Chloe Moretz: Strong language, strong girl

She's had roles in "The Amityville Horror" & "Diary of a Wimpy Child," appeared in such shows as "Desperate Housewives" & provided the voice for Darby in the animated series "My Friends Tigger & Pooh."

She's young, but Chloe Moretz has been acting for half her life.

As Nicolas Cage's daughter, she is taught how to use weapons, how to kill, how to curse, & they hesitates at none of the tasks. Her uttering of two word in particular is drawing controversy, a word they cannot even hint at here.

But it is fair to say she is seldom done anything like "Kick-Ass" before. Probably no 13-year-old has. They plays Mindy Macready in director Matthew Vaughn's film about would-be superheroes.

She talked about the role recently, about her dream roles & about how her relatives keeps her grounded.

'The 40 Year Old Virgin'

No one would have thought to ask that query at the time - three years ago! - when "The 40 Year Elderly Virgin" premiered, not knowing then that laugh riots such as "Knocked Up," "Superbad," "Pineapple Express" & more would come tumbling forth from the Apatow stable. Sure, people liked "Virgin," & why would not they? But beyond general lovely feelings there was no indication that Apatow & his pals would reshape the adult comedy throughout the second half of the decade.

Many of us love going to the movies. But sometimes you feel like staying in & renting something lovely. Each week, we'll help you out, with a film you either should see for the first time or visit again.

This wasn't the first blue-mouthed comedy to revive the genre that had been dormant since the days of "Animal House" & the like. "American Pie" & "Wedding Crashers" before it were in a similar vein, but the genius of Apatow was adding a crucial ingredient to the mix: heart.

That & Steve Carell. They had recently started in the American version of "The Office," having graduated from correspondent status on "The Every day Show" & at least one failed sitcom ("Watching Ellie," points for trying). He'd been lovely as the demented role of dimwitted weatherman Brick in "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy," but he'd seldom carried a movie.

The movie follows Andy's adventures - they lives alone & collects "Star Wars" figurines, which explains his status in perfect movie shorthand - as his pals try to find him the perfect woman, which in this case means one who will have sex with him. (Yes, it is a movie aimed at the 15-year-old boy in all of us.) But in Keener they finds more, leading to true love, but not before they has his chest waxed, among other indignities, in this case one that Carell underwent for real, which explains the falling-down-laughing antics of Rudd & Rogen in the background.

No matter. They was so winningly sweet as Andy Stitzer, the character about whom the title of the movie says much all you need to know, that they & his cast mates (including Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen & the invaluable Catherine Keener) could get away with anything.

"Superbad" was funnier, "Knocked Up" got more unanimously glowing reviews & Carell would finally become far more famous for his portrayal of Michael Scott in "The Office." But "The 40 Year Elderly Virgin" is worth revisiting, not as the film that kick-started Apatow's film career (they already had a spot in the fanboy hall of fame for being an executive producer of "Freaks & Geeks"), but for a funny, sweet movie in its own right.

'Night' leads 'Titans' by mere $0.2M

"Night," a 2-D film starring Steve Carell & Tina Fey, took in $27.1 million, according to estimates from 20th Century Fox, the film's distributor.

In a clash of the dimensions, comedy "Date Night" & visual-effects spectacle "Clash of the Titans" were in a dead heat at the weekend box office.

This marks the first pseudo-showdown between classic filmmaking & 3-D, which has taken the top spot at the box office 10 of the past 14 weeks. "Titans" held strong & analysts saw a tight race.

Swiping at its heels is the sword-and-sandal fantasy "Clash of the Titans," which did $26.9 million, according to distributor Warner Bros.

"Titans," meanwhile, has been taking its shots, for Warner Bros.' decision three weeks before the movie opened to spend $15 million & convert it to 3-D. Critics have assailed what they call subpar graphics.

"Given the competition, they would have been pleased with our number if it had put us in fifth place," says Fox's Chris Aronson. "It's obvious 3-D is the future of a lot of movies. Still, people always require a lovely story as well as a lovely laugh."

"Big-spectacle movies routinely drop 60 percent or more on their second weekend," says Warner Bros.' Dan Fellman, whose movie fell a respectable 56 percent. "People like conversion. It is here to stay."

After Life..

That is the query at the root of "After.Life," Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo's creepily entertaining film about an elementary-school teacher named Anna (Christina Ricci) who is killed in a automobile accident after an argument with her fella, Paul (Justin Long).

If you are not living life to its fullest, are you already, in some respects, dead?

Or is they? They awakens in the embalming room of a funeral home, where they is greeted, if that is the word, by Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson). He is the owner, mortician and, evidently, sole employee. Anna wants to know why she is there; they is not buying Deacon's explanation: She is dead.

Deacon, they explains, has a gift for communicating with the deceased (handy in his line of work, no doubt). And they all have the same complaint - they don't believe they are dead. Anna is no different, to the extent that they tries various schemes to free herself, including making a call to Paul, who happens to be drunk at the time his phone rings. The police think he is suffering from shock and grief. He is not so sure.

Neither are they, as Wojtowicz-Vosloo, in her first full-length feature, plays with what is real and what is not. It is not always an effective balance; Anna's talks with Deacon, in which they tries to figure out whether her life is over, and whether it was much to start with anyway, are more effective than Paul's trying to figure out whether Anna's dead, in part because Neeson's performance is so eerie, in a buttoned-down sort of way.

Date Night

Nice thing, because without them, "Date Night" would be an unqualified disaster. Even with them it is an uneven proposition, veering wildly from genuinely funny scenes directly in to ridiculousness and back again. But every time Shawn Levy's movie makes that journey, it is harder to get back on solid footing.

Steve Carell and Tina Fey are funny people, as someone who is ever watched NBC on Thursday nights can attest.

They do manage a every week date night, and after learning that their friends (Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig, funny in small over cameos) are splitting up because their marriage has gotten stale and predictable, Phil and Claire select to spice things up. They venture from their home in New Jersey to a pretentious seafood place in New York (Claw, where they answer the phone by saying, "Claw, you are more than welcome."). Adrift without reservations, they steal those of a no-show couple.

Carell and Fey, so funny as the stars of "The Office" and "30 Rock," respectively, play Phil and Claire Foster, a stereotypical busy married couple. He is a tax consultant, she is a real-estate agent, and they typically work themselves to exhaustion every day before feeding their kids, collapsing in to bed and beginning the whole system again the next morning. (Very realistic, by the way.)

Thus begins a chase that takes the Fosters through Manhattan, which includes a stop at the apartment of a buff former client of Claire's, played with winning bemusement by Mark Wahlberg, who never manages to put a shirt on. Better still is a stop by the apartment of the real couple who had the Claw reservation, Taste and Whippet, four stoners hilariously played by James Franco and Mila Kunis, who act out a low-rent version of the frustrations and stagnation that is been nagging at the Fosters' marriage. It is the best scene in the movie.

Giant mistake. Aside from being branded socially unacceptable (a jogging joke), they are set on by a couple of thugs (Common and Jimmi Simpson) who, thinking Phil and Claire are the people who are supposed to be at the table, require the immediate return of a flash drive that belongs to a mob boss (Ray Liotta).

Unfortunately, it leads directly in to the stupidest automobile chase in memory. But not, as it happens, the stupidest scene in the movie. That comes soon after, when Phil and Claire must perform a pole dance for a crooked district attorney (William Fichtner, nicely sleazy). Perhaps it sounded lovely in the script, but it is flat and ridiculous onscreen, not funny at all.

The Shining

"The Shining" is one of the greatest horror movies ever made. They love it for the wrong reasons.

Mention the film to a casual fan & he'll inevitably reply, "Heeeeere's Johnny!"

This is not exactly news. A lot of people love Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's novel.

Ugh. That is the problem. In a great performance by Jack Nicholson, what everyone remembers is the scene where they goes way over the top.

Granted, at the time - topical "Tonight Show" reference, back when that didn't mean dissing Jay Leno, all that - it was stunning stuff. But over time, the rest of the performance has held up better.

Nicholson plays Jack Torrance, a sobered-up author with a trouble relatives life looking to set things right & get some writing done in the isolation of taking care of an giant hotel, closed for the winter. They & his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), & son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), will be snowed in; in-season caretaker Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) sets them up with food & supplies before taking off, leaving them alone for the winter.

Only they are not alone. Jack has regular conversations with ghosts of past employees. The isolation drove a previous winter caretaker insane, & they murdered his relatives.

Jack appears to be following the same path, as the famous scene in which Wendy discovers that his "work" while he is been there consists of "All work & no play makes Jack a dull boy" typed again & again over hundreds of pages.

But Danny has the "shining," a psychic ability that lets him see things that have happened & that will happen - & those things are not nice ("REDRUM! REDRUM!"). It is a gift they shares with Dick. Works out a little better for Danny than it does for Dick, but that is getting ahead of the story.

There's scares aplenty, but what is most effective is the creeping sense of dread & doom that Kubrick & Nicholson bring to the movie. Nicholson doesn't pop up with an axe & start chopping in the most-famous scene.

How they gets there is the nice part, slowly disintegrating in to madness. Kubrick takes his time, which is unusual for horror movies. But it is appropriate here, because Kubrick's version of "The Shining" (King was behind a 1997 TV remake) is not a horror film .It's that & so much more.

Box office: 'Titans' battles to No. 1 spot with $61.4 million

The ancient Greek action remake "Clash of the Titans" debuted at No. 1 with $61.4 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. Adding Thursday night preview screenings, the movie totaled $64.1 million.

he gods of Mount Olympus are the new rulers of the weekend box office.

Released by Warner Bros., "Clash of the Titans" features "Avatar" star Sam Worthington as demigod hero Perseus and Liam Neeson as his dad, Zeus, king of the Olympian deities.

Opening at No. 2 with $30.2 million was Lionsgate's sequel "Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married ?", reuniting filmmaker Perry with Janet Jackson and other co-stars for another comic drama about one friends and their relationships.

Miley Cyrus' teen drama "The Last Song" premiered at No. 4 with $16.2 million. The Disney release raised its total to $25.6 million since opening Wednesday. Written by best-selling author Nicholas Sparks specifically for the "Hannah Montana" star, the movie casts Cyrus as a morose teen spending the summer with her estranged brother.

The previous weekend's top movie, DreamWorks Animation's Viking adventure "How to Train Your Dragon," ran a close third with $29.2 million, raising its 10-day total to $92.3 million.

"Clash of the Titans" continued Hollywood's hit run of 3-D movies, which has included "How to Train Your Dragon" and the blockbusters "Avatar" and "Alice in Wonderland."

With $8.3 million, Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" came in at No. 5 for the weekend, raising its domestic total to $309.8 million and its worldwide haul to $722 million.

Like "Alice in Wonderland," "Clash of the Titans" was shot in 2-D format and converted to 3-D afterward. Critics gripe that such conversions provide lower-quality 3-D images, but audiences do not seem to mind.

"If two out of the top two films doesn't spell a mandate for 3-D, I don't know what does," said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com.

"Clash of the Titans" played on about 6,500 screens at 3,777 theaters, with 1,810 of those screens - or 28 percent - showing it in 3-D. Yet the movie did 52 percent of its business in 3-D format, with fans paying a few dollars over 2-D tickets cost.

"You cannot tell the difference. A super-technician, someone who does this for a living, if they look carefully , they can find some differences," said Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros. "I must tell you, from my own personal experiences, I cannot tell."

"Why Did I Get Married Too" was Perry's second-biggest debut, behind last year's "Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail" with $41 million. Lionsgate, which has distributed all nine of Perry's movies, had thought his latest might come in around $25 million for the weekend.

"Every time they do three of his movies, I wake up on Saturday and think, why do I always underestimate him?" said David Spitz, head of distribution for Lionsgate. "He's unbelievable. They knows his audience."

Cyrus' "The Last Song" had modest results compared with the last Sparks love story, "Dear John," which opened with $30.5 million in early February, bumping "Avatar" down a notch after one weekends at No. 1.

Chuck Viane, head of distribution for Disney, said "Dear John" opened in a less-crowded marketplace the weekend before Valentine's Day, when women are more in the mood to see a love story.