The news broke over the weekend that Bell and Microsoft were shuttering Sympatico/MSN and preparing their own separate sites — but don’t worry, I’m fine.

As of today, I’m over at the shiny new MSN.ca. I’ll be doing my usual thing, covering movies and video and even doing the occasional television story, like this morning’s interview with James Kyson Lee from “Heroes”. (The new season? Expect twists!)

Oh, and MSN’s massive Fall Movie Preview? That’s mine, too.

The master link at the right of the page has been updated to reflect our new reality. Click away!

“The Final Destination” beat “Halloween II” by a considerable margin over the weekend, with New Line’s fourth kick at the deathtrap franchise grossing $28.3 million to the $17.4 million taken in by Rob Zombie’s slasher sequel. Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” dropped to second place with $20 million.

Curiously, after headlining the worldwide “Basterds” gross last week, Variety goes back to using domestic numbers for this weekend’s report. Which is weird, really, because “The Final Destination” also opened internationally, pulling in another $10.1 million from foreign screens. Variety doesn’t mention that number until about a third of the way down the page.

You know how I was half-kidding about the Weinsteins using their pernicious influence to get Variety to run with the larger number, just so they could wave the page around and impress people with the great big opening weekend they needed so badly? Now I’m just weirded out.

I can say nothing more. And you know, I don’t have to; he speaks for himself just fine.

Udo will be appearing at the Bloor Cinema tomorrow night at 7 pm for some sort of Q&A/”evening with” thing. You should probably go. It will be most entertaining.

You know, it’s almost a blessing when studios don’t screen movies for us at TIFF time; I really can’t imagine squeezing one more title onto my to-do list. “The Final Destination” and “Halloween II” will have to be left for others to tackle over the weekend … me, I’m looking towards next month.

Oh, and I haven’t seen “Black”, “Enlighten Up”, “Taking Woodstock” or “You Might As Well Live”, either. Yeah, I know, I suck.

I did see “Lorna’s Silence“, and liked it plenty, so if you need something to watch this weekend, get down to the Royal and enjoy. Or go see “The Hurt Locker” — that’s still around, right?

Now it can be told: At the 2008 Cannes film festival, I spent a very pleasant afternoon at the Unifrance pavillion with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who’d just premiered their new film “Le Silence de Lorna”.

About a year after the movie came to TIFF, it’s finally getting a commercial run, so I get to run the interview in today’s NOW — a nice little flashback to what seems like calmer times, in the middle of the frenzied rush to TIFF ’09.

Speaking of which …

What’s this? People are already making lists and debating their best films of the decade? For the love of Godard, it’s not even September — and if you want to get all pedantic about it, the decade doesn’t end until December 31, 2011. But good luck selling that one after all the foofaraw about the turn of the millennium.

Via The House Next Door, here’s a very animated liveblog about an unlikely contender for Best of the Decade status — Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence”, which I haven’t seen since the summer of 2001, and wasn’t much impressed with at the time.

Still, after considering the film through the articulate prisms of Keith Uhlich, Michael Joshua Rowlin and Kevin B. Lee, I’m ready to take another look. I can’t imagine it’ll unseat any of my current picks — “War of the Worlds” and “Munich” still top my Spielberg list for this decade — but, you know, never say never.

The weekend box office numbers have landed, and “Inglourious Basterds” has landed at the top of the heap with an entirely respectable domestic haul of $37.6 million.

But over at Variety, they’re using the worldwide gross instead, crowing that “Basterds” has opened with $65.1 million. This is objectively true, but it seems designed to frame the film’s success on a larger level than, say, last week’s “District 9”, which pulled in $37 million in North America — the only number used in Variety’s box-office summary last week.

Why the change? Does this mark a new style in Variety’s reporting of box-office numbers, now acknowledging that international numbers can be just as important — and sometimes even more so — than the North American take?

Or might this have something to do with The Weinstein Company’s naked desperation for a great big hit, as examined just last week in the New York Times? Because 65.1 is obviously a much larger number than 37.6, and even more so when you put “million” after it. And after the humiliation of “Grindhouse” a couple years back, it’s all about being back on top, for both for the Weinsteins and their favorite director.

I’m just saying. It’s kinda weird, isn’t it?

Ah, “Inglourious Basterds”, as problematic as you are provocative. (Seriously, just check out the comments being posted under my review.) And, like any Tarantino movie, you’re just about bursting with nods to the director’s influences — some Aldrich here, some Pabst there, and of course there’s always room for giallo.

With my latest Sympatico/MSN movie gallery, I do my part to break it down a little for the newbies. But I barely scratched the surface — I mean, the section on Dario Argento could just as well have been expanded to cover Mario Bava and Brian de Palma, too.

Oh, well. World enough, and time … and I have neither, at the moment. Don’t you know there’s a festival on?