It's probably a music rights issue—the scene has them singing "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," which is still copyrighted. The DVD also drops a few other scenes incorporating copyrighted music, like "Home for the Holidays."

I paid $60 to see Weird Al alone a couple of months ago. It was definitely worth it.

The Jack Reacher folks shouldn't be counting too much on the international box office to save them. The movie is tanking in China, where getting a day-and-date release with the U.S. didn't keep it from opening in fourth place and getting trounced by Mechanic: Resurrection (which made around $24m to Jack Reacher's…

Not just early film history—one of the prizes of my poster collection is the one-sheet for Never the Twain, a 1974 film from schlock master Brad F. Grinter (Flesh Feast, Blood Freak) in which a man is possessed by the spirit of Mark Twain while attending the Miss Nude World pageant. The movie was apparently never…

沢 is the postwar simplification of 澤. Akira Kurosawa's surname is sometimes written as 黒沢, but it's usually 黒澤 because that's what he preferred—not surprising, since he was already in his mid-30s when the simplification occurred and the government gave individuals the latitude to use simplified or unsimplified…

Jia has actually spoken, in all seriousness, about retiring from film and becoming a full-time restaurateur. He already opened another noodle restaurant in Taiyuan a few years ago, after A Touch of Sin was banned and he decided to leave Beijing.

The last three years alone have seen a loose adaptation helmed by Stephen Chow and two movies directed by Soi Cheang, and Tsui Hark is currently in post-production on a sequel to Chow’s film.

Franz Frazetta's batshit poster for The Gauntlet. Grossly misleading on multiple levels (Clint only wishes he had biceps like that, 1970s Phoenix wasn't quite the postapocalyptic urban hellscape shown therein, etc.) but it's also 100% appropriate for the film.

Beijing is apparently confirmed now—it'll be showing at the Bona International Cinema in Chaoyang. Also tickets will run 288 yuan, or about $43. I hope you at least get a program with that.

He already told us. He's Bobo.

Lucas doesn't own Lucasfilm anymore and the odds he has any day-to-day involvement with the company at this point are pretty slim.

I am positive there is no such job as Head of Content.

I have no doubt that this is true under some rubrics, but the Catholic Church has a surprisingly unequivocal take on it—per the Catechism, the fallen angels "radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign" and their sin is "unforgivable."

Sure doesn't sound inaccurate. Apparently they installed special equipment at Lincoln Center for the premiere (including two laser projectors "so cutting-edge that they have not yet been installed in cinemas"), and Lincoln Center wasn't exactly a low-end venue to begin with.

I caught a 35mm screening of Re-Animator this week, but I really have nothing to add to everything that's been written about it, so here's some stuff about a couple of Chinese documentaries:

I prefer the Old Man Murray theory of clown "scariness":

The clips I see on Youtube look like tape, not film, though The Hitchhiker and Philip Marlowe, Private Eye started they same year and it looks like they were shot on film (not that anyone is clamoring for HD remasters of those shows). So these "remasters" are probably just going to be upscaled versions from the…

I've written this before, but I'll repeat it here: the fact this is coming out in China in December (their biggest month for domestic blockbusters) and the U.S. in February is a pretty good indication of who the intended audience really is.

I'll buy you a Coke any time, Burl.

He made The St. Valentine's Day Massacre for Fox and had a sufficiently bad experience to send him back to independent filmmaking. A few years later he made Von Richtofen and Brown for UA and had a sufficiently bad experience to retire from directing for the next couple of decades.