Not again...

Oh, the Oscar whisper campaign has begun in earnest. But to really improve your chances with the Little Golden Man(TM), you gotta make at least 200 million dollars these days. The Help's halfway there. I couldn't help but do some half-assed research behind that quote that gets tossed around here in this age of internet lists: Margaret Mead's extra quotable "Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Why, did you know that the 2006 music video for "If Everyone Cared" by Nickelback ends with her quote? My good friend Wikipedia told me so! But I am part iconoclast, and I couldn't help but read the rest of the Wikipedia entry, and ran across this:

"Occasionally a message carried by the media finds an audience so eager to receive it that it is willing to suspend all critical judgment and adopt the message as its own. So it was with Margaret Mead's celebrated 'Coming of Age in Samoa.'"

Sometimes you gotta get both sides of the story. Not global warming, though. We've definitely screwed ourselves. Cars are fun! In other box office news, the latest Luc Besson/Robert Mark Kamen juggernaut, Colombiana, makes the U.S. box office its bitch. See? This is exactly the kind of thing that The Help has to put up with! Such a lack of civility. Not exactly a surprise coming from the French, of course. At #3, Guillermo del Toro applies the Pan's Labyrinth family formula to a reboot of the 1973 TV movie Don't be Afraid of the Dark. Our Idiot Brother is the last of the debuts this week at #5. Judd Apatow didn't officially produce this one, but Paul Rudd has been in scads of Apatow films, as you might know. Apatow's got the second-hand golden touch! But the real interesting story this week is that The Smurfs is back! For two weeks it was hovering at 11 and below, but popped up again like a buoy that someone was trying to drown. Usually these overloaded Hollywood vehicles are like giant sponges, and they never stop soaking up the water.