Happy Mattress Discount Day!

In the crowded movie marketplace, Lego(TM) Batman(TM) and the Fifty Shades of Gray sequel hold fast to their places, as per the expectations of most.  But Matt Damon and Jimmy Kimmel have finally put their differences aside to help flog Damon's latest, the CGI extravaganza The Great Wall, probably based on a graphic novel by ... I'm going to say the Road to Perdition guy, Max Allan Collins.  Alan Moore wouldn't want to take credit, apparently ever.  As for those who are thinking that Matt Damon has seen better days, well... hey, look at it this way.  Why does Ben Affleck get to have all the fun?  ...well, the appearance of fun, anyway?  Nice work if you can get it.
Meanwhile, our second debut coming in at #5, it's... yes, even though unions of schoolteachers and concerned parents across the globe are finally putting an end to bullying once and for all, Hollywood has to keep the torch burning.  It's kinda their bread and butter, you see.  Good, enduring screenplay crutches are hard to come by, and what has been better to the advancement of celluloid storytelling than having a big guy come in and say "Well, well, well... what have we here?  Fresh meat!  Scraggly, verbose, pimply, four-eyed fresh meat..."  We zoom in on the big guy feeling the nerd's arms, saying "Hmm!  I'm guessing you don't do push-ups much."  We pan down to the nerd's legs and... okay, enough fun.  You get the idea.  But the R-rated Fist Fight, well... it doesn't seem to be for the kids, let's put it that way.  Even the cool high school kids dating jumpy college freshmen are all, like, "Ah, these movies are too grimy these days.  Let's just watch porn at home instead."  Still, sad as it may seem, the screenwriters and producers of said Fist Fight are thinking to themselves that this is the culmination of a dream.  A dream that began with a screenplay twenty years ago.  They tried to get it to Bruce Willis at the time, but he's harder to get to than a North Korean dictator.  I guess his half brother would just have to do... too soon?  Then they tried to get it to Adam Sandler, but you know how it is.  Screenwriter Tim Herlihy is the gatekeeper of Castle Sandler.  As for the implications of already strained race relations in this particular fist fight... Charlie Day v. Ice Cube?  Should be a no-brainer, right?  They both team up against the evil right-wing Vice Principal!  Duh!
And finally, it's a sad day in Verbinski-ville.  If there is a way to put "#1 for Two Weeks" on a license plate, director Gore Verbinski may have found it, but not lately.  Gone are the days of The Weather Man... you know, the small project done in between Pirates of the Caribbean installments.  But he's working his way back to us, babe, with a burning love for final cut inside.  His latest is called A Cure for Wellness.  The plot?  An ambitious young executive is sent to retrieve his company's CEO from an idyllic but mysterious "wellness center" at a remote location in the Swiss Alps... the writers got the idea after they saw Apocalypse Now recently on Blu-Ray... and not just the part where the section of jungle gets blown up, either.  No, the whole thing, all five or six hours of it.  Also, something similar happened to them after they went on vacation after The Lone Ranger (2013) came out in theatres, then just as quickly left.  Owwch!