Video reviews blog

In the end, 29 million Americans couldn't come together in support of David Hernandez. 

After a foray into the Lennon-McCartney songbook resulted in a changing of the guard as far as American Idol's talent-based frontrunners are concerned, it was the 24-year-old Arizona State student (and, one more time, former stripper) who was forced to take an early bow. 

"Things happen for a reason," Hernandez mused after learning he had been eliminated Wednesday. But "you'll see me at the top. This isn't it for me." 

Although technically a strong singer, Hernandez went into hyperdrive on Tuesday with what Randy Jackson deemed an "overdone" rendition of "I Saw Her Standing There." 

"I thought it was corny, verging on desperate," Simon Cowell said, one of several kisses of death doled out on Idol's first-ever Beatles night. (They're going to have another one next week.)   

Also plummeting into the bottom three were Syesha Mercado, who urged no one into her corner with "Got to Get You into My Life," and Kristy Lee Cook, who was advised to go country and ended up in left field with her honky-tonk "Eight Days a Week" arrangement. 

The question of how Idol was going to fill some of that extra time, now that the Wednesday eliminations have stretched into an hour-long format, was quickly answered when Mercado was asked early on to repeat Tuesday's performance—just in case that was it for her.

So the audience was "treated" to three possible swan songs instead of one definite fare-thee-well, meaning we also had to hear Cook rebutcher "Eight Days a Week." (Seriously, even Paula Abdul admitted she "didn't get it.") 

Although the logic behind making contestants relive their worst moment on the Idol stage to date is still questionable, the new "everybody sing!" format at least allowed Hernandez his full moment in the spotlight, as opposed to a few bars and a quick cut to the evening news. 

Wednesday also marked the debut of Idol's new farewell dirge, this time around a cover of Kenny Loggins' "Celebrate Me Home" sung by season-two champ Ruben Studdard. 

But while some fell (David Archuleta forgot the words!!), others rose, including David Cook, whose rockin' "Eleanor Rigby" so impressed Simon that the oft-acerbic Brit said he could picture the 25-year-old bartender winning the whole thing. 

"I thought it was brilliant," he raved of Cook's performance, eliciting a spirited jump and fist pump from the singer, who once said it was a good thing it was America he had to win over rather than Simon. 

Brooke White also hit it out of the park for the third straight week, touching hearts—even Simon's—with her straight-forward take on "Let it Be," the Beatles' last single as a cohesive foursome. 

And finally living up to the hype (not to mention finally loosening up) was Carly Smithson, who tore into a version of "Come Together" she perfected in front of the Saturday-night crowd at the San Diego bar where she sings on weekends. 

"That felt amazing, didn't it?" Jackson said. "You were strong, confident, you were having a good time…there wasn't a note out of tune. Stellar performance!" 

The show also featured a still-intact top 12 singing a Beatles medley and a performance by season-five runner-up Katharine McPhee of the George Harrison-penned "Something." 

To prolong the suspense (and kill more time) at one point, host Ryan Seacrest had the judges answer questions submitted by fans, although he deftly sidestepped one viewer's query, which began, "Simon is sexy…" 

Jim Carrey was in the audience—and in the top 11 at one point, after he figured he could slip into one of the remaining musical chairs unnoticed. 

But instead it is the two Cooks, Mercado, White, Smithson, Archuleta, Chikezie (he's dropped the Eze, perhaps because Paula persisted in pronouncing it incorrectly), Ramiele Malubay, Jason Castro, Amanda Overmyer and Michael Johns who will be around to dip yet again into the works of John Lennon and Paul McCartney next week.

Warner Bros. will split the last “Harry Potter” tome into a two-part film, with the installments unspooling six months apart.

David Yates will direct and Steve Kloves will write both parts, which will be filmed concurrently.

Part one of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” will bow in November 2010, with the second to debut the following May.

The unusual “Kill Bill” strategy solves a thorny problem for the studio, which had been wrestling with a way to adapt J.K. Rowling’s hefty tome and successfully conclude its lucrative franchise, which has generated $4.5 billion at the worldwide B.O. It’s not yet clear exactly how studio will split the 784-page book, however.

Warner Bros. prexy Alan Horn and Jeff Robinov, prexy of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, are expected to discuss their plans for “Deathly Hallows” during the studio’s ShoWest presentation at 2:45 p.m. today.

“Deathly Hallows,” the seventh in the series, is weighty in more ways than one: The boy wizard and his pals battle archnemesis Voldemort to the death. Tome sold a record 11 million copies during the first 24 hours after it hit bookshelves last July.

The sixth movie in the franchise, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” debuts on the bigscreen in November. It is also being directed by Yates, who helmed the fifth installment, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” Kloves has also been a steady presence for the franchise; he will have written seven of the eight adaptations, having missed only “Order of the Phoenix.”

David Heyman has served as producer on the entire series, which last year surpassed James Bond as the top-grossing film franchise (Daily Variety, Sept. 11). Franchise has also proved lucrative on DVD and in other ancillary markets; among other ventures, Warner and Universal have partnered on a theme park attraction devoted to “Potter.”

It's official: Madonna's like a rocker.

The Queen of Pop joined fellow headliners John Mellencamp, Leonard Cohen, the Dave Clark Five and the Ventures as the latest class of immortals in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Monday night.

Some media critics have carped that Rock Hall organizers lowered their standards in choosing a pop star known more for simulating orgasms on stage than rocking out while overlooking more deserving veteran artists. Still, the crowd at New York's Waldorf Astoria justified its love for the Material Mom, warmly embracing her during the enshrinement ceremony.

The "Borderline" singer—who turns 50 this August—received a fawning intro from Justin Timberlake, who collaborated with Madonna on the first single from her upcoming album, Hard Candy, and also cowrote six of the tracks."The truth is nobody's gotten into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame looking this fine," the "Sexy Back" star said. "You're no museum piece."Timberlake ticked off Madonna's accomplishments, from reigning over the pop charts to her ever-morphing music and boundary-pushing antics, including the famous Britney Spears smooch.

"She changed the way the world sounded, she changed the way the world looked and she still found time to have kissed someone I may or may not have kissed myself while I was in the audience. Of course you all know who I'm talking about: Sean Penn," he quipped to a collective groan from the peanut gallery.

Timberlake also noted that during their recent work together, he was ailing one day, prompting Madonna to order him to "drop 'em," pull out a syringe and give him a B12 shot—in his derriere.

"She looked at me and said, 'that's top shelf," he said. "And that was one of the greatest days of my life."

For her part, Madge thanked all the "naysayers" for inspiring her to become the pop force she is today, with more than 200 million albums sold worldwide."They helped me because they made me question myself and pushed me to be better," she said. "I know that I would not be here right now without all of you, because life, like art, is a collaboration, and I did not get here on my own. And why would I want to?

"I have gone on to do so many things in my life, from writing children's books, to designing clothes, to directing a film. But for me it always does, and it always will, come back to the music," Madonna continued.

In what will surely go down as one of the more bizarre highlights in Rock Hall history, fellow Michigan exports Iggy & the Stooges performed ear-splitting punk versions of two of her hits, "Burning Up" and "Ray of Light."

During the latter song, the sinewy frontman stuck out his tongue at the "Erotica" performer and concluded with lines from "Like a Virgin"—"You make me feel shiny and new, like a virgin touched for the very first time"—before snaking off backstage.

Mary Ann is in trouble, thanks to Mary Jane.

Gilligan's Island star Dawn Wells has been sentenced to six months' unsupervised probation after she was arrested last October in Driggs, Idaho, for having marijuana in her car.  

The former actress, 69, pleaded guilty Feb. 29 to one count of reckless driving. As part of her plea bargain, additional misdemeanor counts of driving under the influence, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a controlled substance were dropped.

In addition to the probation, she was sentenced to five days in jail and fined $410.50.

Wells' troubles began as she made her way her home from a surprise birthday party thrown for her by friends on Oct. 18. She was stopped by a cop who allegedly witnessed her car swerving and speeding up and slowing down repeatedly.

After pulling Wells over, Teton County Sheriff's Deputy Joseph Gutierrez claimed he caught the distinctive odor of pot wafting from her car.

When he questioned her about the aroma, Wells reportedly replied that she had picked up three hitchhikers, but dropped them back off after they started smoking marijuana.

A search of her car revealed four half-smoked joints, plus two small cases used to store marijuana, according to the police report.

After Wells failed a field sobriety test, she was cuffed and taken to the sheriff's office. She later posted $4,000 bond and was released.

A trial on the matter was scheduled to begin Thursday but was canceled following Wells' guilty plea.

Wells' Idaho-based attorney, Ron Swafford, said that a friend of hers voluntarily testified that he left a small amount of marijuana in the car after borrowing it earlier that day and that Wells was unaware of it.

He also said that several witnesses were willing to testify that Wells had consumed very little alcohol at her party and was not drunk when she left.

It's not the first time Wells has been linked to a pot bust.

In 1998, her name came up after her Gilligan's Island costar Bob Denver was arrested for marijuana possession in West Virginia, but it was unclear what role she was believed to have played in the situation.

Her spokesman denied that Wells had any connection with Denver's arrest.

"All I know is she had no involvement," the rep said at the time.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Comedy Central is moving into the fantasy arena with a live-action series dubbed “Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire.”

“Krod Mandoon,” set to premiere in the first quarter of 2009, centers on a sensitive, clueless freedom fighter who becomes the last great hope in a medieval struggle. Though the show is set in historic times, it features contemporary dialogue. No actors have been hired yet.

“It’s big, bold, loud and something we’ve never done before,” said Lauren Corrao, the network’s president of original programming and development. “It was a real opportunity to get into a world that people, at least with features, seem to be loving these days.”

Snoop Dogg, meanwhile, is developing a pilot for an untitled animated comedy based on his teen years in 1980s Long Beach, while Richter will star in a pilot for a sketch show, also untitled. The fake-magazine show “David Alan Grier’s Chocolate News” covers urban pop culture topics.

Comedy Central also confirmed that “Gay Robot,” which originally was developed as a live-action series, is now an animated project. “Robot,” from Adam Sandler’s production company, was first ordered to pilot in 2005 as a scripted, live-action adaptation of a character featured on Sandler’s comedy album “Shhh . . . Don’t Tell” — voiced by Nick Swardson.

Baltimore is one of the secret centers of the universe. Seriously. No matter who you are or where you live, I guarantee you are but one degree, two at the most, removed from someone who was born, reared or did serious time there. I know this because I was born in Baltimore (see, and now you know me) and I cannot tell you how many times a working knowledge of Fells Point, the Inner Harbor and the brutal history of thehas come in handy in terms of conversational ice-breaking — even when finding oneself among movie stars.Laura Lippman understands this. As the author of more than a dozen mysteries set in Baltimore, she knows how to work her town, nailing just enough details to give her tales veracity without turning them into missives from the Chamber of Commerce. In her latest, “Another Thing to Fall,” she had me at Hochschild Kohn. The über-department store of every baby boomer Baltimorean’s childhood, the chain is now defunct, but Lippman turns one of the empty stores into a soundstage. Just seeing the name was enough, and by the time she mentioned Hydrox (for a time, an East Coast, and superior, version of Oreos), I was a goner.Which is ironic since the reason I was reading “Another Thing to Fall” was the Hollywood connection. In this, the 10th installment of the Tess Monaghan series, the action revolves around a television show that is being shot — or attempting to be shot, given all the mysterious fires and other mishaps that keep occurring — in Sparrows Point, a neighborhood of the private investigator’s beloved Baltimore area.When Tinsel Town meets Charm City, no one is better suited to play hostess than Lippman. Here it must be noted that Lippman, like her sleuth, is a former Baltimore newspaper reporter, but unlike Tess, she is married to, the creator and executive producer of the fabulous, and just recently concluded, television series “The Wire.” It must quickly be added that the show being filmed in “Another Thing to Fall” is a costume drama with time travel and a female lead; in other words, it could not be further from the gritty, mostly male, mean streets of the HBO series. Still, Lippman clearly knows how a television show works, which lends her tale a measure of color and integrity, not to mention good old insider juiciness.Our gal Tess gets hauled onto the set of “Mann of Steel,” pretty much literally, when, out for a morning scull ride on the Patapsco River, she accidentally launches herself into a shot. Producer Flip Tumulty, son of a legendary Baltimore filmmaker, hires her on the spot; not to investigate the series of fires and vandalism — it could just be the out-of-work steelworkers don’t appreciate a period piece that celebrates the glory days but whose producers aren’t giving back to the community — but to baby-sit the show’s high-strung young star, Selene Waites. Apparently a local man had killed himself after the show began filming and items from the set, including many photographs of Selene, had been found in his apartment. Selene, Flip believes, is vulnerable.Vulnerable all right, but mostly to problems of her own making. No-nonsense Tess takes the job for the money and a chance to give her nephew a shot working on a TV show, but she’s soon losing patience with the ditsy narcissism of her young charge, the arrogance of show writer Ben Marcus, the overbearing nature of petite unit production manager Lottie MacKenzie and the insular self-absorbed insanity of a television production in general. Egos collide in every way imaginable — Flip is trying to sneak out of his famous father’s shadow, Ben is sleeping with Selene but keeping it from Flip, Selene’s costar Johnny Tampa is trying to resurrect his career while Flip’s assistant, Greer, is doing everything she can to jump-start hers. Meanwhile, at least one shadowy figure is keeping a watch on things, for reasons of his or her own.Still, when one of the crew members is found beaten to death, Tess begins nosing, and she senses that not all of the acting is taking place in front of the camera.As is often the case in mysteries with a big cast of characters, the detection of the crime is not as interesting as the interaction among the players. Lippman gives us Hollywood types who are also identifiable as people — no small feat — and captures both the life-in-a-bubble feel of a location set and the controlled hysteria that so often is the creative process. If the stakes of the actual mystery don’t seem terribly high until the very, and a bit out of nowhere, end, the portrait of down-to-earth Tess trying to keep track of the three-ring circus that is “Mann of Steel” provides enough tension and action to keep things moving.It’s difficult to write about Hollywood without lapsing into satire or caricature, but with Baltimore as her anchor and her beacon, Lippman has her fun and keeps it real at the same time.mary.mcnamara@latimes .com

Eddie Van Halen is still on the mend, and his band is still offstage.  

What was originally a four-date postponement has turned into a monthlong leave of absence for Van Halen while its rock-god guitarist continues to deal with an undisclosed illness.

"Seventeen concert dates on the Van Halen tour are being rescheduled so that Eddie Van Halen, who is currently under doctors' care, can continue medical tests to define a course of treatment," über-promoter Live Nation said in a statement. "The tour will resume on April 19." 

Rescheduled dates will be announced shortly, the company added.

Starting with Tuesday's gig at John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville, Virginia, and ending with an Apr. 15 stop at Baltimore's 1st Mariner Arena, 17 shows on the East Coast and in the Midwest will be affected. 

Fans are being instructed to hang onto their tickets for those dates because all will be honored when Van Halen reconvenes onstage, supposedly Apr. 19 in Las Vegas.

The retooled foursome—with original frontman David Lee Roth on lead vocals and Van Halen's son Wolfgang doing the honors on bass—have so far kept mum on what's ailing Eddie. 

When tour plans were put on hold at this time last year, the musician revealed he was taking time off to enter rehab to tackle chronic alcohol addition. Van Halen also battled tongue cancer for a couple of years, with a doctor declaring him cancer free in 2002.

A federal judge late Thursday extended until March 17 a temporary restraining order preventing Britney Spears’s pal Sam Lutfi from approaching the troubled pop star and her family, according to court papers
The two-page order by U.S. District Judge Phillip Gutierrez was in response to a request by Spears’s father Jamie Spears, who is co-conservator of her $100 million estate.
Jamie had asked the judge to extend the temporary restraining order – served on Thursday and set to expire a day later on Friday – until the judge rules on an unusual civil rights challenge to the conservatorship.
The temporary restraining order could be extended at a March 17 hearing. But Jamie Spears would have to be able to successfully serve Lutfi with notice of the hearing; in the past, Jamie has complained that Lutfi apparently attempted to dodge being served. The temporary restraining order, which forbids Lutfi from getting within 250 yards of Spears, her homes and her family’s homes, alleges: “Mr. Lutfi has drugged Britney. He has cut Britney’s home phone line and removed her cell phone chargers. He claims to control everything.”

Be Kind Rewind: Comedy. Starring Jack Black, Mos Def, Danny Glover and Mia Farrow. Directed by Michel Gondry. (PG-13. 101 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

Bad comes in all directions in “Be Kind Rewind.” There are crosscurrents of bad, scenes that fail in two or three ways simultaneously, as farce, as sentiment and as storytelling. The energy of Jack Black’s attack and Mos Def’s talent for moment-by-moment honest thinking onscreen can’t disguise it. The presence of Danny Glover can’t class things up. Inside 10 minutes, at most 15, “Be Kind Rewind” reveals itself as an awful mess, and it only gets worse.

It’s set mainly in a video store of a type that hardly exists anymore, a single proprietorship offering only dusty VHS tapes and titles from years ago. Mos Def plays a guy who works there, and Black is his crazy, zany friend who - under circumstances not worth going into, but the movie gets into them - gets himself magnetized and accidentally erases every movie in the store. And so the two buddies set out to remake the movies themselves, starring themselves.

This is a delicate comic idea, in that it’s wildly unrealistic but it has good farcical potential. The guys would have to be really stupid to believe they could fool people, and the people would have to be really stupid in order to be fooled, but in a wacked-out comic universe, such a concept could fly. Its chief virtue would be the opportunity for Black and Mos Def to parody an unlimited number of well-known movies. Sounds fun (maybe).

The first surprise is that it’s not fun at all. The two friends’ initial foray is to re-create “Ghostbusters,” and there isn’t a laugh in the whole sequence. It’s just witless and charmless. The second surprise is that “Be Kind Rewind” doesn’t take place in some hyper-comic dimension. It stays grounded in what it wants to pass off as reality, with a saccharine plot strain involving the city’s attempt to close down and demolish the video store for safety violations.

The realistic convention undermines the comedy and puts a burden on the story, which is forced to make at least some kind of sense. In a farce, it would be perfectly acceptable, for example, to have scores of customers who actually prefer the remakes. That could be funny. But in story about a downtrodden business owner (Glover) trying to keep his humble enterprise alive, such a turn seems merely sentimental and fake.

So we have fake. We have sentimental. And then we have yet more scenes of Black and Mos Def remaking popular films, but they’re still not able to buy a laugh. Considering that the comic appeal and the entire story of “Be Kind Rewind” turns on the quality and fun factor of these scenes, one would expect writer-director Michel Gondry to have found a way to give his characters some kind of accidental talent or quirky appeal. If this comedy had nothing else, the scenes of the guys filming their remakes should have been surefire. But all we get is the spectacle of Black and Mos Def flailing as they play two idiots who are flailing. If we don’t want to watch them, why would customers pay for home videos as bad they could make themselves?

Into this already thick stew of awful, Gondry adds an incongruous element: a Fats Waller connection. Everybody in the movie is a Fats Waller fan. Everybody in the movie was just talking about him yesterday. The nostalgia lends a further note of sentiment to this farcical construct, and it helps like a tractor on a front lawn.

— Advisory: Sexual references.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com and read his blog, Maximum Strength Mick, at sfgate.com/ZZB.

Vantage Point: Drama. Starring Dennis Quaid, William Hurt and Forest Whitaker. Directed by Pete Travis. (PG-13. 90 minutes. At Bay Area theaters. For complete movie listings and show times, and to buy tickets for select theaters, go to sfgate.com/movies.)

“Vantage Point” has a fractured and frustrating narrative. It presents a colossal terrorist attack in Spain, in which two bombs go off and the president of the United States is shot. We see this happen once, and then the clock is wound back and we see the same events happening again and again, each time from the perspective of another character.

There should be a reason for filmmakers to tell a story in this way, and for a while the temptation is to look for one. For example, if all the recollections contradicted each other, then the movie could be a commentary on the faultiness of memory, particularly in recollecting moments of crisis. Like “Rashomon.” In the case of “Vantage Point,” the basic facts are never in dispute, but even then there’s a willingness on the part of the viewer, at least for a while, to let director Pete Travis and writer Barry Levy have their fun. The expectation is that surely the movie’s plot is a fantastic and intricate construction best revealed in this strange and splintered way. But no. Not really.

When everything is finally revealed, the story “Vantage Point” tells is fairly pedestrian, and nothing special is gained from all the stopping and restarting. The title is the tip-off. Aside from the changing-perspectives device, “Vantage Point” has nothing going on. There’s no artistic, philosophical or even jolly entertainment reason for adopting this strategy. It’s just arbitrary, a gimmick.

Of course, a fun gimmick would have been fine - a fun gimmick is good enough. But the gimmick in “Vantage Point” is not fun at all. This is what it’s like: The movie gets you engrossed in the problems of particular characters and their situation. The segment builds to a crisis - and then just when things are getting dramatic, the screen freezes. The previous action starts playing backward in super-fast motion, and a digital clock rewinds about 20 minutes. The next thing we know we’re being introduced to another set of characters that we either don’t know or don’t care about.

This is not a problem the first time it happens. The second time, it’s mildly annoying, but acceptable. By the third time, it’s irritating. By the fourth time, it’s maddening, and by the fifth time. … Actually by then, the pain is gone, along with any hope.

William Hurt is the president, in Spain to promote an international treaty to combat global terrorism. Dennis Quaid plays a Secret Service agent, back on the job and a little shaky, after having been recently shot by a would-be presidential assassin. Forest Whitaker is just a guy in the crowd, an American with a camera. Each gets his turn to be the focus of the movie’s attention, and so do various cops and conspirators and Sigourney Weaver, who is effective in a feature role as a TV news director, calling the shots live.

“Vantage Point” is at its best in the early going when it focuses on the Secret Service agent, whom Quaid plays with the intensity of a man trying to blast through doubt and fear by staying very, very angry. Quaid is so good that his performance ends up promising what the script can’t deliver - a blazing portrait of an American professional, the sunburned man of action, whose inner torment can’t stop him. He makes the movie seem like it’s going to be about a particular guy, a particular kind of guy.

When that promise fades, there’s still hope that the movie is going to be about interesting things happening, but no action in the movie is more dramatic than the depicted terrorist strike, as it turns out. That’s a problem. The audience waits and waits for the dreaded flashbacks to end, and then, finally, when the movie gets past showing the same 20 or 30 minutes over and over, there’s nothing of compelling interest to see. We just get a climax that’s flat and far-fetched.

Oh, and that Secret Service agent who was so interesting in the early minutes? He becomes just another guy in a car chase.

— Advisory: Graphic violence, over and over.

To hear Mick LaSalle talk about movies, listen to his weekly podcast at sfgate.com/podcasts.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.