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.
It’s too long. We’re miffed by the nominations, and sometimes the process itself. The production numbers are cheesy and interminable. We’re displeased with the final results more often than not. Years later, we’re typically embarrassed by the outcome. So let’s scrap the Oscars and replace this evil with another: We’ll choose the best movie of the year through something similar to the presidential-selection process.
Vantage Point took first place this week with the lowest winning score in Box Office Power Rankings history. Granted, that’s less than a year, but still … .
A heretical question about Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood: Is Daniel Plainview a good person? The inquiry is an overstatement, because the answer is obvious: Of course not. But contrary to the assessments of many critics, I don’t think Plainview is evil, and more than that I’m not convinced he’s much different from most of us. Plus: Michael Clayton.
Between the initial calculations and now, my Box Office Power Rankings-derived formula has not changed its Oscar conclusion: No Country for Old Men is still your Best Picture winner on Sunday.
In this week’s edition of the Box Office Power Rankings, I was planning to address critical disconnect – not between arbiters and their audiences but between critics and themselves. Specifically, I was curious about movies with which there is a large gap between Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores. In this week’s rankings, the extremes were Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (Rotten Tomatoes: 85; Metacritic: 59) and Step Up 2 the Streets (Rotten Tomatoes: 25; Metacritic: 51).
