Happy Friday everyone! For our first Friday of November 2009, we’ve again gathered the latest posters to come out for this week’s poster round-up. So, before you head out to see this week’s opening movies, namely The Men Who Star at goats, A Christmas Carol, The Box and The Fourth Kind, check out the latest promo sheets below.

Screen Rant’s wall this week now includes new one-sheets for Kick-Ass, The Wolfman, Conan, The Twilight Saga’s Eclipse, Clash of the Titans, Scream 4, A Single Man, Avatar, Machete, Green Zone, Let Me In, Tell Tale and The Men Who Stare at Goats.

We also have a few bonus items for this year’s Pixar movie, Up.

Let’s get to it.

So we just finished telling you why the Summer of 2009 was the season of bad movies. Now, as if to validate our point (sarcasm alert) Variety has just announced that the Summer of ‘09 has set a new record as the highest grossing summer of all time at the U.S. domestic box office.

So there you have it, folks, it’s official: Hollywood has no reason to ever hire good writers, produce good scripts, or offer us anything better at the multiplex than what Michael Bay can half-envision.

Awesome.

Well, the summer movie season is officially over, and while box office earnings are way up, it seems like the quality of the films have actually gone way down.  But for every few badly-written movies (like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Transformers 2, and G.I. Joe–though some will say it’s not that bad), there was a diamond in the rough like District 9.  So why were so many movies so bad in the summer of ‘09, even if they did make a lot of money?  Hint: The Writers Strike!

Before the summer began, I wrote an article about how the 2007 Writers Strike might affect the summer 2009 movies.  I speculated that back in 2007, studios were nervous about how long the writers strike could last, leaving them with a possible lack of films for the fall/winter 2008 and all-important summer 2009 season (early May to late August 2009). To make sure they had big films lined up for Summer ‘09, the studios pushed to have their big-budget scripts quick-finished before the Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) contracts were up in November 2007 and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) in summer of 2008.

The nominees have been announced for the fourth annual Scream Awards, held every year by Spike TV. The decisively more “fan-friendly” award ceremony (compared to the Oscars) honors films from the sci-fi, fantasy, horror and comic-book genres of movies, TV shows and comic books. The awards are described as, “the first and only global event of its kind,” to honor those genres.

The Scream 2009 nominees were chosen by the Advisory Board of Hollywood and Genre Leaders, a list which this year includes the likes of Wes Craven, Roland Emmerich, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, Eli Roth and Zack Snyder, plus many more. The event will be taped on Saturday, October 17th this year at The Greek Theater in Los Angeles, and will air on Spike TV ten days later on Tuesday, October 27th (check for local times).

Along with the awards, the show will also be airing some exclusive, world premiere of footage of some of the most anticipated movies of 2010! Presenters and musicians for the event are to be announced shortly.

When the world seems full of doom and gloom, there are always those special people that step up and make you feel good about life. When I hear stories about these heroes, I feel compelled to share them. Not long ago, I wrote about such a thing happening when Somchai Yoosabai, a Bangkok firefighter, single-handedly saved a young autistic boy with the help of his Spider-Man costume.

Today, we have another story of people doing something special for someone out of the goodness of their hearts.

A week ago I wrote a post about how the Weinstein Company supposedly tampered with the trailer for The Road, in order to “help” the film – which is essentially a meditative look at the bond between a father and son traveling across the ruins of America – reach a (supposedly) wider audience.

The post caused a tiny stir and even inspired a response post from Alex Billington over at First Showing, who claimed (echoing the sentiment of many readers) that I was crying foul about something that is by now a banal topic: Hollywood using bait-and-switch advertising to lure us into theaters under false pretenses.

Well, this week I find myself “crying foul” about bait-and-switch advertising once again, this time in reference to a movie I actually saw and loved. I’m talking about Disney/Pixar’s wonderful new film, UP.

In the Wrap Up this Week:

The box office is UP; Robert Downey Jr might still saddle up for Cowboys and Aliens; Lucy beats Nicole Kidman to the Punch; Natalie Portman, Danny McBride and James Franco salute Your Highness; Seann William Scott and Adam Brody are A Couple of Dicks and Chevy Chase dips his toes in the Hot Tub Time Machine and he may return as Fletch.

Short Version: UP is arguably Pixar’s finest achievement to date, and is surprisingly mature (and moving) in its subject matter. Oh, and the 3D visuals are pretty awesome too.

Screen Rant Reviews Pixar's UP (in digital 3D)

There’s nothing better than an easy review: Pixar’s latest summer offering, UP, is a fantastic film. Simply fantastic. Seriously, if Ratatouille and Wall-E deserved to be in the running for Best Picture of the Year (as many said they did at the times of their releases) then UP certainly does.

It’s that good.

With Up coming out this weekend (May 29th), you might have guessed that director Pete Docter has been doing lots of interviews and other press. In a discussion with Coming Soon, an intriguing slip lead to massive amounts of speculation. We tried to stay out of that mess until some clear(er) details were available. So what exactly is Brave you ask?

Apparently, it’s Pixar’s 2011 winter feature The Bear and the Bow.

This week:

Tom Hanks is the box office champion; Terry Gilliam kills Don Quixote…again; Spider-Man has a new Green Goblin (on stage); the Basterds are online; Toy Story 3 is moving Up; Ewan McGregor won’t be Trainspotting and who are the Six Suspects?

Pixar’s lastest offering, the odd-couple adventure UP, has been bringing smiles to people faces ever since the first trailer dropped, or in my case, when I was treated to a special screening of the first 45 minutes of UP, back in February at the New York Comic Con.

By now most of us are used to Pixar films getting love from both fan$ and critics alike; after all, they don’t hand out those Oscar noms to Pixar every year for nothing. Well, UP is continuing in that proud Pixar tradition: the film is getting praise from some of the movie industry’s biggest critics. Check it out:

They call him Wolverine, and he’s the best at what he does, and what he does is shred the box office with berserker rage!  Okay, enough of the Wolverine analogies, but you can’t help but be impressed with the $87 million haul of X-Men Origins: Wolverine!

What a way to start off the summer–with the 2009 box office up over last year, people are still hungry for movies, even in this economy. Fox need not fret any more about the pirated version that leaked out, hurting the box office, because the Hugh Jackman-starrer proved that people love to see movies in the theaters.

Partly Cloudy is the newest short film from the animation wizards at Pixar. It will precede their newest feature film called Up, and it tells the story of where storks get babies before they deliver them to people’s houses.

You know, that old tale…

We’ve already had our first glimpse at the short film last month, which was just wonderful, and today we have another image from it for you to feast your eyes on. It gives a lot closer of a look at the faced-cloud and the stork this time around, and although less photo-realistic than the first released image was (purely because of the animated faces), it’s still damn great looking. Check it out below (click for high res version):

For those not in the know, ShoWest is a convention for theater owners where studios pimp out their movies with the hopes of making a mark regarding their up and coming films. Yesterday, at ShoWest in Las Vegas studios decided to give one another a run for their money. Warner Bros. president Alan Horn showed clips of Terminator Salvation and the new Harry Potter. Both were things we’ve seen before and nothing particularly special.

I haven’t had a chance to write a review yet, but I saw Monsters vs. Aliens with my daughter this weekend and was pretty disappointed. I didn’t exactly go in with high expectations, but it was much weaker than I expected – even with the addition of 3D. It’s strictly for the 8 year old and under crowd.

So I’m happy to present these latest clips from Pixar’s next film, Up, which I’m quite sure won’t disappoint.

We’ve already had some sneek peaks of Pixar’s newest animated creation Up, with posters, trailers, and images (including one of the accompanying short film Partly Cloudy). Screen Rant even got a look at the first 45 minutes of the film which validated hopes that it’s going to be another winner from the best animation studio in the business.

Most of the attention on Pixar always gets directed straight at the main feature they produce every couple of years (although for the last three years in a row they have released one every year), with the always accompanying short film only really being paid attention to once it’s been shown with the main feature.

A brand new full length trailer for Disney Pixar’s Up has debuted for the weekend and if you have seen Watchmen, there’s a chance you’ve already seen it.

While my Thursday midnight screening of Watchmen didn’t have the new Star Trek trailer, it did have this one and I’m happy it did as it had the whole crowd laughing and smiling.

This third trailer for Up finally presents us with a bit of the adventure that the main characters go on in the film. The first trailer only showed the bitter 78-year old Carl Fredricksen launch his home into the skies with the use of balloons and him meeting Russell (the young boy scout).

Today we have a batch of new posters for your viewing pleasure for the upcoming movies X-Men Origins: Wolverine, State of Play and Disney Pixar’s Up.

To start, we have the French one-sheet for X-Men Origins: Wolverine which depicts Hugh Jackman as the fierce mutant re-enacting a scene from The Sound of Music (with his claws out mind you). Following that is the very generic poster for State of Play which lets us see the faces of its lead actors. And last but not least, three new posters for Up, each featuring one of the lead characters.

This past weekend I was lucky to have a chance to catch the first 45 minutes of Pixar’s new film Up. I was lucky because I had to beg my way in – the line was so long the IGN theater reached capacity immediately. Short of selling my soul, I was able to view a sneak peak of the film as well as a Q&A with the director Pete Docter and producer Jonas Rivera.

We’ve all heard stories of the insane amounts of money it costs to run TV spots during the Super Bowl ($3 million for a 30 second spot this year) but it’s certainly not stopping several of the major studios from debuting their highly-anticipated trailers during this year’s broadcast from Tampa Bay.

The following snippet from a Variety article lists the confirmed trailers:

As 2008 approaches its end and we think back on all the big films of the year, we must take time to look forward at what is to come. That is exactly what we will do now – And I don’t use the term “we” lightly as I enlisted the help of the entire Screen Rant team to help me share with you our individual and collective thoughts of what movies to look forward to in 2009.

We began the tradition last year with the most anticipated movies of 2008, and here’s your bright, shiny 2009 version!