Redbox, the Blu-ray and DVD kiosk renter, announced with a little fanfare their movies that were rented the most, by genre, during the course of last year. You will notice that most of the popular rentals were not award winners or box office stand outs.

Here are the results announced via a 5-minute video presentation by Redbox:

•Most Rented Action Movie: Green Hornet
•Most Rented Family Movie: Rango
•Most Rented Horror Movie: Insidious
•Most Rented Comedy Movie: Just Go With It
•Most Rented Drama Movie: The Tourist

Looking at the Redbox’s tally for individuals, we start with Natalie Portman who is honored with the most-rented actress of 2011, due to Black Swan, Your Highness, No Strings Attached and Thor.

Your Highness

Next is Kevin James who took the praise as lifetime achievement award for entertaining Redbox users year-after-year. His Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009) is the fastest Redbox DVD to reach the one millionth mark.

Thus, it’s hard for me to believe, the most rented Redbox film of 2011 was Just Go With It. The silly comedy stars Adam Sandler and Jennifer Anniston. Anniston was even honored with a bonus award for her other comedy role as the sex-crazed dentist in the dark-comedy Horrible Bosses.

Just Go With It

You may be asking yourself why relatively unsuccessful box office movies, like Green Hornet, are so popular at Redbox. It’s easy to surmise that movie goers wait for the box office duds to arrive on the disc rental market to rent them. If you do the math, box office money makers stay in the theaters longer, such as Fast Five, Kung Fu Panda 2, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and their Blu-ray and DVDs counter-parts are purchased by movie goers – instead of rented — whereas less-popular movies are rented via kiosks or Netflix.

The Redbox results indicate the older releases have better records because titles like Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean, arrived closer to the end of the year. Still, not a single one of the award winners takes a position on the current Redbox Top 20.

It will be interesting to watch Redbox during 2012 because from the looks of it, see the above graphic, the kiosk movie renter is sure to expand even more.

Screenhead finished up its Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 giveaway and our winner is Mildred. Mildred played the quiz game hard and got 3 out of 5 quesitions right.

It always a great time joining up with Warner Bros. to help promote the a movie or giveaway. The release of the final Harry Potter movie still includes this Harry Potter Widget without the contest.

The final face-off between good and evil is finally upon us as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is now available, just in time for the holidays! Join Harry, Ron and Hermione as they do battle against Voldemort in the epic conclusion to the film series!

Screenhead has a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 to giveaway. We will be having more giveaways.

Jimmy asks Daniel Radcliff why he feels cooler in New York and about his gaming experience with Xbox.

Daniel tells Jimmy about acting on Broadway in ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying‘.

The man who played Harry Potter performs stand-up comedy for the first time on ‘Late Night!’

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 enchanted the movie goers and won Friday’s box office, earning an estimated $61.2 million that includes about $24 million from its midnight opening.

Way down in numbers with a 49% drop, in second place, is Unstoppable with about $4.075 million while not far behind is Megamind, earning about $3.7 million in third place. Due Date is next in line with an estimate of $2.9 while The Next Three Days collected about $2.2 million, rounding out the top five for Friday.

All in all, it looks like Mr. Potter and his friends (or enemies) are setting the pace for the 2010 holiday movie box office.

Here we go, folks, the crazy train is leaving the station and it’s got a big old “Hogwart’s Express” stamped on the front of it.  It’s quarter of three in the morning and I’ve just got back from the 12:01 showing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One, featuring a whole load of kids who will probably be useless in school tomorrow, and I’m not just talking about the ones in the movie. You just read my cohort Eoin’s take on this particular matter, and now you get my shot at it. And the best part? I’m not at all happy.

We join Harry and company in the midst of the beginning of the end, as Voldemort and his assortment of cronies are running riot in the world of wizardry and planning to take it to the non-magical Muggles on a scale that can only be described as pure Cobra Commander in its genocidal glee. Naturally, Harry and company find this distasteful, and are out to round up Voldemort’s collection of Horcruxes, or, random objects that hold chunks of Voldemort’s life force / power / chi / whatever ridiculous concept’s been cobbled up to try and explain this mush.

You would think that, by about the third installment of a seven or eight film franchise, you’d pretty much have all the names and places and concepts you needed down, and that you could run the events of the world just fine with what you have on hand. Not Harry Potter, oh no. Rowling’s going to be tossing brand new names and concepts out there like we’re still back in book one.  Harry will have somehow learned a panoply of new spells that actually have some offensive use for a change, there will be a whole collection of strange new objects that are somehow vital to the entirety of the film but were never so much as mentioned (that I recall, anyway) before hand, and all sorts of new characters, new places, and new nouns aplenty.

The entire film feels rushed and yet still overlong, with events that should have been huge being glossed over (for instance, the death of Mad-Eye Moody, a big character in previous installments, was essentially reduced to one character–I think it was a Weasley–saying “Oh yeah, by the way, Mad-Eye Moody’s dead.” in roughly the same tone of voice one reserves to mention that a party host is out of shrimp puffs), and events that are ridiculously insignificant being dragged out for several minutes (like Harry’s baffling insistence that Dobby must be buried. With full honors. And no magic. And where the hell did he get the shovel, anyway?). And all the while, things I never knew existed kept popping up, like Hermione’s Preposterously Oversized Handbag, or the strange medical condition that just suddenly hit Ron and tore open his arm while they were teleporting all over England.

And I’m sure that someone, somewhere, has an explanation for how Dobby manages to teleport everywhere that regular wizards can’t, yet somehow, elves are the slave race. Seriously, what’s with that? Harry Potter’s locked in a basement that no one can teleport out of because it’s so very enchanted, not even the absolute chosen king of all wizardry Harry Potter, but here’s Dobby. Oh, sure, it’s absolutely no problem to the only elf in the movie that just learned how SHOES WORK.

The only problem is, I don’t particularly care what that explanation is. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a big, shiny disaster of poor writing, worse adaptation, and acting that to this second makes me cringe, with the lone exception of Helena Bonham Carter, who still plays lunatics like an absolute champ. And don’t even get me started on all the shakycam work. This movie had enough wobbly frames to make me wonder if Voldemort had recently recruited the Blair Witch.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives an exasperated sigh and hands Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One a four out of ten. Oh, sure, it’s fun enough–there’s plenty of action to go around, but the writing is inches from pure incomprehensibility as a movie unaided by book knowledge. And to misquote Animal House: “Big, shiny and dumb is no way to go through life, son.”

Tom Felton talks with Jay Leno about playing Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter series and acting since age 7.

As the story of Harry Potter nears its end, you’d expect the films to get better. The climax is nearing, the subject matter is darker, and so the ante is upped in terms of visuals, performance, etc. Only, the series is getting slightly worse, and the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is probably the most disappointing yet. Being half of a book it’s a veritable non-starter of a movie, complete with forced mini-resolution, and borrowing a lot from a better franchise.

In this story Harry finds himself as an outlaw on the run. The Ministry of Magic has been taken over by the evil Lord Voldemort and his cohorts who are forming a new dictatorship: one in which us regular humans will be considered lesser creatures, and crushed into submission. But Voldemort must destroy Potter first. So our hero flees with his allies, most importantly Ron and Hermione whose relationship is threatened by Harry’s bond with the spritely lass. Feeling alone, Harry must work to find one of the “Horcruxes” that make Voldemort’s soul invincible, and destroy it. But he doesn’t know how and must revisit his tragic past in order to change the future.

In a way, the latest Harry Potter film is no different from the others, but therein lies a major problem. The whole movie franchise suffers from Poor Adaptation Syndrome. Writers fail to acknowledge the vast difference between plots and characters in a novel and in a movie, and so attempt to squeeze in as many elements of a 400 page book into a 120 minute film. So what we see are characters appearing and disappearing faster than corpses dropping in a Rob Zombie flick. These characters often have one important line or piece of information, and then disappear. In this film, for example, we see Brendan Gleeson as Mad-Eye Moody and Domhnall Gleeson (Brendan’s actual son) as Bill Weasley given about 3-4 minutes of screen time and then they completely disappear, having zero narrative function. In the novels they’re afforded more time but in a film it’s so brief it’s pointless from a narrative perspective. This was the exact same problem that made The Golden Compass such a bad film of a great book, and we will never see the sequels made. This latest Potter film goes a step further and forces a sort of climax by reintroducing a character from one of the earlier Potter films and then perish as if he’s some sort of Obi Wan figure. But not only does this pale in comparison to the death of Dumbledore in the previous film, but it’s hard to care about a character that appeared several years ago and doesn’t do much here. It’s like making a 2-hour movie and trying to make us feel for someone who has 2 minutes presence in the entire film. A more ambitious writing team would tear apart the books and restructure it drastically to work as a film. Indeed, the series has had so much padding and so many diversions that it would probably work better as a trilogy. READ ON »

The stars and filmmakers tell what is at stake for Harry, Hermione and Ron in the final two movies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I am so excited!  This movie rocks my boat! 

Based on MovieTickets survey, the next Harry Potter movie coming to theaters this November is the most anticipated movie of the Holiday season. MovieTickets reports that HP7 Part 1 is leading ticket sales at their web site with 57 % of all ticket sales. The ticket selling web site is also reporting 190 sellouts for Part 1.

In this clip J.K. Rowling doesn’t talk about writing another Harry Potter book. However, IESB reports that in her complete interview with Oprah, she will admit she does have a few Harry Potter stories in her head. 

She has been thinking about putting them down on paper. It “could definitely” happen some time in the future, but not until the last movie is released. Then, she will make such a commitment.

All right, Harry Potter buffs–brace yourselves, because we’ve got a sweet new treat for you today! Three, count them, three new posters, all showing off the dark new nature of the latest Harry Potter, the first part of the last installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Clearly this is going to be the Empire of the Harry Potter series, and that’s actually pretty appropriate given that this is going to be the lead-in to the end. And it’s definitely not going to do to have a happy ending two hours before the end actually hits! So look for this one to be a fearsome, dark, possibly depressing affair before the real winner ending hits and clears it all up.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part one of two, hits this November.