Movie News & Gossip

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - New Line has picked up a pitch from Darren Lemke, the writer behind the studio's Bryan Singer-directed project "Jack the Giant Killer," that reimagines the classic tale of "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" as an action-adventure movie.

"Nutcracker" is best known as the Christmas ballet with music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, but the story was written by E.T.A. Hoffmann decades before the ballet's debut in 1892.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Jack Black, who provided the lead voice in DreamWorks Animation's' "Kung Fu Panda," is once again heading into the land of animation.

The actor will produce a feature film based on a pitch by writer Jason Micallef that centers on cryptozoology. The project has been preemptively picked up by Universal-based Illumination Entertainment.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Football film "The Blind Side" tackled the top spot at North American box offices with $20.4 million in ticket sales for a rare climb up the charts in its third week, according to studio estimates on Sunday.

Vampire romance "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" dropped one place from last weekend to No. 2 with $15.7 million in ticket sales, and new release "Brothers," about soldiers returning home from war, landed in third place with $9.7 million.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "Capote" filmmaker Bennett Miller is in negotiations to direct "Moneyball," a baseball drama starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's who rewrote the unwritten rulebook of baseball.

Columbia's on-again, off-again project got back on track in recent weeks as Pitt and the producers -- Michael De Luca, Scott Rudin and Rachael Horovitz -- met with potential directors. A Steven Soderbergh-directed iteration of the project was scrapped in June. The movie began its rehabilitation with when Aaron Sorkin ("The West Wing," "Sports Night") was brought on to write a draft, drawing upon Steve Zaillian's earlier take.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Rock on, Anvil. The aging band that never tasted music stardom found a measure of Hollywood fame on Friday when "Anvil, The Story of Anvil" won two film awards, including best documentary, from a key group of moviemakers.

The International Documentary Association, a Los Angeles group that promotes and supports nonfiction film, late Friday awarded its top prize to "Anvil" director Sacha Gervasi for his story about the metal band that for more than three decades has tried, and failed, to score one major hit record.

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - For those of you who have been desperately awaiting the latest comic opus from David and Scott Hillenbrand, the creators of "National Lampoon Presents Dorm Daze" and its sequel "National Lampoon's Dorm Daze 2: College @ Sea," well, the suspense is over. The director-producer brothers have brought you "Transylmania," the latest in what will no doubt be -- thanks to the onslaught of vampires that have been lately populating movie and television screens -- an endless onslaught of bloodsucker spoofs.

Hopefully, some of them will be better than this one, which opened Friday, and "Stan Helsing," which recently made a brief pit stop in theaters before being shipped off to video stores. Written by the team of Patrick Casey and Worm Miller (who, the production notes inform us, began their collaboration in the 1980s in juvenile detention hall -- who says our education system is failing?), the lame comedy revolves around a group of college students spending a semester abroad at a university housed in an ancient castle in the dark heart of Translyvania.

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - From its generic title to its overly familiar plot line to its B-list cast, "Breaking Point" has the feel of a late-night entry on Cinemax, which no doubt will be its fate sooner rather than later.

This tired tale of a disgraced lawyer attempting to achieve personal and professional redemption should score mild urban business thanks to the presence of rap stars Busta Rhymes and Kirk "Sticky Fingaz" Jones, but even their fans are more likely to catch it on DVD. The indie opened Friday (December 4).

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - The tough-guy mugs of Matt Dillon, Jean Reno, Laurence Fishburne and Fred Ward aren't the only familiar aspects of "Armored," an old-school heist movie that doesn't exactly reinvent the genre.

But for a while there, it nonetheless threatens to get the job done thanks to an approach that forgoes multiple camera angles and flashy cutting in favor of good old-fashioned character motivation and sturdy performances. At least that's until plot improbabilities begin to mount as high as an escalating body count, ending with a whimper of a disappointingly slack payoff. Dropped in the middle of a crowded holiday season, the Screen Gems release, which opened Friday (December 4), will not likely generate a significant box-office haul.