7/1 – 7/3 The talk of movie box office being down just won’t go away, no matter how much cash Lucas has stored up in his money bin. It’s almost as if the movie covering media is determined to self destruct itself, barely a week passes without another story trying to push the idea that people want to stay home and watch DVDs, or that no one cares about going to movie theaters. Yet Mr. & Mrs. Smith is still making bank, Batman Begins is moving steadily, and this weekend War of the Worlds is poised to be the year’s next box office blowup… provided the world isn’t sick and tired of crazy-man Tom Cruise. Someone get that boy a new agent. What’s most interesting to me is W.O.W.’s marketing strategy. They’ve avoided showing anything revealing in their trailers or posters. Unless like me you’ve already seen the movie, you have no idea what the movie’s centerpiece (tripod ridin aliens) looks like. Will curiosity get people in seats? It’s worked for M. Night, why not Spielberg.
Here’s a look at what’s new in theaters this Independence Day weekend. Fire off a bottle rocket to celebrate or something. Unless fireworks are illegal in your area, then I never said that:
Misc. Limited Releases (Opening on fewer than 500 screens.)
The most unfortunate title of the week award goes to the movie April’s Shower, opening in five humble theaters this weekend. It may actually make money, if enough freaks mistake it for a bodily fluids porno. But the only really noteworthy art house flick opening isn’t really all that arty. The movie is an Australian flick called Undead and yeah, it’s about zombies (the human flesh eating kind, not the Rob kind -- though he may also eat human flesh). Clearly they’ve timed the film’s paltry 2 theater release to cash in on the George Romero fervor, but opening a week later they may have already missed the boat on America’s zombie excitement. For those of you disappointed with Romero’s effort, you might want to check this one out so you can be disappointed in it as well.
Rebound (Opens in 2,464 theaters.)
So here’s the last resting place of Martin Lawrence. No wait, that’s Big Momma’s House 2, debuting later this year. Rebound is merely a pit stop on the way to Lawrence’s eventual dissolution, unless there’s a sudden groundswell of support for Momma 2. Moviegoers do seem to have a weird attraction to watching comedians dressed up as fat old women. But Rebound features neither fat-suits nor Eddie Murphy, though there’s sure to be fart jokes aplenty in this story of a college basketball demoted to coaching junior high schoolers. The resulting comedy is doomed to be painfully predictable. We’ve already seen this movie once this year, a couple of weeks ago when it was called Kicking & Screaming. Moving from Will Ferrell to Martin Lawrence is not an upgrade. Is it too late to bring in Mike Ditka?
War of the Worlds (Opens in 3,908 theaters.)
Tom Cruise is a lunatic. I think the media feeding frenzy has pretty well established that. In fact, they’ve gone overboard. Now we’re bashing the guy for standing up for himself when he gets squirted in the face with suspicious liquids. I guess he brought it on himself. But if you can get past that and if you’ve any inclination at all to ever see Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, then you need to see it in a movie theater. I wasn’t blown away by it, but it’s a solid film (Spielberg’s incapable of making a turd) and a superficially stunning piece of work. This is a movie that cannot possibly be experienced properly on DVD, I don’t care what sort of home theater setup you’ve got. It demands to be seen in the absolute best movie theater you can find, as it will no doubt lose a lot of whatever luster it has once it appears on home video. For better or worse, War of the Worlds is the movie to watch this weekend.
