Box Office Power Rankings: October 16-25, 2009

wild-things.jpgShould we consider Spike Jonze’s and Dave Eggers’ adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are a disappointment? It is certainly not a miserable failure. It received good reviews, won the box office when it debuted, and also topped the Box Office Power Rankings in its opening weekend. But its gross dropped 57 percent its second weekend. Thirty-five movies have opened in wide release atop the box-office top 10 this year, and 20 lost a lower percentage of revenue than Wild Things.

Monster Mash

picnic.jpgInstead of generating yet another list of 20 or 50 or 100 great horror movies for Halloween-viewing consideration, I tried to approach the task a little differently. My original plan was to present many movies in various horror subgenres with different labels (“under the radar,” “fashionable but worthy,” “classic,” and “could do without”), but I realized I was mostly repeating myself. So instead, I offer one movie in each of 10 horror divisions, with some effort to avoid the obvious, everybody’s-seen-them choices. A director can only appear once on the list.

Best Left Unsolved

tell-no-one-3.jpgWhile I still don’t really understand the Twitter phenomenon, I’ve loved using the 140-character limit for extreme forced concision. The aim is always to pack these ridiculously short reviews with enough meaning that I don’t feel guilty about never writing more about a particular movie or television show. I would never say that 140 characters is sufficient to discuss much of anything – let alone a feature film – but it’s a great if arbitrary writing exercise: How much can you say within Twitter’s confines? For the most part, I’ve been happy with the results. But with Tell No One, I feel that I need to explain myself.

Agonizing Anticipation

ellroy.jpg“He braced himself for this big fucking scream.” That’s the final sentence of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, the first book in the “Underwold USA” trilogy that concluded with the release of Blood’s a Rover last week. It’s hard to believe that more than 14 years passed between these novels, because the memory of reading that line the first time feels a lot fresher than 1995. It’s nearly seared into my brain.