Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who dominated the Box Office Power Rankings the past two weekends, but it was Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns that taught us an important lesson: It’s good to not suck as much as everybody else.
Candyman is an A movie desperately trying to break out of its B-movie body, like a 12-year-old boy wanting to prove his manhood. It is a slasher film, but it pushes and tugs and stretches to become something more. That it succeeds at all is pretty amazing.
The Bank Job won this week’s Box Office Power Rankings title, but I’d prefer to talk about Fool’s Gold, which has the distinction of being the first three-time 10th-place finisher in the history of our calculations. It’s not as easy as it sounds.
I’ve been otherwise occupied for a while, but I finally got around to inviting Christopher Nolan to dinner. (Not literally, of course. Still, that invitation should be clear.) He hasn’t accepted yet, but I hear he’s busy, too.
The 58th – and second-to-last – episode of The Wire, David Simon’s sociological HBO drama about Baltimore, is titled “Clarifications,” and one scene succinctly serves that purpose. When McNulty takes his faked serial killer of homeless men to FBI profilers, they nail the detective’s character in a few sentences based on his “evidence”: The murderer, they say, is a high-functioning alcoholic who works in a bureaucracy and has a problem with authority. McNulty – in Dominic West’s performance, always lacking self-awareness – can barely cloak his petrified amusement. He seems to be thinking: Am I that easy?
The lesson from this week’s Box Office Power Rankings is that sometimes the winner tells you more about its competitors than itself. The Spiderwick Chronicles, in its third week in release, topped the rankings this week after finishing third last week. That could mean that its relative box-office fortunes have improved – that audiences have finally found it – or it could mean that it had shitty competition. It had shitty competition.
