Box Office Mojo sez: It opened on 120 screens and raked in a total of $369K, for an opening weekend average of $3,075 per screen. That puts Tucker's movie eighth in per-screen revenue out of the nine movies that opened last weekend. Although he came close to matching the $3,100 per screen average of Blind Date (2009).

But sometimes critically acclaimed films don't have boffo box offices. It's just the nature of high art. Let's go to the reviews:

• Reuters: "the film is unfunny from first minute to last, and its half-hearted attempts at emotion merely underscore its general loathsomeness."
• USA Today: "This unfunny, über-misogynistic adaptation of Tucker Max's audacious best-seller of the same name is unlikely to please anyone."
• Chicago Tribune: "The result just might be the most hypocritical feature in the history of film as well as the history of hypocrisy, and along with serving beer, I hope they show 'I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell' in hell."
• San Francisco Chronicle: "That was epic, bro. You should make a movie ...No, you shouldn't! Put down the digital camera, step away from Robert McKee's guide to screenplays, and get back to ramming your head through Sheetrock during spring break."
• New York Times: "a mediocre gross-out movie that barely pushes the envelope."
• Boston Globe: "Ridiculously cheap-looking, smug, scurrilous, but fairly evolved for a project so fundamentally unevolved."

You fool! It was announced yesterday that Werner Herzog's remake of the famous Harvey Kietel peen-flashing crime drama, The Bad Lieutenant, will premiere at the Toronto film festival in September! Lieutenant will be featured along with new films by the Coen Bros and Michael Moore. The original 1992 bad-cop-gets-worse flick is credited for deftly capturing New York's signature 1980's grit and for giving Harvey Keitel his 'Serious Actor' bona fides. The remake doesn't look, uh, as promising.

It features the thespian stylings of rapper/custom car enthusiast Xzibit and includes the line "What? You don't have a lucky crack pipe?" delivered in the mystifying way only Nicolas Cage could. See you in Toronto!

P.S. We're calling shenanigans if we don't see Cage's ween.

Hilton says in the attached Time video that he works alone, with only "a little bit" of help from his sister. But when Guanabee ran 24 of the gossip blogger's recent photo scrawls past a handwriting expert, three of them looked like they were written by someone else.

Writes Cindy Casares:

We've had people come forward to tell us exclusively that they ghostwrote for Perez Hilton as far back as 2006.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.>So don't be fooled. You might like to think all of Hilton's erudite posts are written by the dashing young man who sounds so erudite on your television. But really they're probably just done by some sweaty, hyperventilating loudmouth whose mom still cleans up after him.

[Guanabee]

The NYT today reveals that Leibovitz took out more than $15 million in loans from Art Capital Group—essentially a very high class pawn shop specializing in art.

Last fall, Annie Leibovitz, the photographer, borrowed $5 million from a company called Art Capital Group. In December, she borrowed $10.5 million more from the same firm. As collateral, among other items, she used town houses she owns in Greenwich Village, a country house, and something else: the rights to all of her photographs.

In addition to the lawsuit for more than $700k from unpaid vendors, Leibovitz reportedly used the cash to pay back taxes and finance "a lengthy, costly and litigious renovation on the three adjoining town houses." Why one would pawn their town houses in order to raise money to renovate them, I do not know.

Obviously, a $2 million per year income is no savior from hard times. And hey, Julian Schnabel also pawned some real estate with the same firm to help finance his goddamn monstrosity of a pink, constantly-discounted celebrity condo building, Palazzo Chupi. Pawn shops prey on the rich just as they do the poor. Fairness!

[NYT. By bullshit trend specialist Allen Salkin, but with actual value! Good story Allen. Pic via]

Elterman snapped the two getting into the car, and the pic ended up on a full page in Creem magazine. Elterman, who's photographed stars like Bob Dylan, Joan Jett, and Matt Dillon (see some here) says, "Photographers today just do not know what it is like to make a photograph of a real icon. The stars who the magazines run today are totally boring to me."

Elterman continues:

"I came from a family of art collectors and I have always been active in the arts. It dawned on me one day that if you knew your craft was a photographer, you could make a beautiful iconic photograph that would be published in the magazines and could eventually hang in a gallery or at MoMA in New York. There is nothing different from what were are doing today compared with the work of Walker Evans or Helen Levitt. The concept of Paparazzi As An Art Form has been accepted, and we did our first gallery exhibition early this year at the Seyhoun Gallery on Melrose Ave. The response from the public and the media was overwhelming."

Although we don't use Buzz Foto, we often come across "paparazzi" images that are like artwork, with echoes of Hopper, Lichtenstein (yesterday's Snap of Kate Moss), Seurat, Kubrick, and others, including Ms. Levitt (see Naomi Watts, below). We've compiled some of these arty Snap Judgments into a gallery, here:

Brad Elterman: Elevating Paparazzi To An Artform [Mediabistro]
Brad Elterman: Then and Now [A Photography Blog]
Brad Elterman.com
BuzzFoto.com
Related: "Paparazzi As An Art Form" exhibit information

Earlier: Lindsay & Sam: Got Any Fries To Go With Those Shakes?
A Scene From Sam Ronson's REM Cycle
Saint Angelina, Brad & The Twins Hit Cannes
Mary Kate Olsen Gives Chauffeured Shade
Don't Rain On Serena & Dan's (Art) Parade
Madonna: The Material Girl Is In Her Element
Seth Rogen Makes Naomi Watts Want To Hurl
House Elf Seen Sneaking Into Posh Hotel
Jennifer Garner Updates Famous Seurat Painting For Paparazzi
Chelsea Clinton At Starbucks: We Have Soooooo Been There
Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes: The Visual Metaphors Say It All
Redskins Cheerleader Arrives In Iraq, Promptly Tosses Hair
Kate Moss: Between A Rocker & A Drag Queen

Brad and Angelina photo above via Henry Flores/BuzzFoto.com

You may at some point in your local travels have stumbled upon the art of prvtdncr: Working primarily in spraypaint on somebody-else's-building, the sloganeering graffiti artist throws up provocative phrases that are meant to hold a magnifying makeup mirror up to certain, unseemly facts about the true nature of Hollywood. As our friends at The WOW Report point out, BUTT magazine's current L.A.-themed issue devotes eight pages to some of his creations, including a less-than-generous sentiment regarding the Most Powerful Gay in the Universe.

In fairness to David Geffen, however, we think it's only right to point out that because of poor spacial planning, the original tag, which was to end, "human seagulls of Carbon Beach and Hillary Clinton!" was truncated to the far more inclusive message of intolerance pictured above.

• We Heart Art [WOW Report]
• [BUTT]

To call it art or not to call it art?

That's the question that seems to stir passions and make lips quiver with rage when talk turns to video games.

Begin furrowing your brow now. The whole art vs. non-art discussion is complex, difficult and possibly beyond resolution, but those who exalt the virtues of movies over video games often fail to take into account some of the strange variations in the way movies are made, relevant factors when it comes to deciding whether films deserve to be placed on an art pedestal.

With much trepidation, I'm dipping a toe into these treacherous waters because a) I'm too foolish to refrain and b) because there are elements within the film community - and I'm a 27-year veteran of film criticism - that insist that video games can't be art.

Roger Ebert, perhaps the world's most famous film critic and also one of its best, recently recanted his original position. Video games could be art, Ebert wrote, although not "high art." I know lots of critics who wouldn't hesitate to turn a big thumbs down on the notion that video games can be art, and many of their arguments revolve around intention and singularity of vision.

But when we're talking movies, intentions remain elusive. A very capable screenwriter once told me that he hated the vaunted auteur theory - the one that identifies directors as the guiding force behind movies. Writers generally feel slighted by directors, but this writer's animosity derived from first-hand observation. No theory applies to every film, or even to a majority of them, he said.

He further explained that every movie has its own peculiar origins. A movie might begin with a screenwriter and his script. It might begin with a producer who's trying to read commercial tealeaves. It just as easily could originate with a big-name actor who has enough clout to get a project green lit. Maybe it's the work of some aspiring indie whiz kid with a trust fund and too many credit cards.

In the history of movies, few directors have been able totally to call their own shots and even those have often faced limits. The most sympathetic producer can't always raise sufficient money to bring a project to perfection. The ideal actor isn't always available to play a part.

But wait, goes yet another anti-game argument: Games have winners and losers. Scores are kept. Outcomes vary. Such factors rule out the possibility of art.

Really? I'm not a gamer, but I certainly can imagine games that speak to the mind and heart just as easily as I can imagine movies that don't. On second thought, I don't have to imagine such movies. I've seen thousands of them. And I know that some video games trump some movies in both the skill and imagination departments.

I also can see how a game, if created by a master, might begin to reveal the subtleties of its structure, a certain elegance that not only creates the fun of the game, but also begins to disclose the intricacies of the mind that created it.

And if art needs to be rooted in creative decision, what should we make of movies that are test screened so that studio executives can decide which of several possible endings should be used? Does this bizarre multiple-choice game preclude art? Under such circumstances, who's the artist? The director, the audience or the studio?

Here's a story to keep in mind. The great Chinese director Zhang Yimou ("Raise the Red Lantern") directed a movie called "The House of Flying Daggers." A couple of years ago, I interviewed one of the movie's stars, the lovely Zhang Ziyi. I rattled on enthusiastically about a final battle scene staged in a snowstorm. Zhang told me that the director hadn't planned to shoot in the snow, but the weather changed suddenly, and he decided not to wait for a "better" day.

I felt a little silly, but maybe I was right in the first place. Perhaps Zhang - the highly skilled creator of several masterworks - instinctively knew that nature had provided him with a happy accident. The point is that after all the decisions by committee, the second-guessing and the necessary compromises, art still can emerge, beauty wrenched from apparent chaos.

So in the end, how much does this debate matter?

Not much, I'd say. Movies and games should be appraised on two levels: to determine whether they work well, of course, but also to see what they reveal about the society they depict and the fantasies they promulgate. We should ask if games, like movies, speak to something vital in the human condition, a shorthand term that covers our common triumphs and woes.

Perhaps the effort to separate art from non-art does little more than send us on a wild goose chase.

So if there's a battle raging, count me out. I'm not about to climb any barricades to defend the sanctity of art. If I visit a museum that's displaying video games, as some evidently already have, I'm not about to turn up my nose. I'm going to marvel at the elasticity of a changing culture, and I'm going to remember that even a mild wind sometimes blows away lines drawn firmly in the sand.

Bob Denerstein spent 27 years reviewing movies for The Rocky Mountain News in Denver. He recently took a buyout from the paper and has moved on to other writing challenges. You can follow his musings at Denerstein Unleashed.

Spielberg's spokesman, Marvin Levy, said the director's staff contacted the FBI several weeks ago after seeing a bulletin from the agency's Art Crime Team seeking clues about the theft of the "Russian Schoolroom" oil painting.

"The second anybody said, 'I think we have that painting,' [our] office got a hold of the FBI," Levy said.

Special Agent Chris Calarco of the FBI's Art Crime Team and Jessica Todd Smith, curator of American art for the Huntington Library, inspected the painting Friday afternoon at Spielberg's offices on the Universal Studios lot. The filmmaker was not present.

"He's an absolutely unknowing victim in this," Calarco said of Spielberg.

The FBI's visit to Spielberg's office at Universal also serendipitously resulted in the return of the three Yorkshire terriers recently stolen at gunpoint from a Koreatown home, when the Art Crimes agent realized that the trio of newly procured puppies nipping at his heels ("Geffie," "Katzie," and "Lil Stevie") during his investigation bore a striking resemblance to the ones he'd recently seen on local news footage. After a DreamWorks employee convinced Calarco that they had "no idea" that the adorable Yorkies obtained from their otherwise reputable puppy broker were kidnapping victims, he immediately cleared Spielberg of any wrongdoing and arranged for the dogs' joyful reunion with their rightful owners.

[Photo; AP]

• Stolen painting found in Spielberg's collection [LAT]