2007's Bottom Five Film's- Dave

Best Movie That Was Bad, But Had The Potential To Be Good:

The Kingdom – All-star cast? Check. Decent writer? More or less a check. Good story? Surprisingly, yes. Good director? Check.

So what the hell happened?

Honestly, I do not know. My best guess is that I think the director, Peter Berg, chooses to showcase the action pieces more than the heart that lies with Carnahan’s script. Even though the action pieces are quite good, it almost becomes too much in a film that could have had as much soul as the best action movie of the year, The Bourne Ultimatum.

5. Spider-Man 3 – Three is a crowd. The latest (‘Cause there is more to come) installment in the web-crawler’s trilogy falls short of the previous two. While it may not be a horrible movie, it is certainly a disappointment.


4. Next – “Las Vegas showroom magician Cris Johnson has a secret which torments him: he can see a few minutes into the future. Sick of the examinations he underwent as a child and the interest of the government and medical establishment in his power, he lies low under an assumed name in Vegas, performing cheap tricks and living off small-time gambling "winnings." But when a terrorist group threatens to detonate a nuclear device in Los Angeles, government agent Callie Ferris must use all her wiles to capture Cris and convince him to help her stop the cataclysm.”

That is the plot synopsis from IMDB.com. The scary part is that this is not the most ridiculous thing in the movie. Julianne Moore plays a tough FBI agent, but the cream of the crop is Nicolas Cage’s hairpiece.

3. Shrek the Third – I kind of knew what to expect going into this movie, but it was still bad. The joy that was in the previous two is just not there anymore and they plan on making two more films. Ugh.

2. Rush Hour 3 – I did not see this film, yet the awfulness is so palpable I had to put it number two.

Actually, I put it here because this movie raises more questions than answers.
Consider the following:

• Why was there a six year gap between Rush Hour 2 and Rush Hour 3? It is not like Chris Tucker wasn’t available.
• Did Rush Hour 2 leave that many questions unanswered?
• What does $50 million + $53.25 million + $7 million equal? You could say $110.25 million, and you would be correct. How about the paydays for Tucker, Chan, and Ratner? That would be correct too. How does this happen?
• Tucker’s character is from California, Chan’s is from China, yet the movie is set in France. What?
• You can clearly see the ridiculousness of this all

1. Lions for Lambs – I figured this would actually be a good movie, if not a great one. I looked and saw that Robert Redford was directing and producing the film, which has yielded such results as Ordinary People and A River Runs Through It. I saw Matthew Michael Carnahan, who is an up and coming writer and brother to Joe Carnahan of Narc fame. I saw Tom Cruise, who I admire and has previously worked with Joe Carnahan on Narc for great results. I saw Academy Award winner Meryl Streep, and rising stars Derek Luke and Michael Pena. I figured this was the first movie coming out of the United Artist stable under Tom Cruise’s guidance and he would not allow it to fail.

I was horribly wrong. This film fails on so many levels it almost mystifies me. Similar to this year’s All the King’s Men, I found myself wondering how all this talent just went to waste.

The only positive to this movie is that is clocks in at 88 minutes.

Box Office Trends: September

So for some reason, people always seem to be obsessed with comparing the box office numbers of this year to other years, as if that's somehow relevant. Box Office Mojo, one of my favorite resources/time wasters, always makes it a point to say whether business is up or down from the same weekend last year- because we all know the third weekend in September never changes in national movie-going affinity. Duh.

So I figure I'll only recap the months-that-were by relating the performances of one movie to another: inflation and changing economics in Hollywood will probably render these numbers meaningless in a couple years, but the relative grosses of different movies is a good indicator of contemporary taste, if nothing else.

1. Staying Power

3:10 to Yuma has to feel good about its long-term chances. It opened with a modest $14 million, but never dropped more than 36% week to week, which is pretty extraordinary, no matter the release pattern.

Consider this: 3:10 and Shoot 'Em Up both opened on September 7th- Shoot 'Em Up pulled in a lower than expected $5.7 m. But while 3:10 only took modest hits and stayed in the top five all month long, Shoot 'Em Up dropped 54, 69, and 80 percent in consecutive weeks, and will probably stop being tracked before October's out with a meager $17 million.

Hopefully James Mangold's winning western will continue to stay around this fall, and make a Million Dollar Baby-style push over $100 million after Oscar nominations are announced.
2. The Game Plan vs. The Kingdom

I wasn't really sure which one of these to root for last weekend, which is to say I was rooting for neither, but America has decided: we'd rather see The Rock have an allergic reaction to strawberries than see some hypothetical Saudi Arabian terrorists get blown up. The Game Plan made $22 m to The Kingdom's $17 m. This almost makes me feel better, in a way.

Also, as I said I love b.o.m. for reference, but they employ the worst professional film critic I have ever read on the internet. Ever. Most of the reviews for The Kingdom felt uneasy about the sort of xenophobic, country-full-of-terrorists undertones, but this guy (Scott Holleran) thinks it wasn't racist enough. The title of his review? "The Kingdom: Action Blaster Suggests Osama was Right."

3. Good Luck Chuck opened higher than Stardust

Yep. And people ask me why I'm an atheist.

Other than that, people liked zombies, and sort of liked Jodie Foster shooting people, but September is traditionally a slow month, I hear. A bunch of award hopefuls did okay on a handful of screens, but October will be the big test, when everything goes wide.

Trailer Report: The Kingdom, Hitman, Harold and Kumar 2

Hey, what did I do immediately after posting "Why I haven't seen Shoot 'Em Up yet"? Saw Shoot 'Em Up, of course. It was pretty hilariously ridiculous, it turns out. A review is kinda passe at this point, though, since it's been two weeks.

Instead, here are the trailers we saw in front of it:

The Kingdom


Remember, take your vacation in Saudi Arabia- where all cars have the potential to explode!

Uh, yeah. First of all, Trailer Voice Guy is annoying enough when he's just talking. It's even worse when he's reading things to me (mainly because I know how to read!). Also, I'm sure Saudi Arabia loves us for this one (Saudis: They kill women and children!). I love the carefully juxtaposed images of Muslims praying with random cars exploding- not xenophobic at all. Nope, not at all.

Hitman


This movie featuring no treble whatsoever! I'm not trying to knock Timothy Olyphant here, but seriously- did Vin Diesel have a scheduling conflict? Or is he all like "I'm a serious actor now, I was in a Sidney Lumet movie!" Because nobody saw Find Me Guilty. I checked.

Harold and Kumar 2

It's like they weren't sure what type of movie Shoot 'Em Up was, so they stuck two action movie trailers, and a couple of comedies: we got this short teaser and the trailer for Mr. Woodcock, which I'm not even going to take the trouble to embed. Because this blog is better than that.

As for this HK2, I liked the original, but you can only get so much "foreign people look different" humor on credit- eventually you have to earn that sort of thing.