SPOILER ALERT

A movie blog by Staten Island Advance's Todd Hill

Samuel Goldwyn PicturesMadrid native PENELOPE CRUZ stars as a graduate student who has a relationship with an older (as in much older) man in the film "Elegy," now playing in Manhattan.

We did something over the weekend --- Friday afternoon and then again Sunday afternoon --- that we very rarely ever do, primarily because we usually have to see so many films and don't have the time. We went to see a movie that we had already seen just recently.

We felt a professional obligation to screen "Hamlet 2" again on Friday. We had seen the comedy, which opens this week in Manhattan, back in early June because we had a chat with its star, the British comic actor Steve Coogan, shortly thereafter. But a fight broke out in our screening then between some members of the general public and the critical community. It got ugly, and everyone in the room was so terrorized that nobody laughed for the rest of the movie.

Virgin MediaCarrie Fisher does the slave thing in gold lame in 1983's "Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi."

The readers took the bait! In our last blog entry we opined that movies based on novels shouldn't be judged in the context of what came before. Literature and film are two wholly different art forms, telling stories in wholly different ways with sometimes even wholly different objectives.

In our readers' defense, however, it can be exceedingly difficult to separate the two, so we'll play along. We agree that many (although certainly not all) of novelist John Irving's books have translated well to the screen, often (although not always) because he had a hand in the translation.

Photobucket.comJeff Bridges stars in the 2004 film "The Door in the Floor," based on the first half of the John Irving novel "A Widow For One Year."

We read a film review today; we won't say of what or by whom because that's not important to the point we're making here. The critic pretty much trashed a movie that we think is kind of wonderful, but that's fine. Who's to say we have a monopoly on wisdom? (Or anyone else, for that matter?) But the review's central thesis we found dramatically wrong-headed.

The writer basically argued that the movie isn't as good as the book --- in this case a novella --- on which it's based. Well, who the heck cares? It's virtually unheard of for a film to expand on an original work when that original work is a book. There are countless places a book can go that a film, constrained in most cases to a two-hour time frame, simply cannot. Scenes get cut, characters are lost, and so on.

Photobucket.comElisabeth Shue

We began this week interviewing a long list of actors promoting their various projects. All the chats began to run together in our mind after a while, but many of the celebs we met this week we were meeting for the first time, which made it occasionally fun, if tiring.

Here was the lineup --- Seth Rogen, James Franco, Danny McBride and Rosie Perez for "Pineapple Express," Dennis Hopper and Patricia Clarkson for "Elegy," Alan Rickman for "Bottle Shock," and Elisabeth Shue for "Hamlet 2." We'll have more to say about them all in AWE, beginning tomorrow and on through August, but first, some casual observations.

DVDBeaver.comRobert Redford and Paul Newman, from left, consider their options in the 1969 film "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

We would be remiss if, as a film critic, all we saw were the new movies coming out in theaters. Not only that, but it could get profoundly depressing if all we knew of cinema were, say, "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor." We need to make regular forays back into the classics to reassure us. So should everyone.

To that end, we recently caught one of the titles in our personal movie collection of 180 or so films, 1969's "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." We found ourselves watching because it was the next film on our list and we watch them in order (we're kind of anal that way). This is not just a western, it's not just a buddy flick, but a timeless classic that holds up incredibly well.

DreamWorksTugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) stars in the film "Simple Jack," not coming to a theater near you.

Three summers ago Hollywood offered up a rare R-rated comedy called "Wedding Crashers." We were happy to see it, not just because it was funny, and well-received by critics and audiences alike, but because it showed the mainstream movie business doing something it rarely does anymore --- taking chances.

Like seemingly all trends, however, the trend of the "hard R" may be reaching its limit during this summer of 2008, if two films opening this month are any indication. Both "Pineapple Express," a stoner comedy opening Wednesday, and "Tropic Thunder," a showbiz spoof coming out Aug. 13, illustrate our point.

Independentcritics.comJames Cazievel portrays Jesus Christ in the nothing-left-to-the-imagination 2004 film "Passion of the Christ," directed by Mel Gibson.

If we've said it once we've said it 1,000 times. Just because we see movies for a living, and see about 175 of some a year, and have been doing so for several years, does not render our opinion about what we see any more valid than anyone else's. Really, it doesn't.

Something else we say quite often --- hey, it's only a movie.

We got called to the carpet by a few readers for our negative take on the "Mamma Mia!" film. We found it gagsome, to be honest, but acknowledged in our review --- prominently --- that many in the audience at our screening loved it and that many moviegoers of like mind probably would as well.

20th Century FoxDavid Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, as FBI agents Mulder and Scully, respectively, are lost in the snow in "The X-Files: I Want to Believe."

20th Century Fox, wanting to be all hush-hush about the new "X-Files" movie, didn't screen it for critics until Wednesday of this week. That was too late for us to get our review into this week's AWE, but you can find it in Friday's Staten Island Advance. Or, you can keep on scrolling down and find our review right here, a full day early. Scoop!.....