So the weekend box office race is underway ... and early indications from the Friday #'s are that "The Game Plan" will score a narrow victory over "The Kingdom."

The Rock's latest attempt to prove he's a bankable star appears to have succeeded. The film earned about $6.2M Friday, compared to $5.9M for Peter Berg's politically charged action pic. If those figures hold up through Sunday, it will prove once again that 'fish out of water' comedies are a surefire way for a Tough Guy actor like the former Commander-in-Chief of Jabroni Nation to score box-office points.

Arnold Schwarzenegger pretty much started it all when he argued that "it's not a too-mah!" in 1990's "KINDERGARTEN COP" ... and Vin Diesel reversed the downward spiral of his career with 2005's "THE PACIFIER," which earned an obscene $113M!!

Robert De Niro has been cashing in on his serious onscreen persona for years, most notably with "MEET THE PARENTS" & "MEET THE FOCKERS." Of course, showing your lighter side doesn't work for everyone.
Just ask Sylvester Stallone how much good "RHINESTONE," "OSCAR" and "STOP! OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT!" did for his career.

But it looks like The Rock has finally broken out of the crowded field of highly-paid, heavily-promoted actors and shown he can lure fans into the theater. Now let's see if he can do it with better material.

We'll update the weekend box office race tomorrow night...

“The Kingdom” from director Peter Berg is continuing the fall season trend of serious, good, intelligent films for grownups that was kicked off last week with “In The Valley of Elah” and “Into The Wild.”

It’s a pleasure to be going to screenings these days, when these kinds of films outnumber the “Sydney White”s and “Game Plan”s. And coming soon, we have “Rendition” and “Things We Lost In The Fire” and “Gone Baby Gone” to sink our teeth into.

So I thought “The Kingdom” was a well-written smart action film with some great performances. It manages to be pro-American, but not anti-Saudi, which I think is important. It’s clear from the script that the bad guys are an extremist fundamentalist group which is not supported by the Saudi government.

However, I was alarmed at the audience reaction to some of the later scenes in the film. Without giving anything away, our American protagonists end up in a dicey situation and have to gun themselves out. At which point, the audience I saw the film with became wildly bloodthirsty and cheered fervently whenever someone got blown away. I guess you can’t help people’s emotional responses to entertainment, but I couldn’t help worrying that the message of the film might be lost on some people if al they are seeing is “good guys” (i.e. U.S.) versus “bad guys” (i.e. them) in a bloody exchange of bullets.

The film is about how each side believes it is right, how everyone is fighting for what they believe in, how every man with a gun has a family back home that he wants to protect, that everyone thinks God is on his side. I hope that is what people take away from this film, not just that America kicked ass.

You can always tell Hollywood’s getting into serious movie mode when they start screening movies that won’t hit theaters for another month or so. In today’s film industry, when a big-budget movie is done and all the tweaking & editing is finished MORE THAN A MONTH before its release date, then it’s a clear sign the studio is confident it has a winner on its hands.

And that’s what Universal has with "American Gangster." (And I’m not just saying that because REEL TALK, Uni Studios, is part of the NBC Universal family.) I saw a screening the other night and was simply blown away.

Director Ridley Scott’s 70s crime saga grabs you by the back of your neck from the very first shot in the movie, and doesn’t let you go until the very end. Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe are as superb as you expect them to be.

What separates Scott from lesser directors is that he doesn’t take shortcuts on the details. From the cars to the clothes, its like you fell in a time warp and landed back in the ‘Me Decade.’

And you know how there are about a dozen 70s songs that show up in every movie set in that decade? (Like Thelma Houston’s ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ – the royalties that song earns from Hollywood must be huge!) Well, you won’t hear any of those familiar tunes here. Don’t expect the usual NYC cinematic beauty shots. The New York in this picture is dirty and dangerous and unfamiliar to most moviegoers and really adds to the mood.

BTW, the guy Denzel portrays, Frank Lucas, was a notorious real-life Harlem drug kingpin who was bigger than the Mafia in the early 1970s heroin trade. I’m amazed its taken this long for someone to make a movie about this ruthless, fascinating character.

“American Gangster” opens November 2. Jeffrey & Alison will review the film that week on Reel Talk.

The other day I saw Kevin Bacon’s new film "Rails and Ties," which is set to open later this fall and I was once again struck by what an incredible actor he has become. I feel that he is still not given enough respect for his work.

Perhaps people just can’t let go of the image of him dancing angrily through "Footloose," but everything he has done recently has been spot-on. No one can convey pain, anguish and conflict in his face as ably as he can.

Even in mediocre fare, such as the recent "Death Sentence," it is his grief that engages us early in the story. His face then registers subtle changes from grief and hopelessness, to steely resolve, as he decides to take fate into his own hands…to robotic killing machine at the end. He has said that he wanted to take that role just to do an action shoot ‘em up flick, but I think his performance delivers more depth than the script can do justice.

"Rails and Ties" is directed by Alison Eastwood, daughter of Clint who directed Bacon in "Mystic River"…one of my favorite Bacon performances of late. Sean Penn may have won the Oscar for his flashier role of the grieving, vengeful father, but it was Bacon’s face again that registered the horror of what they were dealing with. And then there was that ‘look’ at the end of the film that had us all debating the meaning of the last scene.

Why he was not nominated for that role, or for his frighteningly honest portrayal of a pedophile in "The Woodsman" escapes me. Perhaps his acting is too nuanced for the Academy?

With Ang Lee’s current movie "Lust, Caution," filmgoers again get the chance to experience another of the endless stories dealing with World War II.

If, like me, you can't get enough World War II stories, here are some older films I recommend: "The Bridge on the River Kwai," only a slightly fictionalized telling of the true story of courageous British soldiers who built a bridge under the control of their Japanese captors in the teeming, steamy jungles of Burma. Directed by Sir David Lean, it's one of the great films of all time, made in 1957 on location in Celon (now Sri Lanka) for an astonishing seven million dollars!

"The Counterfeit Traitor" stars William Holden in a true story of an American businessman who became a Swiss citizen before the war, and was recruited by the allies to spy on Germany's industrial capacity. Much of the film takes place in Berlin where he found romance (in a role wonderfully portrayed by Lilly Palmer), faced death, but still made a major contribution to the war effort.

In "The Man Who Never Was," a stirring 1956 movie directed by Ronald Neame, one retells the stirring cloak and daggar tale of the allies' plan to divert the Germans to the wrong location prior to the invasion of Sicily. Urbane Clifton Webb plays the naval officer who conceived a plan to dump a body of a British officer off a submarine near the coast of Huelva, Spain. The body carried bogus papers about the invasion. The Germans found the body, inspected the papers, then sent in a spy to check the veracity of the courier.

All three are worth checking out on home video.

Last night Alison and I saw "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" with Cate Blanchett in the sequel to her earlier film "Elizabeth," which earned her a best actress Oscar nomination in 1998. She’s part of a long list of great actresses who have portrayed England’s most famous queen.

I’m sure you remember Maude Yates in the role? No? She was the first...back in 1915. Jean Simmons, one of the biggest stars of the '50s and '60s, and still with us, by the way, assumed the crown in 1953. The great Glenda Jackson, ironically now a longtime member of parliament, Flora Robeson, and the immortal Bette Davis are among the others.

But if any actress of our time is worthy of joining such an august list, it's Cate Blanchett, one of the premiere stars of our era. Watch for our interview with Mrs. Blanchett, and our review of "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," on Reel Talk the weekend of October 12th.

We fit an awful lot of stuff into one episode of "Reel Talk"...but there's only so much we can cover in one half hour...so here are some thoughts on a couple of films that I’ve seen recently that Jeffrey and I didn't review on the show.

"The Last Winter".... an effectively chilling horror film set at an arctic research station. This has all the classic elements of the horror set-up.... an intimate group of mix-gender 'types' are stranded in a remote location when strange things start to happen. Larry Fessenden directs an interesting cast....Ron Perlman blustering away, James Legros as the voice of reason and Connie Britton and Kevin Corrigan.

Of course, people start dying one by one, and all hope of rescue is lost early on. This had me going until the very end, where some sketchy special effects blew it. But for what I imagine was a small budget, I thought it was well done and suspenseful.

ReelTalkTV.com is going to be our way of giving you a daily dose of the movie reviews, news and film industry insight you get on our show every week (at least I hope so). Expect to get regular updates from Alison & Jeffrey on various topics -- whether its a heads up on a new movie, talking about a recent interview subject, random trivia questions (a Jeffrey specialty) -- if its occupying some part of their thought process, chances are they'll post about it here.

One of the great benefits of our new site will be to get feedback from you about what you like, don't like and what you're looking for. Since there are about 37 million entertainment-based websites clogging up bandwidth, we want to make sure when you visit our site, you find compelling and engaging content that isn't the same recycled stuff you see on many other websites. So let us know your thoughts.

One last thing. A can't-miss movie is "Into the Wild," based on Jon Krakauer's book of the same name. It tells the amazing and tragic story of Chris McCandless, AKA 'Alexander Supertramp.'

That name will make sense if you've read the book. If not, go see the movie because it is AMAZING. Sean Penn wrote/directed it and perfectly captures the spirit of the book. Emile Hirsch pulls a Christian Bale and completely immerses himself in the role as Chris. It opens in limited release this weekend but trust me, this one's worth the extra effort to find in theaters.

We're also interviewing Sean Penn on this weekend's show - great interview with one of the most talented people in Hollywood. Check local listings for times.

I'll post more on Mr. Penn's visit to the Reel Talk studios soon.

There's a small movie we couldn't get on Reel Talk, but it's well worth checking out. "The Rape of Europa" is a documentary recounting the looting of Europe’s great art museums; all part of Hitler’s twisted, demented schemes to create a great museum for himself. He, of course, had been rejected as a penniless artist from a prestigious art institute and it was one of the many grudges he carried all his life.

I never knew that the Louvre’s treasures were painstakingly carted off to the countryside as the German army approached in 1940. One person interviewed is the daughter of one of the Louvre’s curators at the time, talking casually of having the Mona Lisa hidden in their country home, the painting is referred to as "she."

The movie tells a little-known aspect of world war two. Many of the paintings looted remain lost to this day, with many in the hands of some museums and collectors who don't have the right to possess them. When the daughter of a pre-war Jewish family finally retrieves her parents' treasured painting at a Utah museum, she fights back the tears she's been holding in for decades. It’s playing right now in New York, slowly expanding across the country.

Find out where at therapeofeuropa.com.

This morning we had Jesse Eisenberg, the costar of "The Hunting Party" in for a chat. I’m told he arrived on a bike, which I like. No pretensions. Self-deprecating, almost to a fault, and modest, with mannerisms in the Woody Allen style. He's in an off-Broadway show for a few more days called "scarcity" but is off to do a movie about a run-down amusement park called "Adventureland", shooting in Pittsburgh. For someone about to spend a month in the steel city, he seems ready.

So we finally know what the title of the next Indiana Jones adventure will be …“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”

Already, sides are being taken on fan sites across cyberspace about whether it’s a genius bit of homage or just a lousy title. I think it’s a fabulous choice –- can you imagine how cool this will look on the Drew Struzan-designed poster for the movie?

A lot of people forget Indiana Jones was meant to be a throwback to the 1940s adventure serials George Lucas grew up on. Those old films also had wacky titles, so fanboys shouldn’t be getting their superman underoos in a twist over this one. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” is an iconic title now, but back in 1981, it probably had fans scratching their heads. And that film turned out OK.
What I’m more concerned about is how Dr. Jones will juggle Cate Blanchett and the return of past love Marion Ravenwood. Should make for some major fireworks. Can’t wait for May of ’08!

I’m a huge cartoon guy. Been that way since I was a kid, watching The Flintstones & Spider-Man reruns on TV before going off to elementary school. From the Smurfs to Spongebob, Akira to The Simpsons, if its animated, chances are I like it.

Without a doubt, there has never been an animated show that has made laugh out loud like The Tick. A delightfully satiric, subversive poke at the whole Superhero genre, I used to watch this Saturday mornings back in the 90s when I was exiting high school for college.

"Eat My Justice!" was the catchphrase of the indestructible and clueless title character. Defining the virtues of this show is too tough to do it in the space I have here, but lets put it this way: Without the Tick and his supporting cast like his sidekick Arthur (who dresses up as a Moth when he’s not doing accounting work) and fellow heroes like American Maid and Bat Manuel, there would never have been The Incredibles.

Creator Ben Edlund was skewering capes and having fun at heroes’ expense WAY before the boys at Pixar did it (very well I might add).. first in the comics and then in animated form. The live-action series inspired by this show (starring Seinfeld’s Patrick Warburton) was also a blast, but as usual, network TV execs didn’t realize the gem they had.

Well, you’re not TV execs. You’re much smarter! So go pick up The Tick Vs. Season Two on DVD and revel in the stench of righteousness!