How faithful should film adaptations be? The issue arises both with novels and with films that are remade: fans of the original are none-too-pleased to see the personality of beloved characters changed, settings or time periods moved, or -- horror of horrors! -- the ending changed. Watchmen ignited a mini-firestorm with the decision to alter the ending of the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. On a somewhat smaller scale, faithful readers of Jodi Picoult's novel My Sister's Keeper are upset that the ending was changed for Nick Cassavetes' just-released movie version.

Author Picoult disclaims responsibility while trying to be diplomatic. "Yes, I know the ending is different," she writes on her official site. "Yes, I know some of you are very upset. I didn't change it. The author has no control over the movie, and it was hard for me to accept too. However, there's a great deal in the movie that I think is great, and I enjoyed watching it - and I hope you did too." She suggests that her fans let Warner Brothers know how they feel. As a point of interest, four out of five comments on my review for Cinematical have complained about the ending.

It seems foolish to try and establish a hard-and-fast rule that original endings should never be changed -- filmmakers should have the artistic right to exercise dramatic license when adapting a work to a different medium. Yet how often have film versions actually improved endings that they've changed?

I'm not ashamed to say that I cry at the movies. Not frequently, but occasionally a story and its characters will grab hold of me to the extent that I'm completely caught up in the emotions and feelings being expressed. Films as disparate as John Ford's The Searchers and Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express have caused me to weep with joy, relief, and sorrow.

Despite a relentless barrage of scenes evidently designed with the sole goal of jerking tears, Nick Cassavetes' My Sister's Keeper did not make me cry. It is, however, one of the most glorious-looking terminal cancer pictures I've ever seen. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion, The Natural) paints the oft-mundane proceedings in an otherworldly glow, as though the transition to the next life had already begun. That's the guiding principle of the movie as a whole; even though an inflammatory and emotionally wrenching issue serves as the linchpin for the plot, great pains are taken to soften the blows so as not to inflict lasting damage upon the viewer.

Frankly, that latter point, much more than whether I personally shed tears, is what prevents My Sister's Keeper from escaping middlebrow territory. Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric are splendidly noble as Brian and Sara Fitzgerald, whose daughter Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) is diagnosed at a young age with leukemia. Brian and Sara conceive another child with genetic modifications so she can serve as a donor to her sister. Anna (Abigail Breslin) (*) seems fine with all the body part donations until Kate's condition worsens to the point that she needs a kidney transplant. Then 11-year-old Anna marches into the office of well-known lawyer Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin) and demands medical emancipation from her parents.

On a recent visit to the Chicago-based set of the A Nightmare on Elm Street remake, producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form gave us online types a good hour with which to poke and prod about that film and countless other projects in the works. The Elm St. stuff will have to wait until the time is right, but at the moment, you're just a hop, skip and jump away from finding out where Platinum Dunes currently stands with a Friday the 13th sequel, their present involvement in reported remakes of The Birds and Rosemary's Baby, and how exactly the little-seen Horsemen ended up slipping through the cracks last spring...

Read the full interview at Horror Squad!

Hey, now I can care about a Y: The Last Man movie again! (Harsh, but true -- I cannot tell a lie.) After months of being linked to D. J. Caruso's adaptation, Shia LaBeouf is apparently uninterested in taking the titular role.

LaBeouf told Wizard that it's too similar to his Transformers character. "You take Sam and you put a monkey on his shoulder. "I don't know if it's that big a differential. It seems like he's the ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation again. I'm not willing to make that movie currently, and may be too old to play the role by the time it does come around."

That's fine by me, although if there was a role written for LaBeouf, it was this one. Now, I'm only at the third volume (I never seem to have cash on me when I find the trades), so he may grow up and change, but on the outset Yorick is a rather immature and arrogant sort of guy. He's essentially Mutt Williams -- if Mutt was crossed with James "Sawyer" Ford's ability to drop pop culture references every two seconds. But to me, that sort of character needs a young actor who can really make him likeable under the slick smugness ... and LaBeouf isn't that guy for me. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is (though he's a little too far into his 20s), as is Daniel Radcliffe. There's a 20-something out there just dying to have a meaty, sci-fi story like this, and I will embrace him when he's cast ... unless its Zac Efron, in which case I will make a formal apology to LaBeouf.

[via Superhero Hype]

For a business that is notoriously slow to develop groundbreaking creative projects, the film industry can be remarkably quick when it comes to cashing in on proven success. Thus, when the romantic comedy He's Just Not That Into You -- timed for release to capitalize on Valentine's Day earlier this year -- grossed an estimated $94 million for New Line Cinema / Warner Brothers, the company decided to prepare something similar for Valentine's Day next year, reports the New York Times.

Since He's Just Not That Into You featured an ensemble cast of notable actresses (Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Aniston), the new project, imaginatively titled Valentine's Day, hopes to pack Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Garner, Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, and Shirley MacLaine into a storyline about "would-be romantics working their way through a tangle of circumstances in Los Angeles." None of the women have signed on yet, nor has the company's director of choice, Garry Marshall, nor has Ashton Kutcher, whose name has also been floated, but potential Green Lantern Bradley Cooper has agreed to play a man in the movie.

Lionsgate has sown up Halloween with the Saw franchise, so, strictly from a business perspective, this makes good sense. Of course, just packing "names" into a movie for the sake of names won't necessarily work. Still, if Valentine's Day is successful with big stars and establishes a new franchise for New Line, they could populate sequels with less-expensive stars and turn a decent profit for years to come.

I apparently loved Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.

See, according to the logic doled out by the monogamy-hating, scotch-addled mind of one Connor Mead (Matthew McConaughey), the power of any relationship falls to whoever cares less, and my friends, I really could not care less about whether or not his boozing, cruising lothario was going to learn any magical lesson lifted straight out of Dickens. Ergo, the further I slumped in my seat while watching this mawkish, obvious, and not very funny film, the more powerful I grew in this particular relationship, and let me tell you right now: that and two bucks will get you a cup of coffee, with no need for any more artificial sweetener...

(Note: Possible spoilers ahead for 17 Again.)

Before all the spring movies get pushed completely out of the way by the summer blockbusters, here's a question for you: Did the star of High School Musical make a movie in favor of teen pregnancy? Conceding that she may be taking Zac Efron and 17 Again way too seriously, actress Elizabeth Banks (The Uninvited, Zack and Miri Make a Porno) writes in The Huffington Post: "The message of the movie seemed to be ... knocking up your high school sweetheart is A-OK! Especially if you give up that Syracuse scholarship to marry her! F College!"

Banks is careful to note that she really enjoyed the movie and everyone in it before expressing her concerns: "This movie pretty much glamorizes teenage parenting. ... The problem with this message is that, according to unreliable online sources and my own anecdotal evidence collected over my 3?-something years: this is crap. ... Seriously, this film is a fun ride. I just wish the flick had explicitly mentioned, just mentioned, that it might not be cool to have a kid when you're 18 so for G-D's sake, use birth control!"

Unlike Banks, I am not "inappropriately lustful" for Efron and have no great desire to see the movie. (Jette Kernion reviewed it for Cinematical.) But 17 Again has made a good deal of money, which obviously means a lot of you have seen it. So is Elizabeth Banks really taking the movie too seriously? Are comedies exempt from serious consideration? Do movies aimed specifically at teens have a greater responsibility to include information that reflects real-life consequences of the actions depicted?

Just when you thought it was safe to go wandering in the woods with your portable DVD player, Jason Voorhees appears to remind you: check your calendar before leaving the house. I wish that the Friday the 13th reboot, directed by Marcus Nispel and produced by Michael Bay, had lived up to the promise of its first 20-25 minutes. As I wrote upon its release in February, "the set-up in the present day was classically simple, the action flared up in mean and bloody outbursts, and Jason's appearance was note-perfect."

It's too bad the movie never regained its footing after it paused to take a breath, but I know that won't keep horror fans from checking it out when it hits DVD on June 16, especially since the unrated version will include additional scenes (reportedly nine minutes of unseen footage). The theatrical version did appear short of some of the expected bloody carnage -- a few scenes felt incomplete, while others stopped just before more explicit mayhem might have been unleashed. DVD Active has the early artwork; the unrated edition on DVD includes a "Rebirth of Jason" featurette, while the Blu-ray will have both the theatrical and unrated editions, plus two additional featurettes and a "terror trivia track."

Meanwhile, Shock Til You Drop has details on the extras and artwork for the new special editions of Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter, Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. All three feature audio commentaries and featurettes; Part IV even gets a "fan commentary" by the talented directors Adam Green (Hatchet, Spiral) and Joe Lynch (Wrong Turn 2: Dead End). Personally, I'll be buying at least two out of those three. They'll all be released on Tuesday, June 16.

We've all known for a while now that Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson's teams of merry filmmakers were planning to make TWO movies out of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, but now we have confirmation of the plan by the filmmakers themselves, and they doled out a few small details to Empire Magazine in honor of the publication's 20th birthday. And those quotes go a little like this:

Del Toro: "We've decided to have The Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur."

Jackson: "We decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie. The essential brief was to do The Hobbit, and it allows us to make The Hobbit in a little more style, if you like, of the [LOTR] trilogy."

As Empire's Chris Hewitt observes, this should put to bed those theories that one film would focus on The Hobbit and the second would be some sort of bridging appendices miscellaneous whatnot. Expect a lot more on The Hobbit over the next three years, including every nerdly little tidbit we can get our pipeweed-lovin' hands on.

And hey, Happy Birthday Empire!