Jack Black's Black Christmas
The top movie this holy weekend was the threequel to the epic Meet the Parents trilogy, Little Fockers. Ben Stiller's never going away! Can't say the same for his friend Jack Black, though.
1) Little Fockers — $34M
The fuck? The fuck is wrong with you people? Seriously, just what the heavenly fuck are you fucking fuckknobs thinking going to this fucking piece of absolute cinematic horse-fucking? I would rather fuck Todd Palin while Trig watched than pay money to see this fucking piece of motherfucking dog excrement. But what the fuck do I know? Am I the fucking arbiter of taste for this whole fucking country? Of course fucking not. Oh well. I hope you fucking enjoyed it, you brainless fucks. Are you so fucking excited to bend over a fourth fucking time and get fucked by Paramount/Universal once more, a couple holiday seasons from now? I fucking hope so. I really fucking do. (See what I did there? Clever, huh?)
2) True Grit — $25.6M
Whoa! The Western is back. In Coen Brothers' biggest debut ever, True Grit surpassed all expectations and took a Texas ransom in holiday loot. Oh lord, this could mean some sort of obnoxious attempt to cash in on a Western "trend." The results could be unintentionally hilarious, though. A bunch of the young male Hollywood swaggerbots all trying to grit it up with drawls and pistols. Wouldn't you love to see Chace Crawford in chaps and a wide-brim, staring down some fella in a saloon? (He already does all that now, in real life, but in a very different way.) How about Topher Grace and Ashton Kutcher (reunion!!) riding in grizzled old James Marsden's posse? Basically it'd be fun if they did Young Guns with the current crop of festering idiots they're calling young male Hollywood. The only young fella to do Western well recently was Ben Foster, whose evil gunslinger in 3:10 to Yuma was scary and cool, but even then bordered on kinda silly. OK, it's official. I now really hope this starts a Western trend. "Wilmer Valderrama is El Gaucho." "Leonardo DiCaprio is Cassidy and Shia LaBeouf is the Kid in Butch & Sundance, coming this fall." Let's do this thang, Hollywood.
3) TRON: Legacy — $20M
With a reported $170 million budget, this film's so-far $88 million haul is not really gonna be enough. The movie basically needs to do well-ish every weekend from here til March to recover. Which it's not going to do. Huh. It's strange. It's almost as if a sequel to a little-remembered movie from 1982 about an old man who lives in a computer maybe wasn't worth spending $200m to make. I mean, it's almost like that. It's not actually like that, of course. We also know Hollywood is geniuses. Just wall to wall geniuses. So of course they were right to make this movie for that amount of money. But "Maybe this was a stupid idea" is a thought that passes through one's head on a snowy day when one is stuck in Boston. Maybe...
6) The Fighter — $8.5M
OK, so here's my inevitable Snowmaggedon story. Like I said, I'm in Boston. Yesterday my mom, dad, sister and I go to see The Fighter. Everyone's excited for various reasons — dad likes boxing, mom and sister like Mark Wahlberg, I like to see Oscar movies — and everyone's enjoying the movie, because it is good! We're almost to the end, we're at the climactic moment when Wahlberg is rallying to fight one more round in the big end-of-the-movie fight, the audience in the movie is booing/cheering, the audience in the theater is tense and excited, and then... screen goes blank. Floodlights come on. The theater has lost power. Everyone grumbles and moans, people sit around, finally some poor teenage employee of the theater comes in and says "Um... our backup power isn't enough to turn the projectors back on. Sorry." Everyone moans and grumbles and no one sees the last five minutes of The Fighter. My dad looked up what happened when we got home, so we know, but it's just not the same. It's just not the same. And that is my tragic Snowpocalypse tale. (In addition to the Ballad of Woe that is me never leaving Massachusetts ever again because all trains and buses have become encased in ice crystals for the rest of time, apparently.)
7) Gulliver's Travels — $7.2M
Yiiiiiiiikes. This was supposed to be a big Christmas movie! A big Jack Black family special-fx comedy. And yet... nerfin'. Not nobody wanted to see this terrible-looking, badly reviewed thing based on an old satirical book that apparently isn't quite the literary touchstone the producers thought it was. What does this mean for Adam Sandler's big comedy adaptation of Rousseau's Emile (in which he plays both a tutor and the tutor's obnoxious charge)? It doesn't say good things, is what it doesn't say! And let's not even talk about Jim Carrey's big comeback turn in The Heart of Midlothian. Let's not even talk about that. Anyway, poor Jack Black. I think he's gonna have a hard fight out of this one. Zach Galifianakis done came and stole all his roles, is what happened.