Computer scientists are using Twitter to predict weekend box office
rankings, and its working. They compared 3 million tweets to 25
recently-released movies, and found that their predictions were
significantly close. "We developed algorithms to analyse these tweets
and measure the rate at which they were produced," said Bernardo
Huberman, the head of a computing lab at HP. "Our intuition was that
the faster people tweet, the more likely they are to go and see it." Word of mouth builds audiences!
(more).

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"Hit-Girl is a heroine for these movie times: a vision of female might whittled down to pocketsize," Dargis writes in her review of KICK ASS.

And what,
exactly, is the box office forecast for this weekend? BOX OFFICE MOJO's
crystal ball predicts that two morbidly-themed comedies, KICK ASS, a
superhero comedy, and DEATH AT A FUNERAL, the new Chris Rock
blockbuster, will emerge as winners (more). The man behind KICK
ASS is Matthew Vaughn, a British producer-turned-director of Guy
Ritchie movies, who wrote the screenplay alongside Jane Goldman. His
film didn't sit too well with Manohla Dargis, who describes KICK ASS in
her review as "fast, periodically spit-funny and often grotesquely
violent" and "the latest in giggles-and-guts entertainment" (more).

Dana
Steven's SLATE review of the film does more to explain the legitimate
controversy behind the Tarantino-esque KICK ASS, which began with its
trailer: an 11-year old girl, a superhero, announces her presence in
the preview with the words, "All right, you cunts, let's see what you
can do now." While these lines made the trailer a huge hit at this
year's Comic-Con, Stevens notes that the character swears like this
throughout the movie as if she was starring in GOODFELLAS. Her review
becomes even more interesting when she criticizes the film's shameless
violence. "That's right, I just mentioned moral vision in a review of a
comic-book movie," she writes. "Go ahead and call me a sententious
schoolmarm (you cunts). The bone I'm picking here goes beyond the flaws
of a minor movie like Kick-Ass: I'm ready to rip the needle on
the intravenous feed of comic-book superheroes that Hollywood has had
us hooked up to for decades now" (more).