Sunday, November 09, 2008

From the director of Gas Planet...

Yup! We all gotta start somewhere. And once again it's the 80s and all the nation's kids are dragging their unwitting parents to the theater to watch as Spielberg wows them again. His latest, Madagascar 2, opens with a big Pow. I was going to say bang, but that's so cliché. ...okay, I'm just getting word from my source that he's technically not with DreamWorks anymore, but he's still got Eagle Eye at #10! That's something!
At #2, surprise surprise, it's Role Models. That surprised me, anyway. The timing was pretty good, seeing as how this seems to be the latest apple on a very long branch of the Movie Tree, following the likes of Drillbit Taylor, School for Scoundrels, Mr. Woodcock, and anything else that had Billy Bob Thornton in it lately. David Wain, you got lucky, I'll give you that. Second season of Stella, please?
Showing similar monetary loss, we drop from about 33% down to 50% with High School Musical 3 at #3... how ironic? Oh, it's time to feel some empathy for the embattled Disney corporation. One day you're on top of the world, the next day it's a day like today. HSM3 losing money, BHC just plain gone out of sight. Is there nothing on the horizon to alleviate the pain?
Meanwhile, Changeling STAYS at #4! Cool!
And rounding out the top 5 is good ol' Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Charlie Brown. How to abbreviate that? ZMMP? Or ZAMMAP? Ooh! I like that one. Would make a good Batman onomatopoeic... you know. Cesar Romero gets punched, and the screen says ZAMMAP! If you're really hip, you of course gotta spell it ZaMMaP, or ZaMmaP. The fact that the debate's being had at all speaks volumes.
---
Ugh. The rest. A brief shout-out to Soul Men sadly debuting at #6. It's the third newbie this week. Brought to you by the writing team that brought you such hits as Big Trouble, Intolerable Cruelty and ... Destiny Turns on the Radio! Oh, that's it. That's the most unforgivable one of them all. Moving on.
And the rest are just plain ol' horror movies. Eagle Eye at #10, Saw V at #7... Saw 6 on the way, folks! Boy, they're the horror movie equivalent of the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror. But so much better. AND they come out BEFORE Halloween! Boy, what's THAT all about? Doesn't the Simpsons have any clout? Can't they just show the damn thing on Halloween day?
But I digress. We got horror movies 7 to 10 this week, Eagle Eye, Saw V, The Haunting of Molly Hartley, and the scariest of them all, The Secret Life of Bees. Oh, but Movie Hooligan, you ask! How is a movie about bees a horror movie? Well, isn't it? You notice it's not doing that well in the South, right? That's the South's worst nightmare right there! And Alaska. A cute, defenseless white girl moving into a house of black lesbians practicing and promulgating alternative lifestyles? Oh I tell ya, it's another blow to the National Innocence. But thank God we have people like Grover Norquist on hand ready and waiting to drown the Baby of Government in the Bathtub of ... History? Is that the proper metaphor? It is a metaphor, right? Man, I still can't wrap my head around that one. Guess I just don't have a sense of humour, dontcha think?

No comments: