. " The fourth movie based on the horror video-game series, "Resident Evil: Afterlife" has sold $103.2 million worth of tickets to foreign audiences in 10 days. That's more than any of the previous three "Resident Evil" pictures generated overseas in total. Sony Pictures, the film's distributor, is projecting that "Afterlife" ultimately will take in more than $200 million internationally. The previous foreign high for the series was the last entry, 2007's "Resident Evil: Extinction," which grossed $97.1 million.

It wasn't the sort of gag the Nu-Pike amusement park had in mind when it opened its Laff inthe Dark attraction. It was 1976, and a worker at the Long Beach entertainment center was moving a Day-Glo red figure when its arm fell off. An investigation found that the object, billed as a wax dummy, was actually the mummified remains of a human — an incompetent train robber named Elmer McCurdy (1880 - 1911), who had been killed by an Oklahoma posse. Authorities pieced together McCurdy's missing years — the ones following his death that is — and found that this King Tut of the Tumbleweeds had been a silent greeter for a Pawhuska, Okla., funeral home, a side-show attraction for innumerable carnivals across the nation and even a prop in a couple of exploitation films.

The afterlife in "After.Life" is deadly. Really.Deadly. It's where the not-quite dead exist before they finally cease to, specifically a cold back room in a ghastly funeral home somewhere in the Midwest. According to "After.Life," which stars Christina Ricci and Liam Neeson, it takes a human being about four days to stop being, depending on scheduling and how long the undertaker wants to chat. The afterlife is not, however, nearly as deadly or as ghastly as the movie itself, an undertaking so tortured that it digs a deeper grave with every passing scene.

Playing a dead person in the creepy thriller "After.Life," which opens in theaters Friday, was a painful experience for Christina Ricci. The waif-like actress spends much of the movie reclining in a skimpy red slip -- and sometimes nothing at all -- on a cold porcelain table in a mortician's preparation room. "My spine and the back of my hips got bruised on the first day," explains the former child star of "Mermaids" and "The Addams Family," who had flown in to L.A. from London where she's been making the period drama "Bel Ami" with everyone's favorite vampire hunk, Robert Pattinson.

The American Focus, $29.98; Blu-ray, $39.98 The key image for "The American" is a gun-toting George Clooney on the run, but audiences should know up front that this isn't really an action movie. Clooney plays a hit man named Jack who learns there are people out to kill him. So Jack mopes around an Italian mountain village, plotting his survival in between conversations with a priest and dalliances with a prostitute. Director Anton Corbijn and screenwriter Rowan Joffé (adapting a Martin Booth novel)

At age 102, the visionary Portuguese grand master writer-director Manoel de Oliveira is celebrating his 80th year as a filmmaker with a magical masterpiece, the enchanting yet provocative "The Strange Case of Angelica," a stunning tribute to the power of the image and the longing for perfect love that Oliveira suggests can exist only with the possibility of an afterlife. This fresh, highly original film, inspired by Oliveira's substantially different, never-filmed 1952 script, has been made with the greatest of ease and simplicity and with drollery and wit, yet its underlying impact is profoundly spiritual.

Dave Duerson NFL player on Super Bowl-winning teams Dave Duerson, 50, a four-time Pro Bowl safety who played on Super Bowl winners with the Chicago Bears and New York Giants, was found dead Thursday at his home in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla. Investigators have not determined the cause of death. The Bears released a statement Friday saying they were "stunned and saddened" by the news and called Duerson "a great contributor to our team and the Chicago community. " Born Nov. 28, 1960, in Muncie, Ind., Duerson was a four-year starter at Notre Dame, where he also earned a bachelor's degree in economics.

No other star of Hollywood's golden age continues to hold audiences in quite the way that Humphrey Bogart does. The American Film Institute voted him the greatest male star of all time, and his influence as cultural icon and representative of a certain distinctively American masculinity and noir cool is greater now than ever, half a century after his death. He has not lacked for able biographers ? there appear to be about 40, including the definitive 1997 volume by A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax ?

The American Focus, $29.98; Blu-ray, $39.98 The key image for "The American" is a gun-toting George Clooney on the run, but audiences should know up front that this isn't really an action movie. Clooney plays a hit man named Jack who learns there are people out to kill him. So Jack mopes around an Italian mountain village, plotting his survival in between conversations with a priest and dalliances with a prostitute. Director Anton Corbijn and screenwriter Rowan Joffé (adapting a Martin Booth novel)

Writer-producer Gurinder Chadha has enjoyed much success in finding humor, touched with sentiment and poignancy, in life in Britain's Indian communities, most notably with her international hit "Bend It Like Beckham," about the plight of an Anglo-Indian girl obsessed with playing soccer but plagued by disapproving traditional parents. While her latest, "It's a Wonderful Afterlife," is affectionate and energetic, its comic premise seems too silly, and at times, too tedious, to hope for much cross-cultural appeal, despite a fine, committed cast.

"Resident Evil" has found a new life overseas with "Afterlife. " The fourth movie based on the horror video-game series, "Resident Evil: Afterlife" has sold $103.2 million worth of tickets to foreign audiences in 10 days. That's more than any of the previous three "Resident Evil" pictures generated overseas in total. Sony Pictures, the film's distributor, is projecting that "Afterlife" ultimately will take in more than $200 million internationally. The previous foreign high for the series was the last entry, 2007's "Resident Evil: Extinction," which grossed $97.1 million.

There are almost as many hypotheses in movies about what the afterlife looks like as there are religious interpretations on the subject. But, while no one can quite agree on how big the wings might be and whether the architecture is Grecian or Victorian, most movie-makers do agree on something basic: Stick to one vision of the sweet hereafter.

There was some end-of-summer fatigue for the movie business this weekend but no franchise fatigue for "Resident Evil. " On the slowest filmgoing weekend of the year so far, "Resident Evil: Afterlife" was the only new picture released nationwide. The fourth release in the 8-year-old franchise based on a series of horror video games, and the first made in 3-D, took in a solid $27.7 million in the U.S. and Canada, according to an estimate from distributor Sony Pictures. Accounting for ticket-price inflation and 3-D premiums, the opening of "Afterlife" was in line with 2004's "Resident Evil: Extinction," which opened to $23.7 million, and 2004's "Resident Evil: Apocalypse," which launched with $23 million (2002's original debuted to $17.7 million)

MPAA rating: R for sequences of strong violence and language Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes Playing: In general release