Defamer Reviews 'The Dark Knight': Same Batman, Bleaker Bat Channel

After surviving months of Dark Knight hype, viral outreach and tastefully overblown praise for late co-star Heath Ledger, Defamer finally got its chance at a screening Tuesday to see what all the Bat-fuss was about. And as editor Seth Abramovitch and senior editor S.T. VanAirsdale discovered in their second installment of Defamer Instant Reviews, not everybody is ready to validate its Second Coming status quite yet. Is it good? Absolutely. Is it the best film of the summer? That's where things get complicated — on AIM, of course, because this watershed cultural moment deserves no less.

Follow the jump for their respective two cents — mostly spoiler-free for even the most casual followers of the film, and naturally among the finest criticism available anywhere online.

'Lost Planet' Movie Exciting News For No One

· Ooh: A movie version of a popular video game! Warner Bros. is adapting Capcom's Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. No word on whether or not they'll hire Korean actor Lee Byung-Hun to reprise his role, or if they'll ultimately choose to go in a more Paul Walker-direction. [Variety]
· Christina Ricci has signed on for three episodes of TNT's Saving Grace, in which she'll play "a young detective who temporarily guest-partners with Grace in the hopes of some Emmy consideration." [Variety]
· John Malkovich's production company Mr. Mudd signed a deal with Mandate Pictures to produce at least two films together. [Variety]
· Kristoffer Polaha, Autumn Reeser and Robert Baker have joined The CW's Valentine, Inc., a "dramedy...revolving around Greek gods living among us." Did they just say dramedy? This Wackness '94 nostalgia thing has simply gone too far! Lolz. [THR]
· The final episodes of Nip/Tuck have been ordered. Confirmation on how many different sexual positions Rosie O'Donnell will assume in them is still pending. [THR]

It's arguably the most anticipated movie of the last five summers—the second installment of a rare franchise resuscitation, helmed by a maverick suspense master with nary a misfire to a short but stellar career. Weak links would be replaced. Tragedy would strike. And then a lucky few got to see it, instantly dislodging an avalanche of superlatives. The Dark Knight has, until now, been enjoying the best advance word-of-mouth of any release in a surprisingly bountiful mind-candy season that included Iron Man and Wall-E. In fact, it's until only recently been coasting at an astonishing 100% Rotten Tomatoes score. What changed? Two Daves of note filed their pans: The New Yorker's David Denby (who just lavished his highest praise upon Hancock, so take that for what it's worth), and New York's Dave Edelstein. The cumulative effect of the Dave-naysaying? A sizable dent in the dark armor, with the movie's RT score tumbling to 88% at post time. As for our worst fears—that Ledger isn't posthumously Oscar-worthy, just hammy from the grave—Edelstein confirms every last one of them after the jump. We're seeing it tomorrow, after which we'll try to get our Defamer Instant Review up as quickly as possible, for those who are just dying to know how categorically good this movie is, in easy-to-digest IM format.

'Where The Wild Things Are' Gets New Release Date: Never

We hoped you liked the clip "test footage" of Spike Jonze's troubled adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, which made the rounds in February amid rumors of the $75 million film's slow demise at Warner Bros. We're reading now that that may be all you see for at least a few more years while Jonze tinkers and tweaks on Warners' watch, prompting Alan Horn to offer an update today to his bloggy BFF Patrick Goldstein.

And while the release has now been postponed indefinitely and Horn assures us that Jonze is staying on the project, tell us if Horn's comments after the jump read as one of the less emphatic endorsements you've seen from a studio boss this year:

'Clash of the War God Titans' Duo Sentences Greek Mythology to Die at the Multiplex

It's funny — we were just talking to someone last week about the slow decline of Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote and/or directed some of the '80s best films of their respective genres, including The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat, Silverado and The Big Chill. Little did we know how desperately he seems to regret not having a piece of the cult 1981 sword-and-sandals classic Clash of the Titans, a Kasdan-written, Louis Leterrier-directed remake of which is now on the way from Warner Bros.

Then, right on cynical cue, Relativity Media and the vampires who brought you 300 announced they had attached Tarsem Singh to direct some fucking "mythology epic" called War of Gods. So confusing, Hollywood! Is it a clash or a war? And must we really have it both ways?

David Letterman Dares to Spoil Summer With Impromptu 'Dark Knight' Review

'Get Smart' Adds Anne Hathaway's Man Trouble to Formula For Box-Office Glory

Unencumbered By Boob-Job Drama, George Clooney Mulls His Next Step

· Warner Bros. is developing the spy thriller novel The Tourist as a potential George Clooney vehicle which will explode in the first reel and set the entire plot in motion. What about the goat movie? When does that one come out? [Variety]
· The WGA will hold a referendum next month to simplify its credit procedures, hopefully eliminating screenwriter name-gumbo like this. [Variety]
· If you're currently in production, we hope you're shooting in Waiverland, as SAG head Alan Rosenberg doubts any agreement will be reached by the deadline date of June 30. [Variety]
· Jack Black has dropped out of Borat-writer/director Todd Phillips's Man-Witch, a movie about a man who's a witch, supposedly because Black is concerned Phillips will shoot another movie called Hangover, about a bachelor party who wakes up in Vegas and realizes they lost the groom, first. May the best wacky premise win! [THR]
· Universal buys a comedy spec called Raindrops All Around Me, about "a socially inept high school teacher who learns to 'dumb it down' in order to fit in with the people around him." Said a Universal rep, "We think after a few more drafts to broaden the humor, Middle America will really eat this up!" [THR]

Studio Players Blame Everyone But Themselves For Multiplex Glut

Jon Favreau isn't the only one haunted by release dates these days, though the execs polled recently by Claudia Eller and Josh Friedman aren't necessarily worried about having less than two years to write all the product placement into Iron Man 2. No, their fears hinge on the surplus of new releases reaching theaters annually — 517 titles in 2007 by the authors' counts (most others put it above 600), up 49 percent from '06. And while the glut has been essentially played out elsewhere, it is kind of rare to see such a studio-friendly perspective on the "crisis," even from the pushovers at the LAT; after all, it's the specialty labels of the world — your Warner Independents, not your Warner Bros. — really battling for life in the cluttered market.

But still, Get Smart versus Love Guru is a hell of a quandary. So just for the hell of it, let's hear what the put-upon, overproducing likes of Alan Horn and even Dick Cook are complaining about today:

NBC Time Warner Still A Faraway, Corporate Media Monolith Dream

Time Warner is in many ways a self-sustaining media ecosystem: Their intermittently functioning cable networks and motion pictures wing create celebrities and cultural trends, which then wind up on the covers of their top-tier glossies, migrate online via their internet porthole AOL, and eventually float amidst the other sewage runoff filtered by bad-seed web-holding, TMZ, at which point the entire cycle begins anew. The only pie Time Warner has yet to stick a chubby little finger into is the business of network TV, and recent rumors have indeed suggested that they were hungrily circling NBC Universal. Addressing a media conference yesterday, CEO Jeff Bewkes issued a standard non-denial denial:

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said Monday the media giant has "no agenda" regarding the acquisition of a television network, despite renewed speculation over a possible hook-up with NBC Universal.

Ladies Up, WB Down as 'American Girl' Gets Ready to Storm Box Office

Time Warner Cable To Learn They're Being Sued Just As Soon As Their Service Is Restored

Longtime readers of Defamer no doubt recall the days when our corporate campus was limited to a fifty-acre plot on the Eastside. True, we had all the razor scooters and air hockey we ever dreamed of, but, unfortunately, we were also solely reliant on the unstable intertube-accessing services of Time Warner Cable. This led to frequent outages, requiring the entire editorial department to wander, laptops in hand, from Silver Lake coffee house to coffee house in a desperate search for a working connection—where we'd inevitably be greeted with hastily posted signs of this nature. Why rehash the wounds of the past, you ask? Well, read on:

Time Warner Cable Inc. was accused Thursday of lying to Los Angeles subscribers and providing shoddy customer service in a lawsuit that seeks potentially tens of millions of dollars in fines against the city's main provider of cable television.

Play Along at Home with the Defamer Imploding Film Industry Scorecard

A range of problems persist this morning for movie distributors large and small, with the Weinsteins predictably suffering the karmic retribution for Fraggle Rock: The Movie and another round of threats, invective and spin making the rounds elsewhere. As such, we're spending a little time this morning cleaning up our Imploding Film Industry Scorecard. Tell us if your results vary:

THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY: Nikki Finke has spent the last two days trying to make something out of the Weinsteins reportedly falling two months behind on their residual payments to the Directors Guild of America. Gasp! Or something: An anonymous, "prominent Hollywood helmer" notified Finke that arbitration could start within "twenty days" if the matter isn't resolved. Harvey Weinstein himself followed up to say he knew nothing about it and that he was looking into the third party that handles the payments. The DGA itself acknowledged the delinquency Wednesday, and it didn't quite sound like the meltdown Finke was praying for:

Joel Silver Leaving Warners! Except He's Not! Let Him Get Back to You!

The Worst is Yet to Come in 'Speed Racer' Crash-and-Burn

Guilt, Blame and Other Wreckage From the Picturehouse/WIP Crash

Breaking: WB Mothership Cuts Off Picturehouse and Warner Independent