“Movies” Category Archive

It will come as no surprise that WALL•E is the champion in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings.

But there was one shock: Pixar’s latest didn’t earn a perfect score, because Wanted actually earned more money per theater. (The latter made $12 million less, but it showed in 800 fewer theaters.)

That’s significant because they had offsetting disadvantages: WALL•E was handicapped by children’s ticket prices, while Wanted was hamstrung by its R rating. So the per-theater take of Wanted has to be considered a major victory.

The rankings should get interestingly competitive in the coming weeks, as WALL•E and Kung Fu Panda will make it difficult for other movies to score 9s and 10s on the critical criteria; they have respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of 96 and 88, and Metacritic scores of 93 and 73.

Continue reading for the week’s full rankings and the methodology.

Fuck off from Bizarro Box Office Power Rankings. You won’t notice any changes here.

Our rankings for these two weeks were won by two brand-new movies: What Happens in Vegas and The Strangers. Critics love them, and audiences are willing to have sex with animals to get into the packed auditoriums. My nemesis said he’d rather get a hot poker up his ass (probably a euphemism) than watch Cameron Diaz and Asthon Kutcher together, and I’m happy to oblige. To the most recent champion, The Strangers, me say: Watch out for The Happening and The Love Guru; they’re really picking up steam.

And to you assholes who say that Hulk and The Incredible Hulk are exactly the same, you are absolutely wrong. Me prove it to you.

Hulk. Opening weekend: $62,128,420. Second weekend: $18,847,620. Total after second weekend: $100,593,300.

The Incredible Hulk. Opening weekend: $55,414,050. Second weekend: $22,136,060. Total after second weekend: $97,055,430.

See? Very different.

Hello, and if you come back next week, I’ll kill you. Hate, Bons Erutluc

Stop reading for the weeks’ full rankings and the methodology.

(Through June 25, we are under the sway of Bizarro. Blame Piper at Lazy Energetic Eye Theatre.)

My distate for the stone-faced British comedian Rowan Atkinson is well-documented, as is my loathing for his signature creation, Mr. Bean. I like subtle, sophisticated verbal comedy as much as the next guy, but Atkinson takes it too far; I’ve been with people who stare at his almost subliminal act without a hint of a smile, unaware that the turkey-on-the-head routine is a joke.

But in spite of the insufferable Atkinson, I had reason to be hopeful about Mr. Bean’s Holiday.

If Hulk was a bomb, why are people calling The Incredible Hulk a success five years later?

The lead from the AP story:

“The Incredible Hulk was a box-office bruiser, yanking in $54.5 million over opening weekend and laying to rest the stigma of his unappreciated big-screen adventure five years ago.”

Really?

Hulk
Release date: June 20, 2003
Domestic opening-weekend box office: $62.1 million
Number of opening-weekend theaters: 3,674
Production budget: $137 million
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 135 minutes

The Incredible Hulk
Release date: June 13, 2008
Domestic opening-weekend box office: $54.5 million
Number of opening-weekend theaters: 3,505
Production budget: $150 million
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 114 minutes

(All figures from Box Office Mojo.)

A rule to live by: Don’t bet against computer-animated movies for kids. For example: Kung Fu Panda topped this week’s Box Office Power Rankings by a wide margin, finally knocking Iron Man off its perch.

A prediction: Kung Fu Panda smash green ass of Incredible Hulk (at least in Box Office Power Rankings) while Happening cower with Zohan in corner like little girl.

Continue reading for the week’s full rankings and the methodology.

(As much as I’d love for you to enter blindly and leave scarred, one cannot talk around the premise of Teeth, so heed the Spoiler’s Creed. And beware of dirty talk. And bad wordplay.)

Dawn is afraid of her body, but it’s the boys who are in trouble.

She is a star in a local abstinence program — a heartfelt, eloquent advocate for preserving virginity — but she’s not immune to the temptations of the flesh. One night, while fantasizing about the cute boy she just met, her hand creeps down ... but she can’t do it.

Perhaps she knows instinctively what a handful of boys and men are about to discover in Teeth: She has a bloodthirsty vagina.

To mark the fifth birthday of Culture Snob — born July 10, 2003 — I’ll be hosting the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon from Wednesday, July 9, to Sunday, July 13. (Previously, I initiated the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon and latched on to Only the Cinema’s Short-Film Week Blog-a-thon.)

Put simply, the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon is about the intersection of movies and life. My hope is that it will serve as a celebration of the power of the moving picture removed from the critical, cultural, and financial contexts in which it is typically considered.

Of course, we bring baggage whenever we talk or write about movies, but this is meant to be more personal — intensely idiosyncratic reactions and analyses, difficult times when movies became more than movies, brushes with movie stars, crushes on movie stars, memories from youthful encounters with film, embarrassing revelations, cinematic epiphanies, meticulous drawings of Darth Vader from your eight-year-old self, ... .

The only rule is that contributions have two central elements: movies and you.

Submissions (or promises of submissions) can be made in comments, through the Culture Snob e-mail form, or at snob@culturesnob.com. New work is encouraged, but moldy links are welcome, too.

And remember: For once, it is all about you.

The few weeks that I neglected the Box Office Power Rankings featured two hotly anticipated movies — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Sex and the City — as well as the second chapter in the Chronicles of Narnia series. Iron Man kicked all their asses, with a little help.

I’m guessing its five-week reign atop our chart will end this week, but it has been an impressive run. Beating Speed Racer is one thing, but besting Indy?

Dr. Jones simply didn’t have the critical juice, even though his movie tied for the crown in its second week of release. Opening weekend, it was hamstrung not by a giant metal man but by The Visitor, whose pesky presence in the box-office top 10 relegated Indiana Jones to fourth place in both of our critical criteria.

Sex and the City was doomed in the Power Rankings by its mediocre reviews. And can you recall a movie that this many critics have dismissed with such aggression and preemptive defensiveness? Roger Ebert: “I am not the person to review this movie.” Jim Emerson: “Nobody has enough money to pay me to go see Sex and the City.”

By the way, the minimum price for me to see it is $1,182.16, plus expenses, with no guarantee that I’ll stay awake.

Continue reading for the weeks’ full rankings and the methodology.

When you think of David Cronenberg, you’re likely to see fusion: Brundlefly, a living typewriter, a gun made of bones.

All of those are the work of Carol Spier, Cronenberg’s art director (from Fast Company through Videodrome) and production designer (from The Dead Zone forward, with the exception of Spider).

It’s easy to reduce Cronenberg to those signature images, which clearly reflect his longstanding concern with the relationship between technology and the flesh. Yet his two most recent movies — A History of Violence and Eastern Promises — have revealed a filmmaker of startling economy and density who doesn’t need to lean so heavily on those old tricks.

Cronenberg’s and Spier’s aggressive use of the tangibly repulsive — their creations have a physicality that’s unparalleled in cinema — obscure their more-mundane (but no less impressive) storytelling skills.

I’m guessing that reading about Speed Racer is a hell of a lot more fun than seeing it, but I’ll never have the movie experience.

You might start your literary adventure at Nathaniel R’s review at the Film Experience blog and follow the first link, where all sorts of fun awaits. Nathaniel also hits on one of my refrains:

“The Brothers Wachowski don’t seem to have any self editing skills ... .”

Oh, if only they were alone with that flaw ... . I call it the George Lucas Problem, in which filmmakers have enough power to insulate themselves from constructive feedback — in particular people who wield the script- and movie-editing equivalents of red pens. The result is bloated movies in the tradition of Titanic, announcing their grandiosity with their running times. Hence: a 135-minute movie for kids called Speed Racer.

Anyway, in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, Iron Man retained its crown and became the first movie to post a perfect score in consecutive weeks. Speed Racer finished fourth.

Continue reading for the week’s full rankings and the methodology.

I’m late to the party as usual, but this bellyache looks like it’s going to stick around for a while: Paid movie critics are a dying breed! The horror! The horror!

I can’t get worked up too much.

The Orphanage has one indelible image, and that’s plenty. It also has a sly current of grief and healing that hits home mostly on reflection, after cold recognitions and resonances sink in.

Directed by Spaniard J.A. Bayona and written by Sergio G. Sánchez, The Orphanage arrived in the United States under the banner of producer Guillermo del Toro, and it suffers from the expectations that name carries. Del Toro’s Spanish-language films are compact, textured, and rich with meaning. Cronos (1993) is an alluring, lethal metaphor-dispensing machine, while Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) has the ageless authenticity of a folk tale, among its many other merits. The Devil’s Backbone (2001) most closely resembles The Orphanage in his oeuvre, but with so much attention paid to milieu — physical, social, historical — it transcends its obvious genre; its spectral elements become nearly secondary.

Bayona’s movie is merely a good ghost story, which is no small thing, but it ain’t Guillermo del Toro. While the acclaimed Mexican writer/director is fundamentally a symbolist, The Orphanage approaches its story through the emotional prism of its lead character.

So the 2008 summer-movie season begins the way the last ended: with a perfect score.

Iron Man became the first movie since The Bourne Ultimatum in August to top all four of the Box Office Power Rankings criteria. That Jon Favreau’s movie will win our title next week is all but assured, and there’s a good chance that it will retain all of its 40 points — which would be a first.

The only way that won’t happen is if people actually go to see Speed Racer, and I can’t fathom living in a world in which they do.

Then again, our world is often unfathomable to me ... .

Continue reading for the week’s full rankings and the methodology.

At the Too Many Projects Film Club, Jeremy Bushnell will host the Production Design Blog-a-thon from May 19 through 25.

It’s a fantastic idea.

Roughly halfway into Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, the movie is finished. The plot involving a kidnapped youth has been apparently, tragically resolved.

But the movie still has an hour left, a clockwatcher will tell you. And even if you’re not a person regularly calculating how the anticipated remaining X plot will unfold in the remaining Y minutes, you know that there’s plenty left to come. So what will it be? What will this movie be about, having dispensed with what appeared to be its primary story?

One of the great joys of cinema is a movie that genuinely surprises you — not with a twist ending but by being something different from what you expected or (even better) different from what you’ve previously experienced. (Surprise endings are so obligatory in thrillers nowadays that the only real surprise is their absence.)

So I was seriously jazzed about Gone Baby Gone at its midpoint, wondering where it would take me and excited that it seemed to be a nearly honest drama about missing children. It might actually substantively explore grief, responsibility, repercussion, community, and healing.

It didn’t take long for it to disappoint me, for it to choose the false path I should have expected.