The Playlist

You need to hear that Bill Murray is the hold-out on the long-gestating "Ghostbusters 3" project like you need a hole in the head. While a script was just delivered to the elusive star -- who has no agent or PR person -- the actor has been badmouthing the idea of a third 'Ghostbusters' film for what feels like longer than a year now. He's got his reasons and the biggest question probably is: Why a "Ghostbusters" film now, twenty one years after the fairly mediocre "Ghostbusters II" (which did $126 million less in box-office receipts than the original)?

Comic Crime Caper To Hit Theaters In Early 2012When Harvey Weinstein aggressively goes after something he usually gets it. Case in point. The Weinstein Company honcho has acquired domestic distribution rights to Aussie director Andrew Dominik's follow-up to “The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford” (a picture that won Brad Pitt one of his first major awards; 2007's Best Actor prize in Venice). Thanks to his new bevy of investors, Harvey has dollars and clout and apparently slapped down a $20 million dollar promise for promotion and advertising alone for Dominik's latest, "Cogan's Trade," a pretty weighty pledge for TWC.

Loud, clamoring, haphazardly thrown together and risibly scripted from what feels like a poor first draft, Michel Gondry's unfunny, unengaging "The Green Hornet" lands in a January release date because it's exactly warranted: it's a throwaway action picture meant to fill the early new year void, but contains zero substance and few genuine joys or laughs.

Overrated screenwriter Allan Loeb is curiously one of the most in-demand writers in Hollywood right now, and we're beginning to understand why. His screenplays tend to sell high-concept work which makes executives and producers feel good about themselves, but the actual execution undermines whatever originality and vigor the original premise may have had, keeping things safe for mainstream audiences to embrace without thinking too much, which makes studio heads happy. But if you look closer, Allan Loeb seems to be writing the same script over and over with entire plots hanging on one character struggling to tell somebody the secret he's holding. Exhibit 1: "The Switch" spent nearly half its running time with Jason Bateman agonizing over whether or not to tell Jennifer Aniston that it's actually his sperm she used to have a child. Exhibit 2: In "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" Shia LaBeouf could have avoided a world of hurt he had just been honest with his girlfriend, Carey Mulligan, about what he was doing with her Dad. Which brings us to Exhibit 3: "The Dilemma." Once again, a character grapples for the majority of the film's running time with a should I?/shouldn't I? situation, in this case it's whether or not to tell his best friend that his wife is cheating on him. Yes, "The Dilemma" is another one of those movies where you're going to wait for somebody to stop acting like an idiot and do what most normal people would do without hesitation. It's pretty painful.