It was a patriotic explosion of patriotism at the box office this weekend, with our ultimate superhero and protector soaring to high heights. Those blasted British wizards still did good too, unfortunately. And some red-blooded American youths played all right as well.

1) Captain America: The First Avenger — $65.8M
 Let's hear it for the red, white, and blue! Let's launch hotdogs out of our fireworks cannons and drive a Chevy into a Walmart and hump some cheerleaders under the bleachers. Let's disenfranchise some poor people and start reckless wars and pump poison into the water table. Let's abandon the moon and give up on science and make history a myth. Let's have a beer blast on top of the Rockies because man oh freakin' man, Captain America has come home to roost. Our boy did better than Thor (well, maybe) and better than X-Men and better than that weird green fag the Lantern. With nothing more than a leather suit, a shield, and one whopping case of 'roid-rage, the Captain gut-busted $17,000 from each and every movie screen it played on. Talk about AMERICA! Whoo hoo! So everyone get on your ATVs or motorcyles or hop into your giant smoke-belching suburban assault vehicles and let's all drive down to the quarry and piss into Hell's great gaping maw, because we win, everybody. We motherfucking win.

2) Harry Potter and the Heyyyyy Ron Weasleys, Part 2 — $48M
 So this movie dropped big-time from its opening weekend, but that was to be expected. I mean every goddamned body saw that thing last weekend, so this $48 million was contributed by the few weirdo stragglers and the few weirdo return-customers. You know, the ones with the wizard hats and stringy, greasy hair, and asthmatic wheezes, and Tevas and whatnot. The wizard people, dear readers. But still, despite the drop the movie is of course doing quite well, and is on track to earn a billion galleons around the world by the time it's done, probably even more, so don't worry about old Harry Potter. This last broomabout will likely be the most successful of them all, a fitting end. And still for weeks and maybe even months to come, those same jean-shorted and overalled weirdos will continue to pour their dumpy frames into movie seats, will quietly mouth all the dialogue as it goes, buttery popcorn tumbling out of their mouths, outside the bright world spinning along, near forgetting these creatures as they huddle in the dark and pray to their sorcerer god.

3) Friends With Benefits — $18.5M
 Oooh sexy! While not the biggest R-rated comedy hit of the summer, to be sure, this little sex flick still did pretty well. The box office tea leaf readers over at EW tell me that audience exit polling gave this film an average of a B+, but the under 18 crowd gave in an A. An A! Why, because they can sexily relate to all the sexiness on display in this movie? Ha, no. Stupid pimply old teenagers cannot relate to having casual sex with Mila Kunis or Justin Timberlake. Sorry, teens! What they can relate to, or rather respond to, is a deep and abiding wish to have casual sex with Mila Kunis and/or Justin Timberlake. Oh man do teens want that, with all their sweat-fisted might they want it. And while it really is a deep and serious ache inside, it's slightly cathartic to publicly manifest that desire as laughter, with levity. "Ha ha," they communicate to each other. "Ha ha, isn't that silly and ribald and wild! Ha ha." But all the while the terrible lust worms inside them are devouring their beings, love's strange battery acids burning away their cores. And then when they leave the theater, hungry and guilty and satisfied and spent, they tell the exit poll person "A! A! It was perfect, it was perfect." Not because it was perfect, nothing ever is, but because oh how they'd like it to be.

4) Transformers: Everyone's Assholes — $12M
 I don't really want to talk you people anymore. Not that I think you're the main ones seeing this movie, but odds are one of you did this weekend? At least one of you said "Transformers, please" to the theater employee, or at least mashed a finger onto the Transformers button on the ticket machine. And that just makes me sad and angry all at once. So let's just not talk about it, huh? Let's just try to not talk about this movie ever again. It existed. It was. It will, in some new form, be again. And it's one of you people's fault. Just one, though.

39) The Myth of the American Sleepover — $9K
 Just as mystifying, in a way, as the one person among you who saw Transformers this weekend, are the people who went to go see this movie at the one theater it's playing at, the Angelika on Houston. At $13 a ticket, let's say, that means some 700 weirdo New Yorkers went to see the weird sleepover movie this weekend. "Hon?" said some chunky-spectacled person to another chunky-glassed person. "You want to go see the sleepover movie? It's playing downtown." "Sure," said the other person, putting down The Economist or the new Ann Patchett novel. "We'll take the 1 down to Christopher and walk over?" And that's what they did. They and 698 or so other people, descended upon the Angelika and said "Seven hundred for the sleepover movie, please." Then they all sat in the dark, subway cars rumbling around them, and they watched the sleepover movie. And on the subway ride home one person with chunky black glasses turned to the other person with chunky black glasses and said "It was good. Though, don't you feel like we should have seen Captain America?" And the other person thought about it, there underground in the deep dark tunnel, and finally said "Yes, I guess we should have."