What're you seeing this weekend? HERE ARE YOUR OPTIONS:

The Twilight Saga: New Moon: I suspect that whoever came up with the title for this is also the person who came up with the name Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. They should not be allowed to title things.

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Saphire: Mo'nique's latest fun-filled comedy!

Black Dynamite: It's no Pootie Tang.

The Yes Men Fix the World: Jackass for the NPR set!

The Blind Side: In which Sandra Bulluck takes some time off from making crappy romantic comedies to solve that pesky race problem.

Planet 51: By my count, this is the third film that has united the Rock and Seann William Scott. You're probably better off renting one of the other two. Just saying.

Also, it's a surprisingly strong week in terms of older films playing at different spots around town, usually for cheap or for free:

• The always-beautiful Magnolia is at the Press Club (2621 SE Clinton) on Sunday at 8 (free).

• Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love (also beautiful!) is at the Fifth Avenue Cinema (510 SW Hall) this weekend.

• Best in Show and This is Spinal Tap make for a Christopher Guest-tastic double feature at Boxxes (1035 SW Stark) on Monday (Show at 8:30, Spinal Tap at 10:30, free).

• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan used to be, indisputably, the best Star Trek movie ever—until J.J. Abrams' Star Trek came along, making that whole nerd debate infinitely more complicated and annoying. Anyway, Khan is at Pix Patisserie (3901 N Williams) on Monday at 8:30 (free).

• Michael Mann's Heat, which is probably one of my top-ten favorites, is at the Laurelhurst through Wednesday.

More, as always, in our Film Shorts and Movie Times.

Time for a lightning-quick ticket giveaway, folks. Want to see Fists of the White Lotus at the Hollywood Theatre tonight at 9:45? Grindhouse Film Fest organizer Dan Halsted says you do:

Gordon Liu is out to avenge the destruction of the Shaolin Temple! But oh shit, he's up against an incarnation of the greatest villain in martial arts movie history: the unstoppable white eyebrowed Pai Mei (Gordon Liu played another incarnation of Pai Mei in Kill Bill). Lo Lieh plays the villain here, and he's at his shit-talking, beard-stroking, kung fu annihilating best. He'll even fight while he's naked. But watch out for his kung fu crotch! The opening credit sequence alone is worth the price of admission, and the fight scenes are choreographed by kung fu master Lau Kar Leung (director of 36th Chamber of Shaolin).

As Winson Wolf would say, time is of the essence—so if you want the two tickets to White Lotus that're sitting on my desk, email me no later than noon today and make sure your subject line is "acupuncture kung fu." I'll pick a winner at random before I grab lunch and email them to let 'em know how to pick up their tickets. (Note: If you'll win, you'll need to be able to swing by the Mercury offices [605 NE 21st] no later than 5:30 pm today.)

Have at!

Maybe I'm still riding my "inane spectacle" high from 2012, but, um, SHIT YES. Fuckin' A. HD here.

P.S. "Titans will clash" is officially the laziest tagline ever.
P.P.S. If they were insistent on using "titan" in the tagline, they could have at least used "Well, at least it'll be better than Titan A.E."
P.P.P.S. Or they could have just said "Liam Neeson is Zeus. THE FUCK ELSE DO YOU NEED."
P.P.P.S. Okay, fine, I kind of liked Titan A.E.

Welcome to "Movies You Might Have Forgotten Even Existed, But Are Nevertheless Awesome," an irregularly recurring Blogtown feature that will continue until whenever I get bored of it. Have a film you'd like to suggest for a future MYMHFEE,BANA? Leave it in the comments.

This installment's featured film: 2003's The Rundown! Originally bearing the far-cooler titles Helldorado and Welcome to the Jungle, The Rundown is directed by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom), written by R.J. Stewart (Xena: Warrior Princess, Cleopatra 2525), and features The Rock, Seann William Scott, Rosario Dawson, Christopher Walken, and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from Arnold Motherfucking Schwarzenegger. It also features a scene in which a baboon humps The Rock's face.

That's a lot of cows indeed, Christopher Walken! Now, I cannot be certain of this—the film is, after all, a mere six years old—but I am fairly confident when I suggest The Rundown's genius will be recognized by future generations, and that, one day, this film will be acknowledged as one of the finest motion pictures ever made.

One of my favorite kung fu flicks, 1978's 7 Grandmasters, screens Tuesday at 7:45 at the Hollywood Theatre (4122 NE Sandy). Dan Halsted from the Grindhouse Film Festival sums it up nicely:

A kung fu teacher sets out to prove that he is the greatest fighter by finding and defeating the 7 Grandmasters. One by one, he fights their wide variety of animal styles (tiger, leopard, mantis, monkey, etc.) He also puts a young student through elaborate training, and is followed by a mysterious kung fu villain in a weird hat. Featuring all the best old school sound effects, fighting styles, martial arts weapons, and silver haired villains with maniacal laughter (plus the best monkey-style kung fu fight ever put on film).

Want two free tickets? Sure you do. You know the drill: Email me no later than 2 pm on Monday, November 9, and make sure the subject line of your email is "Pai Mei." On Monday at 2, I'll pick a winner at random* and email them to let 'em know how to pick up their tickets. Have at!

*Flattery, as always, helps.

The Northwest Film & Video Festival opens today with a little-bit-of-everything program of shorts at Whitsell Auditorium and an after-party at Cravedog Studios (412 NW Couch, Suite 203) at 9pm.

Here’s the festival trailer, which on the one hand is not very informative, but on the other hand is an endearing short in itself. Respect the owl!

I wrote a little preview for this nine-day inundation of regional film, but I couldn’t squeeze in everything. Things got lost, but I share my over-word-count hit and miss picks after the jump. Or, skip my editorial and go straight for the information overload.

Tonight and tomorrow night, the 99W Drive-In (3000 Portland Road, Newberg) is hosting a truly fantastic double feature: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Zombieland. First feature starts at dusk, second feature follows. Stock up on some Twinkies beforehand and enjoy.

So I have a vague suspicion that those selling this film are trying to make it look just a teensy bit epic. This trailer is about as subtle as shouting "HOLY SHIT NEW JAMES CAMERON IT'S SO INSANE IT'S GONNA MAKE YOUR DICK EXPLODE ARE YOU READY HELL YES YOU'RE READY!!! PANDORAAAAAAAAH!!!!" (Which is a good thing, as far as I can tell; so far, the marketing department at Fox hasn't seemed to know what he hell to do with Avatar, but at least now they're trying to convey the sense that it's a Big Deal.)

Via AICN. (A site which also inspired the look of the Film section in this week's Halloween dress-up issue.)

Following Funny People—in which he played a sell-out comedian who stars in movies like Merman, My Best Friend Is a Robot, and Re-Do—Adam Sandler's next movie will be Jack and Jill, in which he'll play not only Jack, but also (wait for it...) Jill. Variety manages to keep a straight face about this news, but FilmDrunk puts it best:

You can say Funny People was overlong and self-indulgent, it was still the best thing Adam Sandler’s done in 10 years. It was honest, he was actually trying, and he made you remember, oh yeah, this guy’s actually really funny. And how did we reward him? With his first box office flop, pretty much ever. So now we get Adam Sandler playing Jack and Jill in a script from the writer of Paul Blart Mall Cop.

Goddammit.

The next entry in the Old School Kung Fu Masters series, Fatal Flying Guillotine, screens at 9:45 on Tuesday, October 27, at the Hollywood Theatre. The pitch, via festival organizer Dan Halsted:

Following the Shaw Brothers' Flying Guillotine film, and Jimmy Wang Yu's classic Master of the Flying Guillotine, came this lower budget batshit-crazy production. A young student is out for revenge for his mother's death, while a group of Shaolin monks search for a kung fu book. All roads lead to an old evil master who fights with dual motorized flying guillotines, beheading anyone who challenges him. This movie seems to have been written in some sort of drug fueled haze, and gets crazier by the minute. Protect your neck!

Dan was kind enough to donate two tickets to the screening for a Blogtown giveaway, and here's how you can win 'em: Email me no later than 1 pm tomorrow (Friday, October 23), and make sure your subject line is "Age of Consent." (Bonus points for anyone who guesses how I arrived at that phrase from Fatal Flying Guillotine.) Shortly after 1 pm on Friday, I'll email the winner to tell 'em how to pick up their tickets.

Sound good? Good. Go.

• Photograph by Martin Schoeller, via the New Yorker.

This is how the New Yorker's "Man of Extremes: The Return of James Cameron" begins:

The director James Cameron is six feet two and fair, with paper-white hair and turbid blue-green eyes. He is a screamer—righteous, withering, aggrieved. “Do you want Paul Verhoeven to finish this motherfucker?” he shouted, an inch from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face, after the actor went AWOL from the set of True Lies, a James Bond spoof that Cameron was shooting in Washington, D.C. (Schwarzenegger had been giving the other actors a tour of the Capitol.) Cameron has mastered every job on set, and has even been known to grab a brush out of a makeup artist’s hand. “I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt,” he says. “It saves so much time.” His evaluations of others’ abilities are colorful riddles. “Hiring you is like firing two good men,” he says, or “Watching him light is like watching two monkeys fuck a football.” A small, loyal band of cast and crew works with him repeatedly; they call the dark side of his personality Mij—Jim backward.

Holy shit. Dana Goodyear's piece is a fascinating profile of Cameron, and it's loaded with insane details about the making of Avatar. ("This film integrates my life's achievements," Cameron says at one point. "It's the most complicated stuff anyone's ever done.") If you have any interest in popular cinema, read the whole thing ASAP.

Check out this funny and fairly awesome trailer for Black Lightning—a Rooskie movie about a nerdy kid and his crappy car that turns out to have all sorts of wicked cool super powers. It's like Spider-Man except Spider-Man's car was bitten by the radioactive spider instead of him.

(If this was filmed in Portland, the movie would be about a super-powered bike. Sigh.)