The latest issue of NOW offers some entertaining diversions, including my interview with Don Cheadle, co-star of “Brooklyn’s Finest” and the impending “Iron Man 2”, a look at the World of Comedy Film Festival and Benjamin Boles’ cover story on the band Zeus, who — as it happens — will be the musical guests on CBC Radio One’s “Go!” this weekend.

Why am I mentioning a band you’ve (probably) never heard of? Why, because I too will be appearing on “Go!”, for a very special episode, “The Worst Movie Ever!“. I’ll be appearing with Adam Nayman and Jennie Punter on the program, which airs Saturday morning at 10:30am on Radio One.
Want to be part of the live studio audience? Tickets are still available here.

Or you can stay indoors and listen from the comfort of your nice, warm bed. Not that I’m trying to sway you one way or the other.

I’ve banged out a Spring Movie Preview for MSN, tracking the March-April release slate; if you’re trying to plan your moviegoing for the coming weeks, you might want to take a look.

But this is interesting: The Nicolas Cage medieval thriller “Season of the Witch” has disappeared from the schedule just weeks before it was slated to open.

What’s the deal, Lionsgate (in the U.S.) and Alliance (in Canada)? After “The Wicker Man”, “National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets” and “Knowing”, a Nicolas Cage vehicle has a long way to go before it can be deemed unreleasable.

In more encouragng news, Conan O’Brien is tweeting. And his first post is funnier than anything Jay Leno’s done in, like, a decade.

That ginger fella’s going to come through this just fine, you’ll see.

Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” held on to the top spot at the box office over the weekend, pulling in another $22.2 million for a cumulative gross of $75.1 million. But close behind it were “Cop Out” and “The Crazies”, with $18.6 and $16.5 million, respectively.

I’m finding myself more and more troubled by the success of “Shutter Island” — not just because it’s Scorsese’s weakest picture since “Gangs of New York”, but also because it’s likely to enable Leonardo DiCaprio in his quest to use that ridiculous Bahstan accent in more movies.

And then there’s this: Craig Simpson finally identified the weird tugging I experienced at the back of my brain while watching “Shutter Island” — turns out we’d both seen it before, in a different but much more thematically successful configuration.

Spoilers abound, but if you’ve seen the film, you’ll want to check this out.

With “Cop Out” invading the megaplex, I had no choice but to dedicate this week’s MSN Movies gallery celebrates the specific magic that is the American buddy-cop movie.

Really, I’m just doing my part to keep fine folks like Billy Rosewood and Pep Streebeck off the ash-heap of history.

Yeah, you heard me. Pep F*cking Streebeck. That’s why “Rush Hour” didn’t make the list, incidentally; everything Chris Tucker tries to do in those movies, he owes to Mr. Tom Hanks and his delightful affectations.

It’s Friday. There’s movies afoot. I’d say something pithy, but today’s a big writing day and I’m already behind, so let’s just get going, shall we?

“Cop Out“: Hey, remember the ’80s? Kevin Smith’s first movie as a director for hire certainly hopes that you do, since nostalgia is really all it has going for it. Well, that and Tracy Morgan’s line reading of “It’s not for me, it’s for the table.” My review should be up soon. UPDATE: Finally!

“The Crazies“: George A. Romero’s understandably obscure 1973 satire gets a shot of adrenaline in Breck Eisner’s proficient genre update, which improves upon its source in virtually every way. And why isn’t Timothy Olyphant a bigger star? Dude’s awesome!

“L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot“: Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea Annonier resurrect Clouzot’s abandoned 1964 psychothriller in this enthralling documentary, which would be worth seeing if it consisted entirely of Romy Schneider B-roll. But it’s so much more.

“Last Train Home”: When you hear the term “migrant worker”, you probably think of the laborers that fuel America’s produce industry. In China, the term means something else — people who leave their villages for work in industrial factories in cities across the country. Lixin Fan’s powerful documentary follows two of them as they head back to visit the children they left behind. Susan gives props.

“The Maid”: Sebastian Silva’s drama about a servant (Catalina Saavedra) desperate to maintain her position in her employers’ household has been rolling through the festival circuit for a while now, but I still haven’t managed to catch up to it. (Stupid conflicting schedules.) Jason and Susan liked it well enough.

“The Messenger“: There have been plenty of movies made about the human cost of war, but Oren Moverman’s one is different: It’s a piercing drama about two soldiers tasked with informing families their loved one won’t be coming home. Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson and Samantha Morton give thoroughly lived-in performances, and Moverman announces himself as a director of considerable skill and intelligence. See this, would you?

“The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights“: Jack and Meg rock their way across Canada in this striking concert movie, which feels a little more intimate than the usual musical follow-along. Sure, you’ll be able to pick it up on DVD in a couple of weeks, but wouldn’t you rather see it with a crowd?

My latest MSN DVD column is up, featuring “The Informant!” and “The House of the Devil” — two very contemporary films that cloak themselves in the trappings of the 1970s and the 1980s, respectively.

And the new issue of NOW is on the stands, where you’ll find my interview with Breck Eisner, who’s just remade “The Crazies”. Sometime later today they’ll post my Q&A with Oren Moverman, director of “The Messenger”, and I’ll throw up a link when they do. (UPDATE: Thrown!)

But now I have a lot of work ahead of me, so if it’s okay with you guys I’ll just post this and get back to it …

My latest MSN DVD column still hasn’t gone up, so your distraction today is the AV Club’s newest “I Watched This on Purpose” — in which Tasha Robinson tackles Rodrigo Garcia’s utterly forgettable “Passengers”, the plane-crash-survivors drama with Anne Hathaway and Patrick Wilson.

Spoilers abound, obviously, since “Passengers” is a movie with a Really Big Twist, and the nature and execution of that twist is central to the movie’s failure. (Funny, there’s another movie out there right now with the same problem.)

But then, “Passengers” is the kind of movie that arrives pre-spoiled, in that it’s entirely awful. So jump right in!

I’m off to a screening of another 3D movie this morning — which is perhaps not the best time to click over to io9 and discover an article called “Science Proves 3-D Movies Hurt Your Brain“.

Click through for the details, including a video that demonstrates exactly what the process does to your poor synapses.

As someone who didn’t even get the hint of a headache during “Avatar”, I’m apparently one of the lucky ones … but of course, I only saw it in Real3D. The poor bastards who see it in IMAX never had a chance.

“Shutter Island” pulled in an impressive $40.2 million over the weekend, easily topping the box-office charts and giving Martin Scorsese his biggest opening yet.

This is good, I guess. One wants to see one’s favourite filmmakers do well, even if their latest offerings isn’t exactly good.
Quite a few of my colleagues are struggling with the same issue — with “Shutter Island”, Scorsese has delivered what’s basically a gorgeously made, utterly inconsequential genre picture — a film with even less weight than “The Color of Money”, the movie we tend to bring up when discussing the director’s work for hire.

The better comparison, of course is “Cape Fear” — an overwrought piffle that started out as a tribute to the movies Scorsese loved as a youngster, and metastasized into a ludicrous, overdirected mess.

In his interesting Slate essay, Elbert Ventura argues that Scorsese has spent the last decade or so sliding from his pedestal, and the American critical community is largely too polite to call him on it. (I’d say the slide began earlier, when he started his run of Oscar-baiting prestige pictures in the 1990s, but then I’ve never had much patience for “The Age of Innocence”.)

Glenn Kenny mulls a similar case at The Auteurs, with examples and everything. And the link to that piece on his personal blog has generated a very readable comment thread.

Check ’em out. And if you’ve seen “Shutter Island”, what did you think? Intriguing exercise in genre reclamation, or empty affectation? Or were you just in it for the atmosphere?