The suddenly massive contingent of preteen female Comic-Con attendees swooned at the sight of Korean pop star/Ninja Assassin star Rain, and 300/RocknRolla hunk Gerard Butler, at Joel Silver’s Dark Castle Entertainment presentation. Jeremy Piven threatened to take his shirt off. Crickets.

Highlights:

–Dark Castle is investing in a bunch of direct-to-DVD sequels of moderate horror hits; judging by the reaction to The Hills Run Red, no one cares.
–”Korean music video sensation.” Rain is a legitimate sensation. At least with the girls were just still a little turned on from Twilight. Boys hold their hardons for “Gerry” Butler.
–Asking Joel Silver, Jeremy Piven and/or Guy Ritchie for words of encouragement is just about the biggest faux pas you can make as an attendee in Hall H.

–Joel Silver reveals the ten-words-or-less pitch that landed financing for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movie.
–Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s relationship was solid enough during filming of RocknRolla that she was tasked with shooting syringes into Gerard Butler’s ass

6:39 - Q: Gerard, what’s your favorite memory from being on set?

Yep, there's another Dark Knight review, I just got back in having seen it in the UK previews. Wall-E I also saw recently, only a couple of days after release (yes, I was much more enthusiastic about Dark Knight than Wall-E at first)

*Contains Spoilers*

Walking to the cinema I tried my best to prepare to be disappointed, I know full well how films tear your hopes out when you are too enthusiastic.
This film is excellent, and harbors most if not all the mood and consistency of Begins, which I love in sequels. But the only flaw was how looooong it was. I was aware it was a full 20 minutes longer than (an already stretched) Batman Begins. More on that later.

From the get go, we have Ledger as The Joker, and throughout the film we are bombarded by his amazing performance. Now I know a few skeptics out there who feel people are overdoing Ledger's act, even glorifying due to his passing... but I do agree that his Joker steals the show. Much like Johnny Depp in the Pirates movies, as soon as he's on screen there is a great energy, and when he isn't, things settle.

Kevin Smith has a sort of Clerks-does-Letterman interview style. He uses it mercilessly on some Hollywood women who love to make pain: Gale Ann Hurd (producer Terminator, Terminator 2), Lucy Lawless (Xena, Battlestar Galactica), Jaime King (The Spirit, Sin City), and Pia Guerra (Y: The Last Man).

Highlights:

- Lucy Lawless has more sex than Kevin Smith (obviously)

- A 16 year-old palm reader warned Lucy of Jay Leno

- Jaime King is named after The Bionic Woman

- Zach and Miri opens on Halloween

Liveblogging transcript after the jump

5:20 - KS and Jaime King:

4:05 - Something secret (TRON 2!!!!!):

Wait a minute.

They’re back onstage.

Showing us something secret.

That “no one will see for another year or so….”

Some sort of a clip.

Disney logo, Tinkerbell flies over, and the castle turns evil looking.

Storm clouds.

Holy fucking shit.

IT’S TRON.

Badass light cycles and everyhing.

CGI galore, my mouth is on the floor.

Looks like a remake.

Clashing light cycles.

Dear god, someone please put this on YouTube.

Jeff Bridges is in it.

Bearded and everything.

Tron 2.

So a yellow and blue lightcycle clash on the game grid, duking it out.

Blue escapes through a crack in the wall, only to be taken down by yellow a bit later.

Forget Iron Man, Batman, Superman, and all the other average joe male superheroes. Comic-Con is all about the Barbie. Mattel’s booth has one glass display case tucked away in the corner, far away from their massive replica of Castle Grayskull, and it’s an entire homage to Barbie. You’ve got Barbie as Supergirl, Barbie as Wonder Woman, Barbie as Batgirl, Barbie as Catwoman, Barbie as Trixie from Speed Racer and… Barbie as Tippi Hedren from The Birds? Nothing really says “comic book fan” like a Barbie action figure dressed up as the star of a 1963 Hitchcock film, complete with a trio of attacking ravens. I totally want one. Photo evidence after the jump.

It comes as no surprise that The Dark Knight easily finished in first place again on Wednesday, adding an incredibly strong $18.3 million to its already very impressive total gross.

Knight has now brought in a mammoth $222.1 million, and it should easily cross the $300 million mark this coming weekend.

Not to be totally overshadowed, Mamma Mia! is also performing very well for a film of its kind. The musical finished in a distant, yet still strong, second place on Wednesday and it has now grossed $40.6 million. Mamma Mia! should face little competition for its desired female audience when Step Brothers and The X-Files: I Want To Believe open this weekend.

Journey to the Center of the Earth is continuing to hold up pretty well and it was able to finish in third place on Wednesday.

WALL-E is also showing considerable staying power. The robotic love story finished strong in fifth place by adding another $1.6 million to its impressive box office run.

2:09 - KNOWING clip:

Now they’re showing us a clip from the flick, it’s high school recess back in the 1950s, and a small girl named Lucinda is a bit… off.

Her class is told to draw pictures of the future, and they’ll get locked into a time capsule. Lucinda just writes down a ton of numbers…. and it gets locked away.

Nic Cage’s son gets the envelope with her numbers in it when they crack that sucker open, and strange stuff starts happening.

It turns out the page of digits contains dates of all the major disasters that have happened on the planet for the past 50 years, and it also predicts an event that’ll kill 81 people in the next few days.

Of course, no one believes poor Nic Cage, and he finds himself in the middle of a plane crash that slams into a traffic jam on a bridge. Killing 81 people.

CUE SPOOKY MUSIC.

So, he sets off on a quest to figure out what to do with the numbers… and the clip ends.

2:05 - KNOWING Panel

The giant hook came onstage to yank everyone off, and now they’re introducing Alex Proyas, “director of such movies like The Crow, Dark City, and more…”

Alex quipped, “I’m sorry I don’t have any beautiful actors here to sit next to me” to which a woman on the front row shouted “YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL!”

He was visibly flushed.

The pitfalls of elevating sketch comedy material to feature length are laid out like trophies on a mantle in this latest effort from the increasingly overexposed Ap Pack (as in Apatow), far and away the most prodigious tribe of the Frat Pack nation. Step Brothers and the forthcoming Pineapple Express, in fact, represent the Apatow factory’s seventh and eight films in just the past 12 months, and their fourth and fifth in just the first seven months of 2008—an output that would be entirely unobjectionable if even a small fraction were on par with The 40-Year Old Virgin or Knocked Up (as it happens, the only two entries actually directed by Apatow). Most, unfortunately, have turned out to be middling-to-bad, which is precisely the trajectory of Step Brothers, a tiresome misstep for the Talladega Nights team that’s unlikely to sustain much interest with any demographic beyond a largely marketing-driven opening week.

The story, as it were, concerns the rivalry between a pair of layabout live-at-home 40-ish goofballs who become intensely competitive stepbrothers when their respective single parents (Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen) decide to marry. Dale (John C. Reilly) and Brennan (Will Ferrell) aren’t that different—both act and talk like spoiled, foul-mouthed 13-year-olds—hence the intensity of their initial dislike for one another. For a pair of developmentally-challenged adult brats, there simply isn’t room enough for two in one house.

We were able to chat with Larry Collins, Vice President, Film for Carmike Cinemas about life in the exhibition industry and his own personal taste in movies.

Number of years he has been in the exhibition industry: 33

How did you get started?

"My first job in the industry was in high school. I had a summer job as an usher in Downtown Philadelphia and I saw Irma a Douce 47 times and I laughed every time. I just got fascinated with movies ... My stepfather owned some theatres in York, PA and as I got a little older I asked him some questions about the industry: How do the movies get there?, Who buys them?, Who sells them?

After college he got me an interview and I got a job with Universal as a student booker and I just progressed from there."

What was the first movie you saw in theatres?

"I don’t know if this was the first movie, but I saw the first Rock and Roll movie, Rock Around the Clock with Bill Haley and the Comets."

What is your favorite movie of all time?

"Lawrence of Arabia. Always has been and I think it always will be."

What does your job entail on a day-to-day basis?

One of the many fads for cinephilic YouTubers, perhaps next in popularity after mashups and sweded remakes, is the condensed movie. Actually, thanks to a recent Empire contest, the art of sweding and the art of fitting features into a 60-second time frame is now also a mashed-up fad (though I guess sweding has always involved shortened versions). But while in this day and age any fanboy can do a shortened remake of his or her favorite movie or an abridged recut that breaks a film down to its bare essentials (i.e. its use of the f-word), condensing a film is not necessarily a low art.