Although at first glance it seems to be divided down national lines with the American critics coming out with the pitchforks and battle axes while critics in the UK, where the film debuted last night, seem to mostly like it.

In the US the trade critics are first out of the gate with their notices, and they are not one bit pleased with what Mr Jackson has been up to all these years, tinkering away with the little tale of a slain girl looking down from heaven and remembering her rape and murder.

Variety's Todd McCarthy writes, "Unfortunately, the massive success Jackson has enjoyed in the intervening years with his CGI-heavy "The Lord of the Rings" saga (the source of which receives fleeting homage in a bookstore scene here) and "King Kong" has infected the way he approaches this far more intimate tale...the director has indulged his whims to create constantly shifting backdrops depicting an afterlife evocative of The Sound of Music or The Wizard of Oz one moment, The Little Prince or Teletubbies the next."

And at the Hollywood Reporter, Kurt Honeycutt bemoans that Jackson has turned Alice Sebold's magical otherworldly tale into a simple Law and Order-like thriller, while conceding it works okay on that level.

Over in the UK however, The Times' critic calls the film a return to Jackson's pre-blockbuster form that she showed in cult classic Heavenly Creatures. While Total Film gives Bones four stars, calling it, "A sister film to Heavenly Creatures, brimming with not just tears but imagination, thrills and verve. It's heart-on-sleeve, sure, but it also has a whiff of awards potential."

But while the Bones lingered, America's awards pundits had, sight unseen, all but written off the film's Oscar chances, locking in Precious, The Hurt Locker and Up In the Air as the race's lone heavyweights. On The Envelope's pundits poll (in which Defamer casts a vote) Lovely Bones came in a distant ninth place for best picture favorites. On Movie City News' Gurus of Gold poll, Bones takes the number eight slot.

The pundits have been pining for a shake-up in a race that seemed depressingly settled half a year before the Oscar show. Could Bones be coming in with enough support from some people at least that it will stampede the race? The question will soon be the subject of many a column, blog item and tip sheet in awards land.

Via Awardsdaily.

Suddenly the Universe is a very cold and empty place.

• Apparently we are not a nation of people waiting for Amanda Woodward to return to Melrose Place. Heather Locklear's trip back to the series did little to ease its struggles, lifting its gruesome ratings by a mere 15 percent to a 0.8 rating in the 18 - 45 demo. [Hollywood Reporter]

• Meanwhile, just as the world was sending its mocking obituaries to the printers, guess who's having a good week? Jay Leno is up five percent this week, "matching its highest ratings in six weeks." [Hollywood Reporter]

• With two and a half months to go, the Super Bowl's ad space is almost sold out. CBS reports a 90 percent sell-out rate thus far, meaning only six slots are still available. Like everything else these days, Super Bowl ad sales are being viewed as a barometer of the nation's economic health. [Ad Age]

• A Writers Guild report of diversity among its ranks finds "little if any improvement" for the prospects of women and minority writers. Variety writes that the report "found that women scribes remain stuck at 28% of TV employment and 18% in features while the minority share has been frozen at 6% since 1999." [Variety]

• Jennifer Hudson will play Winnie Mandela, the ex-wife of the ex-South African President Nelson Mandela in Winnie, a biopic to be directed by Darrell J. Roodt, maker of Cry the Beloved Country. [Variety]

• Roger Ebert may be off the airwaves, but his influence lives on, remarkably, as the online buzz king. A survey by Nielsen of which critics dominate the internet reveals that Ebert remains a goliath online, crushing all the competition combined. [thehotblog]

• Making 2012's grosses look like the change fallen under the cushions of your sofa, the video game Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2 reported sales of more than $550 million in the first week of its release. The LA Times puts production costs on the game in the $40 - $50 million range (a fraction of 2012 or Avatar), putting its total budget including marketing somewhere around $200 million. Who's in the wrong business now, movie people? [LA Times]

• Lovely Bones director Peter Jackson told a reporter that, despite his PG-13 rating he had upped the violence in his upcoming film after early test screening audiences "were simply not satisfied" with the depiction of a character's death. [Hitfix]

• Nikki Finke reports that investor Carl Icahn has been snatching up MGM bonds like "A bat out of hell." [Deadline]

• The LA Times reports further on Disney's heroic decision to pull the plug on McG's attempt to America's memories of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with his remake. The paper writes that execs saw the project, scripted by novelist Michael Chabon as "too dark" and that they will take another stab at it somewhere down the line. [LA Times]

1. In the nerd equivalent of heaven, James Cameron and Peter Jackson attended their first Comic-Con, and did a panel together where they talk about the future of film-making and Jackson reveals that a script for The Hobbit, his Lord of the Rings prequel, will be finished in a month. [Zap2It]

2. Lost isn't known for parting with information easily, but they did have some good tidbits at their panel. Characters Juliet and Daniel Faraday will be back for the final season. Also in season six: no more time travel, the return of Charlie and Boone, the backstory for the enigmatic Richard Alpert, and some allusions to what may be alternate timelines. Damn, that shit makes our brain hurt. [EOnline]

3. Warner Bros. tried to roll out the new Patricia Heaton comedy The Middle at their Mom-A-Con. No one showed for the counter programming. Everyone said, "Mom, stop embarrasing me!" [THRFeed]

4. Hayden Panettiere is going to get some girl-on-girl action for the new season of Heroes. Yeah, cause that is what is going to fix this show. [io9]

5. Two scenes from the upcoming Twilight sequel, New Moon, were screened. Lots of girls screamed. [CelebrityCafe]

6. Iron Man 2 is going to fucking rule. Fans were excited by footage that shows Samuel L. Jackson's return as Nick Fury, Mickey Rourke playing new villain Whiplash, and a bunch of awesome special effects. Robert Downey Jr, director Jon Favreau, and new additions Scarlett Johannson (who plays sexy spy Black Widow) and Don Cheadle (replacing Terrence Howard) were all in attendance. That's either an A-List Comic-Con panel or a night at The Waverly Inn. [EW]

7. Ok, Iron Man gets two entries because the sequel is laying the foundation for Marvel's much anticipated (among comic geeks) Avengers movie (not the crappy Uma Thurmond one, this one has Captain American and shit). [EOnline]

8. We haven't seen the last of Battlestar Galactica, Edward James Olmos' career to continue. [io9]

9. You're probably not going to see Family Guy's "Abortion Episode," at least on the air, but it will probably be on DVD. What? Fox suddenly has standards? [LAT]

10. Alien invasion drama Vis back and the geeks love it. Is there anything left from the '80s for us to bring back? Alf, maybe? [THRFeed]

(Whether or not the phrase, "For God's sake, it's not the fucking Elvish afterlife, Peter!" was uttered at any given point we can not say.) Now, thebadandugly.com reports the movie's release date has been pushed from March 13, 2009 to the far more vague "fall 2009." First Valkyrie, now this: We'd just gotten used the fact that we'd have to wait months for our one-eyed Hitler-hunter yarn. But at the rate things are going now, it seems like we'll never get a change to enjoy kicking back to a brutally raped and murdered tween's mile-high observations about the family who has yet to discover her skeletal remains. It's no fair!

• The Lovely Bones Delayed [thebadandtheugly.com]

There's trouble in paradise. Our spies have reported that Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones has ceased filming due to a rift between the big man and his art director over the best way to depict Heaven. [...]

The Wellington crew are having a break while the creative differences are sorted.

Meanwhile, at the Speed Racer premiere in London, Empire reports that Bones cast member Susan Sarandon has expressed dissatisfaction with her character. "I play the comic relief, an alcoholic grandmother - my first grandma - but she doesn't really seem like a real grandmother because she has a lot of hair and jewellery and nails and liquor. I don't think I ever talk without a cigarette and a drink in my hand."

"Peter Jackson is really a nice guy and very interesting. It was really a very different way of working. We had a good time, I'm really curious to see what it's like because he kept pushing me to be more and more extreme and sometimes that's when you make your big mistakes so I'm not sure how it will come off - it will be interesting to see it from the point of view of the audience."

Portraying Heaven on screen is a far dicier proposition than, say, the Fires of Mordor—all those feathers, fluff, and pearly gates threaten to tip your vision too easily into the Realm of the Cheesy Afterlife. (Just ask the guy who thought sticking Robin Williams in a Monet painting in What Dreams May Come was a good idea.) Still, we have high hopes for any Jackson film, and we only pray he doesn't use this production to indulge his more volatile creative instincts, pushing a tray of painstainkingly hand-sculpted femurs and ulnas into his prop master's face, screaming, "These bones aren't nearly lovely enough!" before storming off to his trailer.

• Scoop! Lovely Bones Hits A Snag [flicks.co.nz via slashfilm.com]
• Speed Racer Premiere Report [Empire Online]

1. Alfonso Cuaron. Del Toro's close friend and (with del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu) one of the "Three Amigos" conveniently packaged by American press in 2006, Cuaron was Warner Bros.' surprising pick to helm 2004's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. But his indie chops came in handy in both humanizing the franchise and positioning it more dynamically against Chris Columbus and Mike Newell's entries that sandwiched it. He's a versatile guy who gets the marketplace but isn't beholden to genre interests; in that way, his similarities to Jackson, who jumped from graphic B-horror comedies like Bad Taste to Heavenly Creatures to LOTR, are almost uncanny. Also, he's just a better director than del Toro; Cuaron could have made Pan's Labyrinth in his sleep, but del Toro couldn't have touched Children of Men.

2. Neil Jordan. Another guy with tons of range, the Crying Game/Michael Collins filmmaker is also a grossly underrated craftsman who could save everyone a lot of time and money by shooting both Hobbit films over about four months in Ireland. Alas, Jackson would likely object to the requisite IRA subplot in which Bilbo Baggins is sidelined indefinitely by injuries sustained in a car bombing.

3. David Lynch. A natural short-lister for any film involving midgets. Plus we all know how well his previous would-be fantasy franchise went.

4. Woody Allen. While it's true that Allen has returned from his four-year European exile with a new project featuring Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood, he has made little secret of his availability to the highest overseas bidder. With this in mind, and seeing as Middle Earth's brow-furrowed humorlessness is perhaps its most annoying attribute, we'd like to see Allen invited to New Zealand for a comic run through Baggins' deeply embedded neuroses — not the least of which is his underage shiksa love interest, played by saucy new Disney cast-off Miley Cyrus.

5. Uwe Boll. Why not? He is the only genius in the whole fucking business.

· Tony Scott's remake of 1970s subway-hijacking classic The Taking of Pelham One Two Three gets more then just a digitized-title upgrade: it also gets James Gandolfini as the NYC mayor. Unfortunately, it also gets John Travolta. [Variety]
· Jon Heder and Dax Shepard Career Death-Rattle Watch: They both get one last wheeze playing Kristin Bell love interest in When In Rome. [Variety]

But breathe easy, hairy-footed-little-person enthusiasts, Fanboy-Pre-Approved Visionary Guillermo Del Toro is in talks to do both movies, a fact that should put to rest your recurring nightmare that a panicked New Line, turning to the only person the studio truly trusts when it's desperate for a blockbuster, were seriously considering Brett Ratner's pitch to do the back-to-back Hobbitses as "Lord of the Rings, but with, like, much more dwarves and shit blowing up. Chris Tucker's already really excited about stretching himself by playing Dildo Bagboy or whatever he's called."

• Del Toro doubles up for 'Hobbit' [THR]

THOSE old "creative differences" are to blame for director Peter Jackson's firing of Ryan Gosling from "Lovely Bones." "Peter couldn't stand Ryan," said one source.

Though Variety reported that Gosling had "stepped down" and was replaced by Mark Wahlberg, our source said, "Ryan cut his own hair, and was fighting with wardrobe. He was so demanding . . . Peter booted him two days before filming started." The flick is based on the best-selling novel by Alice Sebold. A rep for Gosling did not return calls.

Given that Jackson, the veteran director of feature films that have grossed more than a billion dollars domestically, surely realizes that the price of working with Genius involves tolerating the talent's occasional behavioral quirks and would be unfazed by matters as trivial as those mentioned above (or the weight gain referenced in Variety), we're inclined to speculate that Gosling's on-set behavior was considerably more unconventional than reported. Perhaps the notoriously intense actor insisted on preparing for his most heart-wrenching scenes by laying down in a pile of bones he claimed were those of a murdered teenage girl, a pre-performance ritual that he considered indispensable to meeting the emotional demands of his role, but which understandably made the crew uneasy. Happily, however, Jackson should have a more docile collaborator in replacement Mark Wahlberg, whose needs should prove no more onerous than requesting that no one knock on his trailer door as he performs the six-hundred crunches that comprise his daily acting prep.

• Last-minute Ax [Page Six]

Re: "Lovely Bones" Cease and desist from further copyright violations

To Whom It May Concern:

We are counsel for Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. It has come to our attention that a copy of our clients' screenplay "The Lovely Bones" has unlawfully been placed on this tracking board without the consent of our clients, whose copyrighted works are being illegally exploited. A secret id word has been imbedded [sic] in each copy of the screenplay and we are presently investigating the source of the leak and appropriate action will be taken.

We hereby demand that the webmaster of this tracking board immediately remove the screenplay from the site and that all individuals immediately cease and desist from any further dissemination of the screenplay. Our clients own all the right, title, interest and copyright in the screenplay and anyone coping, offering and/or distributing the screenplay is infringing on their copyright in violation of the U.S. Copyright Act, Title 17 of the United States Code Section 101, et.seq., and is exposing themselves to criminal liability. Please be aware that infringement of copyright can result in criminal prosecution such as when an individual continues to distribute infringing items after being placed on notice by the copyright holder. If anyone continues to copy, offer and/or distribute the screenplay in violation of the US Copyright Act and our clients' rights, we will contact the proper authorities and aggressively pursue a criminal investigation and prosecution against the infringing individuals. Please govern yourself accordingly. This letter does not constitute a complete and exhaustive statement of all of our clients' rights, claims, contentions or legal theories regarding this matter. Nothing stated here is intended as, nor should it be deemed to constitute a waiver or relinquishment of any of our clients' rights or remedies, whether legal or equitable, all of which are hereby expressly reserved.

Sincerely,

Nelson Felker Toczek Davis LLP

The Jackson camp should probably take pains not to throw too big a scare into the assistants; if the entire script-covering underclass finds itself too paranoid to touch Bones for fear they're holding a copy with the "secret id word" embedded within (we're guessing it's something like "fucknewline"), negotiations for the sale might stall indefinitely as annoyed studio execs are forced to actually read the screenplay themselves.

• Previously; Hobbit War Rages On [Defamer]