Apparently we like things that blow up, sound like Johnny Depp, really should make us want to hug our moms, and are full of magical headwear — where hats and hoods abound.
Let’s see who made a little money this weekend.
1) Battle: Los Angeles — $36 million
BOOM!: The Movie made a good hunk of change this weekend. And just why wouldn’t it? It’s not everyday Alien attack movies show up to make bank at the box office. Usually they just peter along with all their special effects and flashy spaceships and the American public is like, “What? Space aliens that attack the country and some guy has to save the world, and there will be, like, explosions and gun battles, and maybe a full out war? Huh? No, I don’t want to see that. I don’t want to see that at all. Survivor: Season 900 Billion Twenty-Seven is on. That’s what I’m doing today. Whatever, aliens.” Given this, we’re going to assume the success of this movie is an anomaly that won’t be repeated.
2) Rango — $23 million
Officer Tom Hanson along with a team of young-looking police officers have started an undercover unit that specialize in youth crime. He will clean up those mean streets by infiltrating every high school known to man and then eventually hook up with a crazy-haired necrotic gremlin and go on to make several surreal, foppish, strange, and endlessly similar movies until he hooks up with Disney and runs around dressed like a pirate at a Michael Kors fashion show…and then out of nowhere appears a Gecko.
3) Red Riding Hood — $14 million
Amanda Bynes, Colin Firth’s illegitimate daughter, was in retirement when this was made. Fortuitous! This means there was a movie available for Amanda Seyfried, freed from the Big Love Compound of Endless Pronouncements About The Principle, to take on this miraculous gem of a film about werewolf threesomes, Gary Oldman’s waning career, and Jeremy Irons’ son doing some sort of hot-sexy teen grimace. Apparently some of you cared about who the werewolf was. Many more of you didn’t. I just think they should have said, “This is Twilight, but less so, so here, watch this silly thing about fairytale werewolves and Amanda Seyfried’s big kewpie eyes, because, really, that’s all we’ve got.”
4) The Adjustment Bureau — $11 million
The power to adjust the world and cause paradoxical ripple effects lies in the hands of Justin Timberlake’s hat choices from 2007. Right? Right. Seems simple enough. Oh, and then there’s Matt Obama Damon running for Senator of New York and talking about change, and being a real candidate. We’ve heard that one before, Matt! Ha! Take your magic hat and do something like end war and dictatorship! No? You want to be with a girl. Well, okay. What girl? A British girl. Um, okay. You do know that we were once under their rule, right? And that they call us Yankees. And that they eat lots of tea and cake (So un-American, the tea and cake) and something called Bangers and Mash, and they Shag and Wank, and say Bollocks, and make a ssshhh sound when they say Schedule, instead of the American scckkkkkk sound? But you want to risk everything for her though, right? Okay, Brilliant!
5) Mars Needs Moms — $6 million
Oh, ho! Disney made some money off of this thing about one-dimensional mom characters. There was a fight over broccoli, a boy who didn’t give a fig that his mom was taken by aliens, and when he finally stopped jumping on Mars’ trampoline, he asked his overlords if they could find his mom by miming vacuuming a rug, because Disney believes that all mothers have vacuum cleaners extending from their shoulders in place of actual hands. Yup. Let’s all see this little movie about June Cleaver and The Beaver “Aww, momming” and “Now, Beaving” their way into the copious annals of Disney history for now and forever through to the year 2050, when moms will become princesses and husband Charming will ride along and give their lives new meaning and replace those vacuum hands with singing birds! The End.
Looks like King Aragorn from that movie with all the slow walking trees may join the rebooted Superman reboot. He may be cast as General Zod (Kneel!). We’re not sure how we feel about Viggo in a black jumpsuit, though. Could be sexy. Could look like he’s got tacos wrapped up in a chest sling. We’ll wait for the first stills.
We’ve long had a fascination with the plight of the werewolf. The whole concept of man turning into a large beast, well it’s the things of nightmares and really good movies. In my opinion there is nothing like seeing a really great werewolf transformation. It is the pinnacle of any movie featuring werewolves. We all wait to be awed by the technique. And we feel totally let down if the transformation doesn’t strike the right note of fear, shock, pain, and horror. I consider myself a werewolf purist in this regard. I can instantly tell when a transformation is going downhill. Mostly when you don’t see it happening. If a movie glosses over the transformation, then well, they’ve not done their movie and the genre service. If one minute there’s human and the next there’s wolf (especially a traditional quadruped wolf) then they’ve blown it.
Aside from any werewolf blasphemy, I love discovering a new entry worth its salt. The latest on my “super spectacular” wolf list is the UK version of Being Human. While the American version tries to stoke the same fires, it’s really the UK version that sails into respectable wolf genre territory. I’m halfway through the second season (So no one ruin the third season for me) and I’m pretty impressed so far with the wolf character “George” played by Russell Tovey. He strikes the right balance of fear, shame, and eventual acceptance of his curse. The horror and resignation is there, but also this sort of subtle charm that belies the real “monster” he can become. There is no CGI (Computer Generated Images) for the audience to lazily rely on. For a television show, an albeit gritty and no-holds barred television show, the graphic detail is phenomenal and the use of traditional special effects is impressive.
Werewolves in movies are not the sole interpretation of the likes of Stephenie Meyer and her bevy of non-shirted hunk-wolves. No, cinema and television have been the birthplace of the wolf for generations. And each new generation adds just a bit more to the lore to make a complete compendium of wolves from bipeds to quadrupeds, to full shifters to half shifters, to teenage wolves, wolves backpacking, girl wolves, boy wolves, middle aged wolves, medieval wolves, and King of Pop wolves — the curse runs the gamut.
But as we get even further into the 21st century the evolution of the werewolf is bound to take on even new shapes so to speak. Werewolves have often played second fiddle to their fellow monster brethren. Vampires have taken over the show, Zombies and their penchant for apocalypse have overshadowed the wolf, and aliens still manage to rake in movie dollars. The plight of the werewolf in modern times has been significantly reduced, mostly landing them in the B-movie category. Or shamefully worked into an overwrought period piece with not enough new elements to add to the genre, and relegating it to workable CGI (that they’ve built the whole movie on) and stunted acting from the stars of such film. See: Benicio Del Torro and Anthony Hopkins in a remake of The Wolfman. But I think the return of the wolf is coming, because just how many beautiful undead creatures can we really watch, and just how many chemical outbreaks can cause the Walking Dead? Somewhere, someone will establish a righteous ode to the moon cursed. And I’ll be waiting.
You stake your claim. Perhaps you put your jacket and handbag in the seat next to you, you know as a subtle indication that you don’t want the Johnstons and their trough of children, Gummi Bears, Slurpees, and loud-talking nonsense sitting right next to you. They won’t get the message. They never do. Nevertheless, you’re comfortable, you’ve leaned back in your reclined seat, and the armrest is all yours.
At the AMC theater’s Empire 25 location on West 42nd Street — you may recall this was the home of an infestation of bedbugs leading to the theater’s closing for fumigation — there were 15 heath violations. One of which was for “evidence of mice or live mice present in [the] facility’s food and/or non-food areas.” Yoikes! He also swabbed the “butter button.” You know that little contraption that’s used to spray butter on your popcorn, yeah well, that thing came back with “environmental organisms” with likely the presence of other, potentially harmful bacteria.