Don't get me wrong; I think Gerard Butler is a talented enough guy. I also think he's handsome, funny on talk shows, generally inoffensive, and I found him to be one of the least annoying things about The Ugly Truth. So it's not like I don't think he should be a movie star, because, sure, why shouldn't he? It's just that I'm worried his career path is increasingly molding him to be a lesser Jason Statham in the end, and whether he's been trying to rival the Statham or this whole thing is just a coincidence, I still don't like it.

Sometimes a director will torpedo ticket sales for his own movie because he feels it just didn't live up to its promise, as Matthieu Kassovitz did when his Babylon A.D. sucked like a Hoover. It's rarer that a director will discourage fans from seeing a movie because he feels it's really good. Rarer, and you might say, downright illogical. But there is sort of a method to Robert B. Weide's madness when he tells us we shouldn't buy the Region 1 DVD for his film How to Lose Friends & Alienate People. Weide believes in the movie, loves the movie, but the DVD just doesn't cut it.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop has a lot working against it. For starters, it's comedian Kevin James' vanity project, which came about, as James told ComingSoon.net, because he wanted to do something like TV's ChiPs. Nothing wrong with vanity projects, necessarily. But unless you're, say, Robert Redford or Clint Eastwood, taking on a lot of jobs in your own movie might wave a few warning flags. In James' case, he's writing, producing and starring as the titular security guard. In the hands of an experienced craftsman, this is no problem. For anyone else, this kind of multi-tasking might be a sign to the moviegoing public that the star in question is too close to the project to know what's not working. And indeed, the film's attempt at viral marketing over the summer was so unfunny that it might prove to be a vaccine against the film.

Whether you'll be sitting down to a turkey dinner or a Tofurkey lunch this Thanksgiving, we invite you to reflect upon the following ten movies from 2008. They weren't necessarily the lowest-grossing pictures of the year, but they failed to live up to financial expecations, in a big way. These suckers plummeted to the earth, flightless and doomed, like those poor gobblers dropped from a helicopter in that famous episode of WKRP in Cincinnati. It's not hard to imagine some of the investors saying, much like dazed radio station manager Arthur Carlson, "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." But they couldn't, and they can't, so they've landed here with a resounding thud.

Writer-director Terry Gilliam's movies have had such a reputation for being beset by unforeseen problems that The Onion spoofed the former Monty Python member's propensity for terrible luck. (This was even years before the untimely and tragic death of Heath Ledger, who died soon after shooting began for Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.) An attempt to make a sequel to Time Bandits never got off the ground because several of the original actors had died. Budget disputes put the kibosh on other projects. Two attempts to adapt Alan Moore's Watchmen never came to fruition. Way back in 2000, Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was beset by a flood and an injury that sidelined star Jean Rochefort. But it looks like Gilliam's luck may be changing for the better.

Since Brits (and suave American Double-O-Odie) get their fill of Bond this Friday, two weeks before America, The Guardian is running a special section on all things Bond. There are articles on stunts, villains and a very weird, almost homoerotic video featuring my doppelganger Cuba Gooding's Boat Trip co-star, Roger Moore. In honor of tonight's world premiere of Q of S in London, here are some of the highlights.

Despite all the troubles the automobiles of Quantum of Solace have, er, enjoyed in the last several months, from the Aston Martin that was driven into Lake Garda on its way to the set to the stuntman who was hurt when the Alfa Romeo he was driving crashed into a wall, car makers still seem to be rather fond of the Bond franchise. So fond in fact, that as reported by Motor Authority, Aston Martin has given Bond star Daniel Craig an open invitation to drive any car of theirs he pleases, for life.

Folks on the France set of John Travolta's One Night in Paris -- I mean, From Paris, With Love took a song from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and made it literal. Only this time, the lyrics were "Burn, baby, burn! Auto inferno!" According to the AP, a suspicious fire caused the filmmakers to suspend shooting in "in one of the Paris area's toughest housing projects." Ten automobiles were turned into car-b-ques by vandals, and the movie's producers sound surprised that such a thing could occur. What did they think they'd get in the roughest projects in Paris? A welcome wagon filled with wine and cheese?

Tommy Lee Jones is suing Paramount for money (specifically, $10 million) he wasn't paid on the back-end of No Country For Old Men, and while I usually don't have a lot of sympathy for actors, what with all their money and perks and luxury, I have even less for movie studios. Plus, it sounds like Paramount is trying to get out of giving Jones the kind of money they used to lure him into being in the film.

Stop me if you've heard this before: Tom Cruise's troubled WWII movie Valkyrie is having problems. The film, which is in the can and tentatively scheduled for release on December 26th, is now the subject of a lawsuit brought on by twelve German extras. E! Online reports the actors were appearing in a "less than action packed sequence in Berlin" that turned into an injury packed tour de force: the actors fell out of an improperly loaded truck. I guess the force they toured was gravity. I know studios are cheap, but this is one case in which United Artists doesn't want to buy something that fell off a truck. It might cost them $11 million.