Nationwide audiences had New Years Eve and The Sitter to choose from this weekend, and so, they didn’t. This weekend’s box office tally is weak, and Breaking Dawn, Part I is still lingering in the top 3 like an undead slime. Time for some Dragon Tattoo upheaval, STAT. Bring on Christmas! Let’s discuss the breakdown after the jump.
What the saying again? You can fool some moviegoers all the time and all moviegoers some of the time, but you can’t fool all of them all the time? Something like that — maybe we should ask Warner Bros., Garry Marshall and all the stars stuffed so ruthlessly into New Year’s Eve , who recycled the model that earned the aromatic Valentine’s Day a $56 million opening weekend and found less than a third of that crowd ready to fall for it again. Still, it will be enough for first place on a pillow-soft weekend. Your Friday Box Office is here.
In this weekend’s Young Adult , Charlize Theron plays a bitter teen lit author who returns to her hometown to reclaim her high school sweetheart. (A high school sweetheart who also happens to be a perfectly happy husband and new father.) So how did the South Africa-raised Theron transform herself from a delicate ballet dancer to a Oscar-winning onscreen homewrecker?
We may remember this as the week David Fincher and Scott Rudin went to war on movie critics, but think of it this way: If critics couldn’t get an early look at Garry Marshall’s New Year’s Eve , then how would any of us ever know what a soul-rending atrocity it is? I mean, even Pete Hammond hated this movie ! He was in some fine company, too:
Having begun his career as American independent film’s great hope with delicate, languid features like George Washington and All the Real Girls , David Gordon Green has devoted the last few years to turning out goofball stoner comedies that, aside from their hip and very current casts, could seem like forgotten oddball ’80s artifacts discovered in a box of dusty VHS tapes at a garage sale. While it’s not a career trajectory anyone who went googly-eyed over his early output would have guessed for him, there’s an unmistakable undercurrent of glee to these recent films that suggests Green — who still works with many of the crew members with which he started, including composer David Wingo and DP Tim Orr — is having a great time making exactly the type of movies he wants to.
Even though it’s something of a slick mess, Madonna’s W.E. is just the kind of movie you’d expect from an artist who once, with a delightful lack of irony, declared herself a material girl. A weirdly sympathetic portrait of Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom a king gave up his throne, W.E. is the story of a life told through stuff: Evening gloves, cocktail shakers, baubles from Cartier, little hats trimmed with netting. It’s as if Madonna went back in time and forgot to talk to actual people, to find out how they lived and what they thought — but she sure did a lot of shopping.
I don’t pretend to be a feminist or even understand feminism beyond accepting the fundamental concept of gender equality. That has always seemed straightforward enough, despite the vagaries and complications evident in myriad cultural examples from Michele Bachmann to Margaret Cho to Diablo Cody, the stripper-turned-scribe whose three produced screenplays to date — Juno , Jennifer’s Body and this week’s Young Adult — make up some of contemporary cinema’s rangier ruminations on feminism. Or at least what I think is feminism.
Some movies come directly to you, begging for your attention if not demanding it outright. And other movies sit still and quiet even as they hold out a hand, beckoning you closer until you’ve been drawn in almost in spite of yourself. Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy , an adaptation of John Le Carré’s 1974 novel, is the latter type.
Alec Baldwin, one of our chirpiest and most opinionated tweeters, has apparently given up Twitter altogether. The 30 Rock star and Oscar nominee fled the site following an incident in which American Airlines booted him off a plane for playing Words With Friends and for being violent, abusive, and aggressive . All that remains of his Twitter is the handle name and the word “Deactivated.” Sad, sad day. Thrust your American flag at the sky and never forget his above-average GOP putdowns. [ @AlecBaldwin ]