Film

On any given day during the last several seasons you might have found five or six Eagles sprawled out in their locker stalls catching some midday zzzzs. In most cases, the players would build themselves a makeshift bed with pillow, their heads covered with a shirt or some other piece of clothing, their outstretched legs obstructing passage through the narrow lockerroom at the NovaCare Complex. There were other places to sleep - the lounge, the trainer's room - and, it seemed, plenty of opportunities for exhausted players to nap under Andy Reid.

Everybody wants to date Kate. Well, maybe not everybody, but a lot of guys working on Katie Holmes ' new flick Mania Days apparently have warm feelings for the fair Kate, the New York Post reports. A source tells the Post that Katie, 34, has received seven offers to step out: "They were crew members and extras just chancing it. It really got on the nerves of director Paul Dalio . Needless to say, she said no to everyone," the source said. Holmes has been unattached since sundering last year from Tom Cruise . The only mushy stuff for Kate has been strictly business, with costar Luke Kirby . They play manic depressives who fall in love in a psychiatric hospital.

Now that the Kimmel Center has disassembled the imaginary time machine that long dominated its lobby, the Gershman Y across the street has something closer to the real thing: The reconstituted 1918 film The Yellow Ticket , which was partly filmed in the later-razed Warsaw ghetto and was one of the first cinematic exposés of anti-Semitism. Now on a multicity tour with a live score by violinist Alicia Svigals, founder of the Klezmatics, The Yellow Ticket will be shown at 8 p.m. Thursday (copresented by the National Museum of American Jewish History)

Rarely has a film been so superfluous. The title of Syfy's silly diversion Jersey Shore Shark Attack really says it all. Jaws swallows JWoww. Bothering to actually watch this shabby spoof feels kind of redundant. Its one redeeming quality: It doesn't come within 100 miles of taking itself seriously. And the movie's easy, breezy, cheesy air can be rather winning. For about half an hour. Tops. You want the plot? You got it. It's Fourth of July weekend in the Jersey beach town of Seaside Heights.

It's rare, in the course of interviewing movie stars about their new film, that one of the actors leans over and smacks another in the head, then rips a soggy bagel out of his mouth. It's simply not done in most proper social settings, even among pampered film actors. But then, most movie stars aren't Jacob and Adam Worton, the blond, blue- eyed, 19-month-old identical twins who make their acting debuts - actually, their crawling, grinning and drooling debuts - in the new comedy Baby's Day Out. "WWAAAAAHHH!

"Today is Black Thursday," Channel 6 cameraman Bob Kravitz said yesterday, the day Saddam Hussein had threatened a "rain of fire. " After almost a week in Saudi Arabia, Kravitz and Action News reporter Dann Cuellar have decided to sleep during the day and remain awake at night because "that's when he starts peppering us with his Scuds," Kravitz said in a telephone interview from eastern Saudi Arabia. "This was the first morning we didn't get a 'wake-up' call. We call it Scud awake," he said.

Many parents in Evesham Township have found the recent curriculum changes in the K-8 district, which include the video That's a Family!, unacceptable. The reasons vary, and I can speak only to my own rationale. While I understand and support the schools' efforts to promote respect for all persons, the district circumvented this goal when it presented materials explicitly or implicitly endorsing one particular moral viewpoint over competing views. That's a Family! was produced not to encourage tolerance, but to aggressively advocate the normalization of homosexual behavior.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan deployed its army to protect diplomatic missions in Islamabad on Thursday amid some of the most sustained and violent protests yet against an American-made film that denigrates Muhammad. "We have to do everything we can to protect foreigners in the country," Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira told the GEO television channel, criticizing violence he said was an attempt to sabotage the government's call for peaceful rallies Thursday. "Is this the way to show respect to our Prophet?"

It's impossible. It's exhilarating. It's a quick fix. It's total immersion. It's that strange beast known as a film festival, a time to be surprised and startled, provoked and transported - and on occasion, to be bored or enraged. And it's a time to tear around town with your dog-eared, marked-up program guide - or your thumb-smeared calendar app - hustling to get to the next screening before the theater lights go dark. The 21st Philadelphia Film Festival began Thursday night with one of the strongest opening entries ever, and certainly the most Philly-centric: David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook . (The raw and rollicking Bradley Cooper/Jennifer Lawrence dramedy romance starts its theatrical run Nov. 21.)

The weeds are sky-high in Times Square. Deer run the avenues, hopscotching around abandoned cars. Mass graves fill Central Park. Manhattan, in the year 2012, is a ghost town. Not even Rudy Giuliani could save the place. But maybe Will Smith can. In I Am Legend , a big-budget adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 sci-fi novel (and two film versions: the 1964 Last Man on Earth and the 1971 Charlton Heston-starring Omega Man ), Smith plays Robert Neville, a military scientist who seems to be the last man in Manhattan.

Inside the former Collingswood Theatre, Tom Marchetty and Josh Longsdorf talk about assembling the cast of their new production. "We've got a photographer, a printmaker, a guy who makes portable power systems, and a woman who's got her own clothing line," Marchetty says. "We're looking for innovators," Longsdorf adds. "People who are passionate about what they do. " The 1,200-seat Haddon Avenue movie house, which was renovated decades ago for other commercial uses, reopened in January as the Factory Workers ("the Factory" for short)

Now that the Kimmel Center has disassembled the imaginary time machine that long dominated its lobby, the Gershman Y across the street has something closer to the real thing: The reconstituted 1918 film The Yellow Ticket , which was partly filmed in the later-razed Warsaw ghetto and was one of the first cinematic exposés of anti-Semitism. Now on a multicity tour with a live score by violinist Alicia Svigals, founder of the Klezmatics, The Yellow Ticket will be shown at 8 p.m. Thursday (copresented by the National Museum of American Jewish History)

Repertory Films Adventure Aquarium 1 Aquarium Dr., Camden; 1-866-451-2782. www.adventureaquarium.com . 4D Theater. $22.95; $19.95 children 2-12. Ambler Theater 108 E. Butler Ave., Ambler; 215-345-7855. www.amblertheater.com . M (Germany, 1931) $9.75; $7.25 seniors, students and children 17 and under. 5/16. 7:30 pm. The Barnes Foundation-Philadelphia 2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy.; 215-278-7000. www.barnesfoundation.org . ArtKids at the Movies: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

In even the most functional family, there can be a painful something that triggers a strong emotional response, despite the passage of time. For the Benders, it's the digital camera. "Digital killed the family business," Ben Bender says. Yet digital just might be the route to a family-business revival, as well. Bender has become the region's only franchise owner for TapSnap, a social-media-equipped replacement for the party photo booth. To fully appreciate this cycle of commercial irony - a primary motivator of which was his cancer scare three years ago - a little history is required.

With legendary film auteur John Cassavetes as their father and Oscar-nominated actor Gena Rowlands as their mom, it must have seemed inevitable that at least one of the Cassavetes children would become a filmmaker. But all three? Alexandra "Xan" Cassavetes laughs when asked if film was a destiny pre-written for the Cassavetes brood: The 47-year-old writer-director's brother Nick, 53, and sister Zoe, 42, are also directors. Cassavetes this week follows up her 2004 documentary, Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession with the vampire love story Kiss of the Damned . "I didn't plan to be a director until I was 35. For years I wanted to do anything but!"

Deanna Durbin, 91, whose songs and smile made her one of the biggest box-office draws of Hollywood's Golden Age with fans that included Winston Churchill, died last month outside Paris, where she had lived out of public view since 1949. The exact date of her death was unclear, and family friend Bob Koster, whose father, Henry, directed six of her films, also did not know the cause. At the height of her career, the Canada-born Miss Durbin, who made her first feature, Three Smart Girls, at 13, was among the highest-paid actresses.

Chaos was in the air Thursday night in Doylestown. About 5:30, two hours before a locally produced film about a runaway slave, The North Star, was set to premiere at the County Theater, the star and director were missing. The star, former Eagles linebacker Jeremiah Trotter, was stuck in traffic. He was supposed to greet fans and media at Rob's Bar before heading down State Street in a horse and buggy, but was behind schedule. The director, Thomas Phillips, who wrote the script and shot the movie in his home county of Bucks, faced a bigger predicament.

In the 1840s, Benjamin "Big Ben" Jones of Baltimore was a fugitive slave living in Bucks County. The mountainous Jones - nearly seven feet tall, according to historical accounts - made friends in the region, but in 1844, he was caught by his slave master and forced to return to Maryland. Those friends from Buckingham, however, helped him return. After raising about $700, they bought Jones' freedom, bringing him back to Bucks County, where he lived until his death. Jones' dramatic life has been recounted in books and historical exhibits, and now will be brought to the screen in The North Star , a biopic set to debut at theaters in Doylestown and Newtown this week.

The city's first film festival aimed at children and a family art-making festival run in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts are among the 21 projects funded through the PNC Arts Alive initiative, which is concluding the $5 million program's five-year life with this round of grants. Over the course of the five years, Arts Alive has awarded 122 grants to 55 arts organizations in the Philadelphia and South Jersey region. "The creativity of Philadelphia's arts sector is clearly evident in the innovative programs by PNC Arts Alive grantees," Bill Mills, PNC regional president for Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey, said in a statement.