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.

While some people were excited to see Titanic duo Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio teaming up again for Revolutionary Road, some of us were eagerly waiting for another big movie pair-up... for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, co-stars of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Not only will they buddy up again as comic book geeks for 2010's Paul (which the two also wrote) but they've also just been confirmed for Steven Spielberg's big-screen adaptation of Belgian artist Hergé's comic strips, The Adventures of Tintin. The two will play Thompson and Thompson, a pair of bumbling detectives who will be showing up earlier in than they did in Hergé's work, where they first stumbled onto the scene in Tintin's fourth adventure.

Will Smith was voted the best moneymaker at the box office for 2008, the second time a black actor has been at the top of that list. (The first? Sidney Poitier in 1968.) Okay, I get that Will Smith is a big box-office draw, and I've even been known to acknowledge how well his movies tend to do at the box office. (Seven Pounds is looking like an exception.) But, um, "voted"? "Voted"? As in, they cast a ballot on who made the most money?

Proving this country loves nothing if not its dogs, Marley & Me held tight to its position at the top of the box office this weekend, adding $24.1 million, for a two-week total of $106.5. Impressive, yes? Indeed. Even for a dog film. According to Box Office Mojo, it's "the third-highest grossing dog movie on record," a coveted position, as we all know. It falls behind only Scooby-Doo (really? That movie?) and 101 Dalmatians, and is fast approaching the top of that list.

In a move that everybody who witnessed how well Beverly Hills Chihuahua did saw coming, the latest cutesy dog picture to come out of Hollywood, Marley & Me, came in at number one at the box office, with $37 million for the weekend, and a whopping $51.6 million since Christmas. Sure, sympathetic tabloid fodder Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson may have helped those numbers, but never underestimate the power of puppies (or puppy-dog eyes).

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.

Apparently, Jim Carrey still has it, as his wacky comedy Liar, Liar-- uh, we mean Yes Man topped the box office this weekend, beating out Will "I am Box Office Legend" Smith's sad-looking Seven Pounds. But just barely -- Jimbo got $18.1 million, while Big Willy got an even $16 mill. Still, they were the standouts of the weekend, which remained mellow in the face of holiday shopping. (Expect the holiday weekend, with its six major releases, to turn everything on its ear.)

An alien version of Keanu Reeves (which is different from the normal version how, exactly?) overcame a world of bad reviews in The Day the Earth Stood Still, which rocketed to the top of the weekend box office with $31 million, knocking Four Christmases out of its two-week reign. Christmases managed to stay in second, though, taking in another $13.3 million.

I have quite a list in my head of headlines I never thought I would type without irony or a punch line. Among them, "Brett Ratner Directs Masterpiece," or "George Clooney Proposes to Moviefile Blogger," but "Jerry Lewis to Get Oscar" was somewhere really close to the top of the list. But the headline, my friends, is true. At this year's Academy Awards celebration, Jerry Lewis really will take home a golden statue.

One would assume that among the decisions Steve Guttenberg regrets would be choosing to return for too many lame Police Academy movies and making that sequel to Three Men and a Baby, right? I mean, one too many bad movies has to be what killed his career back in the '90s. But Guttenberg doesn't regret returning for sequels; what he regrets is not returning for enough of them.