Depp is far from the first movie star to express literary inclinations. The most typical venture in this realm, particularly for actors whose careers are a bit off the boil, is to come out with a children's book. Jamie Lee Curtis and John Lithgow have written several well-received picture books, but everyone from Jay Leno and John Travolta to Whoopie Goldberg, Julianne Moore and Madonna has given it a shot. And why not? At a couple of thousand words tops, the actual writing doesn't appear terribly taxing, and the best illustrator money can buy will be enlisted to make up for any deficiencies. Even Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista resistance movement in Chiapas, found time to write a kids' book while fighting off the Mexican government.

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Depp will help run a publishing imprint with the same name as his production company, Infinitum Nihil, meaning "Nothing is forever." Already on the list of books is "The Unraveled Tales of Bob Dylan," which aims to set the record straight on the songwriter's enigmatic life and career and will be based in part on interviews with Dylan by best-selling historian Douglas Brinkley.

The imprint will be part of HarperCollins Publishers, which announced Monday that Depp will seek "authentic, outspoken and visionary ideas and voices."

"I pledge, on behalf of Infinitum Nihil, that we will do our best to deliver publications worthy of peoples' time, of peoples' concern, publications that might ordinarily never have breached the parapet," Depp said in a statement released by HarperCollins. "For this dream realized, we would like to salute HarperCollins for their faith in us and look forward to a long and fruitful relationship together."

Brinkley, who recently wrote a cover story on Dylan for Rolling Stone, said he and Depp thought the Dylan book was "the ideal way" to inaugurate the Infinitum Nihil series.

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In September 2011, Alison Whelan commandeered the Dart Princess on the River Dart in Devon, England. According to the BBC, "she had been drinking for two days and was eating hallucinogenic deadly nightshade, which is poisonous, magistrates were told."

Whelan, of course, was channeling the Johnny Depp character Captain Jack Sparrow, from the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies.

It took police about an hour to chase down and recover the boat, though in the process Whelan crashed it into two other boats, the Force Majeure and the Tomcat.

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Johnny Depp is not the problem. But the entertainment industry is so bloated and reckless that it can pay him $50 million in the last year alone. Depp just shrugs: "If they're going to pay me the stupid money right now, I'm going to take it." But in the midst of economic collapse, it's time to stop paying Johnny Depp stupid money. It's time to Occupy Hollywood.

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Where is the money going, you ask? Well, originally it was going to pay for all the werewolves.

Yes, werewolves.  The Lone Ranger and Tonto were going to fight werewolves.

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When Johnny Depp blabbed in the new issue of Vanity Fair that he loathes doing photo shoots -- "You just feel like you're being raped somehow. Raped. The whole thing. It feels like a kind of weird,  just weird, man" -- the actor opened up a fat can of worms. Turns out some people don't believe getting your picture taken by Annie Leibovitz is very much like sexual assault at all. "Whenever you have a photo shoot or something like that, it's like -- you just feel dumb," he said. "It's just so stupid." Yeah, rape is so dopey.

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This might change with "Turtleneck and Chain," especially after this weekend's mind-blowing performance with Michael Bolton for the "SNL" digital short "Jack Sparrow." I've been singing this song nonstop for the past 48 hours straight. It's some of the group's best work, and I'm pretty sure it's the best thing to happen to Michael Bolton's name since "Office Space." If you haven't seen the video, you need to fix that immediately:

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But even before the journey begins, the journalist's 10-year-old son has joked that she's decided to fall in love with James, and her behavior around him is oddly imperious and demanding. When a cafe proprietor in some picturesque village makes the obvious assumption -- that she and James are married -- Binoche's character pounces on it: It's been 15 years, my husband works all the time, I never see him, we fight a lot. James returns from making a phone call to persons unknown (perhaps his real wife or girlfriend) and gradually gets dragged into the game. As the pair continue their odyssey through a Tuscan afternoon, sparring like a couple who really have been together 15 years, the movie's real question comes into focus: How does a forgery or copy of a relationship compare with the so-called real thing?

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In recent decades, as the kidult, media-saturated generations raised since the '70s have grown in consumption power and produced their own offspring, the polarity of animated films has gradually but decisively shifted. This week's premiere of "Rango," a grotesque and sometimes thrilling mishmash that announces the arrival of "Pirates of the Caribbean" director Gore Verbinski and George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic studio into the animation wars, offers an intriguing case in point. With Johnny Depp voicing the title character, a lost pet chameleon who must save a parched Old West-style town from the depredations of water barons and developers, "Rango" is a chaotic assault of in-jokes and movie quotes, pilfering its plot from "Chinatown" and individual scenes from "Rio Bravo" and "Shane" and "High Noon," and adding a surprising (for the genre) amount of violence and grisly humor. (My 6-year-old son pronounced it "great," although roughly three-quarters of it was over his head.)

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Johnny Depp and Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" took in $34.5 million to remain the No. 1 movie for a third-straight weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday.

The Disney release raised its domestic haul to $265.8 million and its worldwide total to $565.8 million after just three weekends in theaters, a huge result for a film playing in the typically slow month of March.

"You rarely see this kind of domination by one movie at this time of year," said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com. "Normally at this time of year, films don't make this kind of money, and they don't hold in this long."

"Alice in Wonderland" easily beat a rush of new movies led by 20th Century Fox's family film "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," which opened at No. 2 with $21.8 million. The movie is adapted from Jeff Kinney's cartoon novel about a sixth grader maneuvering through the intricate social structure at his middle school, which includes its own "cooties" game known as the "cheese touch."

"I think cheese touch equals magic touch at the box office," said Chris Aronson, head of distribution at 20th Century Fox.

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Johnny Depp and Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" easily remained the No. 1 weekend draw with $62 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. The Disney fantasy has climbed to a $208.6 million total domestically, becoming the first $200 million hit released this year.

In its second weekend in theaters, "Alice in Wonderland" pulled ahead of the $206.5 million domestic haul of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" to become the top-grossing of Depp and Burton's seven films together, which include "Edward Scissorhands," "Sweeney Todd" and "Corpse Bride."

"I believe it's literally the magical, if you would, pairing of Tim and Johnny," said Chuck Viane, head of distribution for Disney. "When you take those two, they always seem to make something really out of the ordinary."

"Alice in Wonderland" added $76 million overseas to bring its international total to $221 million and its worldwide gross to $430 million.

A rush of new movies had so-so openings, led by Matt Damon's Iraq War thriller "Green Zone," which debuted at No. 2 with $14.5 million domestically. Released by Universal, "Green Zone" stars Damon as the leader of a U.S. Army team who stumbles onto a conspiracy over the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

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Despite the mixed reviews and word of mouth, the Scorsese thriller is still the only real event movie out there for people who don't need a return trip to Pandora. While I didn't care for "Shutter Island" one bit, I am heartened that a moody, complicated, two-hour-plus, non-sequel, R-rated thriller from Martin Scorsese is a genuine smash hit. In this day and age, it's always refreshing to see an adult-driven genre picture to reach heights only usually accorded to franchises and animated films. The picture is Scorsese's fifth-biggest domestic grosser, and will reach no. 3 on that list by next weekend. Whether or not it can surpass the $132 million earned by "The Departed" is an open question, but it won't have any demo competition until "The Green Zone." That Bourne-goes-to-Baghdad thriller opens March 12. (I have no idea if that's an accurate summary, by the way, but it's sure how the Paul Greengrass/Matt Damon film is being sold by Universal).

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On May 5, 1993, three little boys were mutilated and murdered in the West Memphis, Ark., woods, a crime that had the hallmarks not just of unspeakable brutality but also the guise of ritual.

Soon after, three teenage boys were arrested for the killings. The young suspects, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, had the misfortune of being black-clad, Stephen King reading, heavy metal fans. They were convicted, and have now spent almost half their lives behind bars. Echols is currently on death row.

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Variety reports that Judd Apatow and Paul Feig, the duo responsible for the much-celebrated "Freaks and Geeks," are set to produce a new film starring Kristen Wiig of "Saturday Night Live," who also co-wrote the screenplay. Apatow will handle producing duties, while Feig will direct the movie rumored to be about "women competing to plan a friend's wedding party."

In other movie-collaboration news, it turns out Scorsese and von Trier are not discussing plans to make an updated version of "Taxi Driver." The gossip gaining strength throughout the hype-incubator known as the Internet is "unequivocally false," said Scorsese’s publicist, Leslee Dart.

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Gilliam was in town to promote yet another of his troubled projects with a tortuous production history. As he put it in our conversation, every film he makes becomes a film about the making of a film. The one-time Monty Python member has had collapses, aborted projects and problem-plagued productions before, from his underappreciated box-office bomb "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" to his failed efforts to adapt Alan Moore's "Watchmen" to an unproduced "Time Bandits 2" script to "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote," which was shut down after a week of filming in 1999. (Gilliam and Johnny Depp still hope to make that film.)

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But in practice, Terry Gilliam is too often simply exhausting. He has made some marvelous pictures -- among them the melancholy apocalyptic ballad "12 Monkeys" and the openhearted urban fable "The Fisher King" -- that are far from perfect, and yet whose flaws perhaps make them more compelling, rather than less; one thing that's never lacking in Gilliam's movies is the human touch.

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