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Clearly having filibustered enough last week on Letterman, Pacino declined Goldstein's interview requests. But inveterate B-movie godfather Avi Lerner wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to spin:

"I like [88 Minutes] — it's exactly the movie I wanted it to be," he says. "The critics can say what they want. That's the great thing about America. Everyone gets to have their opinion. It hurts when people call and say the reviews were terrible. But I don't read reviews. I hardly read anything." (Lerner is famous for not reading scripts either, though he insists he read 88 Minutes.) ...

When I asked if the scathing reviews for 88 Minutes could damage [Righteous Kill]'s commercial chances, he joked: "Hey, it's two different movies, two different sets of 17 producers." Turning serious, he said: "They are still two icons. If you get out of Beverly Hills, to Ventura Boulevard, every person you ask will say — we want to see them together. Just like people did for Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in The Bucket List. And they're even older!"

Oh, now we get it: We just have to "get out of Beverly Hills" and into the parallel universe where the hoi polloi eat up hammy, old-man condescension like sweets. At these prices, though (Goldstein puts Pacino's 88 Minutes price tag at $9 million), we can't imagine many souls that wouldn't be for sale. Alas, we'll always have Heat.

[Photo Credit: Splash]

• Pacino and De Niro: How the Mighty Have Fallen [LAT]

WHAT'S NEW: Chockablock with tropical raunch and waaaay more of Jason Segel than you ever wanted to see, Forgetting Sarah Marshall has Variety suggesting that the film's "R" rating could push it down to a opening weekend "in the low- to mid-teens." Not half-bad for a studio comedy budgeted at $30 million, but probably not enough to surpass the PG-13 Jet Li-Jackie Chan action-fantasy The Forbidden Kingdom, which is predicted to top out around $18 million on roughly 3,100 screens. Also opening: Morgan Spurlock's gonzo War-on-Terror doc Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?; the portentous Uma Thurman-Evan Rachel Wood drama The Life Before Her Eyes; the Ben Stein entry Expelled; and the throwaway MGM thriller Pathology.

THE BIG LOSER: Prom Night stands to drop as much as 70% from last week's No. 1 spot, but really, we're just waiting to see what kind of audience revolt ensues at screenings of 88 Minutes. Already recognized among the decade's most reviled films, the Al Pacino suspenser will likely draw about $30 million in masochistic lookie-loos, with $25 million being returned shortly thereafter in angry box-office mutinies around the country.

THE UNDERDOG: We haven't even seen the Jenna Jameson crossover vehicle Zombie Strippers, but that's no reason for us to withhold our zeal. Plus, let's face it: The world needs a Robert Englund comeback in the worst way.

FOR SHUT-INS: New on the DVD shelf this week are special editions of the essentially interchangable Juno and Alien vs. Predator - Requiem; other titles include the Sidney Lumet drama Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Ryan Gosling's sex-doll romance Lars and the Real Girl and the long-long-awaited complete fourth season of Melrose Place.

Take a few minutes and call your own shot for the weekend — can male full-frontal knock Jackie Chan out of the multiplex? Are you getting your pitchfork and/or torch ready for 88 Minutes?

Somewhat astonishingly, their All-Time Low Scores—a Cinematic Excrement Hall of Fame, if you will—ranks it at #3, bested only by Bio-Dome, and lesser-known, gay-Holocaust-romance-with-supernatural-elements drama, The Singing Forest. (We highly recommend watching the trailer.) With Uwe Boll coming in at a relatively respectable #18 for Alone in the Dark, we imagine it's only a matter of time before the reviled director adds 88-helmer Jon Avnet to his ever-growing shlockteur shit list, filled with those guilty of unleashing far more heinous cinematic crimes upon the moviegoing public than he.

• All-Time Low Scores: The Worst-Reviewed Movies [Metacritic]

While most of the marketing of HDTV is targeted towards cinemaphiles and sports enthusiasts, there certainly is an net-positive end benefit for connossieurs of news programs to plunk down the $2 grand or so it takes to upgrade to hi-def. Not only does the medium allow viewers to be more sufficiently stimulated on both the visual and audio fronts, this blogger would argue that it makes the viewer more likely to actually absorb and process the information that the program is trying to relay. For instance, in Bush's War, the visual clarity of the footage that was shot in Iraq (not to mention the haunting stills from 9/11) resonates within your head and your heart in a way that traditional, low-def TV cannot possibly compete with.

Which is why we are so surprised that the venerable news division of CBS has staunchly refused to upgrade their flagship show, 60 Minutes, into HD. Sure, no one wants to see Andy Rooney's nose hairs in 1080p, but we're pretty sure they could gauze up their lenses in such a way that everyone's favorite cantankerous crankypants could look as good as Cybill Shepherd did on Moonlighting. But there's no denying that the rest of the show could really use the upgrade. Take last Sunday's segment where Anderson Cooper got in goal to try and stop David Beckham's patented bendy kicks, for example. Since the show has already acquiesced to lowering their journalistic standards to a point where they can justify interviewing someone as vapid and meaningless in our country as David Beckham, why not go the extra mile and take their visual presentation to the next level? We're sure it has something to do with cost, but that excuse quickly flies out the window when you consider that the budget and funding-challenged PBS can afford to do so. So, Sean McManus, the gauntlet has now been thrown. You already have a last-placed news show on your hands, so why not invest the extra $$$ necessary to make the strides to save the last remaining audience members you have left?

RELATED (but not really): 5 Ways In Which The Hills is JUST LIKE An Antonioni Film [Spout]

We think, however, that Smith underestimates just how much unadulterated X-factor is contained in his DNA, for if a plan that deceptively simple were to work on every actor, we imagine we might be seeing Stephen Dorff running around an abandoned, post-apocalyptic Mahattan in a $150 million Omega Man remake.

• 60 Minutes

• TMZ TV [TMZ]