Sometime in the early ’90s, my young adolescent existence went from nerdy and tomboyish to boy-crazy, nerdy and tomboyish. Once it happened, I started noticing cute boys everywhere and I found that my girl friends did, too. We would have sleepovers and hang outs and talk for hours about the objects of our obsessions, pick which ones were our favorites (making sure to choose diplomatically, in case two girls picked the Justins and nobody picked the Lances), and replay particularly swoon-worthy scenes in our heads (i.e. “Remember that time Jonathan pretended to be a girl to get on the soccer team!?”). Only these boys weren’t the cootie-carrying classmates we went to school with; they were the dreamy, pretty, charismatic nice boys the likes of which could only be found in fantasy land. These were our movie crushes.

To kick-off this new column celebrating our collective childhood movie crushes, I’m taking it back to the first onscreen boy that ever made my heart beat with (innocent!) romantic palpitations. (Check out Jessica Barnes’ Michael Biehn post for a much more respectably nerdy first crush.) The year was 1992, his name was Michael Treanor, and he was one of the young stars of a major motion picture that had girls the world over swooning while simultaneously asking their parents to sign up for karate lessons: 3 Ninjas.

Filed under: Fandom, Home Entertainment, Stars in Rewind

Continue reading My Movie Crush: Michael Treanor in ‘3 Ninjas’

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February is about to get really interesting for Pierce Brosnan. A mere week after his debut as a self-proclaimed “horse’s ass” (aka Chiron) in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief on February 12, a much smaller and much more controversial thriller he’s in will be hitting art house screens in New York and Los Angeles. Brosnan is one of the heavy-hitting stars in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, the movie Polanski was doing post-production on when he was arrested in Switzerland on an outstanding warrant from 1978, when he fled the US before being sentenced for having sex with a minor. (Polanski finished the film while under house arrest.) Pierce Brosnan, who plays ex-Prime Minister Adam Lang, is part of an impressive ensemble; Olivia Williams is Lang’s intensely intelligent wife Ruth, while Ewan McGregor is the titular writer who reluctantly signs on to help Lang with his memoirs after the first writer turns up dead.

Brosnan spoke to Cinematical about working with the legendary figure on The Ghost Writer, as well as Percy Jackson, dealing with Robert Pattinson’s screaming fans on the set of Remember Me, and much more.

Filed under: Drama, Thrillers, Noir, Mystery & Suspense, Celebrities and Controversy, New in Theaters, Interviews, James Bond

Continue reading Interview: Pierce Brosnan on Polanski, Percy, and R-Patz

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Beware the arrows this week; we’re just six sleeps away from Valentine’s Day, that time of year when Cupid’s bow sprays the populace with love bug-laced arrows. Or, more accurately, that time of year when jeweler’s make you feel like a stingy fool if you don’t spend your life savings on diamonds, when rose prices skyrocket, and every business preys on those who itch for a little of that dirty word called “romance.”

Some may lead you to believe that it is the practice of romance that is a dirty, woman-centric desire on the big screen, but let’s face it, folks — we all love a little love. Boys, girls, men, and women. It’s in almost all of our films, and is the basis of most of our favorite stories, from straight-forward romantic comedy and drama to action, sci-fi, and every other genre out there.

The menace seems to be in the word. Merely uttering romance breeds slights like “chick flick” and “crap,” and inspires many a moviegoer to place one foot outside the door. But it’s the 21st century, and it’s time for a little evolution.

Filed under: Romance, Girls on Film

Continue reading Girls on Film: Romance is a Dirty Word

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While all thoughts were swarming towards Superbowl showdowns and commercials, the lovely and venerable James Spader celebrated his 50th birthday. I’ll let that sink in for a moment. 50 years… Half a century. To the younger folks that might not seem like such a shocker, Spader being nothing more than that overly talky, whisky-drinking dude from Boston Legal, who got particularly kinky with Maggie Gyllenhaal not too long ago. But to those whose first forays into cinema included the likes of Pretty in Pink, Mannequin, Less Than Zero, Wall Street, and Sex, Lies, and Videotape, it’s a pretty big thing to wrap your head around.

What might be most impressive or surprising, more so than Spader’s age, is that he is such an absolute and quintessential part of ’80s Hollywood for only a very small handful of films. There are many men and women who graced the screen over and over during that decade, but it took exactly one role to make him famous: Steff in Pretty in Pink — rich, suit-wearing, and holding enough charming sleaze to fill a football stadium. He ruled the high-school-jerk legions, and even if you weren’t a fan of John Hughes’ Molly Ringwald world, you knew about Spader’s sleazy slick nature.

Filed under: Fandom, Trailers and Clips

Continue reading Happy Belated Birthday, James Spader

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With the East Coast and Midwest awaiting a monster snowstorm, popular weather forecasting site Accuweather, is rolling out a timely relaunch of its site. The site, which provides up-to-date local information on weather in the U.S., is launching a beta version of the site that includes a complete redesign and a few extra user-friendly features. The new version of the Accuweather is still in private beta but will be publicly launched to the public on February 15.

On the content side, the general theme for the new version of the site is “weather for your life,” with specialized and interactive weather forecasts for Weather and Health, Weather and Travel, Weather and Home and Garden, Weather and Outdoor Activity in your area. The health-related weather interest sections include Arthritis Pain Forecasts, Asthma Forecasts, Common Cold Forecasts, Flu Forecasts, Pollen Level Forecasts and more

In terms of everyday weather forecasts, the new site features hour-by-hour, 15-day forecasts, and next month forecasts. The site also has upgraded its multimedia offerings, with detailed videos fro meteorologists and a wide range of weather maps – including radar, satellite, severe weather, forecast maps, and more. The site will be adding 600 weather-related videos every day, with local video forecasts for over 100 U.S. cities.

The layout and design of the site itself is a lot cleaner and less cluttered. The older version of the site was a virtual mash-up of information, content and advertisements. The new version has larger numbers and text, is more spaced, and is all-together more friendly on the eyes. And I’m sure Accuweather is getting better feedback from advertisers on the layout, as the streamlined version is more complimentary to serving ads on the site.

In comparison to competitor and rival Weather.com, Accuweather’s site wins the contest in my opinion, with a nice balance of content and easy-to-use web features. According to Compete, Accuweather site saw 8 million unique visitors in December whereas Weather.com saw 33.5 million unique visitors in December. While Weather.com received more traffic, Accuweather’s forecasts are syndicated to over 175,000 media sites. And with the new redesign, Accuweather could become a more attractive destination for weather forecasts.

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Last year, there was no shortage of developers who were complaining about Apple’s App Store. The situation got so heated that no less than Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, got personally involved with a number of developers having issues. Since then, the complaints seem to have died down quite a bit, but Apple is still on the case.

The company has started sending out a survey to iPhone developers asking about their experience with the program. While the long survey covers a range of things, the majority of the questions are about the application review process, and developers’ overall happiness with the program.

Examples of questions asked include:

Please rate your level of satisfaction with each of the following aspects of the Application submission process (using iTunes Connect).

Please rate your level of satisfaction with each of the following aspects of the application review process (using iTunes Connect).

Please rate your level of satisfaction with the length of time it takes to get updates available on the App Store.

Apple asks you to answer with: “Very dissatisfied,” “Somewhat dissatisfied,” “Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied,” “Somewhat satisfied,” “Very satisfied,” or “Don’t know.”

They also ask, “What one thing could Apple do to make the iPhone Developer Program better?” and give you a text box to write anything you want. A few months ago they certainly would have gotten some interesting responses there.

Sometime around the first of the year, Apple made some changes to the App Store approval process that drastically sped things up for many developers. In fact, a number of developers noted that approval process wait time went from two weeks (or worse) to just a couple of days in some situations. There have also been reports of improved communication from the app review team.

It seems likely that Apple staffed up its app review team and also provided them with better training and instructions over the past few months. Still, if the App Store continues to grow at its blistering pace, it’s hard to imagine that things won’t get bogged down again. So during this time of relative peace, it’s smart for Apple to survey its developers to fine tune the system.

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Are you a budding Web entrepreneur who would like some pointers or advice from seasoned company founders? MayField Fund and First Round Capital are sponsoring a raffle to give away mentoring sessions with the founders of Digg (Jay Adelson), Flickr (Caterina Fake), Mint (Aaron Patzer), Ning (Gina Bianchini), Slide (Max Levchin), and Zynga (Mark Pincus).

The raffle will take place at a private event in Silicon Valley with space for 100 attendees on March 1. But you can win a ticket for the event by applying here. The event and raffle are free, but the 100 attendees in the running will be selected beforehand by partners at Mayfield and First Round.

Winners of the raffle do not get to become Best Friends Forever with the founders. But they will get one intense mentoring session each.

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Since the dawn of Facebook’s Photos feature, users have been tasked with the not-so-terrible burden of having to manually click through every photo in an album. Sure, you can also hit the arrow key on your keyboard to jump to the next picture, but even that repetitive task could send you inching down the treacherous path toward carpal tunnel syndrome. Now, there’s a way to view hundreds of photos without lifting a finger: a new Facebook Prototype lets you turn these photo albums into slideshows. You can activate the prototype here.

The new feature was released as a Facebook Prototype some time last week, and it’s about as basic as they come. After activating it, you’ll find a ‘Play’ button nestled between the ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ navigation buttons in the photo viewer. Clicking it will turn the album you’re currently viewing into a slideshow, displaying a new photo every five seconds. That’s it. There apparently isn’t any way to change the frequency of the photo changes, and there aren’t any fancy transitions like you’ll get from iPhoto. But hey, you don’t have to click any more.

Facebook Prototypes are similar to Google Labs, in that they allow the social network to showcase some of the pet projects and unfinished features created by its engineers. Prototypes launched in September at TechCrunch50, and have since spawned some compelling new features, including a Mac desktop notifier, an improved photo uploader, and even a measure of Gross National Happiness.

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Google is planning to unveil a broad new social product on Tuesday that will integrate with at least two existing Google products. Some details emerged earlier today on the Wall Street Journal (“a new feature that makes it easier and faster for users of Gmail to view media and status updates”), but our understanding is that the product goes well beyond a Gmail integration.

As I wrote last night, there is still a lot of room for improvement in online social services. Status updates, photo and video sharing, review and location based content are not only decentralized today, but are becoming overwhelmed with spam and other noise.

The Google event begins at 10 am. Tune in to TechCrunch for live coverage.

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Movie ratings site Flixster raised issued $12.5 million in new shares funding, according to an SEC filing. The last time Flixster raised money was a $5 million Series B in April, 2008. The new round brings the company’s total capital raised to $19.5 million.

Flixster operates both a Web site and a companion iPhone app, which is the most popular movie app in the App Store. The iPhone app lets consumers find nearby movies, add their ratings, and buy tickets. In January, the company bought Rotten Tomatoes from News Corp for an undisclosed sum. The combined reach of the two movie review services is 30 million people, according to the companies.

The new capital could be tied to the purchase. According to the filing, the first sale of securities in this round was on December 31, 2009, just a few days before the deal closed. Flixster probably used the money, at least in part, to finance the acquisition.

Update CEO Joe Greenstein got back to us. He says, “We actually have not raised any new money recently.” The SEC filing was in relation to the Rotten Tomatoes transaction and “was describing shares issued to News Corp” as part of that deal. He cautions against concluding that the $12.5 million was the valuation of the deal, but it is hard to come to any other conclusion since it was an all-stock transaction. Of course, there are many different ways to come up with a valuation for an acquisition, and the numbers reported to the SEC might not be the same as the numbers the companies used to justify the deal to their boards. Greenstein won’t get into what that valuation was, but he does share that Flixster’s mobile applications on the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry recently crossed 11 million users.

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