With inhuman Aliens, Predators, and Water Horses the only new things in wide release between Christmas and New Year’s Day, the Box Office Power Rankings this past weekend was all about re-shuffling. A cursory look at the rankings suggests that Juno is hot, and Sweeney Todd is not. But a closer examination reveals some interesting trends.
“Happy New Year, first of all,” Jimi Hendrix says to the Fillmore East crowd at the dawn of 1970. “We hope you have about a million or two million more of them – if we can get over this summer.” He pauses and follows that with a “heh heh heh” that suggests a hint of self-loathing. In hindsight, it might be the saddest recorded laugh in history, as Hendrix didn’t survive the summer, dying at age 27 on September 18. Of course, it would be stupid to read anything into Hendrix’s audience banter beyond the irony of his imminent passing. He was simply acknowledging the lameness of his quip, and he moves on, dedicating the next song to urban warriors and quickly appending: “Oh yes, and all the soldiers fighting in Vietnam.”
The billions of you who neglected to bet against me when I claimed that The Simpsons Movie would spend a second week atop the Box Office Power Rankings look pretty foolish today. See what I did there? I was wrong wrong wrong in my prediction, and I made you the idiot.
Much to my surprise, I can find no reference to the nearly universal cinematic “wedding-ring rule”: Any time a wedding ring is a prominent prop or visual motif in a movie, infidelity will be a central theme. The obverse: Any movie with infidelity as a central theme will feature the wedding ring as a prop or visual motif. I could offer dozens of examples, but the best might be Lantana, which is obviously about sexual straying but has a greater interest in marriage overall, especially the underlying, intertwined issues of trust and honesty. Although it’s nearly too blunt in its themes, the movie feels continuously right, nailing not only relationship dynamics but interred grief and pain. Throughout, it gets the tone, nuance, and scale of life correct.
Fuck off from Bizarro Box Office Power Rankings. You won’t notice any changes here. Our rankings for these two weeks were won by two brand-new movies: What Happens in Vegas and The Strangers. Critics love them, and audiences are willing to have sex with animals to get into the packed auditoriums.
Here is a movie that so badly wants you to cry and to feel the heartbreak of emotionally stunted characters and to bask in their eventual breakthroughs that I did my damnedest to resist it. In America is one of the most shamelessly manipulative art-house movies you’ll ever find. It works surprisingly well.
We were in the play area of the department store – most likely building things with Legos – and two girls were taking great delight in excluding me. They were speaking a language I didn’t understand, and it wasn’t exactly a private conversation. They would glance my way during their exchange and occasionally laugh. I felt mocked, which was exactly what they wanted. They were speaking Pig Latin, I figured out later. Of course, Pig Latin is only effective as a private language through a certain age, but we update and upgrade our codes throughout our lives.
Today marks the release of Brian De Palma’s adaptation of The Black Dahlia, and I’m torn.
I anticipated finding Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut a lesser film than its forebear; I thought writer/director Richard Kelly would use it mostly as an opportunity to try to explicate his impenetrable plot, and to impose his reading on a text that had been ambiguous to the point of beautiful inscrutability. And that’s exactly what he does. Here’s the funny thing: I liked this version nearly as much as the theatrical cut, but for very different reasons.
Regardless of which film takes home Best Picture on Sunday night, the Academy Awards finally got it right. I don’t mean that the best movie of 2009 will have won, even if one only considers the 10 nominees. Rather, the Oscars have chosen a sound voting system – an instant-runoff election – that nearly guarantees that every ballot will help determine whether Avatar or The Hurt Locker nabs the prize.
