To celebrate the arrival of “Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus”, the Onion AV Club does it again: This week’s inventory is an inspired compilation of “27 Ridiculous Yet Entertaining Pop-Culture Fights (That Didn’t Take Place in Comic Books)“.
They left out “Buffy vs. Dracula” and “The Squid and the Whale”, but nobody’s perfect.
Good news, everyone! Pixar’s “Up” held the top spot at the box office over the weekend, pulling in an entirely respectable $44.2 million in its second week of release.
Coming in on its heels with $43.3 million was “The Hangover”, which is still pretty good for an R-rated comedy with no stars. (Don’t get me wrong: I love Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis, and Bradley Cooper is a swell guy, but none of them has ever opened a picture before.)
And in other news, the Tonys tried to kill Bret Michaels. So the universe is ruled by a just and decent god.
UPDATE: Turns out the estimates were wrong — when the final tallies were delivered on Monday, “The Hangover” had crept into first place with $44.98 million, dropping “Up” into second with $41.14 million. Maybe now they’ll bring back “Kitchen Confidential”.
In light of “The Hangover” opening this weekend, my latest Sympatico/MSN gallery follows the obvious path, cataloguing memorable movie drunks.
And before anyone says anything, I know I left out “The Lost Weekend” and “Days of Wine and Roses”. Didn’t really suit the tone.
Summertime is all about blockbusters and counter-programming, as the smaller distributors clear out their backlog of festival acquisitions under the pretense of firing everything they’ve got at the big, bad studio pictures. Either way, it means stuff’s coming out.
“Empties”: Festival favorite Jan Sverak’s comedy about a bored retiree (screenwriter Zdenek Sverak, who’s also the director’s father) looking for something to do finally gets a theatrical run nearly two years after its bow at TIFF 2007. Glenn liked it; Adam did not.
“The English Surgeon”: Glenn was raving about Geoffrey Smith’s profile of neurosurgeon Henry Marsh at last year’s Hot Docs; he’s just as high on it now. So, clearly, we should see it.
“The Hangover“: No, Todd Phillips’ ultimate Vegas nightmare breaks no new ground, but it’s appropriately entertaining and absurd, and almost perfectly cast. I even enjoyed Justin Bartha, which is saying something.
“Land of the Lost”: In which Will Ferrell shouts non-sequiturs at dinosaurs for an hour and a half, apparently.
“O’Horten”: The week’s other movie about a retired guy seeking purpose, this one from the deadpan Bent Hamer. Jason and Paul both enjoyed it; I’ve been trying to see it since Cannes, with no bloody luck.
“My Life in Ruins”: After the disaster of “Connie and Carla”, Nia Vardalos goes back to humping the Greek thing. Susan didn’t mind it; I suspect Adam‘s response is closer to my own.
“Tokyo!“: Three directors, one city, one more metropolitan omnibus film. But it’s worth seeing for the Leos Carax episode alone.
“Waterlife“: Kevin McMahon’s look at humanity’s destruction of the Great Lakes is somewhere between a conventional documentary and a thumb-sucking visual essay; I found the visual-essay stuff so twee that I turned against the documentary portions. Also, it’s at least half an hour longer than it needs to be.
Also: David Carradine, dead at 72 … and, um, apparently not a suicide. Damn.
Guess what’s coming to Bell this summer?
I mean, I’m not sure if I want to buy it, but I’ve been kind of auguring in the direction of a new phone for the last few months, and this sure looks like a purty one.
I spent more than a decade as a Palm guy — from the Pilot to the Visor through several Treos — before switching to the HTC 6800 last fall, and I have to say, Palm’s usability and ergonomics are second to none. And unlike that other device, the Pre will be able to cut and paste text right out of the box, which is fairly important in my line of work.
The downside: The Pre comes with a brand-new OS that’s neither Palm nor Windows-based, which means none of the apps I’ve acquired will work on it, and there’ll be some inevitable configurationing trouble. Also, it’s a first-generation device, and we’ve learned that first-generation devices tend to be a little on the quirky side when it comes to mobile phones. (See above re “cut and paste”.)
But … so pretty! So smooth and rounded, but still with a full QWERTY keyboard! And Engadget really likes it! Want! Want!
Yep, we’ve returned — loaded with chocolate biscuits, teabags, books and Region B Blu-ray discs, and, yes, one lonely little HD DVD that I grabbed more for the novelty than anything else. (It was only five pounds, and I kinda wouldn’t mind seeing that air-cycle chase again.)
And now that we’re back, regular life resumes, including the posting of a link to my latest Sympatico/MSN DVD column, which focuses on the contorted well-meaningness of Edward Zwick’s “Defiance” … because I’ve already said my piece about “Revolutionary Road“, dammit.
So that’s that. Did I miss anything?
As we’re leaving the land of mini Jaffa cakes and chocolate ginger biscuits this afternoon, there’s not much time for the net … so here are a couple of new movie galleries over on Sympatico/MSN’s “Pelham 1 2 3” site, focusing on inventive hostage thrillers and souped-up remakes, respectively.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to take one last whip around the video shops in search of abandoned HD DVDs …
If the Guardian allows users from outside the UK to access its video files, you should really check out Nick Broomfield’s new documentary “A Time Comes“.
It’s the story of the Kingsnorth Six, a group of Greenpeace activists who climbed a coal plant tower in 2007 to protest Gordon Brown’s plans to build new ones … and wound up charting a new course for environmental protest law.
It’s not even twenty minutes long. But here’s the trailer, if you’re wary.