Marty and Leo Are Engaged!
O Meo my! It's true! Because their movie Shutter Island just did so well again this week, the longtime pair has agreed to make it official. To celebrate their nuptials, they'll next be making a romantic comedy with Katherine Heigl.
1) Shutter Island — $22.2 million
The thriller-chiller's big numbers make it the highest-grossing second-week, February-March interchange weekend, home-with-your-parents-and-seeing-it-at-Coolidge-Corner movie of all time. Quite a record! This is easily DiCaprio's biggest hit that hasn't involved boats. Oh wait. No, there was a boat in this, wasn't there? Well, it's definitely his biggest hit that involves Boston. Except for The Departed... Hm. OK. So maybe it's not really breaking any records per se, but it's still a splashy late-winter hit, one that is proving Paramount right to have moved it from the fall, and one that ought to have legs as more and more people demand to know its sssseeeeecret. Well, I'll save you the eleven bucks and tell you the secret right now: The yuppie lady who first buys Diane Keaton's gourmet baby jam in Baby Boom is in it. Yep. That's the big reveal. As I was getting up and putting my coat on my mom grabbed my arm and said, "Did you recognize that one lady?" And then she told me and we had a good laugh. Baby Boom is such a good movie, isn't it?
2) Cop Out — $18.5 million
If you level out the numbers between Tracy Morgan's relatively low debuts and Bruce Willis' relatively high ones (save for Surrogates, and much of the '00s), then this was a pretty respectable opening. Oh, and Kevin Smith! Oh yeah, this is pretty good for Kevin Smith too. Good all around. I didn't see it, did you? Mostly I want answers to this question. Why the bicycle?? Is it for wacky reasons, or for zany ones? Madcap or screwball? Irreverent or joyfully subversive?? I suppose I could just read the pullquotes on the poster, but who's got time to read? Who can read?
3) The Crazies — $16.5 million
Showing surprising strength for a documentary, this film — which follows denizens of various middle-American towns as they descend into the irrational and violent frothing madness of the Tea Party movement — seems to prove that America's appetite for political polemics has not waned since the great boiling rage-cauldron days of the 2008 election. Many audience members squealed in terror and vowed to see the film again as they watched a formerly perfectly-sane housewife from Monroe, MI forward emails entitled "How a Hussein Stole the White House" to her son at Grinnell. Others covered their eyes, too terrified to watch, as a respected car dealership owner from Tempe inexplicably brought a loaded firearm to a town council meeting about renaming the local civic center. Truly probing and scary stuff.
5) Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief — $9.8 million
This foreign language import from Greece is showing surprising box office stamina, dropping a slight 35% in its third week. Its total cume of $71 million is an impressive number, considering that, judging from the special effects, the movie cost about seventeen dollars to make. Uma Thurman probably got a fiver, Pierce Brosnan a coupla clams. Sean Bean was just happy to be there, and the little Logan Lerman kid got a Big Mac and a hander from Doris the wig lady. The rest was spent on super classy CGI that makes Catherine Keener (repaying a gambling debt) look like she's standing in a small phone booth while being grabbed by a minotaur. The lady from Providence was actually living on the studio lot when they started building the sets, so they just let her stay around and say a few lines.
6) Valentine's Day — $9.5 million
This movie has now made $100 million. That's one with two zeroes after it. Of millions. That's about the GDP of Kiribati, a small island nation in the Pacific. I don't really know what that means. But that's what Wikipedia told me. I think it means that Topher Grace is richer than all of Kiribati? Topher Grace could buy Kiribati if he wanted? I'm told that Ashton Kutcher actually owns Swaziland. And, for years, Jennifer Garner has been the cruel dictator of Djibouti. You wish that J. Garner was the dictator of your Djibouti! Aww. Remember Djibouti jokes? Oh, Djibouti. What was I talking about again?