herbie Tagged Articles at Cinematical

There is a moment in Joe Dante's neato kitsch comedy, Matinee, when Cold War kids Gene (Simon Fenton) and Dennis (Jesse Lee) are sitting in a movie theater, bored silly by the zany (and entirely fictional) body-switching family comedy, The Shook-Up Shopping Cart (a double bill with the equally non-existent The Bashful Bobcat). It was Dante's way of simultaneously mocking and paying tribute to the low-concept filler that Disney made in between what are now the company's enduring classics, and it was a hilarious moment.

While Disney's remake of their 1959 mega-hit, The Shaggy Dog, is not loaded with hilarious moments, it is, as they say, what it is, even if it is that same sort of self-congratulatory jape. Tim Allen plays a dog-hating lawyer who by convenient magic becomes one, makes a fun enough show of it, rolling together nicely the parts played by Tommy Kirk in the original and Dean Jones in the 1976 sequel, The Shaggy D.A. Like My Three Sons star Fred MacMurray in the original, Allen is a Disney contract player, and while he may not be the fatherly comfort that the MacMurray was, he can certainly sell a movie in the same way. People know Tim Allen from Home Improvement; they know him as the voice of Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story movies; they know him from The Santa Clause, and that is all the selling/warning that most people need.
 

Perhaps on news of it's $46 million weekend, people seem to be dumping Batman Begins shares - its price is down a whopping 9.45 points to $146.12 on heavy trading of over 85 million shares. Almost all of the actors associated with the current Bat-pic are also down with the exception of Liam Neeson, whose bond remains unchanged despite trading volume of 2 million shares. It's hard to figure out why it's down so much right now. None of this week's new releases are likely to knock it from it's perch at the top. It's not until War of the World on June 29 that the Dark Knight will see any serious competition. Perhaps it's more of a statement on the general suckiness of this year's box-office numbers than any specific commentary on the movie.

• Disney is planning a big-screen, live-action version of the classic cartoon Underdog, and to that end, they're "pondering a nationwide talent search for the next dog star." Producer Gary Barber: "Anything where you have a dog in that superhero context, that's appealing on a global basis."
• Five days. 73 countries. $41.7 million. Such are the numbers on Batman Begins' foreign box office.
• Former Batman Val Kilmer, currently appearing on the London stage, "kept a appropriately low profile" the other night at Batman Begins' premiere there - which means, he wasn't invited.
• Picturehouse, the new Bob Berney-led venture comingling the assets of HBO Films and New Line Pictures, has announced several additions to their New York-based staff. Among them: longtime Berney cohort Rob Schwartz has been tapped as COO, and former Newmarket and Miramax exec Crystal King has singed on as VP of marketing.
• Disney has picked up a pitch by Aline Brosh-McKenna called Trophy Wives' Club, a May-December romantic comedy.
• Remake round-up: Joe Leydon predicts that Herbie: Fully Loaded will be able to overcome any tabloidy damage to score with its target audience, and Justin Chang has little but good to say about Land of the Dead, which resurrects George A. Romero's "legendary franchise with top-flight visuals, terrific genre smarts and tantalizing layers of implication."