BoxOfficeFangrl

Yes and no, I mean, there's a certain amount of theatrics, but it has to be pretty easy for the line to blur, that's why you get stars who won't do certain things anymore because they feel like it would be cheating, even though it's just part of the job. How if Wolf of Wall Street rated PG anywhere? Coke and orgies for the whole family!

Some is simulated (the stuff that comes on movie channels late at night) but for hardcore it's the real deal. Sometimes for movies that get released in theaters, for the graphic scenes, they use prosthetics so it's not technically hardcore but looks realistic.

Spike TV has been running The Departed recently. The TV edits are kind of amusing. The mouths and words don't remotely match at times.

The same way people listen to songs more than once...

Not thrilled about the SEC in the title game yet again, but seeing Urban Meyer all sad-faced on the sidelines...

College football is huge in places that don't have a pro team in the state or nearby, like Alabama.

I don't have a problem with Hutcherson, I'm just surprised that a studio that picked Liam would also go for Josh, because they could've gone in the Alex Pettyfer direction.

So I see I missed video game, Potter and Hunger Games discussions (and now 90s music, SWV represent!)... I kind of write off the chemistry issues with Peeta and Gale in the movies as Katniss being very reserved and tomboyish and them being stuck in a dystopian killing game, so maybe it's undrealistic to expect Notebook or Titanic-level fireworks. In some ways, I'm kind of surprised/impressed with the studio that they did go ahead and cast Hutcherson for Peeta. I think Liam got cast because some studio exec figured teen girls would think he was hot. Josh has his admirers, but he's not the traditional "leading man" type (neither is Peeta the book character but that's never stopped Hollywood from wanting to upgrade the characters' looks). It's not like THG started out when they were little kids and they didn't know how he'd grow up, no, they picked Josh, anyway, when way "prettier" guys tried out.

Rollin makes me think of The Fast and the Furious so Limp Bizkit wasn't totally useless...

Never saw it, the reviews were rather meh, the advertising/hype was minimal and another straight R&J remake just seemed unnecessary. She was also in Ender's Game, though that's not quite on her shoulders in the same way. I do hope the commercial/critical success of True Grit won't prove to be a fluke for her.

For real, how is that possible? I guess it's in twelve theaters and some (most) of them were empty all day? That's a Zyzzyx Road kind of number.

I figured the Games couldn't go on to their conclusion because otherwise all the new supporting characters would die, or there would be multiple winners again, and that had been done the year before. And the series only has three books total, so there's not going to be the same level of story arc repetition that something like Harry Potter has. Anyway, I thought they might escape somehow, so it was either finding a secret passage out (unlikely, with the cameras everywhere) or blowing up the arena and the latter is a lot more dramatic.

Maybe traveling? Some people probably begin the trek home from Thanksgiving on Saturday.

ABC News ‏@ABC 2m .@ABC News confirms "Fast and Furious" star Paul Walker has died at the age of 40 Hollywood Reporter ‏@THR 1m Paul Walker Dies in Car Accident at Age 40 http://j.mp/18uTKYF

They're both hot, just different types of good looking. But variety is the spice of life... Amazing for Catching Fire, if it hits $300 million in 10 days that will be spectacular, even if not, $400m is a lock.

Longbottom, Neville Longbottom Matthew Lewis: I do think it will be someone around that age (b. 1989), maybe a few years older but not much more, when they get around to replacing Craig.

Can't say I'm a fan, even though there were clues left for both pairings all along, I was hoping they were just red herrings. Ron and Hermione having their first kiss when they did made zero sense. Harry only liking Ginny once he saw what a hot kisser she was with other guys, real great message there. I felt like Harry should have been put with a girl who brought out interesting aspects of his character rather than the one who would make him an "official" part of the Weasley family. In real life, sure, people love who they love, but in a fictional story there aren't those same constraints and you can do something more dynamic and meaningful.

Not feeling it, they should have done a Quidditch movie...

That's true but that makes it a kids' book, which is fine, but when people try to argue that Potter is so YA and dark and edgy and deep, I think, well, then, the plots and twists and the message have to hold up to better scrutiny than, "But it works for kids!" Order of the Phoenix is my favorite Potter book because it was the series moving into areas the little kid fans were just flat-out too young to understand, it showed the series really growing up and I felt HBP in a lot of ways was a retreat from that, which I found unfortunate. Calling it now, Matthew Lewis (Neville) is going to be the next James Bond after Daniel Craig.

Yeah, what were the odds that he was really going to be a bad guy after all? Also, I guessed the twist for the real reason he and James hated each other so much after Sorcerer's Stone, Azkaban sealed it for me. It was so obvious what the death was going to be in Book Six, because that type of character always dies at that point in a story, but you also knew that Snape was still going to turn out to be a "good" guy. Did people really think Book Seven was going to be all about how Snape was really evil the whole time and pulled the wool over Dumbledore's eyes? So the last two books were kind of lacking suspense for me on that front. I preferred the idea of Ginny really moving on to the whole "she just said she moved on but was really holding out for him to notice her once she got hot" angle. The Ginny build-up started in OotP when she started talking around him and was the secret Quidditch star and she caught the Snitch under Cho's nose and Ron was trying to push them together at the end when he heard she was dating Dean. What Ron wants, Ron gets, because what is Harry Potter all about but making the Weasleys the heart of everything? I think maybe the triangle in The Hunger Games is so dry because Katniss isn't the most sentimental character and they're all struggling in a dystopian universe.

But Ron and Hermione bickered all the time, that was supposed to be the tip-off that they were truly meant to be! I can't say Rowling didn't leave clues about where the ships were headed from the start, but for me, the main pairings are the least interesting option done in the least interesting way. When there's the attitude that they're too young, the romance has to be "lighthearted" and not "too gritty", well, okay, but you've kind of shaped the audience's thinking to discount romance as being really important to the story. So when that card is pulled with Snape in the end, and you want to say, this is the reason for everything he did, you had fans who were mad and couldn't deal with a Potter book using that angle, because they were trained to think that HP wasn't that kind of story. So I kind of wish Rowling had gone for it a bit more with the romance, not been scared to make it a little less innocent. I mean, I don't even like Ron and Hermione together, but when they were camping for months and had no adult supervision, they never got around to kissing for all that time because...? IRL, come on, Harry would've walked in on them about to screw at least once.

That's another issue, too, that the characters' flaws were all kind of smoothed out too much, but that was with several characters besides Harry, like Hermione and Snape. But I do think the whole "Dumbledore explains it all, or Hermione is there to look it up" aspect of the books is a huge issue with adapting the films, less so when he's a little kid but more in the later books when Harry is supposed to be the man. In movies especially audiences respond more to characters who discover/do things themselves. Also the romance, the way it's done in Potter just seems...wrong to me, where it's only natural the audience is more invested in his friends getting together, because you know them a lot better, collectively, than Harry and who he ends up with. It would be like in Star Wars, if Luke got with Hannah Solo or something. Nice enough, I guess, but a bit "who cares" compared to Han and Leia. Speaking of the Imperial March, Hedwig's Theme is just a rearranged version of it, right?

That's the basic problem of condensing the movies down to being all about Harry. I don't fault the movies for not all being 4-5 hours long but Rowling for creating a world around such an ultimately blah protagonist who's led around by the nose and constantly saved by smarter/more dynamic characters. It would be different if he weren't the freaking title character for every single book. Maybe that won't be a problem with the Fantastic Beasts movie, which BTW seems like a big underwhelmer waiting to happen. They really should've done a Quidditch movie.

The night game on Thanksgiving only goes back to 2006 and stores have only in the past few years started holding Black Friday sales on Thursday night, so you have men and women who might have gone to the movies in the evening, watching football or shopping instead. It definitely has an impact on the box office. If you look back at 2001 or so, you'll see movies actually increasing on Thanksgiving Day, which pretty much never happens now.

Has someone saved all the different thread titles since Friday?