Well, I ventured out of my art house hole last week to catch a Friday morning showing of Snakes on a Plane (a whopping 3555 screens) and I loved it. I finally got the summer movie I wanted. I was ready to hate it, I admit, mostly because I was peeved about New Line not screening it for the press, and all the B.S. they churned out to explain themselves ("it's not a movie for the critics," "everyone's going to get to see it together," etc.). In the end, they wound up with a fairly paltry $15 million gross, mainly because the core audience -- you good folks, the savvy Internet users -- got wind of the film not screening for the press and assumed it was a loser. With a slate of good reviews, mine included, I guarantee business would have been a bit brisker.

While we're at it, let me duck back down into my dank, darkened art house realm and talk about guilty pleasures. Let's start at the bottom, with a gay romantic comedy, The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green, currently hanging on by its manicured nails on one lousy screen with barely enough gross to pay back the caterers. Based on a comic strip, the film is about a wishy-washy hero who can't decide what he wants; when his boyfriend asks him to move in, he panics and breaks up. Most reviewers complained about this guy (played by Daniel Letterle), but the performance was just sunny and flighty enough to score a win. Not to mention that the entire movie has a sort of goofball unreality to it; it sets up the rules that anything is allowed to happen, then it plays by those rules and plays hard.

Last month, Scott told you about New Line's planned remake of the cult-classic Japanese film Battle Royale. It turns out that contrary to what was reported by our source, Variety, the studio has not completed acquiring the rights just yet. But otherwise the Americanized version is on its way toward production. So far, fans of the original are outraged at the idea and many people are baffled at how New Line is going to handle the violent story of a class of 9th graders who have to kill each other. Surely, they think New Line is going to screw it up by toning it down.

The New York Times talked with Roy Lee, who has produced remakes of the Asian films The Grudge, Dark Water, The Lake House and The Ring, and who is now producing Battle Royale, about the issues of the film's content and what we might expect from his version. It will take place in America (like all his remakes save for The Grudge) and will still be about high school students. Lee said that to tone down the story, he could make it so the students are in jail (or juvie?) at the beginning, but he sees that as pointless. He also assures that the film will be R-rated -- with a very hard R -- because the original would have received an NC-17 if released in the U.S. Finally he admits to being a huge fan of the original and has no intentions of ruining it with a bad film.

We can all breath easier now, right?. I mean, he must just not have been a huge fan of his other remakes, right? That's why they were bad films (okay, The Ring was okay). Personally, I'm still not assured that Lee will be able to appropriately handle the material over here.

In the new film The Lake House, Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock play residents of the same house, but in different years, who are able to correspond via time-traveling letters. Although the premise is pretty fantastic, the first response I get from people is not about the time displacement, but about the fact that the characters still practice the old-fashioned art of letter writing rather than email. After all, The Shop Around the Corner was already updated for the digital age as You've Got Mail. Now we get this film about physical, tree-wasting post?

Well, it turns out Reeves and Bullock can relate pretty well to their characters. They have been pen-pals, with the pen being literal, since they starred together in Speed twelve years ago. In fact Reeves doesn't even own a computer and avoids email as much as possible. This is Neo, for goodness sakes! Bullock defends him, though, saying that email is not as "special." She says, "I love keeping in contact with Keanu through letters because I can revisit our conversations whenever I like."

Sandra Bullock successfully extended her June 2003 restraining order against crazed fan, Thomas James Weldon, until 2009. The over-enthusiastic Weldon allegedly followed the Miss Congeniality star throughout three states and bombarded her with faxes and voice mails, (I didn't hear her complaining when it was Matthew McConaughey ...). Sandra told the court that, "I do not know defendant, I have never met him and I have never communicated with him." My sympathies to everyone involved, but WOW, talk about cross-promotion! Sandy is about to release, The Lake House, her newest rom-dram co-starring Keanu Reeves. The tag-line for The Lake House? How do you hold onto someone you've never met? A big thank you to Thomas James Weldon for cracking that brainteaser. 

Speaking of McConaughey ... he and Spanish siren, Penelope Cruz, are calling it quits. The twosome blamed busy work schedules as the main reason for their separation. Personally, I don't really care why they hit splits-ville, I just want to see who Penelope dates next! Let's see, judging from her past relationships it seems that her ideal man must be both a little bit crazy and a former "Sexiest Man Alive."  That pretty much narrows the field down to Nick Nolte and he'd totally go for Cruz. I hear he's a sucker for anything that rhymes with "booze", or any vice for that matter. Here's hoping he'll misplace her Spanish accent and assume she's from Tijuana ...