Folks, the penis enlargement emails are encroaching once again in my email. Not content to merely stay in my Bulk Mail folder, which can only mean it's time for another week's worth of Box Office duke-em-outs! Does size really matter, ladies? Isn't an arms race as such fundamentally dangerous? Shouldn't we as a nation be more obsessed with the proverbial motion of the ocean? Maybe someday we'll turn the tide, if only for the sake of the melting polar ice caps, but there I go mexing my mitaphors again, I'm afraid.
Meanwhile a cabal of mathematicians at Palo Alto finally solved the Lie group E8 math puzzle. Kinda makes me wish I visited the Lie group E8 websites before this was done. It'll be hard to find a site now that's not trying to cash in on the craze. But anyway, back to the bizness at hand of the Box Office Business. This week featured a good many new fresh contenders in the ol' Movie Meat Grinder, but the turtles have it! Hurrah for PG movies, they'll make a comeback yet. But let us turn back the clock and start from #10. I was going to go with the cumulative totals, but it works out pretty much the same anyway. Ah, screw it.
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But even before we get to that, let's pay a brief tribute to all those films from last week that are no longer on the box office list.
Man! What a regular Box Office Colonic!
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This week, at #10 it's one of last week's survivors, Dead Silence, the latest variation on the ol' Alien theme: in space, no one can hear you scream. Of course, these days, at a movie like Dead Silence, you might just hear the audience laugh at moments the filmmakers probably didn't intend to be unintentionally funny. Audiences are just growing numb to the horror and the romance genres in genral, don'tcha think?
Pride comes in at #9. Oh, I saw an online ad for this! That's all I ever saw for it. Guess I wasn't watching the right channels or something. Even Bernie Mac wants to forget this one. He'd almost rather do a Guess Who sequel at this point, but there's always Ocean's 13 to look forward to, right? And I kinda hope the other guy doesn't turn into another Cuba Gooding Jr. That would be bad, right, Spike?
Ah, and far too soon we arrive at Reign Over Me, at #8? Only #8? This is an outrage! Click made more money its third week! The way they were talking about it in the ads you'd'a thought it'd done a lot better than this. But after all it is an Oscar contender of sorts, so it has to make Oscar money, right? For those who don't know, Oscar money is a lot less than Blockbuster money. Generally the Oscar films don't crack the top 5, and barely make it to between 6 and 10. Except for the occasional anomaly like Lord of the Rings. But back to Reign, the alchemical blend of Sandler and Binder. Me myself, I blame Spielberg for putting Binder in Minority Report. It gave wings to his otherwise flailing career. I mean, for God's sake! He couldn't even sustain a sitcom on HBO! As for the film itself, the premise is that Adam Sandler lost his whole family on 9/11. Not to be too cynical, but what the hell, everyone else is at this point on the big 9/11: did anyone really lose their whole family in 9/11? Were there day care centers for the whole family in those business-oriented Trade Towers? Not only that, but evidently Sandler's character got insurance money for his 9/11 loss, which may very well make him the only 9/11 victim that has gotten insurance company money yet.
Coming at lucky number seven, it's The Last Mimzy, and out of resepct to Michael Phillips, some of the ads were calling it the best film since, you guessed it! CE3K, of course! I think they also lumped E.T. in there, too. The film itself seems a bit more like Zathura, but I don't think we want to go there at all.
And the would be hits just keep on coming. You know, rarely in this bizness do we see the rising of a whole new studio. Traffic gave us USA Films, The Peacemaker introduced us to DreamWorks, I think... anyone remember Savoy? Those running buffalo? Just me? How about Mandalay with the tiger vanity logo? The only film I remember associating with MAndalay was that Dennis Rodman / Van-Damme flic. (Man! Belloq falling on even harder times than usual.) Anyway, we have a new studio now: Fox Atomic, and they bring us The Hills have Eyes 2. And not a moment too soon, I'm afraid. Obviously it's a paean to the Iraq war, or a tribute, I can't tell which. And the bad guys are probably supposed to be the Iraqis, but only those Iraqis who still aren't standing up so that we can sit down in this ever increasingly more dangerous game of Bloody Musical Chairs that is the... what are we calling it this month? The Global Struggle against the Camel Jockeys? Let's face it, folks. With so many threats looming, Saudi Arabia threatening to deflate the dollar, and China and Wal-Mart threatening to make permanent the bottom line, the only thing that can save America is some good old fashioned World War II-era stereotyping. It probably wouldn't play as well in the European Union, but what else can we do to mobilize our own troops? The point being, the rest of the world hates us already, right? Even more so than during Monica-gate?
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And now the better half. Clinging to it at #5 is Premonition. Someone has to post the inevitable review: "Not as bad as you've been led to believe."
Wild Hogs at #4. Still speechless. Although I can imagine where it'll go in the Disney collection: between "The Wild" and ... Xanadu? "Old Yeller"? Guess I don't really care.
And finally! Seems like we've had to wait forever for this one. It's Shooter at #3. One of the TV spots had some subliminal messages in it, but I guess I'm not interested enough to decipher them. Maybe next week if this is still in the top 10. Doesn't Marky Mark look so damn cool in those shades, though?
At #2, it's 300, and it's closing in on the 200 million mark. Almost two thirds of the way there! They had an unfunny bit on SNL last night about the filming of the movie. It used to be, a long time ago, that SNL bits had more dimension than just one, back when Robert Smigel was on the writing staff, and Jon Lovitz fought valiantly against the writers' snobbishness, bringing balance to that force.
And finally, at #1, someone's latest triumph of marketing, it's TMNT, and not in some quasi wussy Muppet form. It's all CGI, baby, and all the better for it. Well, one way they prepped our appetites was by showing some recent TV incarnation of the turtles on TV, on Fox if I remember correctly. Anyway, kudos. And finally! The new Weinstein Company has a hit. Suck on that, Clerks 2. As for the Turtles themselves, they've been in the biz going on about 20 years now. It's been a long road and they're still crawling along it. All I know is that Turtles' co-creator Kevin Eastman is married to Julie Strain, that's all I know for sure about the man. Lucky bastid.
And that's about all the damage I can do this week as far as the Box Office is concerned. And now, back to the taxes, if I don't fall asleep first.
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