Only Two More 'Christmases' To Go Before We Can Forget It Existed

The weekend kicked off with a mild rumbler and closed out with a sputter, as not even Lionsgate's completely stupid Punisher remake of a remake of a remake managed to connect with completely-stupid-movie-loving audiences. Still, things continued to bode well for indepe—we mean specialty films—with Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, and a number of other brain-fertilizing offerings continuing to show specialty legs. That said—buckle-up for a ride on the post-Thanksgiving Deja Vu Express, aka the Grove Trolley to Movie Hell: More »

'Four Christmases' Quadruples Your Forgettable-Holiday-Movie Experience

Fears that the R-word would keep audiences from the movies this weekend were unfounded, as the name "Reese Witherspoon" still proved an impressive multiplex draw. Have another helping of turkey-chip pancakes topped with cranberry syrup and a pat of yam, as we grind down to the last of the leftovers and run down the box office numbers:

Australia Does Not Celebrate Thanksgiving

We hate to say we told you so, but Australia—Baz Luhrmann's sweepy weepy about his homeland in the 1940's—is not doing so well at the ol' box office. Nikki Finke reports that it's basically tanking, ceding top honors to such unambitious, unartsy fare as the darkening Twilight and this weekend's most likely top dog (and we mean dog), Four Christmases. More »

Vince Vaughn, Nicole Kidman Share Their Turkey in Hollywood Charity Tradition

Welcome back to a special holiday edition of Defamer Attractions, your weekly guide to everything new, noteworthy and/or stillborn at the movies. And this Thanksgiving, we're grateful for a slate of Wednesday releases granting us a reprieve from another day of Twilight chatter. Not that any of them will surmount last week's blockbuster, but we have a quick and dirty forecast for long weekend's hits, sleepers and subplots, including a glimpse at the biggest disappointment and underdog to come. As always, our opinions are our own, but are easy to bake for that last-minute dessert idea. The full recipe is after the jump. More »

4 Bizarre Films Coming To A Theater Near You

In the excitement following last year's Hollywood writer's strike, a lot of projects got restarted or greenlit. The fruits of those labors are now unfolding in movie theaters across the country, and some of them are too weird to live, and too rare to die. Whether it was studio enthusiasm to get any project going, any at all, or a desire to repeat the same old formulas and see if they could still make money (or do so for the first time), these upcoming films seem particularly unlikely to succeed:
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'Esquire' Wants You to Know That Vince Vaughn is Fat Now

When Vince Vaughn first made his mark with Swingers, he was so whippet-thin that his wild, improvised riffs almost seemed to be a unique form of cardio. Now that a decade has passed, though, things have changed — a fact that Esquire's new issue takes great pains to point out. Vince Vaughn is not thin anymore, each line of its cover story (entitled "The Biggest Man in the Room") seems to say. No, Vince Vaughn is now a fatty, a great big fatty fat person. Think we're joking? Enjoy this opening paragraph, with all the ooky, relevant parts bolded in Defamer ChubbyFont™: More »

Kisses Are For The Second Date, Reese Witherspoon

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Why Can't Reese Witherspoon Get First Billing?

Correct us if we're wrong, but didn't Reese Witherspoon, y'know, win an Oscar just a few years ago? We're pretty sure she did, but you'd never know it from this poster for Four Christmases, the upcoming comedy she stars in with Vince Vaughn. Despite the fact that Vaughn fired UTA and his manager after the star vehicle Fred Claus opened to less than his first $20 million paycheck, the poster still gives him first billing over the Oscar-winning, A-list Witherspoon (and for another Christmas movie, no less!). To be fair, Witherspoon's last film Rendition was a box-office bust, but she wasn't top-billed on that, either: new beau Jake Gyllenhaal was, despite the fact that he's not yet proven himself as a box office draw. After winning the industry's highest award and proving her ability to single-handedly open a comedy with films like Legally Blonde and Sweet Home Alabama, what more does Witherspoon have to do to be called first in the billing block? More »

Egads! Could it be that actors with dissimilar personalities and performance styles are experiencing some professional friction even as they pretend to love each other in front of a movie camera? Gape in disbelief at a report that the set of Reese Witherspoon/Vince Vaughn holiday romantic comedy Four Christmases is rocked by not-getting-along-great scandal that could threaten the civility of their small talk around the craft services table! "'Vince rolls onto set in the morning looking like he just came in from a night out, while Reese will arrive early looking camera-ready,' says our San Francisco source. 'Then Reese tries to force Vince into blocking out each scene and running through their lines as Vince tries to convince her that he's an ad-libber and wants to play around and see where the scene goes.' ... 'She's a one-take perfectionist and Vince likes to try it a few different ways,' snickers our snitch. 'Sometimes Vince will be standing behind her and he has this look on his face that he just wants to kill her!'" [Gatecrasher]