Film

Often film sequels are slam dunks at the box office, a seamless continuation from where a previous hit left off. But as the new installment of the 15-year-old franchise "Men in Black" proves, getting to the big screen isn't always a cakewalk. One of the most troubled productions in recent Hollywood memory, Sony Pictures' latest movie in the Will Smith-Tommy Lee Jones sci-fi-comedy franchise encountered multiple script rewrites, a discontented star and a three-month production shutdown as writers and studio executives scrambled to fix a project that nearly fell apart . By the time it was over, the studio had run up a tab of nearly $250 million - making "Men in Black 3" one of the most expensive releases of the summer.

WASHINGTON - In the months after the U.S. militarymission that killed Osama bin Laden, Pentagon officials met with Hollywood filmmakers and gave them special access in an effort to influence the creation of a film about the operation, newly released documents show. Emails and meeting transcripts obtained from the Pentagon and CIA through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch suggest that officials went out of their way to assist the filmmakers, while trying to keep their cooperation from becoming public.

Hard-core Harry Potter fans who devoured the books, camped out for the movies and trekked through the theme park now have a new way to relive the boy wizard's adventures. PHOTOS: Making of Harry Potter studio tour Debuting Saturday, the Making of Harry Potter behind-the-scenes tour at theWarner Bros.studios in England will let wizards, mudbloods and muggles pull back the curtain on the movie-making secrets of the most successful film series of all time. Located 20 miles outside of London, the three-hour self-guided tour will take visitors past sets, props, costumes, models and special effects exhibits from the eight "Harry Potter" movies.

Beverly Hills-based RealD Inc. is further expanding its presence in China. The 3-D equipment supplier said Wednesday it had a signed a deal to install 100 3-D screens for the Bona Film Group's theater circuit in China.  Bona, a leading film distributor in China, plans to install RealD 3-D systems at each of the company's 11 theater locations. "3-D technology gives moviegoers a more immersive visual experience, which takes the movie business to a new level," said Don Yu, chairman and CEO of Bona Film Group.

There wasn't much to like about Facebook's first day as a public company. The social media giant's stock rose by mere pennies in its initial public offering. The shares closed at $38.23, barely above the $38 IPO price. The performance fell far short of the grandiose expectations of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and raised questions about whether the company's stock will be the sure bet many had counted on. "There was all this pressure and hype and attention with all eyes on Facebook — and the starlet tripped on the red carpet," said Max Wolff, an analyst at GreenCrest Capital Management in New York.

In ABC's new thriller "Missing," a former CIA agent whose child has been kidnapped springs out of retirement with guns, martial-arts skills and primal parental passion blazing. If that sounds familiar, well, it was also the plot of the 2008 film "Taken," which had Liam Neeson tearing through Paris to extricate his daughter from the clutches of a sex-trafficking ring. In "Missing," the gender roles are reversed. When Michael (Nick Eversman), a student studying abroad in Rome, goes missing, his mother, Becca Winstone (Ashley Judd)

"Battleship"is not the first major motion picture to be based on a board game - who could forget 1985's benighted "Clue"? - but it is surely the most expensive. With every superhero more celebrated than Amazing-Man or the Chameleon already spoken for (ditto for hot toys like Transformers), Hollywood has fallen back on popular games as likely fodder for action epics. If "Scrabble: The Movie" or "Qwirkle or Death" appears on a future marquee, don't say you weren't warned. As its north-of-$200-million budget indicates, "Battleship" has been expanded considerably from its origins as a pre-World War I pencil and paper game to include a major alien invasion that puts the very fate of the human race at stake.

The 25 best L.A. films of the last 25 years "Los ANGELES isn't a real city," people have said, "it just plays one on camera." It was a clever line once upon a time, but all that has changed. Los Angeles is the most complicated community in America -- make no mistake, it is a community -- and over the last 25 years, it has been both celebrated and savaged on the big screen with amazing efficacy. Damaged souls and flawless weather, canyon love and beach city menace, homeboys and credit card girls, freeways and fedoras, power lines and palm trees . . . again and again, moviegoers all over the world have sat in the dark and stared up at our Los Angeles, even if it was one populated by corrupt cops or a jabbering cartoon rabbit.

For millions of people, the quietest room is never quiet enough. Even when surrounded by silence, they can hear a ringing or buzzing in their ears that drives them to distraction. The sound is called tinnitus, and sufferers — often people with hearing trouble thanks to advanced age or loud sounds — are willing to go to great lengths to stop the noise. Some plead with their doctors to cut their hearing nerves completely, but even this drastic measure won't help. The few patients who have had the procedure could still hear their tinnitus — and nothing else.

Like its creator and star Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedy of "The Dictator" is mercurial to the extreme and as crude as the massive oil reserves of Wadiya, the fictional North African nation where his latest movie prank begins. By turns hysterical, heretical, guilty, innocent, silly, sophisticated, teasing and tedious, the film follows the power-mad leader Admiral General Haffaz Aladeen as he loses his bearings, his beard and his heart in New York City. "The Dictator" underscores both Baron Cohen's genius and his folly, and delivers the actor's signature blend of scatological outrage, sagacity and at least one full-frontal assault with a flaccid unmentionable.

Half a century ago, Walt Disney leased a horse ranch in Placerita Canyon to shoot episodes of "The Adventures of Spin and Marty" from the classic ABC series "The Mickey Mouse Club. " Disney liked the property so much, with its rich variety of meadows, oak groves and mountains, that his production company began buying up land, eventually accumulating 890 acres. Over the decades, the storied Golden Oak Ranch, located in an unincorporated area of northeast Los Angeles County, has been used as backdrop for countless Disney TV shows and movies, including "Old Yeller" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. " Now Walt Disney Co. is moving closer to transforming part of the historic movie ranch into one of the largest high-tech production developments in Los Angeles in the last decade -- and the public will soon get its first say on the project.

CANNES, France - Walter Salles carefully raises the fingers of his right hand and gently strokes the back of his left. "These are characters," he says, explaining the gesture, "who experience things not vicariously but on the flesh. Men and women in a quest for something they couldn't define yet, who are trying to amplify their knowledge of the world. " More than half a century after "On the Road" was published, 30-plus years since Francis Ford Coppola bought the rights in 1978, and nearly a decade after Salles began working on the film, Jack Kerouac's peerless anthem to the romance of youthful freedom and experience has finally made it to the screen with its virtues and spirit intact.

In a match made in what's surely somebody's idea of musical heaven, the Long Beach Opera will take a sidelong look toward the Grateful Dead with a Sunday screening of Jim Kohlberg's "The Music Never Stopped." The film, which was an entry in the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, acts as a sort of stage-setter for the company's production of Michael Nyman's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," an opera based on the work of Dr. Oliver Sacks by the same name.

Video-on-demand services usually come into play toward the end of a film's life span — either to follow a theatrical run or to take a movie straight to video. For the website Prescreen, however, VOD is the launching pad. Prescreen, which debuted in September, offers users a curated selection of independent films, most available for 60 days and many exclusive to the site. A single film is spotlighted in a daily email, and most rentals cost $2 to $8 for a 48-hour viewing window.

MGM had great success with several movie franchises in the 1930s and '40s, including "The Thin Man" with William Powell and Myrna Loy, the Andy Hardy family comedies with Mickey Rooney and the Dr. Kildare medical dramas with Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore. The studio hit pay dirt again in 1939, when blond, brassy and endearing Ann Sothern was cast as a good-hearted honky tonk singer named Maisie Ravier. The first in the series, "Maisie" found her in the Wild West and falling in love with Robert Young.

The box-office debut of"Battleship" - an attempt to transform the kids' strategy pastime into a summer blockbuster - looked like a very different board game over the weekend: Trouble. Universal Pictures' $209-million alien invasion spectacle fizzled badly in its domestic premiere, grossing just $25.3 million and finishing a distant second to the third weekend of Disney's "The Avengers," according to Sunday estimates. The debut of "Battleship" - whose ticket sales were about 40% lower than some predictions - was even worse than the $30.2-million March opening of"John Carter,"one of the biggest fiascoes in Hollywood history, and the film's audience was surprisingly old. "I'm hugely disappointed in this opening," said Nikki Rocco, Universal's president of domestic distribution, who added that the film's respectable international numbers will soften the domestic blow.

The title "8 Million Ways to Die" was already taken, so "The Grey" had to settle for "The Grey," named for the plus-size wolves waging war on the desperate human survivors of an Alaskan wilderness plane crash. Tough situation. Frostbite. Wolf bite. Drowning. Falling from great heights. Harsh outcomes abound for man and beast. And yet the film takes some time to let its characters ruminate, by way of dialogue, on their circumstances, which gives "The Grey" a distinctly late 20th century feel.

After defeating Voldemort and his Death Eaters in seven bestselling books and eight hit movies, Harry Potter is taking on perhaps his greatest challenge yet: boosting the Los Angeles economy. Universal Studios on Tuesday took the wraps off plans to build a Southern California version of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which drove a 68% increase in attendance at its Orlando theme park during the first three months of the year compared with the same period in 2010. Ron Meyer, Universal's president, said his company would spend "several hundred million dollars" to create the attraction, which is expected to include a re-creation of Hogwarts Castle along with Potter-themed rides, shops and restaurants.

EUROPE Presentation Experts will help first-time visitors to Europe plan a realistic budget and devise a workable itinerary as well as discuss security and safety issues. When, where: 7:30 p.m. Monday at Distant Lands, 20 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena. Admission, info: Free. RSVP to (626) 449-3220. BICYCLING Presentation Want to tour the California coast or another destination by bike? Experts will offer tips on gear and clothing as well as tours.

Moviegoers may be impressed by "Snow White and the Huntsman's" computer-generated trolls, flying fairies and mythical beasts. But it could be Colleen Atwood's complicated, handmade costumes that really steal the show. The film's Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) may be losing her grip on the title of fairest of them all, but she nevertheless tops the cast's best-dressed list. In some cases, some of Ravenna's 20 outfits (counting several multiple versions of the same gowns) took weeks to construct, though they might appear on screen for only a few seconds.