First Movie

World Wrestling Entertainment star John Cena stars in his second movie, the action-adventure 12 Rounds, which opens Friday. We caught up with the professional wrestler recently to discuss his acting career. Was acting in a movie easier for you the second time around, after having done The Marine? It was certainly easier, but I don't think it had everything to do with the experience from The Marine. We really just had a very, very good crew. Mark Gordon's production company - he produced Speed, Saving Private Ryan - really stepped in there with Fox to make sure this thing kind of knocked itself out of the park.

If you're the parent of a Pokemon fan, the release of the soundtrack album from "Pokemon -- The First Movie" (Atlantic 83261, arriving in stores today) is a real bad news/good news situation.The bad news is that you're facing an ever-widening array of Poke-product. Not only have the cute little critters spread from Gameboys and trading cards to the TV, thanks to the "Pokemon" animated series, but now they'll be taking over movie theaters and home stereos. Who knows how many other appliances will fall under their sway?

"Pokemon" comes straight from the Short Attention Span school of the cinema. With its incomprehensible plot, flat visual style and indecipherably mixed messages (violence is good; no, wait, violence is bad!), this movie seems chiefly to be an excuse to sell even more trading cards, those elusive billets that have turned a generation of youngsters into thieves, mercenaries and compulsive gamblers.But when has cynical marketing ever kept throngs of kids from clamoring for anything? Rest assured, they will demand to see "Pokemon," which presents parents with a dilemma: forbid the little ones to see what amounts to a swollen version of what they can see every Saturday morning anyway?

A LOCAL BUSINESS is a success when it makes money. It turns into an institution when it becomes part of the community's collective identity. Institutions evolve over time. They require a community's affection, which can't be bought with gimmicks.Catonsville's Westview Cinemas, which roll the projectors for the last time tonight, are an institution. People reacted as if they were losing an old friend upon learning the movie house will be razed to make room for a Circuit City. Folks even rue the loss of the theater's 1950s-1960s architecture, which, it is safe to say, no one considered classic when it was built in 1965.

You're a big-time movie director. You were a fellow in directing at the American Film Institute, and directed 36 music videos, the cult film "Kill Me Again" and the brilliantly received "Red Rock West." Now you've got one of the most ecstatically reviewed movies of the decade in "The Last Seduction." Life should be great, no? What's to worry about? Everything is easy!Well, no."Basically, it's a fistfight from Day One," says John Dahl wearily. "You just fight and manipulate and . . . sometimes you win a little and sometimes you lose a little."

If you haven't heard, there's a baseball strike looming. I love baseball strikes myself, if just for the humor.Millionaire ballplayers walking picket lines. Rapacious owners not walking (they take limos) to the luxury hotel where they whine about how you can't get good help these days. Puts you in mind of "Grapes of Wrath."But, for some folks, this is deadly serious. If there's no baseball later this summer, what's a sports fan to do -- watch World Cup soccer, a game in which so little happens that C-Span was bidding for the rights?

Attention! Do not look down into your popcorn box for the last few kernels while watching "Hot Shots! Part Deux," even for a few seconds. You will miss at least a couple of gags.Then again, you have seen their like before.Yes, the sequel to "Hot Shots" from director/writer Jim Abrahams follows the 1991 sendup of "Top Gun." It also fits right in with the "Naked Gun" and "Airplane" series, upon which Mr. Abrahams worked with those wild and crazy brothers, David and Jerry Zucker.And like its predecessors, the new movie follows the carpet-bombing theory: Unload a belly-full of sight gags, puns, body function jokes, silly stunts, lampoons of other films and juvenile sexual innuendo, and you will score some belly laughs.

The audience for "Road Scholar," which opens today at th Rotunda, certainly should include readers of The Sun. That's because this is the first movie ever about a Sun writer, if you discount Meg Ryan in "Sleepless in Seattle," and Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins in "HeSaid, She Said."Not only that: Our boy actually appears on camera most of the time. He gets to ride a big red convertible and shoot machine guns! Yes: it's "Lethal Weapon IV" with Dan Rodricks in the Mel Gibson role!Oh, forgive my little joke there, folks.

If you want to scare the bejabbers out of a big Hollywood director, mention the words "satire" and "message" while discussing his latest work.For Jonathan Lynn, the British-born director who surprised the movie world this year with the hit "My Cousin Vinny," those two words dropped casually into a recent conversation were cause for a panic attack.It was just a few days before the opening of Mr. Lynn's latest directorial effort, the Eddie Murphy comedy "The Distinguished Gentleman," and he was in no mood for bad-luck charms like the "s" and "m" words.

Old movie posters and cinema lobby cards, many more exciting and of greater lasting value than the films they hyped, are now auction house hits and hot collectibles. Prices of the most desirable posters have doubled and, in some cases, tripled in the last two years. Even lesser quality examples have inched up, although more cautiously.Spurred in part by visibility at the big New York auctions, including a Sotheby's sale earlier this month that grossed $672,210 for 276 lots, and a coffee table-size illustrated history, "Reel Art: Great Posters from the Golden Age of the Silver Screen," by Stephen Rebello and Richard Allen (Abbeville Press, $29.95)

The 372 students attending Baltimore School for the Arts have never once spontaneously poured out the doors to dance atop the rooftops of cars stalled in traffic. Nor are there jam sessions in the cafeteria, in which tabletops are upended and transformed into percussion instruments, while the cafeteria workers smile benignly. Ah, Hollywood. Ah, "Fame." Those scenes from the 1980 film about life at a performing arts school in New York became a cultural touchstone for Gen Xers. They're often the first thing prospective parents bring up upon meeting the local high school's principal, Leslie Shepard, and they make her simultaneously wince and smile.

World Wrestling Entertainment star John Cena stars in his second movie, the action-adventure 12 Rounds, which opens Friday. We caught up with the professional wrestler recently to discuss his acting career. Was acting in a movie easier for you the second time around, after having done The Marine? It was certainly easier, but I don't think it had everything to do with the experience from The Marine. We really just had a very, very good crew. Mark Gordon's production company - he produced Speed, Saving Private Ryan - really stepped in there with Fox to make sure this thing kind of knocked itself out of the park.

Even more than his love of gadgets, more than his appreciation of the comic-book ethos that inspired Iron Man, director Jon Favreau's success in bringing the Marvel Comics superhero to the big screen came down to his success as a mediator. Consider the creative forces he had to bring together. There was Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr., an actor of unquestioned talent and commanding presence, but one weighed down by a personal life that hasn't always been his greatest asset. There were the folks at Marvel Comics, gatekeepers of the Iron Man mythology since his creation in 1963, who were bankrolling their first movie (after depending on others for such mega-franchises as Spider-Man, X-Men and Fantastic Four)

Landmark Theatre Address --645 S. President St. Phone --410-624-2622 Concession stand hours --11:30 a.m.-10:30 p.m. daily AMC Columbia 14 Address --10300 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia Phone --410-423-0520 Concession stand hours --Opens 30 minutes before first movie (usually noon on weekdays, 9 a.m. on weekends) and closes 15 minutes after last show The 8-inch-tall bag, $4.50, held about 5 cups. It was already filled and waiting for me, and it was a little dry. The self-service fountain allowed me to add all the butter flavoring I wanted.

THE QUESTION What was your favorite underrated concert movie, one that quietly touched the soul or maybe came and went in a flash of pyrotechnics? WHAT YOU SAY Perhaps the most interesting film that remains essentially an honest study in music icon egoism is Michael Apted's Bring on the Night. The premise is to chronicle the formation of Sting's post-Police band, The Blue Turtles, all the while making the lead singer appear more new-father human and less short-fused totalitarian than Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland might have argued at the time.

Mike Nichols' latest movie, Closer, adapted from a play by the British dramatist Patrick Marber, is about four people, arranged in crisscrossing couples, who spend most of two hours slicing one another to bits with witty and vengeful repartee. In this respect it is a lot like his first movie, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which in 1966 was adapted from Edward Albee's celebrated play, which remains unequaled in its portrayal of heterosexuality as a form of ritualized verbal blood sport.

I DON'T know about you, but I was disappointed for Demi Moore when I read that her new movie semi-tanked at the box office this weekend. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle debuted at $38 million, off $2.1 million from the opening numbers put up by the first movie, which means it sold about a million fewer tickets. Guess Demi will have to put aside any desire she has for public acclaim for her high art. Still, that's not a bad haul for a film riding the promotional back of a 40-year-old mother of three.

Academic "ologies" can be as fatal for sci-fi fantasy movies as "isms" are for politics. The Matrix Reloaded, the second in the Matrix trilogy, wastes much of the goodwill of the first movie in gaseous speeches about theology, ontology, mythology - any ology will do. Of course, the allure of Matrix movies lies partly in their cauldron of adolescent-rebel attitude, ominous yet sexy black-leather style and thinking-teen's gravity. The first Matrix succeeded in making alienation captivating: It proposed that the everyday world of the late 20th century was the creation of conquering machines that numbed humans into lassitude, then fed off their bioelectrical force.

The Jungle Book 2 covers the bare necessities. Several times. "Bare Necessities," you might recall, was the centerpiece song of the original Jungle Book, the 1967 animated feature that was the last film overseen by Walt Disney himself (he died the same year). Thoroughly enjoyable - though the animation wasn't up to Disney standards - the movie succeeded largely on the vocal talents of Louis Prima (King Louie of the apes), Sebastian Cabot (Bagheera the panther), George Sanders (Shere Khan the tiger)

A new question about The Fellowship of the Ring periodically took over discussion of The Two Towers last week during three days of press conferences in New York: Which is the definitive version of the first movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy? The 178-minute theatrical cut? Or the roughly half-hour-longer presentation on the "special extended edition" of the DVD? Even director Peter Jackson couldn't decide. He initially suggested that the theatrical version did play better in theaters.