The U.S. cinema box office continues its long decline. New release Tower Heist finished below expectations, coming in second behind returning champ Puss in Boots.
The Brett Ratner-directed Tower Heist got relatively good reviews—69 percent positive, according to Rotten Tomatoes—but the good reviews and star power of Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy failed to propel it to the top spot, earning just $25 million while Puss brought in $33 mil.
U.S. moviegoers avoided theaters over the weekend, except those showing new release Paranormal Activity 3. But fans of Rowan Atkinson and his Johnny English master-spy character needn't worry about the film's poor performance at the box office--odds are he will live to see tomorrow.
The Help, a comedy-drama film set in the South during the turbulent mid-1960s, finished at the top of the U.S. movie box office for the second weekend in a row. Although the film received largely positive reviews, a critic from the Boston Globe predictably lambasted the film for insufficient hatred of the American South: It’s possible both to like this movie – to let it crack you up, then make you cry – and to wonder why we need a broad, if sincere dramatic comedy about black maids in Jackson, Miss., in 1962 and ’63 and the high-strung white housewives they work for. The movie is too pious for farce and too eager to please to comment persuasively on the racial horrors of the Deep South at that time. But the critic, Wesley Morris, didn’t stop there. His biggest complaint is that the The Help shows black women of the era as needing help in order to reach their full potential in the Jim Crow South. The central character, a white female known as Skeeter (Emma Stone), he notes, “changes the lives of a couple of dozen black women whose change is refracted primarily through her.” Not good, Morris complains:
NPR, of all places, makes the case for good, old-fashioned entertainment in the movies. Without agreeing with all of the writer’s evaluations, it’s nice to see a populist look at the cinema. Story here.
Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader Tops Weekend Box Office.
As soon as I learned Disney was putting out a movie about the greatest horse of all time I knew I had to see it. But it wasn’t so much about the horse as much as it was about the time. It’s hard to imagine in 2010 a race horse having rock star status in America, but it was a different time. Horse racing was still a major sport, and in the era of Watergate, hippies, and Vietnam the American people were looking for something to believe in. This was before the VCR, before cable, before the internet; a time when American culture wasn’t fragmented in a million different directions. And who could not be moved by what might be once in forever greatness. Although I don’t remember the specific moments when Secretariat raced, like I remembered Nixon announcing his resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination, or the first landing on the moon, I vividly remember the phenomenon of Secretariat. This freak of nature swept up an entire country in his pursuit of immortality. Nostalgia is a powerful and interesting phenomenon we tend to indulge in as we get older, and it is something I used to disparage when I was young.
A forthcoming British film will portray post-World War II Israeli Zionists as terrorists, according to people formerly involved in the production. Story here.
You Are What You See is a good introduction for Christians at their wits' end trying to figure out what to do about popular entertainment. You won't be given a hard-and-fast formula, but you'll come away with some maps and compasses to help you find your own way.
The box office appeal of 3D films is waning.
It was a solid weekend for traditional-themed movies at the U.S box office. The entertaining and Christian-themed 3D animated film Toy Story 3 was the top draw at the U.S. box office last weekend, bringing in an estimated $109 million during the three-day period. It was the most successful opening weekend ever for a Disney/Pixar animated film. Crowd-pleasers The Karate Kid and The A-Team both did very well in their second week of release, in second and third places with tallies of $29 million and $13.8 million, respectively, expressing their themes of self-reliance, duty, honor, and the value of hard work. Another film with clear Christian themes and traditional values, Shrek Forever After, finished in fifth place in its fifth week of release, bringing in $5.5 million. Now nearing the end of its main theatrical run, Shrek Forever After has grossed an estimated $223 million in U.S. ticket sales. The supernatural Wild West revenge film Jonah Hex stumbled badly in its first weekend, debuting in seventh place with just under $5.4 million. Perhaps it’s just an amazing coincidence that the $35 million production’s two lead performers, Josh Brolin and Megan Fox, have made numerous leftist-progressive public comments in recent months,
Bill Whittle is a clever, erudite and indefatigable proponent ofliberty and limited government. His latest PJTV video, entitled “Support Your Local Tea Party: Vigilance & The Siren Song of the State,” is a must-see, especially if you’re on the fence about attending a Tax Day Tea Party near you. Whittle’s video and the political movement it endorses are incredibly important. At the 2 minute 30 second mark, however, note his list of fields “the enemies of freedom have … taken over.” “Things have gotten this bad because we’ve allowed them to get this bad. We’ve been busy minding our own business for forty years, while the enemies of freedom have slowly and surely taken over academia, newspapers, movie studios, comedy, music, and politics. Now a huge slice of our own people long to escape the responsibilities brought on by the freedoms our forefathers gave their lives for. We can’t let that happen.” As usual, Whittle’s analysis is spot on, but one of those fields doesn’t quite jive with the rest. Everything that Whittle ticks off in his list influences that final item. Politics is a lagging indicator to these cultural influence professions. You can’t change Washington DC and
… at least on Fox come May after the conclusion of it’s eighth “day,” otherwise known as a season. From The Hollywood Reporter: Tick, tick, tick … and done. After eight seasons, Fox’s “24” is coming to an end. The groundbreaking action drama will air its final real-time episode in May, the victim of a confluence of circumstances: a swelling budget, declining ratings and creative fatigue. BOOOOO!!!!! Apparently, due to the fact that salaries spiral upward dramatically the longer a show is on television (especially after the fifth season), Fox was paying an incredible $5 million an episode for this year’s installments. Let’s see … 5 million times 24 episode equals …. A LOT! But Jack Bauer himself, as he’s proven countless times on “24″ is hard to kill: Yet for fans of Jack Bauer, there remains hope. Studio 20th TV is developing a theatrical film that takes Bauer to Europe, and showrunner and executive producer Howard Gordon says other possibilities are being explored as well. “There are other possible iterations of Jack Bauer and his world,” Gordon said. The producers of “24″ have long begged off shifting Jack Bauer to the big screen because it would screw up the
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