To kick off the weekend, Richard Simmons visited the team of folks participating in the movie-watching marathon (check out Crazy Legs Conti!). Simmons served up some "heart-healthy energy foods" and taught them how to do exercises while seated in their lounge chairs. Since Thursday the eight contestants have been slackin' off and watching flicks in an attempt to break a world record, and take home some cash. So far, 50 or so movies have......

Today in Times Square the world's laziest competition began: the Movie-Watching World Championship. For five days, 'round the clock, these eight folks will be in a world of celluloid. Each competitor is attempting to spend the full five days in the arena "where they’ll watch movie after movie in the hopes of breaking the movie watching world record of 120 hours and 23 minutes. The event champion will win a $10,000 cash prize, a......

Samuel L. Jackson—who, as Anthony Lane at the New Yorker notes, is about to turn 60—stars in Lakeview Terrace, a suburban noir featuring Jackson as an L.A. cop and single dad who cannot stand the liberal mixed-race couple next door. It's directed but not written by Neil LaBute, though Lane thinks "it sounds a lot like him, in the lethal simmer of its conversation...It’s a shame, then, that the later stages of Lakeview Terrace......

Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce star in Traitor, a terrorist thriller conceived by Steve Martin that the Village Voice calls "uneven yet engrossing." In it, Cheadle plays an American-born mercenary who at age nine witnessed his Sudanese Muslim father die in a car bombing. When the flick finds him as an adult, he's seemingly gone from U.S. Special Ops to selling explosives to jihadists, with Pearce as the FBI agent on his tail. The......

Speaking of Moonstruck, this week the Central Park Film Festival is screening movies highlighting the different boroughs of the city. Tomorrow night's kickoff film is Working Girl, starring Melanie Griffith as a plucky secretary from Staten Island trying to make it in the business world. The rest of the films: 8/20, The French Connection (a Bronx candy store under surveillance); 8/21, Strangers on a Train (the Alfred Hitchcock thriller); 8/22, Moonstruck (with an introduction......

Nope, still not July 18th; will Space Chimps never open? Well, let’s put on a brave face and make the best of it. Hellboy 2: The Golden Army is looking pretty interesting, actually. Based on the graphic novel about a demon from hell who ends up sympathizing with the enemy (us), this sequel from talented Pan’s Labyrinth and Hobbit director Guillermo del Toro is “capable of delighting even the most jaded, comic-book-weary summer-blockbuster conscript,”......

This weekend Time magazine looked at the return of the Drive-in movie theater. A classic viewing option that's currently only available at 400 places in the U.S., and was invented by Camden, NJ resident Richard M. Hollingshead, Jr. (his first theater was in Pennsauken). While New York City doesn't have a traditional Drive-in theater, there is one option around. Last year DRV-IN opened, and this year it's moving into a permanent location (allegedly on East......

Photo via Brian Fountain's Flickr. The Bryant Park Summer Film Festival kicks off its 16th year tonight with the 1962 (Sean Connery era) Bond classic Dr. No, though it's likely the opening evening will get rained (and stormed) out. The Monday screenings will continue throughout the summer, however -- here's a look at the schedule:June 16th, Dr. No June 23rd, Bride of Frankenstein June 30th, Hud July 7th, The Man Who Came to Dinner......

If "butter" flavored popcorn and Sour Patch Kids aren’t your ideal movie snack food, then you'll probably find the New York City Food Film Festival much more palatable. Starting Saturday at Water Taxi Beach in Long Island City, Queens, the festival will pair 18 movies with relevant munchies under the night sky. George Motz, who started the festival last year with chef Harry Hawk, says he wanted to create “a cinematic scratch 'n sniff......

Clearly Lafayette Street between Houston and Prince Streets isn't gritty enough when a movie production crew has to carefully spray paint tags on boarded up store. And of course the boards were applied to the former Otto Tootsi Plohound location earlier in the morning. All this hard work is for When in Rome, a comedy starring Kristen Bell (aka Veronica Mars, Sara Marshall), who told MTV, “It’s about a slightly cynical girl who has......

Mayor Bloomberg and the rest of New York City will have to wait for the director's cut to see him in the new Sex and the City movie. CityRoom noticed that he's been griping (jokingly, not red-faced-ly) about being left in the cold. While giving a commencement speech at the University of Pennsylvania, Bloomberg discussed all the hype for him to enter the presidential race:I have to admit: All the buzz was very exciting —......

The Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack whose films include Tootsie, Out of Africa, The Way We Were and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, died this afternoon in his Los Angeles home. The cause was cancer. Pollack grew up in Indiana and headed to New York City when he was 17, joining The Neighborhood Playhouse and studying acting under Sanford Meisner. He acted, but, according to the NY Times obituary, Burt Lancaster told him to direct,......

So a little movie called Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has opened at last. Fan-boys have live-blogged during the premiere, physicians have written open letters of protest deriding the movie’s myriad junk food tie-ins, Russian Communists have been offended, and archaeologists have condemned Dr. Jones for his “unethical” violation of international treaties. But is the long-awaited (by some) $185 million fourth installment of the George Lucas/Steven Spielberg franchise any good?......

Next week some of the best films from this year's Sundance Festival will unspool at BAM during their third annual Sundance Institute takeover. The ten day mini-fest features 10 dramatic features, 12 documentaries and 36 shorts. Most of these selections screen just once or twice, and not all of them have distribution, so you've got to stay on your toes if there's something you want to see. The screenings kick off May 29th with the......

Photo via The Real Janelle. The Cobble Hill Cinemas has liberal parents and their curious children cinematically covered, with their series: Bi Movies for Little Kids. On the 19th they'll be screening Hoppity Goes to Town, followed by June screenings of The Wizard of Oz and Muppets from Space. Related: Big Movies for Little Kids.......

If more NYU kids were like John Waters, the university’s downtown super-saturation would at least be a bit more colorful. In a recent interview with Details, Waters took a nostalgia trip back to his NYU days, when he, uh, did a lot of tripping: Back then you weren’t very interested in school. Who lasted at NYU longer, you or Woody Allen? I bet Woody went longer, because I think I was there from September to......

Jean-Luc Godard (whose Contempt, starring Brigitte Bardot, is at Film Forum now) famously said that to make a movie all you need is a girl and a gun, and the marketing team for Boarding Gate are banking on it: the print ads show wild Italian actress Asia Argento armed with nothing but a pistol, heels and panties. Times film critic Manhola Dargis thinks French director Olivier Assayas made the movie just so he could......

New Yorkers like to go out. A lot. A website aptly called Outalot allows fast and easy browsing of three nightlife basics: restaurants, bars, and movies (Gridskipper calls it "menupages-meets-yelp"). The Google Map based-site lists restaurants by cuisine, bars by type, and provides local cinemas' showtimes. You can bookmark your favorites (and check out your friends') and green thumbs up/down symbols quickly signify how others' feel about an establishment. Though many New Yorkers pride themselves......

A train hopping skate boarder gets blood on his deck after fending off a brutal rail yard security guard in Gus Van Sant’s moody Paranoid Park. In her rhapsodic Times review, Manohla Dargis swoons over Van Sant’s “use of different film speeds and jump cuts, and his tendency to underscore his own storytelling" in the Portland, Oregon-set film. But Van Sant fan Jeffrey Wells calls it “meandering and even dreary… nowhere near as striking......

Drawing on his roots in the fecund 1970s East Village avant-garde film scene, critic J. Hoberman has spent his three decades at the Village Voice introducing readers to the more adventurous cinematic worlds awaiting beyond the realm of Hollywood. He is the author of nine books, most recently The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, which was described by Slate as "an extraordinary publishing event." To commemorate his thirty years at......

Another Will Ferrell sports flick will inflate this weekend, capping off a nationwide “Funny or Die” promotional tour that brought him to Radio City Music Hall Sunday night. The movie is Semi-Pro, which stars Ferrell as Jackie Moon, owner of the 1976 Flint Michigan Tropics, a team in the maverick ABA basketball league. To keep his career alive against all odds, Moon initiates off a series of increasingly desperate publicity stunts to attract fans –......

Museum Guard, by Atomische at flickrToday on the Gothamist Newsmap: a bank robbery on Amboy Rd. in Staten Island, another bank robbery on 5th Ave. in Manhattan, and a scaffolding collapse on Grand Concourse and 149th St. in the Bronx. A building slated for destruction on Governors Island will become a lab for the FDNY to examine the dynamics of high-rise fires and how best to defeat them. Fire crews from cities around the......

Photograph of Queens native Amy Ryan, nominated for best supporting actress for her role in Gone, Baby Gone At 8:30PM (following a half-hour red carpet special), the 80th Annual Academy Awards ceremony will begin, finally putting an end to the "There Will Be Oscar" or "Oscar Country for Old Men" type headlines. You can prep yourself with the Oscar nominees list as you watch (or avoid) red carpet coverage. You could read NY Times......

Considering that most smokers pick up the nasty habit during their impressionable adolescent years, it makes sense to put off exposing the tykes to the temptation until they're old enough to poison themselves. Riding that puff of thought, the State Health Commissioner Richard F. Daines wrote an open letter earlier this month to film makers this week asking them to refrain from including smoking scenes in G, PG, and PG-13 rated movies. The (Health) Commish......

Ooh, a fun update about the remake of The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three. AMNY's Subway Tracker reports that location scouting is well under way, "Crews were at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station today...crews will be doing a camera test near Jerome and Tremont in the Bronx tomorrow some time (near the 4 line)." Transit officials even confirmed that crews were scouting today! Last September, the remake plans were announced, with Tony Scott directing and Denzel Washington reprising......

With the writers' strike looking like it'll wrap up this week, Crain's points us towards another problem for New York's entertainment industry. Seems our neighbor Connecticut has started to offer up a deal no self-respecting Hollywood suit can refuse -- a 30% tax rebate on all production costs. The incentive program started in 2006 and in 2007 alone we've lost approximately $400 million in production revenue to the Constitution State. The problem has spread to......

Actor Roy Scheider died yesterday at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, after battling multiple myeloma for several years and suffering complications from a staph infection. He was 75 and had been living in Sag Harbor, New York (after moving out his house in Sagaponack that Billy Joel purchased). Scheider may be best known for his role as Police Chief Martin Brody in Jaws. One of his lines from the movie,......

Photograph of Kathy Bates and AMPAS President Sid Ganis announcing the nominations by Chris Pizzello/AP While the writers' strike continues and prospects of an awards ceremony are unclear, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences went ahead and announced the contenders for their 80th annual back-slapping ceremony. Oscar-winning friend of the academy Kathy Bates was on hand to announce this year's golden picks. From Bob Dylan to Michael Clayton, many of the nominations......

Due to the Writer's Guild of America strike, Hollywood's party, the Golden Globes Awards were transformed from a boozy, fun dinner party to a press conference where presenters from entertainment programs like Extra! and E! News got to announce the winners. Yes, it was as painful as it sounded (Giuliana Rancic, it's not about you); many said they couldn't believe they were announcing the winners but said they would prefer it with the stars.......

Two years ago the famed Saturday Night Fever dance floor was sold at auction for $188,000 when the Brooklyn club where the movie was filmed, Odyssey 2001 (later called Spectrum), was closed. Just yesterday the legendary movie turned 30 and amNewYork got nostalgic looking back at the Bay Ridge kid, Tony Manero, who sought refuge on that dance floor.Thirty years ago this weekend, a tough young kid from Bay Ridge strutted across America's movie screens......