The Oscars Take Down All the Other Movies With It
It was a quiet weekend at the cineplexes, mostly because everyone was busy at home doing their pre-Oscar calisthenics, frantically catching up on all the movies they missed, feverishly sewing beads on a dress while a cruel Anne Hathaway stood over them with a whip. You know, Oscar things!
1) Gnomeo & Juliet — $14.2M
Everyone really seems to like this movie! I mean, it's almost exclusively because of the title, right? That has to be it. I've seen many ads and trailers for this movie and I still have no idea what it's about, so I'll bet a bunch of other people were confused too. And yet they went, because the movie is called Gnomeo & Juliet and that pleases them. Particularly the gnome part, obviously. Can we then expect a new slate of gnome movies with punny gnomenclature? Gnomeward Bound: The Incredible Journey? Gnoman Holiday? Ethan Frgnome? The possibilities are endless!
2) Hall Pass — $13.4M
The Farrelly Brothers strike out yet again. Well, not entirely. The movie was made for a reasonable $36 million, but remember when they used to be the biggest deal? It is not the 1990s anymore, ladies and gentlemen, in case you were confused. Times have changed. Mary's hair has finally settled. You could say it's lost its spunk.
3) Unknown — $12.4M
I'm pretty excited for the sequel to this movie, Unknown 2: January Jones Is Missing, about a film crew running around Berlin trying to find January Jones. She went off in search of a bathroom one day toward the end of shooting and now she's gone. They figure she's probably lost somewhere, looking at shiny things, but in a place like Berlin that could be almost anywhere! It's going to be a taut yet whimsical thriller.
5) I Am Number Four — $11M
Is Alex Pettyfer over before he started? Everyone's been like "Oh he's the new action star, plus Beastly" for a while now, but Beastly has been delayed forever (it's finally coming out next week), this movie isn't doing terribly well, and all the gossip rags are saying that Pettyfer is a mean crazy jerk who scares his ex-girlfriend. Could he be a bellowing, meaner version of poor Gretchen Mol? I mean, not just anyone is invited to Ellen and told to take their shirt off, so maybe we should have waited on that with Pettyfer until we were sure it was the real deal? Because right now I am not feeling it. Something's off. If we're waiting for a new young male star, I think this kid is the one to watch. Sorry Pettyfer. It was fun while it lasted.
9) Drive Angry — $5.1M
Oh dear. This bomb will be immediately followed up by Drive Sad, about Nicolas Cage driving around in a rental car, weeping. It wasn't hard to film. They just put a video camera in Nicolas Cage's rental car for a week, figuring he was bound to drive around weeping at least three or four times. And they were right! Oh they didn't know how right they were.