10/14 – 10/16 It’ll be another weak, scattered weekend at the box office. Elizabethtown has the best chance to capture the week’s number one, but really any of the big openers could take it. Don’t expect the weekend’s top earner to make much more than Wallace & Gromit did last weekend though. Next week is the first time there’s a movie with a chance to break people out of the past two week’s box office funk. Doom could blow up. Till then, enjoy the short lines and use this as your guide to figure out what you should watch this weekend.
Misc. Limited Releases (Opening in fewer than 500 theaters.)
Debuting in limited release this weekend is the compilation movie Nine Lives. It tries to be a meaningful ensemble film about strong women dealing with the intricacies of estrogen-filled life, but it’s really a bunch of short skits jammed together with lame plot devices. Loggerheads also opens in the nation’s artsy-fartsy theaters, it’s an adoption movie that mixes homosexuality and turtles into its story. But the limited I’m most interested in is the Kevin Bacon movie Where the Truth Lies. The story there isn’t so much the content of the film, as it’s battle with the MPAA rating system. The movie was slapped with an NC-17 after the MPAA allowed religious clergy into it’s appeals proceedings to help them make the decision. Where the Truth Lies has since decided to release unrated, and whether or not it’s good, to me it stands for something that’s worth supporting. Kevin Bacon’s career choices have been really interesting lately, he seems to be courting controversy in his film choices, and even if you don’t support the cause of keeping religious clergy the heck out of our ratings system, the movie is worth seeing just to figure out what Bacon is up to this time. Prepare for gay stuff. No, he won’t be dancing.
Domino (Opens in 2,000 theaters.)
Tony Scott is a good director, and because of that there are certain people who will go see this movie no matter how horribly bad it is. Please… don’t. It’s got a 16% rating at RottenTomatoes right now for a reason. And I don’t want to hear any more about how stylish the movie is. At some point stylish just becomes garish and annoying. Domino passes that point within the first 5 minutes. From there on out I think the movie qualifies as cruelty to humans. The worst thing about it is that it’s written by Richard Kelly… and now I’m starting to question where maybe he really was just an accidental, one hit wonder. My hope for Southland Tales dwindles. Also, I am a bounty hunter… and I have a really bad cell phone connection.
The Fog (Opens in 2,972 theaters.)
This isn’t a movie about that crazy fog that turns you inside out and launches a swinging Simpson’s dance number. This is a movie about a fog that swallows up Shannon from ‘Lost’, which might sound pretty good until you consider that the movie wasn’t screened for the press. When a studio chooses not to screen a movie for the press, there’s only one reason for it. The movie sucks, they know it, and they’re hoping to hide it long enough to make some cash off it before word gets around about how bad the pic is. Selma Blair and Tom Welling are also in it. Tom Welling is useless unless he’s standing around looking big, blue, and pretty but Selma Blair has some talent. With this movie on her resume, she’s lucky they’re making a Hellboy 2. Yeah, I know the original Hellboy movie tanked. The sequel’s existence doesn’t make any sense to me either. Creative accounting.
Elizabethtown (Opens in 2,517 theaters.)
Elizabethtown has a problem. Critics hate it. I gave the movie four stars in my review here, but I can understand the negativity from the press. This is a movie with structural issues. If you’re focused on examining every nook and cranny, you’re probably going to hate it. On the other hand, I think if you sit back and just let it hit you, on a purely emotional level it’s incredibly satisfying. For most people, that’s the only level movies hit them at. The average moviegoer doesn’t sit down in their sticky theater seat and analyze every nuance of the film to figure out what the director is doing. You’re going to plop down, and in the case of Elizabethtown, probably really enjoy it. This is one case where I believe, and hope, that there might a disconnect between the reviewing press and the average moviegoer. Most of the more reasonable criticisms being leveled at Elizabethtown are absolutely correct. But if you watch the movie as a whole, I contend that absolutely none of that matters. Cameron Crowe has created a story that runs on pure, understated emotion and as a result, almost in spite of itself, it connects. Ignore the bad reviews and give Elizabethtown a chance.
STILL IN THEATERS AND WORTH YOUR TIME: Serenity, The 40-Year Old Virgin, Just Like Heaven, Wallace & Gromit, Capote
