WHAT'S NEW: We're avowedly Team Tropic Thunder, a genuinely funny (if perhaps too-close-for-comfort) satire that nevertheless looks likelier and likelier to slide softly into history as DreamWorks' last noble misfire. We'll discuss that more below, but our skepticism doesn't mean it can't finish on top for one happy weekend — the question is, How happy? Opening opposite Star Wars: The Clone Wars and still facing a formidable money magnet in The Dark Knight, we could see Thunder surmounting the new Harry Knowles favorite with around $25 million. Clone Wars will finish close to $19 million, with TDK wielding enough juice to creep as far north as maybe even $18 million. Pineapple Express will holdover nicely around $13 million.

Also opening: The disposable Kiefer Sutherland thriller Mirrors; the Luke Wilson disease-of-the-week dramedy Henry Poole is Here; the 3-D housefly-in-space adventure Fly Me to the Moon; the seedy, acclaimed LA saga Falling; the Argentinean hermaphrodite coming-of-age story XXY and finally! In the city limits! At the Nuart! Lionsgate's dump-and-run splatter flick The Midnight Meat Train. See it while you can.

THE BIG LOSER: Can a film finish in first place at the box office but still be considered a disappointment at Defamer Attractions? Sure — especially Tropic Thunder. It's turned into a bit of a headache for DreamWorks, which has saturated the media to the point of overexposure — literally to a place where the casual viewer they so desperately need for a $90 million R-rated comedy (especially women) is dead to the stimulus. Some folks we've talked to are avoiding it on principle alone, arguing they've already seen the movie via its infamous redband trailer and on about 50 billboards flanking Santa Monica Blvd. Love it though we do, we can't really argue with them.

THE UNDERDOG: Vicky Cristina Barcelona is Woody Allen's admittedly overrated return to mid-level form: Two nubile Americans abroad (Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall) fall into a love triangle with smoldering artist Javier Bardem, which becomes a skewed quadrangle after the entrance of his batshit ex-wife Penelope Cruz. We could take or leave its hammy narration (or hell, the entire narrative) and postcard cinematography, but Hall nearly redeems the film with a fantastic performance recalling Diane Keaton's tart, tormented other woman in Manhattan. We'd watch her in anything, even a dirty old man's overindulgent Euro slop job.

FOR SHUT-INS: Slim pickings among new DVD's this week, including the Ellen Page/Sarah Jessica Parker ensemble comedy Smart People; the Val Kilmer/Stephen Dorff prison flick Felon, the complete 11th season of South Park and the must-have The Love Boat: Season One, Volume Two. Two volumes! Who knew?

So choose your outs, kids: Is Tropic Thunder a bigger success or disaster-in-waiting than we're foreseeing? Do you dare spend money on The Clone Wars, let alone speak up here on its behalf? Or is it just another sluggish Olympic weekend at home. Speak up — what's good?

It’s not the look or design that pushes it over the top into stereotype, of course, but the voice (performed by Corey Burden), a lispy, high-pitched twang purposively reminiscent of Truman Capote. So how did a character who wasn’t even supposed to speak English wind up sounding like that? Because George Lucas insisted on it, Clone Wars director Dave Filion confessed.

“Zero, Jabba’s uncle, originally spoke in Hutt-ese, like Jabba and then he had a different sluggish voice just like Jabba, and then George one day was watching it and said ‘I want him to sound like Truman Capote.’ He actually said that and we were like ‘Wow!’” Filion revealed. “It’s a hybrid of it but the inspiration is definitely there on Capote. It’s one of those things that takes him from being an interesting character and I think really does put him over the top and does something. He’s a favorite among the crew here.”

Filion bafflingly stopped short of acknowledging Ziro's sexual orientation, however ("He’s of questionable [sexuality] at least as a slug. They tell me that these slugs can be either male or female depending"), leaving it to Lucas to wait and see how the currently developing Great Sissies of History trilogy does on its own before permuting it for a more fabulous galaxy far, far away.

• Is Zero the Hutt The First Gay Alien In ‘Star Wars’ History? [MTV Movies Blog]

Naturally, Knowles capitulated — he did break the Lucas/Warner Bros. review embargo, we guess — but his insight into a true travesty of imagination has resurfaced elsewhere. And for sheer bile (excerpted after the jump), we've got to say we're really quite proud of the plus-size pushover's efforts:

(T)hey introduced Baby Jabba aka Rotta the Huttlet aka Stinky. ... (But) wait ... Little Stinky the Hutt isn’t the worst character in the history of STAR WARS… because Stinky got introduced earlier in the film. As much as I hated lil Stinky… I was weathering Stinky. I seriously was. But later there was a character of such immense **** – offensively bad. The character was so bad, so incredibly awful – that it was a slap to the face. It woke me out of my ****-accepting stupor and made me angry. SUDDENLY my “inner fanboy rage” was awoken. ...

I watched this terrifyingly awful character named Ziro the Hutt. A seemingly female Hutt – with tattoos and make-up that sounds like a racist take on a Black New Orleans Crack-Dealing Whore. Because this Hutt speaks ENGLISH – and it is many times worse than I’m actually describing. This character was actually too much for me. So bad that every flaw I was looking past, was now a road sign to inadequacy and mediocrity. ... I hated the score, the animation, the shots, the characters and most of all the retarded ******** idiot story.

I hated the film. HATED IT. REALLY HATED IT.

More like this, Harry, seriously. And: If we've said it once, we've said it a thousand times: A jailed George Lucas is a harmless George Lucas. Send in the SWAT team.

UPDATE: Good news! AICN is now emphasizing that Warner Bros. enforced the review embargo, not Lucasfilm or George Lucas himself. We knew the man responsible for Stinky the Hutt and Indiana Jones 4 could never lash out at his fans so indecorously.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• “Harry Knowles Hated The Clone Wars” Review [Hollywood Newsroom]