Happy Truck Day! With pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training in a matter of days, there’s no better time for Steven Soderbergh to announce his umpteen-zillionth project in development, Moneyball. Soderbergh is adapting the nonfiction baseball classic by Michael Lewis that “focuses on Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics who used a sophisticated computer analysis system to piece together a team that regularly contended for the World Series despite a payroll dramatically lower than such big-market rivals as the New York Yankees,” Variety reports. Brad Pitt is lined up to play Beane, and Joe Morgan has already vowed not to see the movie. We assume.

If there are two more romantic words than “The Baster,” I can’t imagine what they’d be.

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Last week I weighed in with my top 10 unwatchables of 2008. When it comes to terrible movies, I feel my credentials are impeccable. And yet the New York magazine culture blog Vulture failed to contact me when compiling their critics’ survey of the worst movies 2008 had to offer. Still, I am willing to overlook this slight, since all of us who endured The Love Guru are part of one traumatized brother-and-sisterhood. “But what about the awful films of 2008? Who will remember them? The Shyamalanian disasters, the failed epics, the oeuvre of Al Pacino? Who will tell us which, of the 300-plus films shat out by Hollywood this year, was truly the most awful?... We've undertaken the most comprehensive survey of crappy movies ever, contacting dozens of major critics and asking them for their least-favorite stinkers, turkeys, botches, catastrophes, and fiascoes.”

The list is amusing enough, but it’s the critics’ comments that make this exercise truly worthwhile.

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This week brings the release of several new Criterions, the latest DVD from a blogosphere favorite, and a box-set tribute to a late, great British director.

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Say what you will about the 10,000 B.C. director (and we have), but at least the man knows his station in the movie universe. “I'm making movies for the masses,” says Roland Emmerich in a recent interview with The Guardian. “These movies are expensive. A lot of people have to see it, like it and come back. If you start making movies for film critics, you've lost.”

If there’s one thing nobody has ever accused Emmerich of doing, it’s making movies for film critics. But of course, everyone is a critic, including Emmerich’s own mother, who did not particularly care for the director’s breakthrough hit, Universal Soldier.

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Roland Emmerich's new movie, 10,000 B.C., opens wide this Friday, and advance reports are... well, advance reports are that it stinks on ice age. Maybe it's because of the script and production problems Emmerich has been complaining about to anyone who will listen, or maybe it's the no-name cast, or maybe it's that Roland Emmerich is a giant hack who can't figure out how to make a movie where he can't blow things up with a fighter jet. But whatever the case, the only interesting thing about the movie so far is the hilariously overwrought internet message board debates it's spawned between atheists offended by the use of the term "B.C." and Christians offended by the portrayal of human evolution.

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Much as it pains us to admit this, the Screengrab is not the only online source of movie lists. Certainly we’re the best, but occasionally someone else on the world wide Interweb will take a crack at it. With the release of Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 BC looming, MSNBC’s Christopher Bahn has assembled a list of 11 great prehistoric flicks.

Right off the bat, we’ve got to call shenanigans on Bahn’s inclusion of Land of the Lost.

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Roland Emmerich makes noisy crap that's entertaining when it isn't being too noisy and crappy. Take, for example, Independence Day. Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum firing a nuclear missile into a spaceship the size of the moon and screaming "PEACE!" is awesome, but Emmerich ruins the moment with a screen full of yelling Randy Quaid heads ten minutes later. 10,000 B.C., unlike Emmerich's other movies, is Quaid-less all around, so it's off to a promising start. But this trailer is odd. It looks like Mel Gibson trying to remake Stargate. And why are all these cavemen so pretty? Only one movie is allowed to have pretty cavemen, and that's Encino Man. — John Constantine