Remember her? Busy Philips, the paradoxically big-boned and svelte ”Dawson’s Creek” alum, has a fun little supporting role in next week’s Patrick Dempsey comedy “Made of Honor,” playing a jealous bridesmaid who resents Dempsey’s guy-pal character for taking the coveted top-spot in her cousin’s matrimonial retinue.

She’s also a product of Chaparral High School, part of the Hollywood up-and-coming actor factory that is north Scottsdale. OK, you got me . . . “actor factory” exaggerates matters a bit, but Garrett Hedlund (”Troy”) went to nearby Horizon High. So it’s more of a boutique.

 One of the great, fringe benefits of going on vacation is catching up on the movies you missed whilst being away. It’s like going to prison and going hog-wild at all your favorite restaurants when you get out. Hey, we’ve all been there.

So I got back from the Canary Islands over the weekend and now I have to decide which of last week’s movies I’m going to see in my free time, off the clock. Judging from the abundantly hostile reviews it received, I think I’ll skip the Al Pacino thriller “88 Minutes,” which opened #4 at the box office with a measly $6.8 million haul.

“Forgetting Sarah Marshall” looks promising. Good reviews. Solid Judd Apatow-produced pedigree. The movie’s $18 million debut isn’t quite in the league of previous Apatow hits like “Superbad” ($33 million) and “Knocked Up” ($30 million), but it’s a fair sight better than “Drillbit Taylor” ($10 million).

Which leaves two other movies that opened in the greater Phoenix area: “Forbidden Kingdom” with Jet Li and Jackie Chan, and “Zombie Strippers” with Jenna Jameson. “Forbidding Kingdom” opened #1 at the box office and showcases two legends of martial arts on the same screen for the first time ever. “Zombie Strippers” showcases zombie strippers. You tell me what to do.

I did actually see a movie when I was on vacation, courtesy of a commercial-free BBC station. It was like low-rent “Fargo” with a dash of “Weekend at Bernie’s” and you can read about it at www.imdb.com

Tired of long movie reviews by brick-and-mortar critics like yours truly? Check out fourwordfilmreview.com, a website that invites movie fans to write their own reviews of today’s and yesterday’s top movies. The only restriction: They must be four words long.

 A quick perusal of the site yields haiku-like fan submissions alternately literal (”MITers hit, stay, count” for “21″), vagely profane (”Zellweger likes Clooney’s helmet” for “Leatherheads”) and genuinely clever (”Pachyderm protects pint-sized peeps”) for Horton.

 Naturally I had to write a few myself.

 ”Shine a Light”: “Skinny geezers rock on.”

“300″: “Male bikini bloodbath party.”

 ”Drillbit Taylor”: “My blond bi-polar bodyguard.”

 They’re probably a bit more fun to write than read.

 And with that, dear reader, I must bit temporary adieu, as I leave on vacation today for a far-off destination where I hope to see nary a computer keyboard or Martin Lawrence movie trailer. My blog will resume Monday, April 21.

 In the meantime, go check out “The Visitor” when it opens in the Valley on Friday, April 18.

 The fact that “Nim’s Island” is playing at Farrelli’s Cinema Supper Club might not, on the surface, seem unusual, but it represents a major step forward for the Scottsdale-based movie exhibitor. Until last week, Farrelli’s was limited to “intermediate” run movies - that is, movies that play a few weeks exclusively in the major chains (like Harkins Theatres and AMC) and then filter down to bargain theaters and specialty houses (like Farrelli’s).

It’s a hell of a handicap, but it could be lifting, thanks to 20^th Century Fox, which granted theater owner Wendy Farrelli first-run rights to “Nim’s Island.” Farrelli says she’s been fighting for years to procure “on the break” (i.e. opening day) films, against the wishes of Valley-based exhibitor giant Harkins. According to Farrelli, Harkins has successfully locked-out independent exhibitors from the first-run film market.

“One small step for Farrelli’s, one giant step for independent theaters everywhere,” Farrelli says.

The theater has changed some of its business policies to comply with first-run studio standards (the tickets, for instance, are slightly more expensive, and the theater is now open seven days a week) but the gamble seems to be paying off: Several of the “Nim’s Island” shows are already sold out. The movie runs at Farrelli’s until Thursday, April 17. (For screening information, visit cinemasupperclub.com.)

The Farrelli hook, of course, is that you can eat a meal and enjoy beverage service in a more comfortable setting (located just north of Thunderbird at 14202 N. Scottsdale Rd.). That affords Farrelli’s a unique market niche in the Valley… for now. In late 2009, Australia-based luxury exhibitor Village Roadshow Ltd. plans to open a theater in Scottsdale, complete with valet service, drink service, plush recliner chairs and $35 seats.

Game on.

The big movie news over the weekend wasn’t the tanking of George Clooney’s “Leatherheads,” but the passing of larger-than-life Hollywood icon Charleton Heston at age 84. Fascinating and controversial to the last, the star of “Ben-Hur” and “The Ten Commandments” kept his movie-star mystique long after the curtain dropped on his leading-man movie career. Eight years ago, I remember autograph-seekers and admirers turning out by the dozens when Heston appeared at a Scottsdale book store to promote his autobiography.  

Politically, Heston was a man of contradictions - the kind of old school, Goldwateresque libertarian who had no trouble reconciling his legacy as a civil rights activist, labor leader and steadfast champion of gun rights. I remember feeling not-especially-sorry for the guy when filmmaker Michael Moore media-mugged him in “Bowling for Columbine” - if Heston had the faculty and stamina to continue stumping for the NRA, shouldn’t he also be able to spar with his critics? - but now, after his death from Alzheimer’s-related complications, the encounter feels like an unfair, unsavory capstone to Heston’s film career. After all, Moore didn’t exactly catch him at his most robust.

Heston won his lone Oscar for “Ben-Hur,” but the incarnation of the actor that I most loved was that string of discomfited, angst-ridden heroes he played in the late 60s and early 70s, in such midnight-shelf genre classics as “Soylent Green,” “The Planet of the Apes,” “The Omega Man” and “Earthquake.” It’s sad, but I don’t think square-jawed, full-emoting masculine moutainoids like Heston are taken seriously in Hollywood anymore. (Look at the career Bruce Campbell has had to settle for.)

We’ll never see another chariot-racing, chapel-painting, ape-damning stud quite like him.

I wouldn’t put too much stock in reports this week that Madonna is trying to remake “Casablanca.”

Check that: I don’t doubt that the almost-50-year-old diva would happily sell Guy Ritchie into slavery to remake the 1943 wartime classic; I just don’t believe that any studio would be foolish enough to bankroll such a folly. Madonna’s credentials as an actress (”Swept Away,” etc.) are pretty much beyond salvage at this point, and no studio wants to be associated with a project that will be popularly perceived as an unholy boondoggle before the cameras even start rolling.

But is Madonna starring in a “Casablanca” remake the WORST movie-related idea ever? I can think of several others that are almost as bad, if not worse.

>> Mickey Rooney and Elisha Cuthbert in a shot-for-shot remake of “Last Tango in Paris.”

>> “Silence of the Lambs On Ice.”

>> Nora Ephron’s “Dawn of the Dead.”

>> Michael Bay, Simon Caldwell and Bill Cosby joining forces to start a Dreamworks SKG-style super-studio.

>> Stephen Baldwin IS Martin Luther King Jr.!

That being said, a “Casablanca”-style thriller-romance set in Iraq (as Madonna reportedly envisioned it) does hold certain appeal. Just not with Madonna.

 The Robert Luketic-directed card-counting thriller “21″ won the weekend box office race with an estimated $23 million haul, but it also claimed another, less enviable distinction: the year’s first bona fide racial lightning rod.

Incensed by the casting of non-Asian actors in the lead roles, a group of disgruntled movie fans has launched a grass roots Internet campaign to boycott the movie. There’s a “Boycott 21″ group at Facebook and scads of anti-”21″ chatter on the movie-themed website imdb.com. (To see the Facebook site, go to www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=24381965401&ref=mf.)

It all comes down to the casting of Jim Sturgess (”Across the Universe”) as MIT blackjack whiz Ben Campbell. The character was based, loosely, on real-life gambler Jeffrey Ma, who took Las Vegas casinos for hundreds of thousands of dollars as a member of MIT’s legendary blackjack team in the 1990s. Ma’s exploits were immortalized in the best-selling book “Bringing Down the House” by Ben Mezrich.

To put it bluntly: Sturgess’ casting feels like a slap in the face to some Asian-Americans, who object to a white actor playing a character based on a flesh-and-blood Chinese-American.

“Please help boycott this film and tell Hollywood that it’s okay to portray Asian-American men in lead roles,” the Facebook manifesto reads. The group also laments the paucity of Asian-Americans who are depicted in movies as “three-dimensional characters with personalities, feelings, and a sense of humor.”

Admittedly, Sturgess - a fair, slightly doughy British actor - hardly fits Ma’s physical profile. But in a movie so obviously fictionalized, so deeply and comprehensively contrived, the casting of Sturgess (and Kevin Spacey, in another role tangentially based on a real-life Asian-American) seems rather innocuous. Cynical, perhaps. Governed by a timid, bottom-line-based fixation on demographics, certainly. But “racist,” as many Internet chat-roomers have suggested? That’s a stretch. (See my largely-negative review of the movie at www.ocregister.com/articles/movie-review-card-2005231-counting-vegas.)

Still, I was surprised by the ferocity and indignation of some anti-”21″ comments. One boycotter asked white audiences to consider their reaction if Hollywood made a movie about the Boston Celtics in the 1980s and cast black actors to play Larry Bird and Kevin McHale. That’s an imperfect analogy - after all, Jim Sturgess isn’t literally portraying Jeffrey Ma, and the movie doesn’t specifically take place in the 1990s - but it still raises an interesting point. Tune into the World Series of Poker sometime. A disproportionate number of the top professional gamblers are Asian. That has to be a source of pride in the Asian-American community. And “21″ probably tramples on that.

More to the point, one can hardly dispute the argument that Asian-American actors are underrepresented in Hollywood, “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” notwithstanding. What is disputable, I think, is how much rage that warrants. Movies are important. But they’re not the end-all, be-all of cultural credibility and self-esteem. Asian actors passed over for the lead roles in “21″ is not exactly a “Birth of a Nation”-level affront.

Ask Jeffrey Ma. In a recent USA Today interview, the blackjack trailblazer dismissed the casting controversy: “I would have been a lot more insulted if they had chosen someone who was Japanese or Korean, just to have an Asian playing me.”

My advice to audiences: Skip “21″ because it’s trite, unrealistic and dull, not because of the race of the actors. And, in the meantime, let’s look forward to the day when Hollywood’s lowest-common-denominator approach to casting inches upward enough to routinely include Asian-American actors on the shortlist of leading men and women. Because it will happen. Boycotts or no.

One of the greatest joys of being a movie critic is walking into a screening for a film that you know nothing about, of which you have no preconceived notions, and being carried out to sea on a riptide of movie bliss. It was like for me when I saw ”Once” (the Irish musical-romance which took home Best Song at the most recent Oscars). I also remember feeling blindsided (in a good way) at the press screening for “The Sixth Sense,” directed by a then-unknown M. Night Shyamalan.

And I felt it yesterday when I saw “The Visitor,” an absolutely wonderful, exalting tale of friendship and transformation from director Thomas McCarthy (”The Station Agent”). It’s about loneliness. It’s about immigration. It’s about playing the bongos. And if you live in Greater Phoenix, you can see it on the opening night of the Phoenix Film Festival next week.   phoenixfilmfestival.org)

Of course, I’d like to go on and on about “The Visitor.” And I will, when the movie opens to a general audience on April 18.

Tyler Perry and his plus-sized alter ago Madea returned in “Meet the Browns,” but it was another large mammal - Horton the Elephant - that won the weekend box office. For the second straight week, “Horton Hears a Who!” was the top-grossing domestic movie, snorting up $24.6 million (”Meet the Browns” raked in $20.1).

Not that Perry is losing any sleep. The Atlanta-based filmmaker rules the under-served black-female movie dollar, cranking out two movies a year on average. (His next movie, “The Family That Preys” with Sanaa Lathan and Jennifer Hudson, is due for release in September.) It makes me wonder why we haven’t seen more copycats: urban soap operas with a strong faith-based component.

This time, Perry might have lost to an elephant, but 20 mil isn’t exactly peanuts.

Savvy filmgoers have learned to give a wide, skeptical berth to the so-called “stealth” release - those movies that studios withhold from critical evaluation, by simply not screening them. In recent weeks, that includes such inglorious titles as “Witless Protection” and “Saw IV.”

The rationale being, if a studio would surrender free publicity (or almost free - screening movies for critics nation-wide does require an outlay) just to keep the public from reading early reviews, the movie in question must be a turkey. And that’s pretty sound logic. But the issue might be more complicated than that.

Consider the two non-screened, non-reviewed movies opening this week: Tyler Perry’s “Meet the Browns” and the horror flick “Shutter.” Both of these movies have highly-focused, specific audiences. For “Meet the Browns,” the overwhelming demographic is the church-going/black-female audience. For “Shutter,” it’s the teen/young adult date crowd.

Now, I’m not a big fan of Perry. In fact, I found his breakout feature, “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” to be offensively mean-spirited and low-brow. But I am prepared to accept the supposition that his movies are no worse than much of the dreck that IS routinely screened for critics - movies like, say, “Over Her Dead Body.” I can’t say for sure. Lions Gate - the studio that distributes his films - no longer screens them for critics. And I can’t quite bring myself to watch them on my own time.

More to the point, Lions Gate knows that Perry’s audience is so niche-y, the benefit of having a review of “Meet the Browns” in an mainstream medium like a daily newspaper isn’t really relevant to its success. He could make the black “Citizen Kane.” It still might not get screened.

As for “Shutter,” well, that just looks lousy. Your guess is as good as mine.