Phew! I’m back from my Film Festival adventure – the movie cans are back at the studio, the foyer props back in storage and the guests back in their boxes (I’m making that last one up). It was a great, frantic and exhausting week, which is exactly why we’ll be repeating it next year, hopefully to include a double bill of The Great Muppet Caper and Who Framed Roger Rabbit! Be there, 2008!

Talking of movies – hey, you like that? – with $27.45 million from its first day alone, is it any wonder that Paramount/DreamWorks have greenlit a sequel to Michael Bay’s Transformers? I’ve yet to see the film, but its box-office dominance is sure to continue the momentum from the July 4 holidays and looks set to settle any bad blood between Bay and DreamWorks, whose last partnering on The Island took a beating on release despite being that rare thing: a pretty good and thoughtful blockbuster.

In other news, Keith David has been announced as the voice of Dr. Facilier (why do I keep thinking of Steve Martin?), the villain in Walt Disney Animation Studios’ return to traditionally animated fare, The Princess And The Frog. The film is now said to be “based on an original story by Disney filmmaking duo John Musker and Ron Clements”, so how close this will sail to the original The Frog Princess is, at this stage, anyone’s guess. Already the Russian setting has been switched for 1930s New Orleans, and the originally proposed Alan Menken music replaced with a jazzier arrangement by Pixar favorite Randy Newman.

In DVD sales, Happy Feet inexplicably continues to trudge on, becoming the biggest selling disc of the first half of this year, according to industry figures. You can read what I thought of this mess of a movie right here, but my choice would have been the official number two, Night At The Museum, a truly solid family outing. Animated titles rounding out the Top 10 so far this year are Open Season at numero four and Charlotte’s Web at five, while a duo of Disneys and a DreamWorks/Aardman complete the bottom half: Cinderella III: A Twist In Time, the Platinum Peter Pan and, just scraping in at ten, the immensely enjoyable Flushed Away.

Due to some distributor issues, we’ve only just been able to announce the winners of our Winnie The Pooh giveaway, but we’ll be announcing the Casper names shortly and have more new stuff coming up for you soon. In the meantime I posted my take on the 2004 release of The Critic, a super funny show that deserves due credit. It does not, as the lead character insists on proclaiming, “stink”!

– Ben.