NEW YORK - The mid-movie dash to the restroom can turn us into calculating Hussein Bolt wannabes: Ah, this looks like a lull — time to dash.

When we return to our seats, we pray the answer to "What did I miss?" isn't "Darth Vader is really Luke's father" or "the girlfriend is a really guy."

The Web site RunPee.com can help with such anxious guess work.

The site provides recommended opportunities to race to the restroom. It tells you when the action or romance wanes, and gives you a cue ("Baby O.J. is taken from Bruno") for your exit.

The site tells you how long you've got and even summarizes what you missed. Since early July, RunPee.com is available as an iPhone app, too.

Launched last August, RunPee took off earlier this summer. It's been one of the season's runaway hits — a clever idea that has spawned a lot of word-of-mouth from moviegoers.

"Helping your bladder enjoy going to the movies as much as you do," the site boasts.

It was created by Dan Florio, a 42-year-old Flash developer who got the idea during the three-hour-plus "King Kong" remake in 2005.

Florio, who lives in Orlando, Fla., with his wife, does everything for the site, though he gets some help from his wife and his mother. He's become a regular opening day attendee of movies, busily taking notes in the back row.

On Friday, he's planning a double-feature of "Funny People" — which runs nearly 2 1/2 hours — and "Aliens in the Attic."

"I never intended to refocus my energies on this," says Florio. "And I never thought that I'd be seeing every single movie that comes out, either."

The site averages 3,000-6,000 visitors a day, Florio says. The iPhone app is available on iTunes for $1. It's not a huge moneymaker (Florio estimates he'll make $800 this month) but is providing him a little extra cash.

He believes that not only do moviegoers benefit from the service, but theater owners do, too.

"Lots and lots of people comment: `Ah! I can get that 64-ounce drink now!'" Florio says.

Florio designed the site to be wiki-based with break times submitted by users, but it's turned out that he's done most of the work. Finding the right moments and recording the correct time is more work than it might sound — most moviegoers leave their stopwatches at home.

"It's not fun," says Florio. "I would literally have to pay someone to do this."

Generally, the better the movie is, the harder it is to find a break. The 96-minute "Up," for example, is one film where no bathroom break is advisable. But there are suggested options — after all, movies that children flock to are the kind where bathroom breaks are often unavoidable.

There are, of course, limits to the usefulness of RunPee. But it's also found friends in cyberspace like WhereToWee.com , a site in the works that tells you where the nearest restroom is. Ap

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - A partial list of this summer's best box-office bets: Optimus Prime, Manny the Woolly Mammoth and Meryl Streep.

It's understandable if that prompts a double take, but the actress most synonymous with Oscar quietly has become one of the most reliable warm-weather draws at the multiplex. Streep, who turned 60 in June, drummed up nearly $1 billion in worldwide revenue from her previous two summer outings: Fox's "The Devil Wears Prada" in 2006 and Universal's "Mamma Mia!" in 2008.

She puts that streak on the line next weekend when Columbia's "Julie & Julia" opens opposite Paramount's testosterone fest "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra."

The female- and food-friendly pic, tracking to open in the $20 million range domestically, with older females driving interest, could solidify her status as the industry's only serious veteran actress who, in the right vehicle, can carry a midbudget movie to blockbuster status.

With movie-star reliability continuing to buckle and such younger male actors as Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell and Jack Black recently receiving the back of the hand from audiences, Streep's success in nontraditional summer fare is delicious indeed. It was enough that Forbes recently listed her among the industry's top female moneymakers. By the magazine's estimation, Streep placed behind only Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston in 2008 with income of $24 million.

"Isn't that magnificent?" Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chairman Amy Pascal says. "It's just awesome. It makes us all really happy."

ACADEMY ACCOLADES

Sony (Columbia's parent company), which has fielded some notable underperformers this summer, is banking on an actress who has been nominated for 15 acting Oscars -- 12 lead and three supporting. On average, that's one every other year from 1979 ("The Deer Hunter") to 2009 ("Doubt"). She won statuettes for supporting turns in "Kramer vs. Kramer" (1980) and for her lead performance in "Sophie's Choice" (1983).

HAVANA (Reuters) - Hollywood came to Havana on Thursday as Cuban writers and artists gave an award to Benicio del Toro, star of the 2008 movie "Che," in a ceremony attended by fellow actors Bill Murray, Robert Duvall and James Caan.

Murray stole the show when he improvised a version of the song "As Time Goes By," then jokingly passed around a hat, asking for money.

Their presence lent a bit of Hollywood glitz to warming U.S.-Cuba relations, and may have been the precursor for the making of a film in Cuba.

A spokesman for the group said del Toro was in town for the award, but that Murray, Duvall and Caan were working on a "research project.

When asked if he and his pals might make a movie on the communist-led island, del Toro told reporters: "That depends on the governments, on the American government."

Because of the long-standing U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, Americans have been forbidden, with some exceptions, from visiting the island or doing most business there.

Hollywood stars such as Robert Redford, Arnold Schwarzenegger and director Steven Spielberg have come to Cuba in the past but cultural exchanges slowed due to restrictions imposed by former U.S. President George W. Bush.

The group's spokesman said they were traveling under a license granted by the U.S. Treasury Department.

U.S. President Barack Obama offered earlier this year to "recast" relations with Cuba, which have been sour since the 1959 revolution that put Fidel Castro in power.

Obama has lifted travel restrictions for Cuban Americans and restarted immigration talks with Cuba that were suspended under Bush.

Last week, the United States said a Bush-era news ticker on the U.S. Interests Section building in Havana, which the Cuban government viewed as an affront, had been turned off.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A tense new film shows Japanese fishermen luring thousands of wild dolphins into a hidden secret cove in Japan where activists say they are captured for marine amusement parks or slaughtered for food.

"The Cove" follows a team of activists including former dolphin trainer from the "Flipper" television series Ric O'Barry.

They battle Japanese police and fisherman to gain access to a cove in Taiji, Japan, where barbed wire blocks people from filming dolphin killings that begin in September each year.

The documentary opens in the United States on Friday but has yet to receive distribution in Japan, where O'Barry says 23,000 dolphins and porpoises are legally killed each year.

The Japanese government said it has done nothing wrong and cites cultural differences in response to the film.

Dolphin meat is eaten by a very small percentage of Japanese people.

The film has already been praised by critics and won the audience award at this year's Sundance Film Festival. "Eco-activist documentaries don't get much more compelling than 'The Cove'," said Variety's review.

O'Barry, who has been visiting Taiji several times a year for the past eight years and now wears disguises in the town to avoid the attention of fisherman and the police, predicted the film would have a big impact.

"When the film is seen in Japan, it will shut 'the cove' down permanently," he said in a recent interview.

The 69-year-old says he began fighting against the captivity of dolphins when one of the dolphins he trained for the hit 1960s television show "Flipper" voluntarily stopped breathing until it died.

"Ric is a hero," said the film's director, Louie Psihoyos, who has photographed for National Geographic magazine. "He had success, he had fame, he had money and he turned his back on all of that to follow his conscience."