From BBC:

The poster for Righteous Kill was displayed at the station where Mr [Charles] de Menezes, 27, was shot dead after being mistaken for a suicide bomber.

Its tagline read: "There's nothing wrong with a little shooting as long as the right people get shot."

The Advertising Standards Authority said it breached guidelines on decency.

"We understood the siting of the poster at the station was unintentional, but nevertheless considered that the text had the potential to cause serious offence in that location," the ASA said in its adjudication.

You gotta love the U.K.'s fastidious propriety standards. Only in England would a governmental bureau dedicated to enforcing ad-manners reprimand a studio for insensitively mounting a poster that mocks a tragic case of mistaken identity set to occur at some time in the future* three years prior. As a result of their efforts, however, we understand the offending materials have since been covered up, and the title of the movie has been replaced on all marquees with the far more delicate Heat 2: Warmed Over.

*We're informed the shooting took place there in 2005. Either way, Righteous Kill still sucks Scott Caan's balls.

• De Niro movie poster criticised [BBC]

1. Burn After Reading — $19.4 million

The Coen brothers' admirable, totally nonsensical spy farce rode its all-star ensemble like a rented mule, albeit sort of a haunting mutation of mule — one with frosted tips, a hoof-full of Oscars and an unusually foul mouth that nevertheless enticed enough curious viewers to make Burn the biggest opening of the Coens' career. And it's almost enough to settle Focus Features' therapy bill incurred after Hamlet 2.

2. Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys — $18 million

Add another fun fact to Defamer's Tyler Perry Encyclopedia: Five of his six films have now opened among their respective weekends' top two grossers. On roughly two-thirds as many screens as this week's No. 1. With virtually no white people in the audience. Be impressed.

3. Righteous Kill — $16.5 million

And it would have been even more had Robert De Niro and Al Pacino not already fulfilled most Americans' demand to see them sleepwalk through scenes together.

4. The Women — $10 million

Critics be damned — Picturehouse was determined to make this work if it was the last thing it ever did. And, alas, it was.

5. The House Bunny — $4.3 million

The Cult of Anna Faris kept her in the Top 5 with barely a 20% drop from last week. Seriously: If Tyler Perry had an adventurous bone in his body he'd write her into a Madea film and let the Brinks truck do the rest.

WHAT'S NEW: So Burn After Reading is good — more admirable than likable, really, with the Coen brothers returning to their parched well of overmatched dolts in possession of objects way beyond their ken. This time it's Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand attempting to blackmail a CIA analyst (a bracingly potty-mouthed John Malkovich) whose "memoirs" they've found lying on their gym's floor; Tilda Swinton and George Clooney join in as awkward archetypes of paranoia and aloof, striving America. If we sound glib, that's Burn for you — a plot- and style-allergic screwball comedy that succeeds primarily as an almost-clean break (even Pitt's character is ultimately a red herring) from two decades of recycled Coen tropes.

Alas, it's 20 years too late for some moviegoers, whose Coen aversion will keep Burn and its high-octane ensemble around $16 million for the weekend. That might be enough to surpass the De Niro/Pacino miscarriage Righteous Kill for second place overall, but we don't think anybody will overtake The Family That Preys — or, excuse us, Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys. The distinction matters, too: Even with 1,000 fewer screens than Kill, the dude is a box-office witch with a cult following and increasing crossover juice (Kathy Bates!) that'll push Family to $19.5 million in three days. Not that we've seen it — Perry doesn't avail his films to the press — but it's still fascinating stuff; we'll have more on him here later in the day.

Also opening: The chatty, mostly misleadingly titled Young People Fucking; Takashi Miike's acid-trip spaghetti Eastern Sukiyaki Western Django; the flashback-y Jewish family drama A Secret; the enviro-alarmist doc FLOW: For Love of Water; and Matthew McConaughey's shirtless adventure Surfer, Dude.

THE BIG LOSER: Here and elsewhere, we've made little secret of our disdain for Towelhead, Alan Ball's thoroughly revolting, exploitive, amateurish, illiterate and borderline retarded sketch of molesty, multi-ethnic suburban ennui. It's not worth getting into again — that's what Google's for — but look at it this way: Warner Independent Pictures didn't fold because it couldn't compete; it was poisoned. If you pay money to see this movie, you could be next.

THE UNDERDOG: Don't look now (oh, all right, go ahead) but The Women is up to a 9 percent approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes! The comeback is on! Sort of! Still, don't expect some Sex and the City blockbuster shocker; director Diane English can preach gay quadrants and underserved audiences all she wants, but she's only got her cast — not an HBO institution — to rely on. And how much does a Meg Ryan/Annette Bening/Eva Mendes/Jada Pinkett film open to these days? Not a ton, but more than most are predicting on 3,000 screens. We'll call it for $11 million and not a penny less.

FOR SHUT-INS: This week's new DVD's include the hit Sarah Palin comedy Baby Mama; Tarsem's visually sumptuous Flopzterpiece™ The Fall; the long-awaited (we're serious this time) restoration of the Cinerama benchmark How the West Was Won; the 10th-anniversary edition of The Big Lebowski; and, extraordinarily, Child's Play: Chucky's 20th Birthday Edition. Chucky! 20! Christ, we're like grandparents now.

This is more like it, right? Is there anything better than a week when we won't be writing about The Dark Knight and Tropic Thunder on Monday? And when we can finally throw dirt on Towelhead's fetid corpse? Oh, fall. We missed you. Choose your own adventure, and share below.

Boomp3.com

Proving that there’s no age limit on sex appeal, Al Pacino had the women swooning at the after party for Righteous Kill. Pacino chalked up his reinstated animal magnetism to the fact that he wears sunglasses at night. Pacino said, “Girls love a guy in shades. True story. I learned that on the set of The Godfather from Diane Keaton.” Pacino also felt that the shades allow him to get away with more. Pacino explained, “I was hugging Carla and I told her that I thought she was Bobby because you know, I couldn’t see anything with the shades on. It was nice.”

Photo Credit: Getty Images

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

"Nobu and Robert De Niro are clearly making a great deal of money serving up endangered fish," Willie Mackenzie of the environmental group Greenpeace told the Telegraph of London. Greenpeace activists went undercover at the chain, a favorite haunt of Madonna, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, and discovered menus failed to disclose the species of tuna served.

The mouth-watering fish was actually bluefin, a species so endangered the World Wildlife Federation has called for a ban on its sale.

Even though Nobu's New York restaurants were not cited in the report, one diner said it made him think twice about eating at the swank Tribeca eatery.

"I come here for good food, not to be part of some exterminating force," said Lawrence Clay-Williams, 34, of SoHo.

Whatever. It's not like it's illegal or anything, making for an exotic, ultimately guilt-free alternative to less-righteous kills you'll find between bread at Subway or lesser eateries. And think of the exclusivity, with satisfied diners forking over a reported $600 apiece for the privilege of sensually living out a variation on Kill's tagline: "Most tuna respect the fisherman. Every tuna respects the chef." Someone's a genius.

• Robert De Niro's Nobu restaurant called all wet on tuna [NYDN]

Boomp3.com

Righteous Kill star Al Pacino spent a majority of his Labor Day weekend camping out to be the first line for the annual Malibu chili cook off. Attending the cook off has become an essential part of Pacino's transition from the summer to the fall. Pacino said, "I spend all day basking in the cool breeze off the Pacific Ocean while enjoying some of the finest chili Malibu has to offer. Did you know that James Brolin makes a terrific chili? He does. Talk about your 'hooo-aaaah' moments. Must be the cumin."

[Photo Credit: Splash Pics]

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

1. Shave your leading men. We've seen this before on offending posters, most recently when My Best Friend's Girl co-star Dane Cook compared his own mug to "Britney Spears's vagina." But that's Dane Cook, and this is Robert De Niro, and the best Bobby can hope for is maybe "bus driver at 5 o'clock." It's conspicuous and really kind of repellent.

2. Four producers, no more. And we don't care how you do it. It's ultimately Avi Lerner's baby to drop on its head, so there's one. The others — co-producers, executive producers, and six full-blown "producer" producers — can fight it out among themselves under Lerner's snowy-haired, bloodthirsty gaze until the credits look less like a 5K-cancer-walk pledge form.

3. Wake up Al Pacino. At least for Pacino's previous B-cop-snoozer 88 Minutes, his promotional likeness was goateed and actively in search of something, even if it was the nearest exit. This is a little more fraught — sort of a vortex of old-man eye-glaze and paycheck hypnosis from which our hero desperately needs rescuing. But how? Well...

4. Avnet/Pacino Redux. One collaboration this year — this lifetime, really — was enough, guys, seriously. Thanks.

5. It's been done. The movie and the poster. Like, a million times better, too, even despite Val Kilmer:

• 'Righteous Kill' Poster [OutNow]