By RUEBEN PEREIRA

Billions of blistering barnacles! Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s The Adventures of Tintin hits theaters Wednesday. Here are 10 things you should know about the world-famous adventurer before you catch the movie.

1. It’s spelled “Tintin,” not “Tin Tin” and certainly not “Rin-Tin-Tin.”

2. The Adventures of Tintin is based on a series of 24 comic books created by Belgian artist Hergé (real name Georges Remi) that follow a young reporter/detective named Tintin, his scrappy wire fox terrier Snowy and boisterous best friend Captain Haddock as they travel the globe, solving mysteries, seeking treasures and adventures. Think of him as a cross between a young Indiana Jones and James Bond, minus the womanizing, with a dash of the Hardy Boys thrown in for good measure.

3. The 24 Tintin titles, published between 1929 and 1986, have been translated into over 100 languages and have sold more than 200 million copies. Not bad for a series barely known in the United States. A large reason for Tintin’s timeless and worldwide appeal is attributed to Hergé’s meticulously researched stories and striking animation, which drew from numerous political and cultural events of the 20th century including colonialism, Nazism, archaeological discoveries, human rights, the space race, the Cold War and even UFOs.
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Henry Cavill stars as Theseus in 'Immortals', opening Friday. (Courtesy Relativity Media)

by GEOFF BOUCHER

In “Immortals,” the hyper-stylized Greek mythology movie that opens this weekend, Henry Cavill plays brave Theseus, a man who is told by gods and oracles that he has a date with destiny. Cavill can relate, in a way, because a little more than a decade ago, while he was still at a boarding school in Buckinghamshire, England, Cavill shook hands with the future.

The campus of Stowe School was being used as a backdrop for the kidnap thriller “Proof of Life,” and between shots, star Russell Crowe was amusing himself by booting a rugby ball through the posts as dozens of boys at a safe distance watched with wide-eyed fascination and a bit of fear. Cavill was in the crowd and decided that they looked foolish, so he marched up to the movie star and introduced himself.

Showtimes, theaters for ‘Immortals’

“I took his hand and said, ‘Hi, Mr. Crowe. My name is Henry, and I’m thinking of becoming an actor. What’s it like?’ And we talked just a bit,” the 28-year-old Cavill recalled. “A few days later I got a signed picture of him in ‘Gladiator’ that said, ‘Dear Henry, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’ You can imagine how I felt when I got to the end of that first journey of a thousand miles and I’m working with Russell Crowe. …”

Indeed, Cavill and Crowe have been in Vancouver filming Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel,” with Cavill playing Superman and Crowe, the hero’s doomed alien father, Jor-El, a role that Marlon Brando memorably handled in 1978 — five years before Cavill was born. The cape of Superman is heavier than it looks: There is intense pressure to live up to the history of the hero and to create a franchise that will fly for Warner Bros. now that Harry Potter’s magical box-office run is over and Christopher Nolan’s Batman series is drawing to its own conclusion with next year’s “The Dark Knight Rises.”
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Who shot this guy? My grandfather didn't like the answer, or the movie.

My grandfather hated “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” perhaps the only John Wayne movie he didn’t like.  We talked about it not long before he died – “Just didn’t care for it,” he said. And he didn’t get why I liked it so much.

But I don’t just like it. I love it, and have for years,  before I ever saw it, because I loved the Gene Pitney theme song. It was a favorite during  my melodramatic story song phase in high school and college – everyone has to have a melodramatic something stage, right? My thing was lyrics about situations that were usually tragic, ironic and occasionally creepy (“Ode To Billy Joe” still makes me want to hide under the bed and cry.)

“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” the song, pretty much told a lot of the movie’s plot, so much that if spoiler alerts had existed in 1962, they’d have slapped old Gene with one. It’s all there – a brave man “with a law book in his hand” who faces down the town villain when he realizes that sometimes “a law book was no good.” The man who shot Liberty Valance was, Gene said, “the bravest of them all.”

What Gene did not say was that the lawman, played in the movie by Jimmy Stewart, was not really the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (a title that has always reminded me of The Man Who Met Andy Griffith, from my favorite “Married With Children” episode.) That honor went to the town drunk, played by John Wayne, a man who never got the credit and lived in disgrace while Stewart’s mild-mannered lawman went on to prominence for plugging that villain, played by Lee Marvin.

And that’s why my grandfather hated it.

He was a really smart guy, who’d attended several colleges but didn’t get his AA until the week after I graduated from high school, when he was 62. He understood subtext, and irony, and the point that sometimes courage, violence and valor don’t result in glory, and that they’re complicated concepts that go beyond a parade and public adulation. He loved stuff like that, loved discussing the ins and outs of morality and consequence, whether in religion, politics or the news.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think he appreciated that kind of subtext in a Western. Westerns were about absolutes – you killed people, terrorized towns and made a devil of yourself? You needed killing. There were subtexts in real life, but that’s not why he watched Westerns.  My feeling was always that Grandaddy could not accept a world, or like a movie, where strong, brave John Wayne let somebody else take the credit for ridding a town of an absolute blight like Liberty Valence, or that a man of honor would let him. Also, I kind of thought that he hated seeing The Duke so pathetic.

So as much as I argued for the movie’s relevance, for the sad beauty in the complications of friendship, fame and the greater good, he was wasn’t buying it – “I get all that,” he said impatiently. ”I just don’t like it.”

So I didn’t always agree with his taste in movies. But I dug is certainty.

My granddaddy made fun of me not having seen this. What do you think I should see?

In August, the last time I saw my grandfather and namesake, Rev. Lester James, Sr., I was on vacation in the D.C. area, and he was about halfway through a Saturday-afternoon showing of Jimmy Stewart’s “Shenandoah” on Encore Westerns. I watched about 45 minutes of it with him before I had to jump up and dash somewhere else – Oh, the times we don’t spend now that we regret later.

Anyway, I mentioned that I’d never seen that movie before and would have to NetFlix it when I got home, which made my granddaddy, who was already showing the fatigue of the cancer that finally took him from us last Wednesday, looked up from the lunch he had barely touched and gave me a very deliberate eyebrow raise.

“What?” said the Western afficiando, horse lover and man who took his cowboys, both in movie and real form, incredibly seriously. “What do you mean you never saw this movie? I’m surprised at you. You’re supposed to know movies.”

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Al Pacino says the enduring success of “Scarface” is “kind of like a fairy tale.”

At a party Tuesday heralding the Blu-ray release of the gangster classic, Pacino said the film “was eviscerated and treated with disrespect” when it came out in 1983 and “it’s almost a miracle” audiences continue to discover it.

The 71-year-old actor reunited with “Scarface” co-stars Steven Bauer, Robert Loggia and F. Murray Abraham and producer Martin Bregman at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles, where they shared memories about making the movie.

Pacino says he wanted to do a remake after seeing Paul Muni in the 1932 original, and Sidney Lumet suggested he make the main character Cuban instead of Italian.

Bregman called their new version “a perfect film.”

The Blu-ray comes out Sept. 6.

I'm not a super fan, but still wild about "Harry."

SPOILER ALERT!

Confession: I have never been a die-hard fan of the “Harry Potter” series – I think I made it through the first book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” and stopped. And the first several films, while fanciful, were never must-sees for me. Maybe it’s that I was childless, 26 and not a big fantasy fan in 1997, when the first book came out. And since it wasn’t an initial draw for me, I was put off by the hype and the insistence of everyone around me that I simply had to get into it. Blame my Taurus stubbornness, or whatever zodiac sign I’m allegedly since the whole chart changed.

Still, I literally left the house for the first time in three days (housebound by doctor’s orders) this afternoon because I was so excited to see the last half of “Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows.” Maybe it’s that I caught the first half during its theatrical run and was so moved by the story, the acting and the beautiful bond between the cast, that I Netflixed it last week to get back in the spirit.

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Well, it looks like Green Lantern might just be the worst-reviewed comic-book movie this summer. Rotten Tomatoes has given it a 21 percent fresh rating, relegating it with the likes of Priest and Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer.

And now, mere hours after its official release, it’s already started to be a punchline. The Onion pulled no punches, making fun of its aggressive marketing:

‘Green Lantern’ To Fulfill America’s Wish To See Lantern-Based Characters On Big Screen

Ryan Reynolds poses in front of the 'Entertainment Weekly' cover of him as Green Lantern.

Photos: Ryan Reynolds, sexiest man alive

It’s a great day to be Ryan Reynolds.

First, he just got named People‘s Sexiest Man Alive, joining the ranks of Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, and the first, named 25 years ago, Mel Gibson.

And, as his style, Reynolds made a joke about it, according to the magazine (via E! Online):

“We’re trying to nationalize sexy. Sort of like Medicare,” he said of the hotness that comes with being Canadian. “There’s an inherent ability to be self-deprecating. That has served me well in my career and personal life.”

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Rooney Mara, who's just been cast as Lisbeth in 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo', on the red carpet earlier this year. (Gabriel Bouys / AFP / Getty Images)

Rooney Mara will be working alongside James Bond star Daniel Craig in the Hollywood remake of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

Sony Pictures announced Monday that Mara will play Lisbeth Salander, a fearless genius tormented by a terrible childhood, in the crime thriller based on the first book in Stieg Larsson’s best-selling series.

Mara, 25, joins Craig as journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who teams up with Lisbeth to delve into a string of decades-old murders.

“Dragon Tattoo” is directed by David Fincher, who cast Mara in “The Social Network,” a drama about the founders of Facebook due in theaters Oct. 1.

The English-language adaptation of “Dragon Tattoo” begins shooting next month in Sweden and is due out Dec. 21, 2011.