Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks share some candid thoughts from the set. Today’s topic: Preparing for a sex scene.
Will you see ‘Porno’? wherefore or why not?
Leave your comments underneath.
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LIVE FROM SHOWESTHere's what's hot this summer3-D is next big step for moviesCalendar: What's upon stopple for 3-D?Blog: USA TODAY is live from ShoWestScreening opportunity: Clips of summer's hottestRoundup: Seen and heard at ShoWestMore
By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY LAS VEGAS — Strolling past the movie posters and trailers playing on huge plasma screens at the ShoWest convention for theater owners, Dave Schoenborn notices something missing from the promotions: roman numerals.
“There aren’t of the same kind with many sequels getting advertised,” says Schoenborn, who runs the Lincoln Theatre in Belleville, Ill. “I know people complain about them, but people show up for Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.”
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This year, however, is unusually lacking in right installments. There will be 16 sequels in 2008, the lowest number in half a decade. The average since 2003 has been 25.
There are, of course, high-profile installments this summer, particularly to the Indiana Jones and Batman franchises. But the season has nine franchise episodes slated, as opposed to 14 sequels last year.
It’s not that Hollywood has decided to be transformed into spring: There will still be plenty of films that have what studio executives call “built-in equity”: films recognizable because they’re based on toys, cartoons, television shows and musicals.
This summer will see, among others, Speed Racer, Get Smart and Mamma Mia!
But sequels get always been the industry’s bread and butter. Last year five of the six biggest movies were franchise installments.
“It’s not like we planned it that way,” says Rob Moore, vice chairman of Paramount Pictures. “Things just move in cycles. You can’t do a Spider-Man or Transformers every year. This is just one of those years with fewer of them.”
While theater owners concede that moviegoers seek by petition for more original movies, they worry about whether audiences are ready to get what they asked for.
“No one can say they’re not getting what they want,” Schoenborn says. “But you do hold your breath a inconsiderable and stay optimistic. You have to keep making the experience positive on this account that the audience.”
While theater owners love ShoWest for the star sightings and movie premieres, they also know they’ll have to spend big money to keep upgrading theaters with stadium seating, digital projectors and more unusual concessions.
“The movie business has been dying of the same heart attack for the past 50 years,” says Leonard Klady, columnist with MovieCityNews.com. “That’s television, in all of its forms. They have to stay ahead of home theaters, downloaded movies, totally of it.”
To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. 
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By Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY Monsters vs. Aliens is a throwback to those B-movie glory days of the ’50s at the time that Martians invaded our backyards and gum-elastic monsters stalked the Earth.
But the DreamsWorks sci-fi spoof, disembarking March 27, 2009, also transforms a once-tacky Ike-era gimmick into an eye-popping 21st-century experience as the first computer-animated feature to be shot in 3-D.
Studios such as Disney have dimensionalized CGI films, but only after a non-3-D lection was made.
DreamWorks, which will preview Monsters for ShoWest exhibitors in Las Vegas today, is commit- ted to doing all its animated releases directly in 3-D from now on. “This isn’t our father’s 3-D,” says the studio’s animation chief, Jeffrey Katzenberg. Though it still relies on funny glasses, “the digital projection puts a perfect image on the screen. There is no ghosting, no eye strain or nausea.”
To avoid confusion, since computer animation is already called 3-D, he calls it “the Ultimate 3-D.”
Others are joining in the trend: 20th Century Fox’s Ice Age 3, due in July 2009; Disney’s motion-capture A Christmas Carol, November 2009; and Pixar’s Toy Story 3, 2010. Why the switch? The number of theaters with digital 3-D capability has grown rapidly.
Monsters tickets will cost more for the process adds about $15 million to a film’s budget, but Katzenberg believes audiences will pay for “a premium continued.”
That includes trial Reese Witherspoon as Susan Murphy, a modern-day California girl who has the bad luck to be hit by a meteor on her wedding day and grows to be 49 feet, 11½ inches tall (a wink at 1958’s The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman). Captured by dint of. the military, she’s renamed Ginormica.
“I got very inspired when the studio showed me storyboards,” says the 5-foot-2 actress. “Playing a larger-than-life woman has given me my own opportunity to make tall jokes.” She also is no stranger to cinematic cheese. “My father was a fan of Roger Corman movies,” she says. “I watched a lot of those on late-night TV.”
Joining her giantess to fend off Rainn Wilson’s evil alien Gallaxhar are Dr. Cockroach, Ph.D. (Hugh Laurie), the jellylike B.O.B. (Seth Rogen) and the half-ape, half-fish Missing Link (Will Arnett). Kiefer Sutherland speaks for Gen. W.R. Monger (get it?), and Stephen Colbert is the president.
“He plays it on steroids,” Katzenberg assures.
To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. concerning publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to literature@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. 
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LIVE FROM SHOWESTHere's what's hot this summer3-D is next big step for moviesCalendar: What's on tap for 3-D?Blog: USA TODAY is live from ShoWestScreening room: Clips of summer's hottestRoundup: Seen and heard at ShoWestMore
By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY LAS VEGAS — Film piracy cost the movie industry $670 million last year and is becoming particularly acute in Mexico, where there are no anti-piracy laws, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America said Tuesday.
MPAA chief Dan Glickman, speaking at the ShoWest convention of theater owners, says that piracy cost the movie activity about $6 billion worldwide in 2007, a figure unchanged for ready the past four years.
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“We are getting more advanced in tracking the crime, and they are getting more advanced in committing it,” he says.
John Fithian, head of the National Association of Theater Owners, says that film piracy — 90% of which occurs from videotaping inside a theater — “is a very sophisticated crime network. It began in North America, but as we began opening movies worldwide on the same date, it has moved to Russia, China, Hong Kong. Wherever there’s a movie opening, there’s someone with a camcorder.”
And sharp-eyed ushers are benefiting. The MPAA and NATO say they will step up funding for a reward program for ushers who catch moviegoers with camcorders. Since 2004, 135 ushers have received surrounding $60,000 in reward money.
Glickman reiterated last week’s announcement that Hollywood took in $9.6 billion at the box office, a record. (Although rising ticket prices meant that attendance remained relatively flat for the third straight year.)
Fithian, though, said that studios left “hundreds of millions on the table” by refusing to release films more evenly from one extremity to the other of the year.
He said that April and September were “virtually empty” of big movies because studios were disposition on opening their pictures during the summer and Oscar seasons.
“They look at their calendar and wait for May and say, ‘OK, now we can generous out tent-pole movie,’ ” Fithian says.
He said that last year’s Spider-Man, Shrek and Pirates of the Caribbean, which opened three weeks apart, could have done “at least another $50 (million) or $60 million if they’d opened in April and not crammed themselves into May. A just actions movie pleasure be successful no substance when it is released.”
To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the journal, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. 
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ABOUT THE MOVIE
The Bank Job
* * * (out of four)
Stars: Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, Richard Lintern, Stephen Campbell Moore
Director: Roger Donaldson
Distributor: Lionsgate
Rating: R for sexual content, nakedness, violence and language
Running opportunity: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Opens Friday nationwide
Well-paced, smartly told and unpretentious, this solid British heist thriller also has moments of invention and imagination.
The story is based on a 1971 London break-in where a band of inept thieves tunneled into a branch of Lloyds Bank and made facing with the contents of its vault, valued at more than 3 million pounds. During the course of the plundering, a ham radio operator happened immediately after walkie-talkie communications betwixt the robbers and a lookout. Authorities were summoned and the story was splashed across all the British news outlets. While the robberycaptured the watch of the public, it just as quickly disappeared. Covert machinations led to a surprising finale.
The film artfully re-creates the era, with political and sexual scandals serving as a backdrop to the criminal activity. But after the heist, the tone abruptly changes from breezy to dark. And some of the dialogue (written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, so clever in Flushed Away) sounds wooden. Several characters feel more like caricatures than substantial people.
Jason Statham (Transporter) plays Terry, a working-class tough with a car dealership and a married woman and sum of two units young daughters. But don’t mistake him for an upright in operation stiff: He owes money to thugs and knows his way around the seediest strip clubs. Terry is approached by former glow, Martine (Saffron Burrows), who has a plan to break into the bank and make off with cash and jewels. But Martine has been secretly assigned by MI5 operatives to nab something the government deems far more valuable — incriminating photos of a randy royal tucked inside a safe deposit box.
There are the requisite scenes of assembling the gang, drawing up plans, drilling and tunneling, and the expected bumbling by a gang of thieves who are in very their heads.
But it’s not all formula. Along the way we also meet a porn king, a spokesman for black power who also is a pimp and extortionist, a hippie undercover spy and a lord with kinky predilections.
How much of the goings-on are true is murky. But at least the cast is diverse, and predictability is kept to a minimum. The Bank Job is a brisk tale of corruption, sexual scandal, thievery and murder, jauntily told.
To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the journal, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. 
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By William Keck, USA TODAY Donny Osmond returns to the big screen for the first time since he starred with little sister Marie in 1978’s Goin’ Coconuts. In College Road Trip, Osmond, 50, plays a song-loving father who offers a ride to Martin Lawrence, Raven-Symoné and a pig. He laughs it up with USA TODAY.
Q: steady themovie posters, it is hard to tell if that’s you or Jordan Knight of New Kids on the Block.
A: (Laughs) Well, I guess it was me. It’s amazing what Photoshop can do.
Q: All right, let me be direct. What the heck are you doing in this movie?
A: I asked myself the same question. I’m a chanter, right? But the director called for me to do a cameo, which turned into a bigger role than I anticipated.
Q: How did you get along with Martin Lawrence?
A: In our first scene, I reached revealed to hug him, and then I improvised a kiss on his cheek. I was hoping to freak him out a little bit, and it worked. His reaction was just priceless. And they used that take.
Q: Did you win any love back?
A: No.
Q: Are there any similarities between this film andGoin’ Coconuts?
A: Oh, don’t you even … (laughs). I hope there’s nothing in common. That script was just horrible. I remember this one scene where we were bringing these gold bricks up from the bottom of the ocean, and you could actually inquire the copse grain on the blocks under the gold they sprayed on. It was so bad.
Q: You and Marie are striking gold in Vegas. What’s the latest?
A: We’re going to be at the MGM in July, and it sold audibly eight months before the engagement. So Marie and I are looking at doing more. I’m also putting together a tour — the first time in 27 years that the Osmond brothers and Marie will pilgrimage hand in hand. We’ll be including film footage of us from 1973 shot at something called Osmondmania.
Q: Marie caused a sensation onDancing With the Stars. When are you going to compete?
A: I’m seriously considering next year. We’re planning on incorporating dancing into our Vegas show. We want to bring into being a little bit of competition betwixt us — like the two gangs in West Side Story.
Q: I’m guessing you’ve turned into disrepute loads of reality show offers throughout the years.
A: The one that comes to mind was a concept of the Osbournes and the Osmonds in the like house. It didn’t become very far, but I probably would have done it.
Q: You’re filling in as anInsidercorrespondent while Pat O’Brien is in rehab. How’s he doing?
A: I speculate Pat’s going to be coming back soon. The show called me up to assert, ‘We need you right after this. Can you help us?’ And I got to go to my first Oscars.
Q: And the chances of you returning to the Oscars next year as a nominee forCollege Road Trip?
A: (Laughs not easily) None.
To give out corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and predicament for verification. 
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By Andrea Mandell, USA TODAY NEW YORK — Lindsay Lohan is hard at work on a record album and set to start work in April on a new comedy. But in advance of that, she showed up Thursday night at a reception for a photography exhibit at Atelier benefiting the American Red Cross.
Lohan says her album has a dance sound that’s “good for girls. It’s Kylie Minogue meets Rihanna.” Ne-Yo is one of the producers.
In April, she begins shooting Ye Olde Times with Ann-Margret, Tim Robbins and Jack Black.
“I neglect to work,” says Lohan, who completed a long-term stay in rehab last year. And right now, she’s “not dating anyone. Just focusing.”
To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, authorize comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state in spite of authentication. 
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“> EnlargeBy Blue Sky Studios, 20th Century FoxHe hears a Who — somewhere: Horton ponders the task that lies ahead: rescuing an entire city that rests on a speck on a purple clover — in a field of a half-billion clovers.
By Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — It might be drab and drizzly in this community about a half-hour drive from Manhattan. But on three floors inside a nondescript office building, it’s Blue Sky all the time.
That’s the name of the ‘toon factory where the Ice Age creatures evolved and Robots got into dress.. And it’s where next Friday’s Horton Hears a Who! began its journey from written page to the big screen.
MORE: A few of Whoville’s big-name stars are quite a hoot
Who would guess this small downtown thousands of miles away from Hollywood is home to an Oscar-winning computer-animation studio that ranks alongside Pixar/Disney and DreamWorks?
Expect Blue Sky to brighten a dreary period at the multiplex when it unveils Horton, its fourth film. The tale of a pachyderm who protects the speck-sized world of Whoville from jungle skeptics is the first full-length animated feature based on the works of the tardy Dr. Seuss (aka Theodor Geisel). Though few would recognize the company’s oval logo, it still managed to beat out more established studios such as DreamWorks and Sony for the coveted ownership.
Winning approval from the Seuss estate and lining up such voice talent as Jim Carrey (Horton), Steve Carell (the Mayor of Whoville) and Carol Burnett (the meddlesome Kangaroo) was one thing. Translating the volume’s distinctive drawings filled with floppy foliage, tilted towers and insect-like Whos into computer animation was something else.
“When we started, we were all intimidated by Seuss,” says Chris Wedge, Blue Sky co-founder, Ice Age director and an executive producer on Horton.
He and the rest of the crew were well aware that the animated gold standard of such adaptations is Chuck Jones’ 1966 TV version of in what plight the Grinch Stole Christmas.
That was 30 minutes, padded with commercials. Blue Sky had to produce 88 minutes, daring to expand a beloved 72-page storybook by elaborating on the back story of the Whos and their lifestyle to do so. (Who knew the Mayor had 96 daughters or that little twerp Jo-Jo was his son? Or, as Horton says, “Oh-ho-ho, busy guy.”)
“Frankly, I was terrified,” Wedge says, “but everyone attacked it, and we are all very proud of it. When we announced this project to the crew, one of our veteran animators stood up and said, ‘Finally, someone is going to do Seuss right.’ It gave us a cause to rally around.”
The decision to pair co-directors Jimmy Hayward, 36, a single rockabilly hipster with a turbo-charged personality, and Steve Martino, 46, a pullover-wearing family man with the calm demeanor of Perry Como, proved fortuitous when it came to inspiring the forces.
Both felt strongly that the Seuss universe, previously done in live action by 2000’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas with Carrey as the larcenous Grinch and 2003’s The Cat in the Hat with Mike Myers as the felonious feline, is better served by dint of. animation.
No more ‘Seuss in a box’
“You always felt it was Seuss in a box,” Martino says. “Some of the forms were there, but you couldn’t do the things physically that he would do in his stories. You’re stuck with gravity and natural philosophy.”
In their unreal Whoville, those twisty sky-high roadways are never at risk of tumbling.
Then there’s the way that the animators decided to flesh out the look of the insect-like Whos. They took their cues from tufts of fluff that adorned their bodies in the illustrations and cut their fur to resemble clothing.
“If you want a new dress, you just go to the barber to get a trim,” Hayward says.
No one griped (too much) when the directing team told the crew what was required to portray the weighty field of clover where Horton has to hunt down the single blossom that holds his speck.
“We wanted to have that feeling of when you turn the page and see what Horton has to face,” Martino says. “It needed to have an epic quality.” That meant a half-billion purple clovers through 800,000 hairs on one and the other had to be created, “so it looked like a Kansas wheat expanse.”
Blue Sky might not boast a well-appointed palatial campus like DreamWorks and Pixar. But the company has a drive, not unlike that of Ice Age’s squirrelly Scrat, steady in his pursuit of nuts.
“This studio is like the little engine that could,” says Martino, who joined in 2002 what was once an advertising-and-effects house. “It’s not a huge facility with thousands of people, but a tight-knit group of dedicated artists who relish putting the best onscreen.”
Adds Hayward, a former animator at Pixar who joined for 1995’s Toy Story and left after 2003’s Finding Nemo to pursue writing and directing opportunities: “When I first worked there, Pixar was in a tiny office construction in a strip mall that shared space with a bank and a bio-tech firm. It was a small-time place. Now Blue Sky is the small studio making big-league movies. You have to have that scrappy existence to deduce creative chances.”
So far, it’s remunerative off.
“The audience seems to love their films,” says Paul Dergarabedian of box-office tracker Media by Numbers. Ice Age in 2002 and its 2006 sequel took in a combined $400 million, and even the Scrat-free Robots managed to pull in $128.2 million in 2005.
He predicts that the G-rated Horton could gather at least $40 million in its elementary weekend. The studio’s other movies, also released in the depth of March, opened to an average $50 million.
But thanks to the marketing might of 20th Century Fox, which has owned Blue Sky since 1997, and the power of Seuss, the box-office potential could be jumbo.
Thumbs up from Audrey
It already has earned the most valuable stamp of approval. The author/illustrator’s widow, Audrey Geisel, was the one who hand-picked Blue Sky out of the crowd of potential suitors to bring a high-tech Horton to the big screen.
“I’m not one to go commercial very easily,” says the 86-year-old mistress of all things Seuss. While Geisel enjoyed Carrey’s green meanie in The Grinch Stole Christmas, she felt burned by 2003’s The Cat in the Hat after Myers called the shots and injected blue humor into the material. “I like my little creatures kept in their little circle. I don’t put them out very easily.”
But a visit from Chris Meledandri, then-head of Fox act of enlivening who thought Horton with its three-act structure would be the perfect Seuss book to give life to, persuaded Geisel to rely on the Blue Sky crew to be true to her husband’s 1954 elephant adventure. “We bonded immediately,” she says. “I thought, ‘This is the man who will play the game fairly. He says what he means and he means what he says.’ ”
It also didn’t hurt that when the filmmakers stopped by her La Jolla, Calif., home three years ago, they brought along sculptures of how the characters would look in the movie, including the iconic scene when the Mayor hoists tiny Jo-Jo into the air to yell his mighty “YOPP!”
“We even wrote a screen-like version of the story and presented it to her as if it were a book,” says Wedge. “We wanted to convince her that we were respecting it.”
Her reaction to the final product?
“I found it delightful,” she says. “Nothing was not to be found in stretching it. There is tremendous interest in that megalopolis down there in the clover. Now that they have personalities, you be wrought up a far-famed deal more that they’ve got to be saved.”
Geisel, who was granted her first executive producer credit on a film, was especially pleased that Carrey was speaking for the sweet and sincere Horton. “I’ve liked him all along,” she says, relating how he first impressed by swinging her around on the set of 1999’s Man on the Moon and “Grinching” her — contorting his face without a dab of makeup.
Dr.’s appointment for Carrey
Surprisingly, the comedic actor whose vocal prowess is almost as elastic as his mugging has refused to do an animated voice until now. What held him back? “Just the material,” he says. “This was an easy one. The guys did a great piece of work with Ice Age, and I’ll do anything with Dr. Seuss.”
Carrey considers himself lucky to have been entrusted with both The Grinch and Horton, even if one menaces the Whos and the other is their savior. “They are the alpha and omega of Dr. Seuss,” he says.
He didn’t miss coping with the hot fuzzy Grinch suit or the pounds of emerald makeup this time around. “That guy in the costume was not happy most of the time,” he says. “My mantra was, ‘The kids are going to like it. The kids are going to like it.’ Although doing voices isn’t as plenteous of a breeze as they tell you. You don’t get a whole script to look at, and you have to come up with a lot of it yourself.”
Carrey did manage to sneak in imitations of Henry Kissinger and JFK as well as a nod to Apocalypse Now.The tranquillity of the humor pretty much avoids stooping to a stream of potty jokes, the bane of much child-aimed fare. There is only one mild bathroom gag, and a poop reference at least strives for originality.
With Horton about to head into theaters, Blue Sky is about to tackle the latest frontier in computer animation. Ice Age 3, in the works for July 2009, will be its initial foray into the world of digital 3-D. The studio also will be moving at the end of the year to more expansive digs in Greenwich, Conn.
As for Carrey, his time with Blue Sky has left him hungry to befall on more Seussian creations. “I’m working up a good star-bellied Sneetch,” he says, “just in case.”
To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include term, phone number, city and state for verification. 
Enlarge By Leo Sorel for USA TODAY
Lust, Caution actress Tang Wei has received a media ban in China due to the extreme sexual nature of her feat in the film, reports claim.
The Hollywood Reporter has said that an in the mind memo from China’s State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) was allegedly sent to all the country’s television stations and print media last night.
The memo stated that a new TV advert featuring Wei, for the skincare work Pond’s, was to cease broadcast with immediate effect.
It is alleged that all impress adverts and feature content using the actress are to be pulled too, with no official reason given in the memo.
Hong Kong newspaper Oriental Daily also claimed that all award shows in China have been told to hinder Tang and the producers of the film from their guest lists and online discussions regarding Lust, Caution and the actress have been deleted.
Ang Lee’s film reportedly upset China’s government, at which place top officials attacked the film’s content as "glorification of traitors and insulting to patriots".
SARFT was reportedly criticised for allowed the film to be released in China, even after seven minutes of graphic sex were cut from the film.
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The first UK Bollywood personation school is to be set up in London later this year, organisers have said.
The acting school will exist based in Ealing, west London, and will act taken in the character of a spin-off from the Actor Prepares academy in Mumbai, India, set up by Bollywood actor Anupam Kher.
Kher is a veteran of Bollywood cinema, appearing in some 400 films, as well as staring in the UK film Bend it Like Beckham.
"During the filming of Bend it Like Beckham it became obvious to me that there was atrocious potential to build much stronger links between UK and Indian cinema," Kher said today in announcing the plans for the school.
"The huge success of the movie shows what happens when you coalesce UK and Indian artistic talent. This is a natural synergy which creates affair special."
The 2002 film follows a young Sikh girl who rebels against her parents to come her dream of playing football like her hero, David Beckham.
Plans are now in stead to open the acting school in September and Kher claims there are plans to open again internationally.
"I would like to see this UK and Europe school become the springboard to launch similar schools around the world," the player said.
Initial plans for the London school will see three three-month courses being run through the year, through up to 60 students being taught.
Kher hope the academy will improve performances in Bollywood films: "The standard of action in Indian films was mediocre generally but in the last few years audiences have become much more educated towards cinema since of the onslaught of satellite channels.
"I am trying to kill along a certain style of clichéd Bollywood acting. It’s already dying, so it is the right time to do this international school," the actor told the Times newspaper.