If you’ve ever wanted to see a distinguished knight of the British crown fire up the water bong and get high as a Boeing jet to the thumping beats of Notorious B.I.G., “The Wackness” is your chance.

Suffice to say, this is not a standard role for Sir Ben Kingsley.

(New York Post)

Shekhar Kapur, director of Badit Queen, Elizabeth and Four Feathers, explains to Marc Lee why he could never have made Elizabeth had it not been for Trainspotting.

(The Telegraph UK)

‘Vantage Point’, now on DVD, got us thinking about other, better films focused on derring-do in affairs of state — like ”All the President’s Men,” ”JFK,” and ”Munich.” Vote for your own favorites!

(EW)

With action heroes and sci-fi themes populating the fall TV schedule, studios are planning to increase the presence of their television properties at Comic-Con International.

The July 24-27 fandom mecca in San Diego will feature more than two dozen sessions promoting upcoming TV series. The events including panels for such shows as Fox’s “Fringe” and “Dollhouse,” NBC’s “My Own Worst Enemy” and ABC’s “Life on Mars.”

A few years ago, 20th Television didn’t have an organized presence at the event. This year, the News Corp-owned studio will have a booth on the show floor for the first time as well as panels for at least eight series.

(Reuters)

Have you gone on the internet in the last 36 hours? Are you a man, woman, or child who has, at one point, expressed even a passing interest in motion pictures? If so, I’d wager that 90% of you have already been forwarded the link to the beyond bad-ass trailer for the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, a trailer that debuted online this week and already has Bond fans drooling onto their shaken-not-stirred vodka martinis.

How cool is the trailer? Well, we think people will immediately stop mocking the title - it wasn’t warmly received by online pundits - because, even though “Quantum of Solace” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, with a trailer as exciting as the one that just hit the ‘net, they could re-title the film “Mr. Bond’s Wonder Emporium” and we’d still be preordering our opening night tickets as early as possible.

(The Deadbolt)

• The Passion of the Christ star Jim Caviezel (pictured) will join Ian McKellen (The Lord of the Rings) in a remake of the ’60s sci-fi series The Prisoner for AMC that will premiere next year. The network will turn the classic into a six-part miniseries that will feature Caviezel in the title role of Number Six, which was once played by Prisoner creator and writer Patrick McGoohan. McKellen will play Number Two. The original series, which bowed in 1967, told the story of an ex-British government agent who is kidnapped and taken to a mysterious village where his captors try to extract information from him. AMC will adjust the plot to address 21st century issues such as security and surveillance.
• Acclaimed movie actor Tim Roth is set to appear in Lie to Me, a Fox television series about a human lie detector. The drama is expected to debut early next year; Fox has made a 13-episode commitment. Based on the work of a real-life scientist who is able to read the human body and voice to determine if someone is being truthful, Lie to Me will be the first attempt at TV stardom for Roth, who currently appears in The Incredible Hulk and received an Oscar nomination for 1995’s Rob Roy. A pilot is due to be shot in August.
• The truth is out there for another Gillian Anderson character. The X-Files star will produce and star in a biopic of Martha Gellhorn, the pioneering female war correspondent who covered the Spanish Civil War and married Ernest Hemingway. Anderson’s company, Fiddlehead Prods., has acquired the rights to Caroline Moorehead’s 2004 biography Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life; playwright/screenwriter Sharman Macdonald (The Winter Guest) will adapt the book for the screen.

Molly Ringwald modestly resists the label “style icon,” but her quirky looks in some of the quintessential films of the ’80s spurred trends aplenty. Girls ransacked thrift stores for fedoras and gleefully took shears to their mother’s prom dresses. Ringwald spills on the good, the bad and the ugly.

(LA Times)

How to get rid of the ghost that you want to keep close? It’s been more than twenty-five years now since Ingmar Bergman was regularly making feature films, but the master’s mammoth shadow looms over the national cinema with undiminished dominance, and indeed most of European art cinema in general; meanwhile it’s just one year after his death, at age 89, and Swedish cinema is still struggling with the legacy of this fearsomely popular and canonized auteur.

(Indie Wire)

A major Hollywood studio and online search engine Google Inc on unveiled separate moves on Monday to put movie and TV-like content on the Web, highlighting the way in which both see the Internet as critical to reaching customers.

Sony Pictures Entertainment, a unit of Sony Corp, said it plans to make the Will Smith action film “Hancock,” which opens on Wednesday, available online to owners of the Web-connected Sony Bravia TV before the movie goes out on DVD.

(Reuters)

About the best thing that “Hancock” has going for it is the idea of a superhero who’s not a good guy; Will Smith’s titular titan is petulant, rude, alcoholic, destructive and generally peevish. And he’s the hero.

Hollywood has a history of giving us characters who manage to simultaneously drive us crazy and win us over. (If you’ve ever been a teenage girl or a parent to one, you know the powerful irresistibility of the ne’er-do-well.) Talented screenwriters have often created winning villains so charming or charismatic that moviegoers have to resist the urge to cheer on their evil schemes or general wrongdoing.

Everyone has a favorite, of course, but these 10 examples are all wonderfully warped.

(MSNBC)