Fandango

Comcast Corp. announced plans yesterday to acquire Fandango, an online seller of movie tickets, and to launch Fancast.com, a Web site that aims to help users find, watch and organize video content. Comcast and Fandango did not disclose a price. Comcast, already the country's largest cable-television company, with 24 million customers, has increasingly been looking to Hollywood and to the online world to build its empire. The company aims to keep consumers connected to Comcast, whether they choose to watch movies, shows and related content on cable TV, at a movie theater, or on a Web site.

Harry Potter tickets, anyone? If the panicky predictions of Hollywood pundits and showbiz analysts are anything to go by - not to mention the choruses of "Mommy-Daddy-can-we-see-Harry-Potter-the-very-second-it-comes-out?" - a little motion picture is going to do very big business next weekend. Which means long lines and sell-outs for many of the 3,500 theaters where the hugely anticipated, Chris Columbus-directed adaptation of the mega-selling J.K. Rowling book will be playing.

With its challenge to encompass the big-band sound of the score with a cast of thousands, Ravel's Bolero has always brought out the audacious in choreographers. In Fandango, which premiered Tuesday at the City Center, Lar Lubovitch audaciously goes counter to the customary route of mass undulation: Against the massive score, he pits merely a man and woman in an intimate tete- a-tete. The gamble works like a charm. Lubovitch bypasses the musical scale of Bolero to strike directly at its Mediterranean sensuousness.

May the force be with you as you attempt to snag tickets to tomorrow night's midnight screenings of Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Star Wars obsessives have already bought out the 12:01 a.m. Thursday showings of George Lucas' second prequel at theaters including the UA RiverView Stadium 17, AMC Marple 10, and AMC Marlton 8, among the dozen or so vying to be the area's first to screen Clones on opening day. "We're one of the theaters that still has . . . tickets because we didn't know we were going to get a midnight show until [last]

Harry Potter. . . . Bella Swan. . . . Katniss Everdeen? If the bespectacled boy wizard of the Harry Potter books and films and the sulky high schooler-turned-vampire-wife of the Twilight Saga have long been imprinted in the collective consciousness, is it now time for the teenage heroine of The Hunger Games to join them? With the Suzanne Collins book perched atop the children's and young-adult best-seller lists pretty much since its publication in late 2008, and with advance ticket sales for the $100 million Lionsgate film adaptation - opening at Friday - outpacing the inaugural Harry Potter, there are strong indications that Ms. Everdeen is indeed heading for that rarefied realm of pop iconography.

Thousands of Americans will go to bed tomorrow night without their Hannah Montana. Tickets for the highly anticipated 3-D concert film Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert, which opens tomorrow, are almost as hard to come by as actual concert tickets were for the 2007 sold-out tour of the then-14-year-old Miley Ray Cyrus. "Over a thousand showtimes are already sold out across the country," said Harry Medved of the online ticket agency Fandango. He said the film has been a top seller since tickets became available on Dec. 1, and is the best-selling concert film in Fandango's seven-year history.

The process goes by an innocuous-sounding name, data pass, but it allowed something that congressional investigators found disturbingly deceptive: Online consumers were being billed for goods or services without ever intentionally providing their credit-card numbers. Visa Inc. announced Tuesday that it would clamp down on data pass among companies that accept its credit cards - six months after a report by the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee estimated that the tactic had cheated 35 million consumers out of more than $1.4 billion in the last decade.

The Please Touch Museum in Memorial Hall will launch its Rainforest Rhythm exhibit and welcome back its Annual Junior Jazz Festival on Saturday. Stretching 2,800-square feet, Rainforest Rhythm will replace the seasonal Enchanted Colonial Village exhibit in the museum's River Adventures zone. The new music-themed exhibit, open through Nov. 25, was created to give visitors a sensory rain-forest experience. While there, families can interact with a display of singing frogs, feel the texture of a nine-foot forest snake replica and listen to stories in the Storybook Cottage.

After an epic buildup, Mel Gibson's bloody blockbuster about the death of Jesus hits the nation's movie houses this week, a cultural moment driven by controversy, curiosity, and red-hot ticket sales. The official opening of The Passion of the Christ is Wednesday - Ash Wednesday - though many of Gibson's grassroots Christian supporters are getting special sneak previews tomorrow and Tuesday. Hundreds of church groups from Philadelphia to Arkadelphia have rented theaters for the private showings.

It is quite likely that the better team won the first game of the East Regional last night at the Spectrum. Certainly Kentucky, the old, established firm, freed at last from the shackles of NCAA punishment, looked strong and deep, sending in substitutes in waves, playing all 94 feet with pugnaciousness and aggression. UMass is the challenger, just the least bit cheeky and chesty, and with good reason. The Minutemen ended a 30-year absence from the NCAA tournament this year with a year unlike any other in their history.

Harry Potter. . . . Bella Swan. . . . Katniss Everdeen? If the bespectacled boy wizard of the Harry Potter books and films and the sulky high schooler-turned-vampire-wife of the Twilight Saga have long been imprinted in the collective consciousness, is it now time for the teenage heroine of The Hunger Games to join them? With the Suzanne Collins book perched atop the children's and young-adult best-seller lists pretty much since its publication in late 2008, and with advance ticket sales for the $100 million Lionsgate film adaptation - opening at Friday - outpacing the inaugural Harry Potter, there are strong indications that Ms. Everdeen is indeed heading for that rarefied realm of pop iconography.

Worst Romantic Comedy Actress 1. Sarah Jessica Parker: 27% 2. Mandy Moore: 15% 3. Katherine Heigl: 15% 4. Jennifer Lopez: 13% 5. Jessica Alba: 10% Worst Romantic Comedy Actor 1. Ashton Kutcher: 27% 2. Adam Sandler TIED WITH Dane Cook: 21% 3. Freddie Prinze Jr.: 10% 4. Matthew Perry: 10% 5. Ben Affleck: 10%

The process goes by an innocuous-sounding name, data pass, but it allowed something that congressional investigators found disturbingly deceptive: Online consumers were being billed for goods or services without ever intentionally providing their credit-card numbers. Visa Inc. announced Tuesday that it would clamp down on data pass among companies that accept its credit cards - six months after a report by the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee estimated that the tactic had cheated 35 million consumers out of more than $1.4 billion in the last decade.

The Please Touch Museum in Memorial Hall will launch its Rainforest Rhythm exhibit and welcome back its Annual Junior Jazz Festival on Saturday. Stretching 2,800-square feet, Rainforest Rhythm will replace the seasonal Enchanted Colonial Village exhibit in the museum's River Adventures zone. The new music-themed exhibit, open through Nov. 25, was created to give visitors a sensory rain-forest experience. While there, families can interact with a display of singing frogs, feel the texture of a nine-foot forest snake replica and listen to stories in the Storybook Cottage.

Thousands of Americans will go to bed tomorrow night without their Hannah Montana. Tickets for the highly anticipated 3-D concert film Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert, which opens tomorrow, are almost as hard to come by as actual concert tickets were for the 2007 sold-out tour of the then-14-year-old Miley Ray Cyrus. "Over a thousand showtimes are already sold out across the country," said Harry Medved of the online ticket agency Fandango. He said the film has been a top seller since tickets became available on Dec. 1, and is the best-selling concert film in Fandango's seven-year history.

Comcast Corp. announced plans yesterday to acquire Fandango, an online seller of movie tickets, and to launch Fancast.com, a Web site that aims to help users find, watch and organize video content. Comcast and Fandango did not disclose a price. Comcast, already the country's largest cable-television company, with 24 million customers, has increasingly been looking to Hollywood and to the online world to build its empire. The company aims to keep consumers connected to Comcast, whether they choose to watch movies, shows and related content on cable TV, at a movie theater, or on a Web site.

After an epic buildup, Mel Gibson's bloody blockbuster about the death of Jesus hits the nation's movie houses this week, a cultural moment driven by controversy, curiosity, and red-hot ticket sales. The official opening of The Passion of the Christ is Wednesday - Ash Wednesday - though many of Gibson's grassroots Christian supporters are getting special sneak previews tomorrow and Tuesday. Hundreds of church groups from Philadelphia to Arkadelphia have rented theaters for the private showings.

Even those who know next to nothing about the workings of the New York Stock Exchange and even less about its ex-leader, Richard Grasso, probably still have a good hunch why he was forced out. It was about greed. Americans don't need to be experts at business to grasp that the pay levels for people such as Grasso and other captains of modern industry have outstripped both reality and morality. In Grasso's case, the eye-popping pay deal was a deferred compensation and retirement package totaling $139.

May the force be with you as you attempt to snag tickets to tomorrow night's midnight screenings of Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Star Wars obsessives have already bought out the 12:01 a.m. Thursday showings of George Lucas' second prequel at theaters including the UA RiverView Stadium 17, AMC Marple 10, and AMC Marlton 8, among the dozen or so vying to be the area's first to screen Clones on opening day. "We're one of the theaters that still has . . . tickets because we didn't know we were going to get a midnight show until [last]

Harry Potter tickets, anyone? If the panicky predictions of Hollywood pundits and showbiz analysts are anything to go by - not to mention the choruses of "Mommy-Daddy-can-we-see-Harry-Potter-the-very-second-it-comes-out?" - a little motion picture is going to do very big business next weekend. Which means long lines and sell-outs for many of the 3,500 theaters where the hugely anticipated, Chris Columbus-directed adaptation of the mega-selling J.K. Rowling book will be playing.