Hey Moana

Yeah, nostalgia is fun.  For example, I suddenly remember this show on MTV called "The Big Picture" (not affiliated with the 1989 Christopher Guest film of the same name) and one of the features they would have on there is the top five movies at the box office.  And as you may know by now, even in a horse race such as this, people do often have their favourites.  For exmaple, host Chris Connelly was a champion of the Joel Schumacher film Dying Young.  A big champion of it.  Alas, it wasn't exactly the box office gold that, say, Flatliners was at the time.  You know, Brat Pack and all.  Wow.  There's a blast from the past for ya!  But there was one title that managed to climb its way to #1 somehow, probably surprising even the film's makers, and that was F/X2: The Deadly Art of Illusion.  Directed by Richard Franklin, and the sequel to the 1986 original called F/X.  Long before there was a cable channel with a similar name, mind you.  Now, you're probably thinking, oh, the co-director of Quick Change!  I love that movie.  Well, the IMDb informs us that, no, it in fact is HOWARD Franklin.  I'm always getting those two mixed up for some reason.
Anyway, so F/X2 was #1 at the box office, and host Chris Connelly says "Yeah.  Two letters and a number.  Terrific."  Something like that.  I take it he wasn't a fan.  As for us in the present day, something called Moana is #1.  I had a feeling it would do well because I saw some information about it on a box of Rice Krispies.  I couldn't see anything else at all!  So while Moana chants her litany of boredom and frustration, as for me, well... if I go to heaven and Moana's not there, I'm going to write its name on the heavenly stair.  Meantime, someone needs to tell John Lasseter to give it up.  Yeah, beauty pageants are fun.
The only other debuts this week are the old timers down on their luck again.  Big surprise.  First, there's the new Zemeckis non-MoCap feature called Allied.  The Onion didn't care for it, of course; not "transcendent" enough, apparently, which is a little rich coming from a fake newspaper, in a way.  But there's a lesbian lover in it, for God's sake!  Thereby disappointing both fans of Turner Classic Movies, AND all the Millenial LGBTs out there who can smell a trap a mile away.  There were lesbians in some of those old Turner Classic movies at the time, people just didn't officially know it.
As for Bad Santa 2, well... my boys weren't behind the camera at all on this one.  How did that happen, exactly?  I guess the contract lawyers screwed them again.  Usually producers get a piece of any future sequel, don't they?  I guess they're on to bigger and better things instead.  So let's instead examine the filmography of BS2 director Mark Waters.  Well, the most wholesome thing appears to be 2005's Just Like Heaven, and I'm sure he'll take as much credit for Reese Witherspoon's Oscar win as he can.  (Walk the Line, incidentally)  And I'm assuming that Mr. Popper's Penguins and The Spiderwick Chronicles, while basically for kids, has as much raunch packed into their frames as he could.  So perhaps he has the stuff to take on the tradition that a Bad Santa movie requires.  Again, the Onion is soooo picky, calling it basically a "re-gifting" but that it stays current on all the latest raunchiness, nomenclature and otherwise.  What MORE do they WANT?!!!!!  I gotta go.