The FilmJabber Movie Blog

The Friday box office results for August 1, 2008 are in, and it’s going to be a close one for box office crown. We have two films vying for first place this weekend: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the unwanted sequel starring Brenden Fraser, and the very-much-wanted sequel and box office behemoth The Dark Knight.

The Mummy 3 won the Friday battle, raking in $15.5 million, but it may not win the war. The Dark Knight dropped 45% from last weekend – still pretty damn good for a blockbuster of its size – to add another $12.8 million to its cume. Nevertheless, those smart analysts over at  Box Office Prophets except, with some uncertainty, that the Batman movie may come out on top when final box office numbers are counted. For starters, The Mummy 3 may be a little bit frontloaded – whereas The Dark Knight has proven that people want to see it consistently any day of the week. At the very least, if it comes down to the wire, I could see Universal hedging the numbers a bit so that when the weekend box office estimates come out, The Mummy 3 is sitting on top.

Irregardless, this is a win for Universal. After the disaster that was The Mummy 2 (granted, it made a ton of money), Universal has to be pleased with a $40+ million opening weekend. While it didn’t look as bad as The Mummy Returns, the presence of yetis and poorly designed dragons – as well as God-awful reviews – had the average moviegoer thinking that this was a down-and-out release. I had pretty much forgotten that this was part of a very successful movie franchise, and that it’s still summer – a good amount of money can still be made.

As for The Dark Knight, the good news is that by the end of the weekend it will be closing in on $400 million, the fastest movie to do so. The bad news is that now, it is looking less and less likely that it will knock Titanic off its throne.

Kevin Costner’s Swing Vote, by the way, flopped with only $1.9 million on Friday, begging for a $5-6 million weekend. I feel bad for Costner, as I really want him to get a hit one of these days. That being said, it was clear from the beginning that Swing Vote was not going to be that comeback he so desperately needs.

The Associated Press is reporting that due to Shia LaBeouf’s recent stint with the law – and another car – the blockbuster sequel Transformers 2 may actually write his injury into the script. LaBeouf’s truck was struck a few days ago while taking a left turn, causing him and the others in the car – including fellow Transformers 2 star Isabel Lucas – to be transported to the hospital. LaBeouf’s hand was “crushed,” according to his lawyer.

With at least two fingers out of commission, the possibility has arisen that Transformers 2 – which is currently in filming – may need to be modified. On “Access Hollywood,” director Michael Bay mentioned that the injury might be serious enough to modify the screenplay. Granted, there’s no better movie to work in a hand injury than this movie – or any Michael Bay movie for that matter. Just have Optimus Prime step on his hand in the heat of battle, and we’re good to go.

While the other driver has been cited as “at fault,” there are reports that LaBeouf was drunk at the time of the incident. Whether he was or not, this is the latest in a series of scrapes the actor has gotten into. He might want to think about cleaning up his act before he becomes a paparazzi dream for all the wrong reasons.

In other news, I found out that his name is pronounced “LeBuff” not “LeBoof” today.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe opened to a disastrous $10.2 million over its opening weekend, begging the question of how a movie based on one of the most successful movies of all time could do so poorly at the box office, even against the likes of The Dark Knight. While some box office analysts have mused that it was simply too long of a wait since the end of the TV show and that audiences had moved on to bigger and better things, I don’t think that has anything to do with anything. However, I believe the following are a few reasons why The X-Files: I Want to Believe failed to deliver:

1. The marketing was disastrous. While Warner Brothers was out promoting The Dark Knight feverishly, hitting up websites, movie theaters, TV and every other medium with advertisements, previews, images, posters and more, Fox was… well, not doing much at all. I didn’t get a single email from them asking to promote the film; there weren’t a slew of character posters or compelling images; there wasn’t much sign that the movie was coming to theaters at all. Furthermore, the news hardly talked about it all; PR failed miserably.
2. The movie trailers were bad. I didn’t think they were terrible, but then again, I’m an “X-Files” fan who was just excited that the film was coming to theaters. The movie was supposed to appeal to fans and non-fans alike, but the trailers, which lacked any kind of excitement or power, offered nothing of value to bite on.
3. Chris Carter kept the story under wraps. It’s understandable that 20th Century Fox and Carter wanted to keep the plot secret, but whereas Cloverfield, Indiana Jones and even The Dark Knight used this to their advantage to build hype and excitement, Fox did nothing more than lead fans down a few false paths.
4. The title is horrible. I mean really, really horrible. What were they thinking? I Want to Believe? What a dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb title.
5. Fox decided to release this movie a week after The Dark Knight. Sure, they couldn’t have known that Batman was going to be that big, but ever since the first pictures of The Joker appeared online – and especially since Heath Ledger died – the buzz was obvious. Fox should have moved The X-Files: I Want to Believe to another weekend within seconds.
6. There were no marathons or promotion of the show. For the last year, Fox should have been released special DVD sets, running marathons on TV and launching clips online. X-Files should have been everywhere, and it was nowhere.
7. The movie isn’t very good. Ultimately, good reviews would have given this film a bit of a boost, and it just wasn’t good enough to get them. The movie is a bit dull, the story unimaginative. While the marketing group should have done a lot better, admittedly, they didn’t have much to work with. (read my X-Files 2 movie review here)

The new teaser trailer for Saw V is now online, and while I have no interest in seeing the film (the last four have sucked, why won’t this one?), once again the Lionsgate marketing team has done a good job with this preview. Between the music and the simple footage, they keep you guessing until the last second – the perfect teaser trailer.

Thanks, Toyota, for being so innovative with your technology. While you could have spent the last ten years developing fuel efficient cars or figuring out how to make an MP3 jack standard in your vehicles, you instead went out of your way to add a Panic Button to my car’s remote control. What a useful feature. Thank you, Toyota!

After all, the Panic Button is a real life saver. I live in Bellevue, Washington – not exactly crime capital of the world. Hell, I’ll walk around in the streets of Seattle all night and not be frightened for a second. As a 26-year old male I am at huge risk of being attacked by a stalker or rapist, but this Panic Button makes me feel safer. I love the thought that at any time – when I’m near my car – I can hit that little red Devil button and fire up the car alarm, to scare away anyone who’s lurking nearby. Or wake up my neighbors. Or drive me crazy.

Because as useful as the Panic Button is, its secondary uses are far more valuable. Like, when I’m trying to carry my car keys and laptop bag in the same hand, and I accidentally trigger the Panic Button. Thanks for reminding me just how loud my car is – while I’m sitting in it. Or when I’m walking back from the gym, talking on the phone, and holding my keys and gym bag in the same hand. Or several bags of groceries. Or if it presses against something in my pocket wrong (you know what I’m talking about!). Thank you, Toyota.

I really appreciate the time and effort it took you to add this handy feature to my purchase. As much as I would have liked an MP3 jack (I did, thankfully, get to pay Car Toys $250 for a cord to stick out of my dash and not do a damn thing but play silent music) or even – gasp – an automatic trunk release on my remote control, I couldn’t live without the Panic Button from Hell.

Thank you, Toyota, for the most annoying, pointless feature a car can have.

After my discouraging trip to the movie theater on Monday night in a failed attempt to see The Dark Knight, my roommate and I were at least entertained to witness a blonde do what blondes do: something dumb. Now, I have several blonde female friends, and they’re quite smart (though they do have their blonde moments from time to time), so I don’t mean to pander to stereotypes here. Well, OK, yes, I do.

This isn’t going to come across as all that funny to those who didn’t witness such a thing, but as we stopped at a traffic signal in downtown Bellevue, the city where I live (near Seattle), we observed as the woman in front of us – a dirty blonde – started to work on her hair. This is fine, as when I sit at traffic signals and have nothing to do, I usually a) scratch myself, b) stick my hand through my sun roof or, generally, c) try to check out cute dirty blondes in cars around me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see if she was cute or not, but I could see her playing with her hair… and, well, she didn’t make it too far.

She first straightens her hair with her hands, and then starts making a move as if she’s planning to convert her free flow into a ponytail. As I’ve observed women all over the world put their hair into a ponytail, I have to assume this is pretty simple, though I generally am amazed that women know exactly how to turn chaos into nice hairdos. Anyway, while she’s holding her almost-ponytail in one hand, the light turns green.

An average person, I assume, would give up on their hairstyle attempt and wait until another light. After all, it’s not like she had started braiding it in an elaborate manner – she had just grabbed her hair with one hand. But does she let go? No. As a good blonde would do, she keeps one hand on the steering wheel and proceeds to navigate through five or six more lights and over two miles worth of road. The road is entirely straight, with just a few hills and dips involved. Not that I encourage it, but if she really wanted to finish her hair – presumably by just tying a band around the ponytail – she could have taken her other hand off the wheel for a split second to do so.

Instead, she holds her hair with her elbow sticking out toward the passenger’s side. The multiple green traffic signals don’t thwart her. The miles of open road don’t thwart her. And even when I finally turned into my apartment complex, she was still holding her hair like it was a Faberge egg. Who knows how many more miles she carried that hair.

Anyway, not that funny now that I’ve committed it to paper, but it was pretty hilarious at the time.

I’ve added a couple of video clips from the upcoming Luke Wilson comedy Henry Poole is Here. Check it out:

Going into last week, I had a very strategic, three-touch plan to seeing The Dark Knight. I would see it opening night, at midnight, with all the freaks and geeks. I would then see it a few days later with my parents. I would then see it a third time on IMAX, as I’ve never seen a “real” movie on IMAX before.

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Watch the new teaser trailer for the upcoming movie Twilight. For a teen action-horror, it looks pretty good… then again, it still comes off as teen action-horror. The line, “I’m only afraid of losing you,” while not bad, does not exactly escalate the film above teen drama.

A coworker sent me this YouTube video today. It’s been online for two years, but that doesn’t make it any less funny. Can you name all of the films shown in here, which depict some pretty ridiculous death scenes? I sure as hell can’t.

I particularly like the one with the hook through the guy’s eye, though I wouldn’t call that the funniest of the bunch. Some of the shark deaths are pretty classic, although I think the throwing star one gets me chuckling the most.

In anticipation of The Dark Knight this Thursday, I rented the direct-to-DVD movie Batman: Gotham Knights, which hit stores this last Tuesday. Thankfully, I used my Netflix account, because the movie certainly wasn’t worth the money.

Batman: Gotham Knights is meant to bridge the gap between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, so I assumed there would be something about the Joker, so on and so forth. Hell, I thought there’d at least be a plot.

Instead, this Batman movie is six stories pieced together to create a feature-length, 75-minute action-drama. The first story, about a group of kids who all see Batman from a different perspective (one sees him as a shadow monster, another as an invincible robot, so on and so forth), is completely inane. Actually, it’s downright terrible, and does nothing to move the film along.

The other stories aren’t nearly as terrible, as they delve more into some known but little-used villains such as Killer Croc and Deadshot (oh, and Scarecrow, but after Batman Begins I wouldn’t call him “little-used” anymore). Still, short stories aren’t very exciting as it’s impossible to get into the stories with any emotional committment, and then there’s the fact that this movie is meant to bridge the gap between the two Christopher Nolan movies – yet it doesn’t. Maybe I should never have expected much, but I did.

Oh, and just for a record, I am a fan of the original Batman cartoon, so I’m not anti-cartoon. In fact, the visuals are pretty impressive, as the artwork used in the film are much more advanced than anything I used to watch on TV back in the day. The visuals are the only saving grace.

Batman: Gotham Knights has potential and some of its stories are better than others, but its lack of a single story or connection to the films make it a throwaway film.

Watch the new movie trailer for Ghost Town, which stars Ricky Gervais (from the British version of “The Office”) as a man who, after dying for only seven minutes, discovers that he can see ghosts. Greg Kinnear plays one of those ghosts, who enlists the man to hit on his wife (Tea Leoni), who in turn is dating a creep of a dentist.

Ghost Town looks OK, but not particularly funny. The marketing department will have to do more to make this one look appealing.

77 hours. 77 hours until the lights will fade, the previews will begin, and the theater will roar as The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger and all, rolls onto the screen. Anticipation is high… in fact, amazingly high. In order to subdue my hype, however, I went searching for bad reviews, and, of course, went straight over to RottenTomatoes.

The reviews did not help in crushing my hopes. The movie only has an 88% fresh rating based on 20 reviews, and the snippets from the bad reviews include:

This movie is grim and jammed together. The narrative isn’t shaped coherently to bring out contrasts and build toward a satisfying climax. The Dark Knight is constant climax; it’s always in a frenzy, and it goes on forever. -David Denby, New Yorker

Why do comic-book movies want to be serious literature? That’s the problem with this movie the same way it was with 2006’s “Superman Returns.” Instead of being exciting pop-culture entertainment that forces the viewer to take it seriously, the movie takes itself too seriously – and misses the fun in the process. – Marshall Fine, Star Magazine

But then the novelty wears off and the lack of imagination, visual and otherwise, turns into a drag. The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic. Even its most wondrous vision—Batman’s plunges from skyscrapers, bat-wings snapping open as he glides through the night like a human kite—can’t keep the movie airborne. There’s an anvil attached to that cape. – David Edelstein, New York Magazine

Actually, those are all of the rotten reviews thus far, and the first two don’t strike much confidence in me. Denby’s review is scathing, to say the least, but he loses me when he bashes Bale, Batman Begins and everything else I know I’ll like. I can’t pre-judge someone else’s movie review until I see The Dark Knight myself, but when someone hates a movie for being “perverse” and sounds like they hated the first one, too, credibility goes right out the window. After all, Batman Begins is the best comic book movie made, and so it’s unlikely I’m going to agree with him here.

Fine, who still gives the movie 2.5 stars, complains that the movie isn’t fun enough, and points out that comic book movies shouldn’t take themselves too seriously. That’s fine, but one gets the sense he doesn’t like realistic comic book movies, and again, we have a severe difference of opinion. I feel most comic book franchises, from Spider-Man to X-Men, would be best served by being grittier and adult-oriented.

The Dark Knight movie review by Edelstein is the most sobering, as he seems the most unbiased by Christopher Nolan’s approach. If I were to end up being disappointed by The Dark Knight, his review is what I’d write. He complains there’s too much dialogue and that the movie is too smart for its own good; could Nolan have gotten too caught up in the drama of it all that he forgot to make an exciting action movie? I doubt it, but we shall see.

More dampening are the fresh movie reviews that fall short of calling the movie a classic; they liked it but didn’t love it. I didn’t go on to read the movie reviews beyond the snippets in RottenTomatoes, but if The Dark Knight isn’t everything I wanted and more, it will probably fall in line with these reviews. After all, if you hype a movie up so much, you’re bound to be disappointed.

Of course, most of the Dark Knight movie reviews rave about the film; some call it a masterpiece; others a classic. At the very least, they say it’s an excellent film. Damn. My hype has not gone away.

The Dark Knight is one of the most anticipated movies of the year. Fandango is reporting that so many midnight showings have sold out that theaters are having to add 3am and 6am showings (although I just went and bought tickets for a midnight showing at the best theater in town without any problem). More importantly, though, employers should expect a worker shortage on Friday, July 18th, or at least a lack in productivity among their employees.

After all, a Fandango survey of 3,000 customers (presumably 3,000 of their customers that like to pay their high fees over and over again) revealed that a whopping 37% of people are planning to go see the new Batman film late Thursday night, and that 38% plan to take some or all of Friday off to recupurate.

You can read more at my original employee productivity post.

Things have changed since September 11th. Security at airports is more of a pain in the ass in the ever. For some reason, we still have to take off our shoes, as if the terrorists are really that dumb to put C4 in their shoes anymore. The United States is set at a constant state of Orange Alert, whatever that means. Countries can be attacked even without doing anything to the U.S. Our government can spy on us without a court order. However, we’re still looking for WMDs in Iraq.

But what pisses me off almost as much as having to take my shoes off at airports is listening to the song “God Bless America” during the 7th inning stretch of Major League Baseball games. The policy was implemented the day baseball returned to the airwaves after the attacks, and that is fine. The policy continued through the playoffs and World Series. OK.

Then “God Bless America,” if memory serves, played during the 7th Inning Stretch of every MLB game in 2002. A big baseball fan, I go to a lot of games. Maybe not as many as some, but I’d say 25 games a season is more than most people go to. That’s a lot of times to hear “God Bless America,” and think of the players – they have to hear it at least 162 days a year. Sure, the National Anthem and Take Me Out to the Ballgame are played every game, but one is our national anthem, and other is a pure baseball tradition. “God Bless America” is just something Bud Selig added to appeal to patriotic sensibilities, and presumably NASCAR fans.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m patriotic. Yes, I’m liberal AND patriotic (I don’t view the two as being mutually exclusive, at all). No, I don’t wear American flag underpants or burn Dixie Chick records or take everything (or anything) our President says at face value; in fact, I question most things our government tells us, and even what the national media tells us. But I love America and am proud to be an American, despite everything we do to the world.

So, when I say I hate the song, “God Bless America,” I am not being unpatriotic; I am simply saying that it is an overly used, annoying, biased and ultimately offensive piece of music.

Why should MLB not play “God Bless America” at its baseball games anymore? Here are a few reasons:

• As an atheist, it mildly offends me. OK, in reality, I just don’t like hearing the song, but being forced to listen to “God Bless” stuff is just nauseating.
• On that note, though, whenever I hear, “God Bless…” I think Christian. Which is fine, except baseball is a sport for all people and all religions, not just Christians. What do Muslims think? Hindus? Buddhists? Most don’t care; they live in a country based on Christian principles. Fine. But in an age of political correctness, shouldn’t the MLB be a little more… politically correct? (see, I actually suggest being PC when it’s in my best interest)
• Furthermore and foremost, “God Bless America?” Isn’t that a little self-centered, a little pre-globalization. Patriotism and a little bit of nationalism is fine, but how about “God Bless the World?”I’d find that a lot less offensive, as we shouldn’t be concerned about whether God blesses this country but rather the world as a whole? “America” implies the United States, but a good chunk of baseball players are from other countries.

Why this random post? It has nothing to do with movies, though arguably it has to do with entertainment. But really, I just got really annoyed when, after listening to “God Bless America” at the baseball game, the Gasworks Park fireworks show on 4th of July (the biggest show in Seattle) did their finale to Celine Dion’s version of the song. Isn’t Dion a Canadian, for starters? And two, really? That song of all songs to do your finale to? No!