While The Dark Knight dominated the weekend box office here in the US -- with a little love spared for Mamma Mia! and Transsiberian -- in Asia things looked a little different. The Good, the Bad, the Weird , which was just picked up by IFC for the US, opened in its native South Korea to outstanding returns, according to Variety.

The film, a salute to Spaghetti Westerns with a modern twist, is expected to surpass 2.2 million admissions over the weekend, which would make it the fastest to hit that mark this year, beating out police comedy Public Enemy Returns. Its opening day returns put it in the company of previous monster smashes D-War and The Host. We should hear more about The Good, the Bad, the Weird when it plays at Toronto in September.

The news is not as good in Japan, where master filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki's latest animated achievement, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, was expected to dominate. Opening on a record number of screens for a local picture (481), Ponyo is said by its distributor to have earned 83% of the total made by Miyazaki's blockbuster Spirited Away, which sounds good. But as reported by Mark Schilling in Variety, those numbers may be misleading.

Poised to debut in its native land today, a Korean Western is also making plans to conquer the United States. The Good, the Bad, the Weird has been acquired by IFC Films for US distribution, according to CJ Entertainment, the film's Korean distributor.

As noted by the Korean Film Council, advance ticket reservations are unprecedented for what's been described as South Korea's most expensive production (US$17 million) to date. Directed by Kim Jee-woon, The Good, the Bad, the Weird debuted at Cannes in May. Kim Voynar said it is " a crazy, busy Western that centers around a map to a treasure happened upon by a (seemingly) bumbling fool, who ends up being pursued by a good-guy law-enforcement type, a wicked bad guy dressed in black, and, at one point, an entire army. It runs a little long, but it's funny and sharp, with a spectacular chase sequence near the end and a nice final payoff."

The film will have its North American Premiere at Toronto and then open in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and three other major cities in the first half of 2009. The director most recently made the terrific horror flick A Tale of Two Sisters and crime drama A Bittersweet Life. but he also made the wrestling-themed comedy The Foul King and the very darkly humorous The Quiet Family. You can watch the trailer, check out the posters, stills, and more at the Korean-language official site.

[ via Twitch ]

There is a real trend of King Arthur revisionism lately -- first there was Galahad, then Brian K. Vaughn's Roundtable, and now John Woo is taking a crack at it with Caliber. Variety reports that the rights to the series have been snatched up by Johnny Depp's Infinitum Nihil, Barry Levine's Radical Comics (also the book's publisher), and Woo's Lion Rock.

Caliber sets King Arthur firmly into the American Old West, which is rather fitting, since as a location it's nearly as mythical as Camelot. Arthur is given Caliber, a tattooed six-shooter (how do you tattoo a gun?) given to him by the Native Americans. It's no ordinary gun, as it's never loaded with bullets. Only a man with Justice on his side can fire it, at which point it shoots lightning. Accompanying him through the Pacific Northwest are the The Knights of the Round Table, all noble gunslingers, bound by a code of honor to protect the weak and defend the innocent. I guess they have to carry regular guns, though. I can't find an online preview of the comic for you, unfortunately, so we'll just have to hope a Cinematical reader out there can fill us in on the first issue. It certainly has a pretty cover, but I'm not sold on the premise yet.

While the big-screen adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera could not, unfortunately, live up to the text's expectations, the famous writer is getting another shot. This time, however, it's an old screenplay. The Guardian reports that Mexican actor and producer Rodolfo de Anda says that he has picked up the rights to a screenplay written by the author over 40 years ago.

Titled Frontera, the script follows "an ageing pistolero and his much younger partner." De Anda says that he heard about the screenplay years ago, but assumed that it was written by Alcoriza. When he bought the rights "about a month ago, I discovered the surprise that the story was not in fact by Alcoriza, but by Gabriel García Márquez." "Nobody knew it existed, and the most surprising thing is that it is a Western." De Anda says he will take on the role of the older partner, and is, not surprisingly, thinking of casting one of the two Y tu mamá también stars -- Gael García Bernal or Diego Luna -- as the young sidekick.

It's not an adaptation of a translation, so hopefully this will fare better than the last Gabriel offering. But which of the two young stars would you pick for the feature -- Gael or Diego?

In a battle between East Coast gangsters and West Coast cowboys, a New York-based company has sided with the Mob. Erik has just posted about HBO's desire to make a movie based on The Sopranos, despite the reluctance of creator David Chase. However, HBO has shot down even the possibility of making any movies based on Deadwood, despite the past enthusiasm expressed by creator David Milch.

This might sound like old news. After all, Cinematical first broke the story last September that HBO had scrapped their plans to make two movies to wrap up the storylines explored in the show's three seasons. Fans -- and the actors themselves -- were not happy about the decision. HBO danced around it, with a publicist saying there were "no current plans." (Italics added.) In an effort to hammer the final nail in the coffin, Richard Pepler, co-president of HBO, now says "the likelihood of a Deadwood movie happening is slim to none," according to Zap2it. Michael Lombardo of HBO claims that talks never got past the "discussion stage." Milch, however, said in January 2007: "We have every intention of going forward."

The "slim to none" HBO statement may not be a big surprise, considering the two years that have passed since the unceremonious end of the show's third season, its setting in the Old West, and Deadwood's (relatively) low profile in modern pop culture, at least as compared to The Sopranos or Sex and the City.

You know what I call 18 consecutive days of horror, sci-fi, action foreign, indie, obscure, and generally weird movies? Well obviously I call it heaven, but most normal people refer to it as Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival, which runs every July and throws a couple hundred features and shorts to a very ravenous crowd of genre freaks. And with folks like Mitch Davis, Tony Timpone, and Todd Brown (among others) on the programming end, you could probably just book a flight to Montreal without even checking the official Fantasia website.

I'm still not sure if I can make the trek up north next month, but I have been invited and (based mainly on the recently-released full lineup of flicks) I can pretty much guarantee that the current registrants are in for one hell of a good time. Among their selected titles, I can very strongly recommend All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Dance of the Dead, Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, Let the Right One In, Mother of Tears, [REC], Stuck, and Timecrimes -- plus they're offering solid titles like Fear(s) of the Dark, The Objective, Red, Second Skin, and Spine Tingler. Among the stuff I'm still drooling to see: Babysitter Wanted, Dark Floors, Midnight Meat Train, Pig Hunt, Repo: The Genetic Opera, and (of course) a new Uwe Boll flick. Plus this festival seems to offer more "Asian weirdness" movies than you'll ever find in one place. At least a dozen that look and sound certifiably insane, unless you'd define Tokyo Gore Police and Negative Happy Chain as "mainstream."

For a complete schedule, lineup, trailer bank, and tons of geeky goodness (in your choice of English or French!), click here and then here. (Montreal's not all that far away...)

So what do you think? Is former Punisher Thomas Jane the right man to bring gun-slinging Jonah Hex to the big screen? Film School Rejects is posting what they claim might be test shots of Jane as Hex in the adaptation of John Albano and Tony DeZuniga's western comic -- and if it's a fake, it's a darn good one. The photo might look legit, but there hasn't even been a casting announcement for the film, which leads me to believe that it could just be an overzealous fan with some time on their hands (and Photoshop on their computer). There had been some chatter that Firefly's Nathan Fillion was in talks for the lead, but nothing was ever confirmed.

Hex is the story of a former confederate solider turned bounty hunter with a drinking problem and an itchy trigger finger. In the original run of the comic, Hex stuck to traditional western story lines, but in a later incarnation, there was a touch of the supernatural thrown in; pitting Jonah against zombies and werewolves. Warners first announced the project last year, with Crank's Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor to write and direct; the two had promised that they would be using the later 'supernatural' editions of Hex as a starting point for the story.

But for now, it's all rumor and speculation, so stay tuned to Cinematical for the official word.

UPDATE: Shock says it's a fake, straight from the mouth of Mark Neveldine. So there goes that ...

UPDATE 2: FSR spoke to Jane who says the photo is real, and it was part of his audition to play the character.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Robert Downey Jr. is in talks to star in Cowboys and Aliens, DreamWorks' adaptation of Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley's graphic novel. (Read Matt's original story on it.)

Downey Jr. would play Zeke Jackson, a former Union Army gunslinger, who is engaged in a battle against the Apache. But the battle between settlers and Native Americans is interrupted when an alien spaceship crashes into the Silver City prairie. Turns out, they have their eye on conquering Earth, forcing the warring westerners to form an uneasy alliance.

The project has been in and out of development for years, but apparently the latest draft is catching some A-list interest. As it was written by Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus, who were behind Iron Man and Children of Men, I am immediately expecting good things out of something that, if handled poorly, could be as bad as Wild Wild West. Good writers and a good actor like Downey Jr. could make this movie incredibly fun. This is how movies like the first Pirates of the Caribbean come about.

I have to say, between this and Downey Jr.'s rumored interest in a comic-based Sherlock Holmes, I wonder if he is going to plunge into Hugh Jackman levels of geekdom. They will have to start fighting each other to get to the best comic book scripts. And that should be a movie all its own.

Before it opened, there was much public mulling over whether Harrison Ford had the stamina at age 65 to play Indiana Jones one more time. Apparently the box office grosses answered that question. It was an irrelevant question, anyway. In those Indiana Jones movies, the machinery is what mattered. Ford was there for the ride, just like the audience. I think what was missing in ...Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the elegiac qualities of a late period performance ... for example, the aging heroism in John Wayne's last great movie.

True Grit isn't just the sword outwearing the sheath, and the soul outwearing the breast, as Byron put it. It's also about remaining power in an old carcass. Wayne's rallying of that power in the film's memorable duel: blinking his one good eye at the shock of being called a fat old man, he takes his horse's reins in his teeth and rides down four gunmen. The film is often a comedy, with lines worthy of Mark Twain in it; so much so that the emotional content blindsides you. Every film class in the world quite justly talks about the end of The Searchers, John Ford's image of Wayne framed by a doorway, never at home or really at ease. True Grit has a scene to equal it: a gentle if tersely written scene at a snow-covered grave yard in the high country, with approximately the emotional fire power of the finale of James Joyce's The Dead.

Everyone and their (his?) mother loves The Proposition, the Nick Cave-penned Australian western starring Danny Huston as a villain who could give Chigurh a run for his money in sheer badassery. It's hard to blame them, since movies that gritty and tough don't come along very often. (As modern westerns go, I think 3:10 to Yuma is better, but it certainly isn't as awesomely brutal.) Two years after that film became a critical darling and a sleeper hit of sorts, director John Hillcoat -- who is currently in production on Cormac McCarthy's The Road -- has signed with Columbia to direct an adaptation of a not-yet-released novel by Matt Bondurant called The Wettest Country in the World. The book is about a trio of gangsters -- the author's grandfather and grand-uncles -- who ran the moonshine trade at the peak of the Prohibition Era, and the writer who tracked them in search of a scoop.