"Men of a Certain Age" are dead, but will "Friday Night Lights" shine on?

“Peter Berg told us he wants to do an FNL movie with Chandler/Britton off the final episode.”

As what you can without exaggeration call a rather huge fan of the recently deceased (just last night, in fact) "Friday Night Lights," the above tweet from Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy, definitely caught my eye this morning.

And while fans of TV shows that die, albeit with "FNL" after a five-year run that was quite impressive, always make the case for a movie to follow, this time it actually makes sense.

The show started out, after all, as a popular movie directed by Peter Berg, before going to develop a much richer panorama of characters in its TV life. And though I haven't seen the finale yet (it's aging like a fine wine on my DVR, mostly because it's hard to say goodbye to what I really think has been the best drama on network TV in the last 10 years or so), so I don't know what it set up for Kyle Chandler's Coach and Connie Britton's Tami Taylor, high school football is certainly a popular enough subject to warrant going forward with this, if all the right people (including show runner Jason Katims) are involved.

Besides, I haven't liked a Peter Berg movie since "The Kingdom," and last I looked he was dirtying his hands with a movie of the game Battleship (yes, really), so he'd certainly be better off pursuing this. 'Nuff said.


And moving on to another show I've come to love that certainly won't be heading to a movie theater anywhere near you or me, TNT has just cancelled the perpetually ratings-challenged "Men of a Certain Age."

Not terribly surprising news there, but disheartening all the same. The show definitely moved at its own extremely slow pace, but in doing so dived into the lives of the characters played by co-creator Ray Romano, Scott Bakula and the truly great Andre Braugher in rich and satisfying detail.

But I guess when your fans pretty much match the title of your show and you certainly don't fit in on a cookie-cutter network that specializes in facile buddy-buddy fare ("Franklin and Bash" and "Rizzoli & Isles," for example, neither of which I've seen), a two-year, 22-episode run is pretty much the best you can wish for. And with that, I'm off for a mundanely busy day of shopping, laundry and cooking, hopefully leavened with a viewing of that new "Winnie the Pooh" movie, which this man of a certain age still has plenty of time for. Peace out.

"Hancock": A tale of three movies, none of them any good

Well, I guess it had to happen eventually. After a summer in which I've liked just about everything I've seen since "Iron Man" (with the caveat that I simply skipped several flicks on general principle), I've finally found a true stinker in "Hancock."

I mean, even M. Night's "The Happening" kept me laughing throughout at just how bad it is in stretches and therefore, I must confess, made me enjoy watching it a lot more than I could have possibly expected, but this one is just a lifeless - and pretty much soulless - creation.

I suppose my opinion doesn't matter too much since Will Smith+the Fourth of July still=mad money in the bank ($41.3 million BEFORE the actual holiday), but that doesn't mean I won't sound off anyway.

So, who's to blame for making this an almost singularly unwatchable mess? There's plenty to go around, but it has to start at the top with Mr. Smith himself this time.

I've had my bones to pick with him through the years, but I never really thought it would come down to him not being enough of an asshole to make a movie work.

However, after spending his entire career crafting his image as the black guy so nice that even the late Jesse Helms (sorry, but he's on my brain after reading his obituary) might invite him home to dinner, he simply doesn't have the edge - no matter how hard he tries - to play a character as innately unlikable as the seriously flawed hero "Hancock." So what you get is Will Smith walking around looking surly for 90 minutes or so, telling all the jokes you've already heard in the trailer and no more of any note. What a waste.

I suppose I would have been able to forgive this if director Peter Berg and writers Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan had been able to choose which direction they wanted to go in with this one. Either unable or unwilling to turn the once-promising premise into a real satire on the nature of heroes and our expectations of them, they instead let the movie just get more and more boring as Hancock is rehabilitated, until it reaches a "twist" ending that will just make you want to scream "wtf!" at the screen (I managed to refrain, but it took a whole lot of self-control!)

It certainly felt like they just reached a point where, after putting together 70 minutes or so of footage that goes absolutely nowhere, they all huddled and came up with the most ludicrous way possible to bring this to its mercifully quick end (though sequels are definitely already on the way.)

Jason Bateman does his best to wrest some laughs from his part as Hancock's PR man, and indeed succeeds at a few points, but he's just fighting a losing battle here. Charlize Theron, however, just looked even more confused by this maddening flick than I was.

And, as much as it pains my heart to say it, Berg's direction here is almost as bad as the story itself. Unsure where to point his camera at many points, he simply lets it spin around at least 360 degrees, never for any apparent reason. And lest anyone who's never been here before think I just had it in for "Hancock" from the start, that's simply untrue. I have nothing but love for Berg's "Friday Night Lights" and even more so the nearly perfect TV show that followed in it wake. But "Hancock" is simply an awful movie from start to finish.

Even so, there are surely great things to come very soon in superhero land, with Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" coming next week and then a little movie you may have heard of called "The Dark Knight" right after that, so keep hope alive. Peace out.

Weekend update: What - if anything - is worth watching?

I suppose I'd be extremely remiss if I didn't lead off today with the news that Guillermo del Toro is now officially going to be making "The Hobbit," even if the news does now seem more than a little anticlimactic.

He'll be moving to New Zealand for the next four years because, I suppose, it's now written law that any Tolkein movie with Peter Jackson involved has to be filmed there (and I can certainly think of a few worse sacrifices to have to make.)

The somewhat dubious move, of course, is that they're actually making two movies, one that's the real "The Hobbit" and then a sequel that somehow bridges the gap between that work and the first of the "Lord of the Rings" novels. Since this rather extreme act of hubris means they certainly can't call the sequel "J.R.R. Tolkein's 'The Hobbit'," how about "Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson's imaginary bridge to 'The Lord of the Rings' "? I kid, of course, but I bet they'll both turn out to be simply uber-cool.

Though no release date has been set, Variety - with the four-year window - bets it will be one in 2011 and one in 2012, which seems to make sense.

And, before we move on to this week's movies, two bits of TV news, one nothing but bad and one that could turn out to be surprisingly good.

Just to get the ugly out of the way quickly (it is Friday, after all), NBC has definitely traded down in announcing Jimmy Fallon will take over Conan O'Brien's show when the latter moves into the "Tonight Show" chair. I've been wrong at least once before, and to be honest I rarely manage to stay up until 12:30 a.m. very often any more anyway, but I just can't see any scenario in which I'll do so for Jimmy Fallon. Sheesh.

In better news, Nathan Fillion - a k a Captain Mal from "Firefly" and "Serenity" - has signed on to star in a pilot for ABC called "Castle." Despite that rather mundane title, the premise - a "comic procedural" about a famous mystery novelist (Fillion) who helps the NYPD solve crimes - does hold some promise.

But enough about that ... now lets take a look at this week's offerings (which are all really just filling space until the arrival of "Iron Man" anyway), with the added bonus of a trailer for a flick that should probably have made my previous Summer Top 10 list.

1. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
I realize that I'm far too old to watch this one in a theater, and I can't with good conscience recommend that anyone else take a chance on anything this juvenile, but I will indeed be there Saturday afternoon. My inner snob led me to pass on "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," but once I saw it on DVD it's just become one of those silly little comfort movies - like "Office Space" or "Super Troopers" - that help erase my mind after a particularly dreary work day. Besides, here's what critic Nell Minow, an always reliable friend to this site, had to say:

Cheerfully offensive, cheekily raunchy, happily outrageous, and often just plain disgusting, the movie avoids the usual sophomore slump by ramping up the political jabs while keeping it all unpretentious and moving quickly.

Sounds right up my rather juvenile alley, so this time, I'll be there for the first round.

2. Deception
I had never heard of this until it showed up at our multiplexes this week, but with a cast that includes Michelle Williams (hearty huzzah), Ewan McGregor and Hugh Jackman, I might have been willing to take a chance. A quick peek at the Rotten Tomatoes, however, shows it only managed a 6 % positive rating, which seems rather astonishing. Granted, that's only with a few reviews, but the words "predictable potboiler" are enough to stop me (and besides, even "Harold & Kumar" managed to garner 51 % positive.)

3. Baby Mama
I have nothing but love for both Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, but I just can't shake the suspicion that this one just won't have enough funny to sustain a feature-length movie. Besides, in the commercial, there's a litmus-test joke, methinks, when Maura Tierney actually wipes something brown off the face of youngun and tastes it to decide if it is "chocolate or poop" (I may be paraphrasing just a bit, but you get the gist.) It's hypocritical I know since I support the often just disgusting "Harold & Kumar," but that joke just kind of makes me sick enough to wait for DVD on this one.

And finally, as promised, the extended trailer for "Hancock," which made its premiere on the TV last night, probably during the rather great "Office" episode with the coke-addled Ryan, but since I fast-forward through the commercials I would have missed it anyway. For anyone else who did the same, here's a look at Peter Berg's July 2 flick about an alcoholic superhero (Will Smith) in need of a makeover from a PR expert (the always funny Jason Bateman.) All those ingredients sound right to me, and the trailer is indeed pretty darn funny. Enjoy, and have a perfectly enjoyable weekend. Peace out.

Lions for Lambs: Hardly a blunt instrument

Coincidentally enough, I had to go to work directly after seeing Robert Redford's far-too-ponderous "Lions for Lambs" and was confronted with an AP story pointing out that, with six soldiers dying Saturday in Afghanistan, this is now the deadliest year there for American troops since the invasion began. And in the minute or so it took me to read that story I learned much more than I did from Redford's flick.

Which, in many ways, is a tremendous shame. Though I read a lot of newspapers, with the New York Times and Washington Post (call me pinko if you want to) being my usual first choices, I usually skip right over the headlines about war and go right to the stories about the 2008 campaign. They just interest me more, as wrongheaded as that might be.

So, in a way I suppose I should be among the target audience for Redford's salvo in the war of (many, many) words, and I certainly get his point. How in the world could you miss it when it's made even less subtly than Laurence Fishburne running around campus at the end of "School Daze" (which for the record, I enjoyed a lot more than this flick) screaming "wake up!"

To beat us over the head with this mantra, Redford uses a quasi-real-time triptych of stories, which if he weren't so consumed with righteous anger would have made for a much more clever conceit. In the first, and best, storyline we get Tom Cruise (whose United Artists studio put this out) as a GOP senator and rising star who is pitching a new front in the war on terror to a reporter who has helped him out in the past, played with her usual finesse by Meryl Streep.

Just in case you somehow missed the point that he was supposed to represent our current president, Cruise's senator uses "enemy" constantly, just as Mr. Bush does to pitch his war on TV. What made this segment the most interesting was that, with Streep effectively playing the Judith Miller character in this game, it presented a plausible enough scenario about how the Media can get seduced into becoming a watchdog with no fangs.

From there, however, it just goes downhill fast. The second scenario? We essentially get Robert Redford as, well, Robert Redford, berating a student (played by Tom Garfield) who doesn't care enough about the future as he should. OK, fair enough, but if the student is supposed to represent us, that's exactly what we get: Robert Redford yelling at us to pay attention, and it's often even less entertaining than it sounds like it would be on paper.

And the third story goes from simply wordy to weird. As Cruise is pitching his new front in the war, it is seemingly simultaneously being put into action, with director Peter Berg leading the troops. Berg, of course, directed a much more entertaining flick about this subject, "The Kingdom," this year, which like "Lambs" was written by Matthew Michael Carnahan (which I assume is why Berg is in this to begin with.) In case you couldn't guess from the title "Lions for Lambs," the mission doesn't go too well, but I won't tell you any more than that in case you still want to see the movie.

As he did with "The Kingdom," Carnahan wraps up "Lions for Lambs" with a very clever punch, this one about the state of our Media. But the verbal torture you had to sit through to get there just wasn't worth suffering through for that little payoff.

Now, I can respect that Robert Redford is angry, and I can understand why. If he wanted, however, to win over any "hearts and minds" (as Cruise's character so mockingly puts it here), this certainly wasn't the way to do it.

Information overload? A slew of good movie news

I managed to see Paul Haggis' "In the Valley of Elah" Monday, and while I can report it's Haggis' best movie yet and the first one he directed that I almost entirely enjoyed, i'm still wrapping my mind around it so can't say much more than that. In the meantime, here's a ton of news about people I always like to hear about.

First up comes a serious case of trading up by Spike Lee, and confirmation at the same time that his next movie should be a great one.

It's been hard to tell exactly what Spike will sink his teeth into next, but it seems the WWII drama "Miracle at St. Anna" will indeed be next on his plate. And, in even better news, it seems that Wesley Snipes has dropped out of the lead and been replaced by Derek Luke, easily one of my favorite actors.

Though almost noone saw it in theaters, Luke starred in, for my money, one of the best movies of 2006 with Phillip Noyce's South Africa drama "Catch a Fire." In "Miracle at St. Anna," he joins an impressive ensemble that already includes John Turturro and James Gandolfini. Luke, who also stars in the upcoming "Lions for Lambs," will play one of four members of the Army's all-black 92nd Division who get separated from their squad behind enemy lines. The soldiers, bitter about racism and the feeling that their own government treats its enemy better than it does them, finds humanity in the small Tuscan village of St. Anna (filming in Italy forced Snipes to pull out because of his tax troubles.

You can now officially list as one movie that I'll report just about every detail I can find on, so get used to it now.

Confirmation that I'll watch Catherine Keener in anything

Easily the highlight of my Friday worknight was an e-mail exchange with Nell Minow, a k a Yahoo's Movie Mom, about the virtues of Catherine Keener. On the list of leading ladies, I think I'd only list Helen Mirren above her among my favorites.

And, as Nell and I agree, she's so good that we like her in movies that have relatively few other virtues, as this next one just might prove. Even with the reliable Joe Wright, director of the upcoming "Atonement," at the helm, "The Soloist" just kind of makes me say meh.

Although I liked Jamie Foxx quite a bit in "The Kingdom," just about the last thing I want to see him do is make another musical biopic, this one about Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless musician with schizophrenia who dreams of playing at L.A.'s Disney Hall. Robert Downey Jr. (huzzah!) will play the Los Angeles Times correspondent who found Ayers on the streets of L.A., and Ms. Keener will play his editor. Like I said, this sounds like way too much schmaltz for me, but it's always worth keeping an eye on a cast like that.

And, for you fellow Catherine Keener fans out there, you can also look for her in "Hamlet 2" with Steve Coogan, Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" and Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are."

Berg nabs epic kidnapping tale

With Peter Berg rising rapidly on my list of favorite directors and season 2 of "Friday Night Lights" coming at 8 this Friday, now comes word he's got his hands on a new project that could be tons of fun.

Universal has apparently signed Mr. Berg to direct a movie based on John Pearson's book "Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty." It's an often sordid tale that involves kidnapping and other high crimes and misdemeanors, so it should make for a compelling flick.

Berg's currently wrapping up "Hancock," his summer 2008 flick starring Jason Bateman (huzzah again!), Charlize Theron and a certain actor you may have heard of named Will Smith, and is then (I think) signed to direct a flick about Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, so he'll be fairly busy for the foreseeable future.

A "Queen" sequel? Bring it on

Though Helen Mirren rightly got most of the acclaim for playing her highness in Stephen Frears' 2006 flick "The Queen," Michael Sheen's Tony Blair was just about as amazing an accomplishment. And now, thankfully, it seems we'll be getting more of it.

Did anyone out there know there was a prequel of sorts to "The Queen," another Tony Blair flick penned for Britain's Channel 4 by Peter Morgan and titled "The Deal"? I didn't, but it's being added to my Netflix queue now if I can get it. Rounding out the series to make a trilogy, Morgan is now at work on a new flick which will be about Blair's relationships with American presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, with Sheen returning as Mr. Blair.

In "The Queen," Morgan and Sheen painted Blair as a wiley pol who nonetheless had a seemingly insatiable desire to be liked by everyone he encountered, so this next chapter should be another nice fit. Though Morgan will stop short of Blair's rather unpopular decision to back W. wholeheartedly on the war in Iraq, you can still expect some enticing palace (or, I guess, Downing Street) intrigue.

Morgan also recently finished a rewrite of "State of Play" for director Kevin Macdonald ("Last King of Scotland") and a draft of the adaptation of John le Carre's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy." Stephen Frears, director of "The Queen," will apparently be handing the reins for the next chapter to British director Tom Hooper, who has episodes of "Eastenders" and "Prime Suspect" listed among his credits.

I always suspected so ...

Though he was more than happy enough to pocket the big Hollywood checks, you can apparently count Jackie Chan (and me) among the legions of people who just can't stand Brett Ratner.

Chan wrote on his blog, according to Yahoo, that when he made the first installment of the "Rush Hour" series in 1998 he only wanted to test the U.S. market and didn't have high hopes.

"When we finished filming, I felt very disappointed because it was a movie I didn't appreciate and I did not like the action scenes involved. I felt the style of action was too Americanized and I didn't understand the American humor," Chan wrote.

He said he made the sequel because he was offered an "irresistible" amount of money to do it and made the recently released third installment to satisfy fans of the series.

Chan said "Rush Hour 3" was no different from the first two installments for him.

"Nothing particularly exciting stood out that made this movie special for me ... I spent four months making this film and I still don't fully understand the humor," he said, adding the comedic scenes may be lost on Asian audiences.

I thought the first "Rush Hour" was funny (and harmless) enough, but didn't bother with the other two. As far as his heart goes, it certainly sounds like Jackie Chan really didn't either.

‘Bottle Rocket’ to get Criterion treatment

Be warned: If it's at all possible you just might see Wes Anderson news on this site every day until I get to see "The Darjeeling Limited." Especially when the news is as good as this.

According to the reliably entertaining MTV movies blog, it seems Anderson's "Bottle Rocket," of which I am the proud owner of a very worn out VHS copy, will someday be getting the Criterion DVD treatment it surely deserves.

“We’ve just begun work with the Criterion Collection to do ‘Bottle Rocket’ on a new DVD that’s going to have all kinds of stuff," he told MTV. "There’s a lot of ‘Bottle Rocket’ that was on the cutting room floor, so we have a lot to work with on that one.”

Though I'd rank "Bottle Rocket" third in the Anderson Oeuvre, behind, respectively, "The Royal Tenenbaums" and then "Rushmore," it's still a damn fine flick well worthy of Criterion respect.

Yes, Will Smith can do anything he wants to ...

IGN is reporting this one simply as a rumor, but it was way too funny for me to pass up.

Perhaps only to prove he can, it seems Will Smith is behind a remake of "The Karate Kid" that would star - get ready - his currently 9-year-old son Jaden. I'd be more put off by this if I could manage to stop laughing.

"Deadwood" officially dead?

Sorry to leave things on a down note, but I did want to pass along what the great Ian McShane, a k a Al Swearengen, had to tell Cinematical about the possibility of two "Deadwood" movies to wrap the story up.

It seems Mr. McShane told the Cinematical folks that, as we all feared, HBO has indeed killed the idea.

"I just got a call on Friday from ... a dear friend of mine, who told me that they're packing up the ranch," McShane said. "They're dismantling the ranch and taking the stuff out. That ship is gonna sail. Bonsoir, Deadwood."

He went on to add: "You feel cheated? Imagine how I feel! We all do. We all do. It was one of those one-off jobs that you do which has got an extraordinary creative brain behind it, and it kept getting better, and the actors were great. It was a fabulous place to be and work. It was a workshop cum theater cum film. It was an extraordinary time. But everything has to come to an end, babe."

I guess it does, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it. Being constantly behind on things, I just finished season two of "Deadwood" and intend to watch the final season before moving on to season four of HBO's greatest series, "The Wire," come December. Though season one was better than No. 2, count me among the many big fans of this Western who are very sad to hear it won't be revived anytime soon.

"Golden Compass" goodness

Whew! Long report today, so anyone who made it this far indeed deserves a reward. Here's a pretty good "Golden Compass" featurette to enjoy. Peace out.

Kingdom come: An almost-perfect political thriller

When I first heard about "The Kingdom" what seems like two or three years ago, I really had no desire to see it. It just looked like a thoroughly routine thriller which would dumb down the politics and amp up the carnage.

Well, I was kind of right, but in the hands of Peter Berg this still turned out to be a tremendously entertaining movie.

The setup: Early on, Saudi terrorists (we think) detonate two bombs at a housing establishment for American oil workers in Saudi Arabia, killing more than 100 people. After overcoming some resistance, the FBI is able to send in an elite team led by agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) to find the culprit.

The opening sequence with the bombing is as hard as to watch as it is expertly constructed. The tension rises steadily between the first and second bombs, and Kyle Chandler of Berg's TV creation "Friday Night Lights" plays a key role you won't hear anymore about from me.

It's in the FBI response team, however, that Berg and screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan really shine. On paper, the four agents are standard Hollywood composites, the badass maverick (Foxx), the wizened veteran (Chris Cooper), the agent with a personal stake in the investigation (Jennifer Garner) and the young, wise-cracking addition (Jason Bateman.) It's how Carnahan and Berg build on these familiar characters, however, that gives "The Kingdom" most of its strength.

And special mention here should go to Ashraf Barhoum, the Saudi police officer who at first blocks them at every turn but (of course) eventually rallies to their side. His banter with his American cohorts, particularly on the prevalence of cursing in American daily discourse, is natural and entertaining, and since it's that season, I think you'll be hearing Mr. Barhoum's name again on Oscar night.

But, of course, this is eventually an action movie, and that's where it starts to fall apart a little bit. With Foxx taking the lead in his least annoying role since "Ray," they steadily, and more than a bit too easily, gather clues and make their case. It does move along at a quick clip toward the shootout(s) you know have to be coming.

And when it finally unleashes the chaos, with one of the agents kidnapped (you won't hear which one from me) and his friends in pursuit, it's a blur of action that doesn't let up for a good 20 minutes. Though Berg never quite resorts to the constant-camera-movement antics of Paul Greengrass, it is an intense finale that delivers what the premise promises.

And a word, if I could, about the politics. A.O. Scott, in an otherwise glowing review of this flick, called it "Syriana for dummies." I'm not really sure where to start with that one. First of all, I may indeed be dumb, because I flat out hated "Syriana." Way too many stories with just about no character development, and several messages just crammed down your throat until you choke.

Now, I'll concede that Mr. Berg does dumb it down a bit, but what was Mr. Scott expecting from a thriller like this? I actually found the opening credits, with a three-minute-or-so summary of American-Saudi relations to this point, to be an effective enough way to draw people into the action.

And Berg's point, when he finally gets around to making it at the very end, is much the same as Steven Spielberg's with "Munich": In our current global battle against terrorism and other evils, we're often in a zero-sum game. For my money, though, he makes that point with a much more entertaining flick than Spielberg's, and I can't ask for much more than that.

P.S.: I've seen the season two premiere of "Friday Night Lights," and can report that though the season predictably starts on a down note, it's still expertly written and very entertaining. The strains of coach Taylor (Chandler) being away at SMU over the summer grow worse as his wife (the great Connie Britton) gives birth to a baby girl, and Tyra and Landry's relationship starts to develop in a most interesting way. You know you should be watching this one, people, so please don't make me beg.