Despite facing a brutal marketing challenge, Funny People managed to top the box office this weekend. Though it was the lowest-performing champ of the summer, the Judd Apatow-helmed laugher brought in $23.4M to hold off a resilient Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ($17.7M | $255.4M). The awful G-Force was a hair behind ($17M | $66.4M), followed by the awful The Ugly Truth ($13M | $54.4M) and the, uh, awful Aliens in the Attic ($7.8M). Orphan ($7.2M | $26.7M), Ice Age 3 ($5.3M | $181.8M), The Hangover ($5M | $255.7M), The Proposal ($4.8M | $148.8M) and Transformers 2 ($4.6M | $388.1M) rounded out the top 10. more ›

If you're planning to see one movie this weekend, you should re-jigger your schedule and see four! Funny People would be an excellent place to start. It's Rogen, Apatow and Sandler's best film to date (LAist review here). Sure, it's not a straight comedy, but it is damn funny. You'll leave the film in a good mood, but that will quickly turn into righteous anger once you've seen The Cove. The best movie at the Sundance Film Festival this year (LAist reviews here and here), it's a thrilling and sad documentary about the annual dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan. I mean seriously, how many eco-documentaries have scenes inside ILM? The Cove is that cool. More to the point, it almost feels like a narrative film with all the intrigue and plot that go into capturing the wrenching footage of dolphins being mercilessly pitchforked in the water by giggling fisherman. See it! more ›

The lazy response to Judd Apatow's Funny People will be that it isn't as, well, funny as his two previous films, The 40 Year Old Virgin or Knocked Up. The subtext of that observation, of course, is that it isn't as good as those other films, and that is a howlingly wrong presumption. True, Funny People is not Apatow's funniest film, but -- true also -- it is his best. While not a straight comedy, it has plenty of laughs and inspired lunatic performances (Eric Bana, in particular, is a revelation). What it also has, though, is an interest in exploring the intersection of mortality and human failing, and it does so with great clarity and a requisite lack of pity. more ›

A Word or 77 (or so): ABC has a lineup of new episodes and shows tonight - bucking the other networks, with the exception of Fox and the CW, who were always trend-buckers [hey, I said "buckers" ok, you dirty-minded individuals]. You might have also seen on the AP that the kids are trying to keep Jericho on the air - if CBS doesn't want to run it, they should sell it. I always... more ›

A Word or 26: Welcome to the land of reruns and late night TV. Someone give me a heads up on other stuff on basic cable that's perhaps worth watching. Tonight - Tuesday - June 5th, 2007 Dodgers @ Padres (PRIME, 7:00 p.m.) Twins @ Angels (Fox Sports, 7:00 p.m.) On the Lot (Fox, 8:00 p.m.) The first 5 finalists present their films. The Sea Wolf (TCM, 8:30 p.m.) Edward G. Robinson stars in... more ›