Clips from The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Sam Raimi plays 'Warcraft'

Sam Raimi has signed on to direct "Warcraft," the live-action film adaptation of the fantasy videogame franchise "World of Warcraft."

Legendary Pictures and vidgame publisher Blizzard Entertainment are mounting the film, and Warner Bros. will co-finance and distribute. The team boasts an impressive pedigree: In addition to the director of "Spider-Man," the partners have added "The Dark Knight" producer Charles Roven to the creative mix.

The plan is for Raimi to supervise development of "Warcraft" and shoot the picture after he completes work on "Spider-Man 4," which gets under way early next year for Columbia Pictures.

This is weird, Harry Potter is supposed to be in the local dollar movie this weekend, that seems awful fast. And they've only got two showings a day, early afternoon and 10 PM. Night at the Museum is on two screens.

I wasn't crazy about HP6. I think the reason is that there wasn't a whole lot of plot. All that time was spent with Drago and the vanishing cabinet but to what end? So that some Deatheaters could come through, smash up Hogwarts' Great Hall and set fire to a hut? The Deatheaters were completely unnecessary to killing Dumbledore, so why were they even there? Without the book's big battle, they were redundant.

I thought the Teen Hormone bits were charming but overemphasized. And I agree with Jessica(?) that Ginny's shoelace-tying-blowjob was just weird.

In related news, this bit from the New Yorker's Anthony Lane proves that slash-recognition can be found in the oddest places:

Unless I am mistaken, [Dumbledore] himself has a quiet thing for Harry, forever putting an arm around his shoulder. "Wands out, Harry," he commands.

[link]

There was a whole post on Gawker about the homoeroticism in HP6.

ETA: [link]

Ha! I liked this bit: Dumbledore confronts a young Voldemort about a literal flaming box of secrets in his closet!

Alice in Wonderland trailer: [link]

Saw Half Blood Prince yesterday. I was ... wildly disappointed. It felt completely disjointed, and the storylines they focused on seemed really off to me, especially the angsty! silly! teen! romance .

I thought Rickman was horribly underused, too. But I will say that I thought the spontaneous wand-lighting moment when Dumbledore died was actually a nice shortcut to the general grief, since the setup of the funeral in the book would have taken a lot of time without a lot of payoff, except a chance to cry a little longer.

The whole thing just felt off to me, as if they'd thrown some random scenes at the screen and called it good as a placeholder. Definitely my least favorite of the films.

I don't necessarily disagree with Amy's point about the wand lighting scene. It did cover a lot of ground pretty much instantly. Except that it sort of made me wonder if Aerosmith had come to perform at the funeral .

bonny, BWAH. Exactly.

Somewhere, "Free Bird" was playing, I bet ...