Howdy all--welcome to Tuesday afternoon, welcome to the Threes!

Here's how it works on Tuesdays: I give you three actors, you tell me what one film all three were in together.

Enter your guess in the comments section directly below this post, and if you are first with the correct answer you win the homemade construction-paper medal! Emphasis on the "homemade" part, as in you make it in your own home.

I won't publish any guesses until tomorrow when I put the correct answer up. 

What film featured:

Forest Whitaker

Katie Holmes

Kiefer Sutherland

If you are unfamiliar with Guardians of Ga'Hoole, the fifteen-book young adult fantasy series by Kathryn Lasky, here's what you need to know before watching its trailer. The story takes place in a "post-human" time, and the main characters are owls. One young barn owl, Soren (voiced by my celeb crush Jim Sturgess), is kidnapped by some baddies (also owls) and taken to be brainwashed and turned into a fighting machine. He and his fellow abductees try to escape to Ga'Hoole, an island where warrior owls are concocting a plan to put an end to the evil owl army. The movie covers the events of the first three books: The Capture, The Journey and The Rescue.

Quite frankly, if I hadn't read the description of the film, I wouldn't have known what was going on in this trailer except that a lot of owls think the Guardians of Ga'hoole rock the house. I'll hold my other impressions until after you've watched it for yourself...

Here's the deal: I just couldn't get past that awful 30 Seconds to Mars song. It seemed totally wrong for this trailer and thoroughly distracted me. I would've preferred an instrumental melody to the cries of emo-rockers, call me crazy. Then there was the issue of an unclear story line. Owls were flying all over the place and clearly they were worried about something, but, as I said above, if I hadn't known what the film's plot in advance, I definitely wouldn't have understood that the action revolved around one of the owls being kidnapped. There is no reference to that at all in the preview.

On the bright side, I thought the animation looked spectacular. This is (of course) going to be in 3D, so I'm sure on the big screen it will be that much more impressive than what we saw in the trailer. It's got a big-name voice cast as well; besides Sturgess, there's Hugo Weaving, Sam Neill, Emilie de Ravin, Helen Mirren, and many other notable actors and actresses. And I can't neglect to mention that it was directed by Zack Snyder, Lover of the Slo-Mo, and the man behind the Dawn of the Dead remake, 300 and Watchmen. Guardians is obviously targeting a much different audience than his usual fanboys, so I'm curious to see how it will do. For now I'm just praying someone comes to their senses and pulls "Kings and Queens" from the next trailer.

... She's back on the market.

But if you're TRULY a big Kate Winslet fan of the male persuasion, then not only did you already know that, you're currently en route to Mexico where Kate was seen less than 24 hours ago, bikini-clad and frolicking on a boat with her two kids.

For non-Winslet stalkers, here's what's going on: at the end of the day yesterday, the law firm representing the Oscar-winning actress and her Oscar-winning husband, director Sam Mendes, released a statement that the couple split earlier this year after seven years of marriage.  Apparently they were just never together because of their work schedules.

I don't know about you, but I think this is going to get verrrry innnnteresting. Kate Winslet and Reese Witherspoon are going to be vying for the Most Eligible Serious Actress title and the tabloids are going to hound their every move from here on out.  Since Witherspoon broke up with her longtime boyfriend Jake Gyllenhaal, she can't so much as look at a guy for more than two seconds without being romantically linked to him. Most recently it's CAA agent Jim Toth.

As for Winslet, here's my prediction: There will be a respectable amount of time that goes by before she returns to the dating scene.  But when she does, I would bet almost everything I own that at some point there will be rumors that she is with her Titanic and Revolutionary Road co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio. Those two have always been very chummy, almost uncomfortably so in some interviews I've seen, and although Leo is famous for dating models a decade younger, I think when he gets serious about settling down it will be with someone like Kate. I just have a weird feeling, maybe I'm crazy. All you other celeb gossip hounds, what are your predictions?

Glance at a description of The Damned United and you may come up with several reasons to skip it. It’s a “sports movie” that’s really not about sports and lacks the heart-warming “little guys triumph” theme hawked by more popular, inspirational flicks. It doesn’t have any celebrity stars. It’s set in England in the ‘70s and embraces rather than downplays both the hideous (even in ironic hindsight) fashion choices and the general coal-gray pallor of Yorkshire’s blue-collar malaise.

And it’s about soccer, er football. Call it whatever you want, even those Americans with kids who play, or who try to feign hip iconoclastic interest every four years during the World Cup, probably aren’t familiar with the true-life events depicted in The Damned United.

So why watch it? For starters, it’s an engrossing, entertaining, well-crafted film that follows events that, while small on a global-historical scale, are ripe with bitter juices. But mostly, this is a film about a character—not a character in a script, but one of those sweet rarities: a real-life, larger-than-life “character.” In this case, it’s Brian Clough, who took over coaching the champion Leeds United football team in 1974. And lasted just 44 days at the job.

Clough is played by Michael Sheen and that's your primary reason for watching. Sheen has been building a steady fan base here in the States with perfectly crafted performances as Tony Blair in The Queen, as David Frost in Frost/Nixon, and yes, as a werewolf and a vampire respectively in the Underworld and Twilight series. But The Damned United marks our first chance to watch Sheen really cut loose on his own, and it's well worth the price of admission.

The Damned United marks Sheen’s fourth film with writer Peter Morgan—before The Queen and Frost/Nixon, their first was The Deal, Stephen Frears’s fascinating little political study of The Rise of Tony Blair. The Deal was about the supposed handshake agreement between Blair and (now PM) Gordon Brown over how they would take turns running Britain--a deal Blair broke. While this may not mean much to American audiences, in England mention “the Deal” and it carries as much iconic weight as “Watergate” does in the United States.

The same sort of obscure (to us, that is) microcosm is at work here. We Yanks may not know who Brian Clough is, or who Don Revie was, or much about the Leeds United football club, let alone events 35 years ago. But mention “the 44 days” to any football fan in England and they’ll know what you’re talking about, if only because they’ve heard the tale passed down in pubs from parents and older siblings. It’d be like asking a baseball fan about Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner.

In 1974, the much admired and respected Leeds United coach Don Levie (played here with a no-nonsense furrowed-brow by Colm Meany) left the club to take over management of England’s national team. Much to the chagrin of Levie (and his Leeds players), his replacement was brash Brian Clough. Prior to Leeds, Clough had made a name for himself by transforming the small-level Darby County team into a national contender, but he also harbored a hatred for Levie and Leeds that was as deep, raw, and lasting as it was petty. (Levie slighted Clough after their first-ever meeting, and Clough came to feel the Leeds team played dirty and won ugly.) While Levie personified the pub-song-singing, working-man roots of English football, we see Clough arriving for his new position while cockily crooning along to Tom Jones’ “What’s New Pussycat?”

The Damned United works like the usual sports film in reverse: The daring, cocksure upstart achieves great personal and professional triumphs and then lets his pride take him on a very big fall. (In fact, after his humiliatingly short tenure at Leeds, Clough went on to become one of England’s most respected football managers. But The Damned United is much more interested in the tumble.)

Nor is there much sports in the film. You won’t see glorious, uplifting moments of human greatness on the pitch. Nor do you really get to know any of the football players on Clough’s teams--there are no misfit hi-jinks or tales of personal redemption. Instead The Damned United is about Brian Clough, a man so slitheringly sure of his (not inconsiderable) charm and charisma that he strides forward, pointy chin and sharp nose needling ahead, to take over a team he loathes just to heap more glory on the Legend of Brian Clough and Rub it in Don Levie's Face.

Sheen uses a controlled almost-manic burn behind a tight, sly smile to portrays the arrogance of a man who simply will not, cannot entertain any notion of personal error or fault. The film steers clear of any whiff of depressing pathos thanks to the actor’s mesmerizing abilities—with his bobbing, grinning ego and sneering nasal self-aggrandizement ("Brian Clough, uber [effing] alles," he brays to the doubting Leeds directors on his first day) Sheen keeps Clough over-sized enough to remain compellingly watchable without blowing the character up into a scenery chewing cartoon.

Director Tom Hooper (the HBO John Adams miniseries) and writer Morgan slide the action back and forth between Clough’s six weeks at Leeds and the previous six years he spent building up Darby, his reputation, and his vendetta against Revie. That gives The Damned United the extra oomph of letting us see how hard Clough worked in the past to get to the top, even as we watch it crumble out from under him in the present.

 It also shows us the true secret to his success (as postulated in David Peace’s 2006 stream-of-consciousness novel on which the film is based): That Clough’s flashy brilliance was shored up by the hard-working football insight of his assistant, Peter Taylor (the always welcome, always mistreated Timothy Spall, all eyebrows and sideburns as usual). The film paints Taylor as not just Clough’s football brains, but also a trudging, un-sexy counterweight to Clough’s look-at-me dazzle--Clough is the shameless ambition, Taylor is the humble heart. (The two even physically resemble the fox and the hedgehog.)

Everyone loves crowd-pleasing "We Are the Champions" sports movies, but The Damned United is something even better--by focusing on Sheen's magnificent "I" instead of "team," it serves up a bitter pill that, as they often do, goes down with a gleeful grimace. And that is indeed well worth cheering.

Remember Me plays like a careful social science experiment: How long can even the most ardent Robert Pattinson fan watch him brood? And smoke. And mope. Then brood some more. Then run his hand through his mussed up hair. And then smoke some more.

And what happens when a "serious" film is carefully drained dry of any dramatic forward motion? And how big of a toast ex machina ending is needed to make something this intermittently dull at least worthy of post-screening conversation? In other words, what does it take for a film goer to remember Remember Me?

The PG-13 film follows the star-crossed romance between Pattinson’s poetry loving, sideburn-sporting NYC rich boy and the slightly livelier gal he ends up falling for. His name is Tyler Hawkins (which is really a fine, fine pirate name) and he lost his older brother six years earlier. In true Ordinary People fashion, his rich lawyer dad, Pierce Brosnan, is all closed off, leaving Tyler to commiserate Caulfield-style with his younger sister Phoebe, er Caroline (Ruby Jerins), and his irreverent roommate (Tate Ellington at first adding a little life, but soon wearing out his welcome).

The young woman's name is Ally (get it?) and she watched her mother gunned down a decade earlier during a mugging. Her dad, Chris Cooper, is a cop and naturally a little overprotective. But who can blame him? He’s got a daughter who’s growing up and flying the coop and a Queens accent that also threatens to run wild. Ally is played by Emilie de Ravin, probably best known from her role on TV’s BeastMaster. Or maybe from Lost.

Aside from being The One Person Who Gets His Pain, there’s not much point to Ally being in the film. Tyler broods and smokes just fine on his own, thank you. In fact, Remember Me doesn’t really get draggy until the romance gets rolling—before that Pattinson is almost engaging enough to hold your interest. At the least you can amuse yourself by counting cigarettes. But once he falls in love the film’s moody artist clichés calcify into moody lovers clichés and things start to move soooooooo slooooooowly with all the “woe is me, pass the hair mousse and the disposable lighter” shoe gazing. Soooooooooooo sloooooooowly.

Sloooooooooooooooooooowly.

Sooooooooooo very sloooooooooowly.

I have no problem with a rich, thoughtfully paced film (remember, I'm the guy who loves The Assassination of Jesse James and Bright Star), but you'd better have your script and acting working overtime to transmute tedium into artistry. Instead, Remember Me writer Will Fetters and director Allen Coulter (the much better Hollywoodland) have deftly taken 60 minutes of story and packed it into a full two hours of movie. Remember Me? You’ll be lucky if you remember where you parked your car, let alone where you live by the time all the moping is done.

Pattinson is not a bad actor by any stretch, and I think it’s safe to say that once this whole Twilight nonsense is over and he gets some career equilibrium back he could go on to impress a lot of folks in a range of roles. After all, he’s no Hayden Christensen. (Sorry for the low blow, Hayden, but I tried, I really did… years of suggesting that Shattered Glass showed some actual chops beyond the weird monotone… but then came Jumper and Virgin Territory, and well, sorry… we’re going to need you to leave your light saber with security on your way out…)

Unfortunately no such Pattinson range is on display in Remember Me. The actor—who does look good on camera—is still following the melancholy formula of his undead role. Except he gets drunk, gets in fights, and bleeds instead of sparkling. That’s not to say everyone involved in Remember Me isn’t working hard to make it about something; life and death, love and loss, poetry and cigarettes. With all the stuff about dead family members and the creative life versus the corporate sell out, it’d be easy to dismiss Remember Me as heavy handed, except that’s an insult to heavy hands.

 Speaking of hands with great heaviness, there’s the ending—the only part of Remember Me that makes the film even vaguely worth discussing. We’re going to stagger into SPOILER TERRITORY here, so if you want to remain pure, best to move along.

Remember Me opens with Ally’s mom getting killed in the subway in 1991. We then jump ahead a decade. For the math challenged, there are other hints along the way. Bush on TV in the background talking embryonic stem-cell research, which you may remember was his Administration’s major domestic policy issue during his first year in office. He gave that speech in August just before going on vacation. Still not getting it? Tyler and his buddy go see American Pie 2 the weekend after Labor Day. Brosnan’s lawyer-dad character works in a tall building in downtown Manhattan. A really tall building.

Yep, think Titanic. Or better yet, think From Here to Eternity.

But here’s the thing—while some have a legitimate beef with how Remember Me uses a certain historical event to make itself all the more tragically poetic (and to appeal to teenage Pattinson fans heading into their "Life Sucks" phase), I wasn’t bothered so much by that.

I have a good friend who used to say there were two set pieces that when used in a film or novel simply cannot be screwed up, no matter how bad the overall work: the Crucifixion and the assassination of JFK. They are such powerful, shared historical or cultural events that no matter how ineptly they’re employed in a work, their raw dramatic impact elevates the whole. Certain other calamitous occurrences from the past decade might now make the list.

So yes, even if you saw them coming a mile away (Tyler makes a hand shadow of a bird over Ally’s back as she sleeps), the penultimate scenes of Remember Me have an impressive dramatic punch—not because they’re well-handled. They’re not. They’re just as cloying and clichéd as the rest of the film. But the “oomph” factor of the event overrides the clumsy, obvious (and yes, perhaps exploitative) way it’s almost blithely tacked onto the end of what had been, up ‘til then, a pretty boring melodramatic slog. In fact, you can make the argument that Remember Me's earlier emotional and dramatic slack is in part because the makers knew they had such a mighty ace up their narrative sleeve for the coup de grace.

Last-minute sucker punches aside, there's still not enough here to really recommend Remember Me—there’s just so much smoking and moping any of us can take.

A combination of the unstoppable Disney marketing machine, the Burton-Depp draw, and those juicy over-sized 3D ticket prices easily kept Alice in Wonderland atop the box office this weekend--impressively so. In its second weekend the live-action head trip brought in a stunning $62 million more, only down 47% from its opening weekend--it also had a very wondrous per-theater average of $17,000.

I'll be honest, I'd found the movie a mixed bag and thought tepid word of mouth might really slow it down in its second week, but there's no doubt the visual dazzle is a hoot. As a result, Alice has already domestically earned back its $200 million budget and is doing big business overseas as well. Why is every big film suddenly desperate to go 3D? It doesn't take a Hollywood accountant to do the math and see the fat box-office results from having ticket prices 25% higher.

The big box-office disappointment of the weekend was the lukewarm response to Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon's Green Zone--it came in a very distant second with $15 million, the low end of Industry expectations. Despite attempts to market it as a Bourne-style action flick, Green Zone couldn't break the Iraq-War box-office "curse." (One of those stupid Hollywood beliefs--like "no one goes to see pirate movies"--that's true right up until something comes along and proves it spectacularly wrong.) But given that Green Zone is a perfectly decent action film, its failure to grab large numbers of viewers probably has much more to do with its upfront anti-Bush Administration politics over WMD intelligence failures. Now, 3D intelligence failures might have brought in some dough...

She's Out of My League came in third with $10 million, most likely because audiences pumped for Hot Tub Time Machine and tired of re-watching The Hangover were a desperate for some R-rated crude rom-com sex comedy. (Sorry, but as much as I love Jay Baruchel, I don't think his name and mug on the posters was the big draw--but someday soon, I hope...)

Nor could attempts to sell Remember Me as "Twilight Without the Fangs" drum up much box office for Robert Pattinson's first major non-vamp starring role. (But he still has the mussed hair! And he still mopes a lot! And is surrounded by death!) The romantic drama only brought in $8 million for fourth place. Alas, have the fickle teenage girls and middle-aged moms abandoned poor Pattinson, leaving his pale, scrawny melancholy behind for hot teen werewolf pecs and abs? 

The weekend's fourth new wide release, the multi-ethnic drama Our Family Wedding, did just fine in half the number of theaters as Green Zone and League, bringing in a very respectable $5,000 per theater and winding up in sixth place.

Rounding out the top ten were Shutter Island, Avatar (losing more box-office steam because it had to give up most of its 3D screens to Alice), Brooklyn's Finest, Cop Out, and The Crazies. (I'll have full reviews of Remember Me, She's Out of My League and Brooklyn's Finest today and tomorrow... which in Locke Time means maybe by the end of the week.)

Both Crazy Heart and The Blind Side got post-Oscar bumps from Jeff Bridges' and Sandra Bullock's wins. Crazy Heart tied with Percy Jackson at eleventh place and The Blind Side's weekend haul actually went up 24%.

Next weekend probably won't bring much of the threat to Alice's 3D domination--neither the Gerald Butler-Jennifer Aniston rom-com Bounty Hunter nor the kinda-gruesome Jude Law satire Repo Men would seem to have what it takes to knock the top hat off Depp and pals. However, in a world where Dear John can topple Avatar, don't count out the family friendly Diary of a Wimpy Kid--if everyone's seen Alice and has no appetite for a return visit to Wonderland, I wouldn't be surprised if youngsters haul their parents to Wimpy Kid and pull off the upset.

I think the official consensus is that Friday's Freeze Frame challenge was a toughie. And here I thought it might be a cinch.  I mean, how many movies has J. Lo been in... right?  Anyway, please forgive me for misjudging its level of difficulty.

Thankfully, movie trivia pro Donna came to the rescue and expertly identified these stills as being from Sunshine Cleaning, Out of Sight and Reality Bites. I don't even have to tell Donna what she needs to do next because of this victory -- she's making aluminum foil trophies and construction paper medals in her sleep at this point.

But she better watch her back, because there were two newcomers right behind her in second and third place: congrats to Jennifer M and Heather. All three of these ladies gave me the link between the films, too. That link being Steve Zahn.  Others who get to craft a Common Thread Button o' Pride including Tammy Lochridge, StacyB and Doug.

I chose Zahn as this week's link because he's in Friday's Diary of a Wimpy Kid -- he's the Wimpy Kid's dad. Frank Heffley. Anyone familiar with Steve's career knows that it's kind of been all over the place. That is to say, while his performances are usually awesome, he doesn't stick to any one genre. He's been the lead in celebrated indies like Happy, Texas, taken on the thriller/horror lite scene in A Perfect Getaway, lent his voice in kids' films like Stuart Little and Chicken Little, starred alongside Martin Lawrence in comedies like National Security and Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz in action-adventure adaptations like Sahara, and, of course, was Phoebe's ex-husband Duncan the ice dancer on Friends.  He's been in so many films that we actually have three, count 'em, three of them in redbox kiosks right now: Management (which, admittedly, I hated... but Locke liked), Sunshine Cleaning and Saving Silverman.

Congrats again to our winners, and this week -- I promise -- I'll take it extra-easy on everyone!