With 14 reviews in, all negative, and some reviews calling Mummy III Tomb of the Dragon Emperor a franchise killer, it’s looking like a really really bad summer for Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz seems to have been weisz (yes I hate himself too) to stay away from this one. Let’s face it, the Mummy movies were never more than second rate retreads of Indiana Jones but they did have a certain amount of charm. Now with an actual Indiana Jones movie out, albeit a second rate one, and with a failed spinoff movie starring the Rock and years gone by, the whole thing seems that much more pointless. Of course I wouldn’t count Mummy III Tomb of the Dragon Emperor at the box office yet. Franchises these days seem popular with audiences and a third sequel seems to be a better lock than an original movie. Dark Knight is holding steady but it’s not exactly a family movie, Mummy III Tomb of the Dragon Emperor likely will be. So Mummy III Tomb of the Dragon Emperor has a decent shot at doing well, if not spectacularly well.

One of the summer’s big hits, especially animation wise is Kung Fu Panda. Mummy III Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is China based. The Dark Knight left Gotham for a scene set in China. Obviously China is a major emerging market and one that Hollywood is finding it tough to crack, as the People’s Republic of China pours on the restrictions to protect its domestic film industry while keeping Hollywood movies out. Gone are the days when Hollywood would touch the Dalai Lama with a ten foot pole, but even that’s not helping. Still action movies are more likely to incorporate a Chinese scene. Mission Impossible 3 did it, Pirates of the Caribbean 3 did it and so did The Dark Knight. I’m not too sure that The Dark Knight’s Hong Kong scene featuring Batman’s forcibly extradition of Lau was really meant to cater to Chinese audiences, the references to corruption in China and the portrayal of Lau is the sort of thing to piss off Chinese authorities, the way they went ballistic over Jet Li in Pirates of the Caribbean 3. Still Hollywood is likely finding ways to include Chinese themes, audiences and locations to capture that all important foreign box office.

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FCC Chief Kevin Martin has come out and said that he currently has not objection to tiered bandwidth pricing plans so long as the bandwidth limits are clearly spelled out. On the positive side this will mean an end to the current Double Secret Probation system that cable customers find themselves on, when they’re told that they’ve gone over the cap, but not how much the cap is or how much they need to reduce their usage. On the other hand this is a virtual greenlight for cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner to bring on the usage caps and turn online video into their private and paid playground. Having the cable monopoly control the on ramp to the video internet is a major problem and conflict of interest, but to the cable companies it’s just synergy which is why the internet is now in big trouble. The boundless greed of cable companies will drive them to use broadband caps to effectively tax the internet and turn services such as Hulu into an added offering just like premium channels.

I doubt I’m the only one who thinks the Joker’s Asylum issues feature the Joker out of character, too well… serious for one thing and didactic. The Joker’s Asylum Two Face issues suffers from most of the same problems as the previous issues. We have the gratuitous use of Batman in order to give the caped crusader some face time even though he has no real place in the story. That means a flashback of being saved from a fire by Batman (isn’t it enough that Batman replaced the Gotham Police Department, does he have to replace the Gotham Fire Department too?) and as an impostor in Two Face’s gambit and finally as the rescuer who saves the day. Again we’ve got flat earnest characters and the usual villains like Joker and Two Face who never really seem right or in tune. The closing of Joker’s Asylum Two Face that breaks the fourth wall and asks us to flip a coin for a man’s life is nicely done and a good tie in with The Dark Knight, I half suspect inspired by The Dark Knight’s rendering of Two Face, but it’s too little too late.

There’s an odd kind of cyclical harmony to things sometimes as the two most noted SF series of the 90’s, the X-Files and Babylon 5, seem to have reached their terminating point, even as Star Trek might have a shot at a resurgence with a splashy new movie.

You might say that the X-Files and Babylon 5 had gotten worn out in the same way that Star Trek had, going through multiple spinoffs and movies under the eye and hand of tired creators. Chris Carter has few excuses, considering the amount of power and latitude he had and just how badly he screwed it up. I remember watching a late season two part X-Files episode that simply never made any sense. Not in the “I’m confused here” but simply consisted of nothing but an incoherent jumble like monkeys had put it together in the editing room. That was what the X-Files became. X-Files 2 was simply the belated nail in the UFO’s coffin as an aging Mulder and Scully tried to reunite with no one but the fans caring anymore.

Babylon 5 was more of an anomaly, a SciFi series driven by its creator and a small fanbase, motivated at least in part by its antipathy to Star Trek, that never could extend itself into the Star Trek like franchise that it tried to be. The game fell through, the novels sold weakly, the audience for the TV movies dropped off, two series were launched and quickly canceled and even the direct to DVD solution that resurrected shows like Futurama proved to be inadequate, as JMS announced that it’s a big screen movie or nothing. While remake fever is underway, it’s more likely to be nothing.

Of course it’s possible that years from now someone will come along to reinvent the shows, more like the X-Files. Or maybe not.Reinvention is a tricky thing and while the X-Files has a simple enough premise, it also requires matching the zeitgeist of an insecure period where people are more willing to… believe.

Page Six is claiming, and everyone is prematurely gloating, that Ben Silverman may be on his way out at NBC. That would be a quite fast departure for Ben Silverman, but then again Silverman also had a quick rise to the top, where he hasn’t done much to justify his reputation.

With The Bionic Woman already dead and NBC left with little in the way of usable series, about the only thing that could save Ben Silverman is a successful 2008 fall series launch. But I doubt anyone seriously believes that Knight Rider will do it. If the two new sitcoms, the Office spinoff and Amy Poehler sitcom, are huge hits, Silverman might survive. Otherwise probably not. With a slate filled with weak summer Reality TV shows and fall slate filled with foreign imports and revivals, Silverman’s creative programming is low on creative and high on derivative. Not a crime in TV land, except when you fail.

With Journeyman and the Bionic Woman as high profile meltdowns, Life and Las Vegas dead, Lipstick Jungle and Friday Night Lights barely hanging on, Scrubs moving to ABC, NBC needs some fast action and needs it now and Ben Silverman no longer looks like the guy to deliver. Worse yet the rest of NBC’s lineup is aging badly. The Office is likely to have a bumpy next season, My Name is Earl has gotten old real fast and 30 Rock, Medium and Chuck as vanilla but acceptable placeholders, NBC’s problems will only get worse and this tepid lineup speaks volumes as to how NBC became the fourth network.

Silverman has filled the 2008 slot with high concept dramas like Crusoe and Kings and My Own Worst Enemy that are all too likely to fizzle when they meet the audience, reality shows that play like second hand FOX and sitcoms that NBC desperately needs, but may not take off. And that’s where the rubber will meet the road.

Summer’s here and summer is always a great time for seafood, but even better the Great American Seafood Cook off is coming, a time to celebrate the use of sustainable domestic seafood, rather than non-sustainable imported products. By relying on domestic seafood whose source is local and known, we save on fuel, carbon footprints and avoid the problems caused by food importation from overseas. The Great American Seafood Cook Off is a very exciting event that for five years has brought some exciting 5 star chefs and recipes in celebration of the best that seafood can be.

I am not the greatest cook of the century but I am a great eater and I do know what I like. This dish is one I absolutely love to see on my plate for dinner any time of year. It’s called Fish Veracruz and it is a mexican style dish but not the usual fare to say the least. It uses local, readily available fish that you can buy fresh from any market any time of the year. Fishes that go well with this recipe are found in abundance all throughout the country and fish is not called “brain food” for no reason. Its simple to make too and you can add alterations as you see fit of course.

You need the following ingredients:

About 2 pounds of fresh or frozen red snapper filets. You can use flounder or cod too, your call but snapper is traditional with this. You need enough for about 6 people .
2 Tablespoons of fresh lemon juice.
1 pound of tomatoes that you core, seed and chop fine. It should be about 3 cups worth of chopped tomato.
1 1/2 cups of finely chopped onion
2 cloves of garlic minced
1 tablespoon of snipped parsley
1 tablespoon of fresh snipped mint (dry if you have to)
3 tablespoons of olive oil
1 small jar of jalapeno peppers rinsed, seeded and chopped fine . If you dont like hot pepper use green chilies.
1/4 cup of pimento stuffed green olives
1 tablespoon of capers
1 large bay leaf
1 tablespoon of snipped fresh thyme.

Take your fish, fresh of thawed and sprinkle with a bit of salt and then drizzle on the olive oil and set the filets aside. In a 12 inch skillet you will cook the tomatoes, onion, garlic, mint, parsley in some olive oil til the onion is tender but not browned. Now add your jalapeno or chilies, the capers , bay leaf and thyme and your olives (sliced olives are nicer I think) Cover and heat til it boils. Now add your fish , lower the heat and simmer covered for about 10 to 15 minutes til the fish is flaky. When done place the fish on a plate and arrange the vegetables on top of it in a pleasing manner. Throw out your bay leaf. Take the liquid from the cooking and bring back to boil after removing veggies and fish and reduce it . Takes about 3 minutes. You can use this to pour over the fish .

Garnish with parsley , capers and more olives. It will serve 6 to 8 people nicely. Do you have any ideas on how this recipe might be better? I would like to hear them. And I think it would make a great contender as well.

Walden Media’s ongoing attempt to compete with the mainstream blockbuster by producing family friendly films reminds me of the wave of self-criticism in the Chinese film industry in the wake of Kung Fu Panda’s success, all focusing on the stifling atmosphere that prevents anything original or controversial from being created. Journey to the Center of the Earth, another Walden Media project thrust into the summer’s blockbuster season against such titans as The Dark Knight, is an all too unfortunate example of the problem.

Journey to the Center of the Earth has been made and remade over and over again, yet despite being a novel that captured the imagination of so many when thrown at the screen it has a way of turning into a lackluster film. Journey to the Center of the Earth is yet another lackluster entry, painfully family friendly and short on actual content. Despite its hefty budget and 3D come on, Journey to the Center of the Earth feels like a TV movie and plays out just as predictably as one. So predictably that even children in the audience should have no problem guessing what comes next, before it happens.

With only three characters and a plot involving, of all things, family, Journey to the Center of the Earth is meant to be the ultimate family movie. Unfortunately it’s the kind of family movie that condescends to the children and bores the adults out of their minds. Journey to the Center of the Earth isn’t so much a movie as an amusement park ride with lots of falling, jumping, falling on a water slide, being swept along a river and occasionally being propelled upward and once in a while being chased by a dinosaur. Some movies have the potential to be turned into amusement park rides, but Journey to the Center of the Earth is an amusement park ride in search of a movie. And that movie is hard to find.

Starring Brendan Fraser as Professor Trevor Anderson, a lecturer delivering lectures no one listens to based on his vanished brother’s theories, he’s forced to take in his nephew for a week, only to have the kid quickly unearth clues in a copy of Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth that leads them to Scandinavia, where Hannah, a pretty but skeptical mountain guide, takes them into the mountains where they naturally wind up finding their way to the center of the earth.

The nephew of course wears a ski cap and a hoodie and teaches his professor uncle all about the internet by accessing Google on his PSP. The mountain guide is of course pretty and competent while Fraser’s character is a klutz, until about halfway through the movie when the mountain guide strips off her outerwear, unaccountably falls in love with Fraser’s character and reverts to a sexist stereotype of femininity, clutching him and running away from danger, while he gets to be the hero.

For fans of the book, Journey to the Center of the Earth offers the occasionally interesting twist on Verne’s original methods updated by more modern science, but it’s unfortunately buried in unreal special effects and a lightweight cast. Brendan Fraser carries as much of the movie as he can with his naturally goofy affable personality, but he doesn’t get much help from his co-stars who seem completely out of their league on the big screen and once the amusement park ride is underway, there’s not much for him to do except panic, deliver the occasional quip and run around in front of a green screen.

If you need a good way to visualize everything that’s wrong with Journey to the Center of the Earth, think back to the CGI waterfall in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Remember how Jones and the crew go over one CGI waterfall and then another bigger one and a bigger one, until you stop caring anymore because none of it seems real and no matter how well the cast tries, they can’t make any of it seem like anything more than a bunch of people trying not to look silly while pretending to go over a waterfall. That’s 90 percent of Journey to the Center of the Earth in a nutshell.

There are nice touches in Journey to the Center of the Earth and even the glowing bird who guides the boy through every turn of the underground journey isn’t as annoying as it might seem. But Journey to the Center of the Earth still suffers from the tepid touch of Walden Media that under the mandate of producing family films, produces antiseptic and lifeless productions. Written by a man whose only previous experience was on War Stories with Oliver North and directed by the visual effects supervisor from The Day After Tomorrow, Journey to the Center of the Earth feels like an expensive and lifeless TV movie that’s short on ambition, originality, characters, plot and everything that makes a movie worth watching.

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I say wonderful because it manages to give people new reasons to hate George Lucas while reminding us of all the old reasons we hate him. It’s so rare that in a brief interview a public figure can destroy his own image with every other sentence, while no one besides the fanboys pays attention. But that’s been the Lucas way for a while. The Star Wars prequels have become a running joke, the new set of Indiana Jones movies is pretty certain to end up the same way, Lucas has demonstrated over and over again that he simply doesn’t care. And so we take it from there.

In the Times interview, there are plenty of fun tidbits. Take Lucas’ admission that he really doesn’t care who he licenses Star Wars to and what they do with it, so long as they send the check to the right place.

“I am the father of our Star Wars movie world - the filmed entertainment, the features and now the animated film and television series,” he says. “And I’m going to do a live-action television series. Those are all things I am very involved in: I set them up and I train the people and I go through them all. I’m the father; that’s my work. Then we have the licensing group, which does the games, toys and books, and all that other stuff. I call that the son - and the son does pretty much what he wants.” He laughs. “Once in a while, they ask a question like ‘Can we kill off Yoda?’, things like that, but it’s very loose.

“Then we have the third group, the holy ghost, which is the bloggers and fans. They have created their own world. I worry about the father’s world. The son and holy ghost can go their own way.”

I’m going to skim over the obvious fact that George Lucas can’t seem to even talk about his own franchise without using some high minded religious metaphor that compares himself to a deity. This isn’t even the first time he’s done it, so it’s old school by now. The Mad TV George Lucas Dateline parody video above covers that one pretty thoroughly.

But let’s just recognize that George Lucas really doesn’t care what the licensees do with Star Wars so long as they don’t kill off major characters. That’s not the attitude of someone who cares about his work. It’s the attitude of someone who cares about cashing in.

“We were hoping for box-office figures like that, which is, ultimately, with inflation, what the others have done, within 10%,” Lucas explains. “So, we squeaked up there. Really, though, it was a challenge getting the story together and getting everybody to agree on it. Indiana Jones only becomes complicated when you have another two people saying ‘I want it this way’ and ‘I want it that way’, whereas, when I first did Jones, I just said, ‘We’ll do it this way’ — and that was much easier. But now I have to accommodate everybody, because they are all big, successful guys, too, so it’s a little hard on a practical level.

Of course Lucas could have just handed the movie over to one of his VFX supervisors to direct and made all the characters CGI, but unfortunately he couldn’t get rid of Spielberg and after the failure of Young Indy, maybe he’s grasped that Indiana Jones without Harrison Ford doesn’t work. But Lucas managed to be the stubbornest one in the trio, ousted Darabont and turned in a weak Indy 4 that even he admits just squeaked by. So naturally he blames Spielberg and Ford for it.

“If I can come up with another idea that they like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that. It’s kind of a hybrid of our own two ideas, so we’ll see where we are able to take the next one.”

So basically George Lucas wants to take it into a future involving Communists, space aliens and Shia LeBeouf. Why stop there? Take it to the 22nd century or a galaxy far far away. The whole reason people liked Indiana Jones was because it took place in the past.

“I’m only going to produce Red Tails — we have a black director — but then I think I am going to direct some more, make some esoteric films that have a personal significance.” And what might they be?

A black director! Amazing. I’m sure he’ll do well as long as he caters to George Lucas’ expectations of what black people are like by talking like Jar Jar Binks,

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Allen Steele has the dubious gift of writing novels that read like short stories or perhaps short stories that have been padded until they turn into novels. On close inspection Spindrift might pass for a novella rather than a novel, padded with minute details of the trip and the explorations of Commander Harker, pilot Emily Collins and traitor and prisoner and all around genius when it comes to aliens, Jared Ramirez.

From the start Spindrift whomps you with a whole lot of background, virtually none of which is elucidated as Allen Steels apparently is writing for people who have read his Coyote novels and expects you to know what’s been going on in the Coyote Universe. But stripped of background, Spindrift is the usual story about a first contact starship mission featuring a blowhard Captain, a savvy first officer, a fearful female pilot and a scientist who no one listens to but knows everything before it happens, who go off to make First Contact and encounter wise and peaceful aliens but nearly spoil it with their usual human warmongering ways.

Steele attempts to bring in some complexity with Jared Ramirez, who traded genocide for immortality in the name of ecology, but is unable to bring any kind of moral reckoning to bear on the whole thing and spends most of the novel using Ramirez as the prototypical genius that the brass won’t listen to but who turns out to be right about everything.

There’s nothing new in Spindrift, not that you should expect it from Allen Steele whose novels are basically simpler, up to date and real world repackagings of SF tropes. Spindrift is no different and like most of Steele’s novels offers no actual surprises, despite the attempt at generating mystery by setting the whole thing as a sort of flashback. If you’ve read Steele before then you know what to expect. If you haven’t, now you will.

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A Wall Street Journal essay comparing Bush to Batman in The Dark Knight has gotten a good deal of attention both positive and negative. It’s inevitable that conservative commentators will attempt to read conservative messages into popular movies, as they view it as a way of demonstrating that the people are with them. By turn liberal commentators are happy to read liberal messages in movies, not in the name of populism, but a sense of artistic vindication.

Since Batman is the story of a vigilante who dons a mask to fight crime while cooperating on and off with the police, it’s naturally going to be more given to a conservative reading than a liberal one. While Batman has been written from a liberal perspective, the politics of the average comic book writer being what they are, the character and setting are naturally more given to a conservative interpretation. And this is a problem for superheroes in general, because aside from having them exclusively fight Neo-Nazis, Big Corporations, the Religious Right and a Neo-Con government, making a superhero liberal takes more work than making him or her naturally libertarian or conservative.

Many movie critics have described The Dark Knight as a post 9/11 movie, which it might be, or simply influenced by America post 9/11. But the important thing to understand about The Dark Knight is that it lacks an ideological agenda, either Democrat or Republican. It takes place in a version of the real world where all actions have consequences and there are no perfect solutions.

The Dark Knight focuses on blowback and escalation, as a product of Batman taking the war to the mob. An anti-war reading however would have to argue that Batman was wrong for putting on the cape in the first place and that the status quo where the mob ruled Gotham was preferable. And that’s a hard position to defend. The Joker is a consequence of Batman’s war on crime as Gotham’s war becomes a clash of symbols. The Dark Knight references CIA extractions, blowback, rendition, surveilance, abuse of power and all those things, but it views them as tragic yet inevitable products of the escalation that occurs when you take on a fight of this magnitude.

Read from the standpoint of middle eastern politics, the mob can be viewed as the Saddam Hussein like dictators while the Joker is the new breed of terrorists dedicated to seeing the world burn. Batman represents the more ruthless darker tactics of Bush’s War on Terror while Harvey Dent represent the more “noble” criminal justice campaign against terror of the Clinton Administration. But Dent like the Clinton Administration has a dark side that makes him no different really than Batman, Bush. The tactics that enable him still rely on illegal and questionable measures.

The question that would really move The Dark Knight into one political category or another, is whether Batman’s actions are ultimately necessary or not. I suspect most viewers will answer that they are, since Batman is the hero. A minority might agree with Bruce Wayne’s regrets and argue that Wayne should have kept off the batsuit and tried to fight crime by fighting social problems, but a conservative rejoinder would be that fighting organized crime attacks the cause of many social problems, including drugs and prostitution and poverty.

The conventional Batman tries to do both, using his wealth to help people as Bruce Wayne and promoting Dent, while fighting organized crime by night. This can be read as the two sides of America, the dark that uses killing, torture and imprisonment to fight threats while the light dispatches foreign aid across the world. One can’t really exist without the other. In The Dark Knight, it isn’t only Harvey Dent who has two faces, but Batman as well. Harvey Dent’s noble public image was an unrealistic veneer just as Bruce Wayne’s is. His results came about through Batman’s darker tactics. Standing in between them Commissioner Gordon meditates the extremes on behalf of the city of Gotham and sacrifices a real hero, Batman to give the city an unreal hero, Harvey Dent. But despite the public war with Batman, covertly Gordon relies on Batman, just as America under any administration must rely on covert and darker tactics to see its way through the dark night.

It isn’t that Bush is Batman. Every US President must be part Batman, part Dent and part Gordon to do his job.

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New Line may be dead as an independent studio, turned into nothing more than an adjunct for channeling the cesspool of Warner Brother’s crap, but Bob Shaye has moved on, and whatever you might think about him, he has run an amazing studio that put out some of the best genre movies ever. And his current plans now focus on bringing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to the big screen. It’s an insanely ambitious project, but one well worth doing in this age of remakes and regurgitation. Why not try to bring something worthwhile to the big screen?

Calling the trilogy “one of the things I’ve had close to my heart” since he read the books as a young man, Shaye said the project had as its goal locating and creating an audience for the Asimov classic. “Our idea to renew the worldwide audience’s appetite for the story,” he said. Shaye noted that the books’ political themes, particularly its focus on the rise and fall of empires, give the movie a geopolitical relevance.

I like the idea that Shaye has read Foundation and lived it as a kid. I did too. The idea of trying to tie the fall of the Empire to some sort of criticism of the Bush Administration may be trendy, but it’s far less attractive. The Galactic Empire was a whole different entity operating on a whole different scale. Not to mention that by the time this gets made, Bush won’t even be in office.

I’d like to see what Unique brings to the table and a Foundation project sounds exciting, hopefully Shaye has learned his lesson from The Last Mimzy and won’t be in the director’s seat and won’t bring the guy from High Fidelity to direct the damn thing either. But even a failed shot at a serious Asimov adaptation is better than nothing. Then again after I. Robot, who knows.

With the emergence of a Microsoft paper touting something called BrowseRank, the debate will no doubt begin over privacy, but as the Google vs Viacom spat has already demonstrated, your data and personal information is stored just as much by Google anyway.

It’s not exactly a secret that Google’s PageRank sucks. Talking about how useless Google PageRank is like mentioning that we’re seeing a lot of rain this summer. Everyone agrees but no one can really do anything about it. The precedence of PageRank exists only because of the precedence of Google Search. Google PageRank itself is mainly worthless and the phrase Googlebombing arose from how easily Google Page Rank was exploited. Using link as votes is about the worst system imaginable and yet it’s the one Google uses, which insures that finding anything on a topic that spammers have chosen to take over is a thankless and pointless task.

Entire industries have been based around manipulating and skewing keyword page rank. Microsoft’s BrowseRank though threatens to trash the entire system. While it should be possible to still fake page views, it will no longer be nearly as simple and would require something along the lines of a botnet or at least a server farm. Of course I wouldn’t celebrate yet. Google is still the 800 pound gorilla and it has no plans to go anywhere, but maybe BrowseRank might rattle the arrogant elitists at Google enough to make them rethink the same old useless PageRank system. Stranger things have happened.

Now called Legend of the Seeker which I suppose is less to the point but more poetic and less clumsy than the original Wizard’s First Rule. Not much to say here. Beautiful cinematography, beautiful girl, lots of killing involving big brutes. What’s there to complain about? Oh I’m sure actual fans of Richard Goodkind, who probably do exist, will find things to complain about, though with the promo teaser trailer so brief and short on dialogue and heavy on music and killing people, I’m not sure what about. Kahlan appears to still have her Confessors’ power, or at least what looks like it. Would have been odd for them to remove something that good anyway.

Sam Raimi’s production is obviously utilizing the scenery over in that side of the world quite effectively and the production feels more serious than Hercules or Xena, so probably it’s not going to be a long string of jokes and cheesy acting involving random figures from history. I guess that will be a change from Hercules, Xena, Cleopatra 2025, Jack of All Trades, etc. Of course it would be nice to have a decent fantasy series on the air and while I have trouble taking the Goodkind authored Wizard’s First Rule seriously, or any of the followup novels, if they were stripped of their ahem derivative issues and the constant lectures and Richard acting like a sociopath, they could conceivably create the source material for something decent.

Again I don’t see this surviving on a network, but there’s room in syndication with the demise of UPN and the inevitable demise of the CW, particularly if you rely on foreign sales more and on dwindling US audiences less. I would actually like to see a relaunch of the whole PTEN Action Network business that was tried back in the 90’s with shows like Babylon 5, Kung Fun the Legend Continues and a lot of other shows no one remembers. Network TV has gotten very stale, the average drama takes place in a courtroom or a hospital or both. There are no decent action series. So I say bring on Wizard’s First Rule or Legend of the Seeker.

Predictably enough there was no stopping The Dark Knight, certainly not with as lame a contender as Step Brothers or the poorly reviewed X-Files movie. Where other big event films had a severe dropoff on the second weekend, The Dark Knight held strong raking in 75 million dollars for a 315 million dollar total. Few would have thought that halfway through the summer DC would be riding roughshod over Marvel again, but not even Iron Man could hold a candle to Dark Knight, either critically or at the box office.

Step Brothers did their best with their little bit of counterprogramming to people who can’t eat jello without spilling it all over themselves, taking in 30 million dollars and proving that despite recent setbacks Will Ferrell isn’t quite done yet and unfortunately neither is Judd Apatow.

Mamma Mia fell one spot to 3rd place with 18 million dollars for a 62 million dollar total. Hefty money for a movie this bad especially with foreign box office. I’m sure Universal is now trying to figure out how to make a sequel.

X-Files I Want to Believe put the nail in the coffin of the X-Files franchise with a movie no one really wanted, delivered too late and in too competitive a season. Opening in 4th place with only 10 million dollars, it’s clear there’s a conspiracy to get rid of the X-Files once and for all. And who can blame them?

Somehow superseding Hancock, Journey to the Center of the Earth made it to 5th place with 9.5 million dollars for a 60 million total, proving that Brendan Fraser can cash in when you aren’t looking and that people really really hate Hancock.

Hancock went to 6th place with 8 million dollars in its 6th week of release, passing the 200 million mark and making Vincent Ngo cry. Already forgotten WALL-E is rolling lonesomely around 7th place with 6.3 million for a 195 million dollar total. WALL-E is sure to pass 200 million next week, but Pixar has already moved on to the less preachy UP.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is busy embarrassing Del Toro in 8th place with 5 million for a 65 million dollar total. Unless this sells more DVD’s Paris Hilton, don’t look for a sequel. I’d tell you about Space Chimps, but honestly do you really care?