Movies

The hottest thing in movie rentals is as old as the Coke machine -- and just as red. Redbox movie kiosks are popping up by the thousands in supermarkets, drugstores, restaurants and convenience stores around the country. The kiosks stock DVDs that rent for $1 a day, a remainder-bin price that is less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Michael Lewis' 2006 book "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game" is a riveting, often heart-wrenching story of Michael Oher, a 6-foot-5, 350-pound African American teenager who is transformed from a homeless vagabond to a star football player, largely thanks to Leigh Anne Tuohy, a dynamic evangelical Christian who helps provide him with a surrogate family and a shot at success in life. When Allen Barra reviewed the book for the Washington Post, he was full of admiration for Lewis' writerly skills.

Her 40-pound weight loss isn't -- insists Nia Vardalos -- some diabolical plan to land herself in the pages of People magazine, amid Valerie Bertinelli, Melissa Joan Hart and myriad new celebrity mothers proving their moral and genetic superiority by dropping their baby weight within days of giving birth. "I find it strange being mentioned as some sort of accomplishment or triumph," says Vardalos, the unlikely writer-star of the unlikely box-office smash of 2002, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."

Early on in 2007's comedy hit "Knocked Up," Seth Rogen and a bunch of buddies, nearly all of them Jewish, are hanging at a nightclub when Rogen announces that he's just seen "Munich," the Steven Spielberg film about an Israeli assassination squad. "That movie with Eric Bana kicking . . . ," Rogen says. "For every movie with Jews, we're the ones getting killed, 'Munich' flips it on its ear. . . . If any of us get [lucky] tonight, it's because of Eric Bana."

In the complex tango between movies and video games, Hollywood may be losing its lead. Motion picture studios have had a penchant for adapting games into movies all the way back to 1993's "Super Mario Bros.," which starred Bob Hoskins as the mustachioed hero Mario and Dennis Hopper as the villainous King Koopa, with varying degrees of success. But today at the giant Comic-Con International fan convention in San Diego, Microsoft Corp.

Sony Pictures Entertainment received court approval to bring Michael Jackson to the big screen, and it set a release date on what just may be the toughest weekend of the year at the U.S. box office. The court's authorization, announced Monday in Probate Court by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff, allows them to edit more than 80 hours of rehearsal and behind-the-scenes footage into a movie. The deal was negotiated last month by Sony Pictures and its sibling unit, Sony Music Entertainment, with the Michael Jackson Estate and AEG Live, producer of the late singer's planned London concert series.

Many Sundance Film Festival movies left this year's gathering without a distributor, but indie film pioneer Harvey Weinstein is alleging that one of the festival's most acclaimed movies -- "Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire" -- actually was sold twice. In three lawsuits filed Wednesday in New York against the film's sales agent, Cinetic Media, Lionsgate Films and the film's producers, Weinstein Co.

Auditioning in December for the role of a Bollywood villain, Rajan Verma was asked to act like a man attacking a train or a building. He clutched a toy gun and spewed out what he hoped sounded like a venomous diatribe. Verma, 28, had no idea what the movie was about. But when the casting director handed him a black T-shirt, beige cargo pants, a blue backpack and a replica of an AK-47 assault rifle, he knew instantly.

Is humanism in film dead? If you consult box-office wonder "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" -- with its crush of ultra-violent, heavy-metal robots -- maybe so. If you talk to Teri Schwartz, the new dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, the answer is hopefully not.

As Hollywood rushes headlong into 3-D filmmaking, few companies have as much to gain -- or lose -- as RealD of Beverly Hills. The privately owned technology company with 75 employees has emerged from obscurity to become the leading provider of 3-D systems for movie theaters, outflanking established players such as Dolby Laboratories Inc. RealD's products -- which include an adapter that attaches to the lenses of digital projectors and lightweight glasses -- account for 90% of the U.S. market.