Tuesday, August 31, 2010

New Dancing with the Stars cast

I don't watch this show, but for those interested:

The official 12 for Dancing with the Stars: singer Michael Bolton, former America's Got Talent judges David Hasselhoff and Brandy, Brady Bunch matriarch Florence Henderson, Dirty Dancing star Jennifer Grey, comedian Margaret Cho, NBA vet Rick Fox, NFL vet Kurt Warner, Disney Channel's Kyle Massey, former Alaskan first-daughter Bristol Palin, Jersey Shore's Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino, and The Hills' Audrina Partridge.

Full Emmy Award Results

Drama
BEST DRAMA - Mad Men
BEST ACTOR - Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad
BEST ACTRESS - Kyra Sedgwick, The Closer
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR - Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS - Archie Panjabi, The Good Wife
BEST WRITING - M. Weiner & E. Levy, Mad Men
BEST DIRECTING - S. Shill, Dexter
BEST GUEST ACTOR - John Lithgow, Dexter
BEST GUEST ACTRESS - Ann-Margret, Law & Order: SVU

Comedy
BEST COMEDY - Modern Family
BEST ACTOR - Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory
BEST ACTRESS - Edie Falco, Nurse Jackie
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR - Eric Stonestreet, Modern Family
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS - Jane Lynch, Glee
BEST WRITING - S. Levitan & C. Lloyd, Modern Family
BEST DIRECTING - R. Murphy, Glee
BEST GUEST ACTOR - Neil Patrick Harris, Glee
BEST GUEST ACTRESS - Betty White, Saturday Night Live

Reality
BEST REALITY COMPETITION - Top Chef
BEST REALITY PROGRAM - Food Revolution
BEST REALITY HOST - Jeff Probst, Survivor

Variety
BEST VARIETY - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
BEST WRITING - The 63rd Annual Tony Awards
BEST DIRECTING - Vancouver 2010 Olympics Opening Ceremony

Mini-Series/Movie
BEST TV-MOVIE - Temple Grandin
BEST MINISERIES - The Pacific
BEST ACTOR - Al Pacino, You Don't Know Jack
BEST ACTRESS - Claire Danes, Temple Grandin
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR - David Strathairn, Temple Grandin
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS - Julia Ormond, Temple Grandin
BEST WRITING - You Don't Know Jack
BEST DIRECTING - Temple Grandin

Un Prophete - DVD Review


***

Starring Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup and Adel Bencherif.
Directed by Jacques Audiard.

Does the world need another prison/gangster drama? Only if it's done well. This is done well.

It's also from France, and I'm pretty sure I've never seen a French prison/gangster drama. The story follows Malik, a small-time crook thrown into the prison. He's low in the pecking order due to his being Arab, but he catches the eye of Cesar Luciani, a lifer mobster who gives him a choice. Malik can kill a fellow prisoner, or get killed himself.

From there, Malik follows the trajectory of any Al Pacino gangster movie, but I give the movie credit for telling a familiar story in an original way.

The Killer Inside Me - DVD Review

*1/2

Starring Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Ned Beatty, Simon Baker, Elias Koteas, Tom Bower, Bill Pullman, Brent Briscoe, Liam Aiken and Jay R. Ferguson.
Directed by Michael Winterbottom.

Some movies can be really well-made but are so repellant at their core that it overrides whatever technical expertise or finesse it took to put it all together. Casey Affleck mumbles his way through this period drama about a small-town deputy sheriff who one day decides to beat a woman to death. After that, more and more bodies are left in his wake as he continues to cover his tracks. The movies invites the audience to be as detached from the killings as the protagonist, but why should they want to?

Sunday, August 29, 2010

City Island - DVD Review


***1/4

Starring Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, Steven Strait, Emily Mortimer, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Ezra Miller, Alan Arkin, and Carrie Baker Reynolds.
Directed by Raymond De Felitta.

We get 10-20 dysfunctional-family movies a year, but this is better than most of them.

Andy Garcia is patriarch Vince Rizzo, a classic name for a guy who's not going to live to the end of a Sopranos episode, but he's basically a good guy, a corrections officer working at the prison, living in (on?) City Island, a section of New York that just doesn't get the pub. He's got a wife, a son and a daughter who each harbor secrets, and he harbors his own. We learn all these secrets fairly early; we as the audience can just enjoy to what lengths the family members go through to keep their secrets hidden.

Garcia did a really good job here as Vince, one of his more memorable roles. I also liked Julianna Margulies, queen of Chicago TV characters, in a New York blue-collar role she normally would not get offered. Especially good is the final ten minutes, where the houses of cards everyone has built comes crashing down.

Mad Men & Modern Family win

Good. Wouldn't mind seeing a different drama, but Mad Men's been a must on my DVR since it debuted, and Modern Family was the best new comedy of last year.

Brycan Cranston wins 3rd time for Breaking Bad

I love Cranston's work on that show, but I would have given it to Michael C. Hall for Dexter. Glad to see it won for at least Directing and Guest Actor.

I don't watch The Closer, so I was pulling for Julianna Margulies, but Sedgwick's always truck me as a good person.

Aaron Paul wins for Breaking Bad

Paul had a good year, but I'm surprised he actually won. And yet it may have been the deepest category, with O'Quinn & Emerson from Lost and Martin Short from Damages.

Happy for Archie Panjabi. My vote probably would have gone for Christina Hendricks, and just because she did two episodes of Firefly, though it helps.

Top Chef wins Best Competition Program

The Amazing Race has been unseated! Wow.

Others:

JIM PARSONS wins for BIG BANG THEORY. Thrilled!

EDIE FALCO wins for NURSE JACKIE. Eh, I would have rather seen it go to Amy Poehler or Lea Michele.

ERIC STONESTREET wins for MODERN FAMILY. Awesome. I hope next year Ed O'Neill allows imself to be up for Best Actor rather than in the Best Supporting pool.

JANE LYNCH for GLEE. The first Emmy for her? Well, I'm glad she won it.

Great Opening for the Emmys

Jimmy Fallon and Neil Patrick Harris should switch off hosting every year for the next ten years.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

My One and Only - DVD Review

**
Starring Renee Zellweger, Logan Lerman, Kevin Bacon, Mark Rendall, Chris Noth, Nick Stahl, Eric McCormack, David Koechner, Steven Weber, Troy Garity and Robin Weigart.
Directed by Richard Loncraine.

I remembered this was based on the childhood of someone famous, but I didn't look up who so I could watch it unbiased. And I was surprised when the reveal came who he is.

My problem with this was the tone and the borrowing. One scene comes straight out of Monty Python's Life of Brian. Another scene comes right out of GoodFellas. And I don't mean tone-wise, I mean they literally felt like someone took those scenes and changed the dialogue a little,a nd then plugged them into this movie.

So is this a comedy or a drama? Zellweger's socialite mother seems like a comic character but with bad things that happen to her. Logan Lerman (Percy Jackson) has the intensity of a dramatic character but when we find out who he is, I don't know, seems like he would've been a little more light-hearted in his youth.

She's a rich woman who learns her husband's cheating on her so she puts her two teenage boys in the car and drives across the country looking for a new husband/sugar-daddy to take care of them. Each guy seems to get 5-10 minutes and then she moves on, and after the third failure, I found myself growing impatient with what's going on. So... she's going to go through the rest of the actors I've heard of in the opening credits before she has her epiphany? A big meh from me.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Brooklyn's Finest - DVD Review


**1/2

Starring Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes, Will Patton, Ellen Barkin, Lili Taylor, Brian F. O'Byrne, Michael K. Williams, Jesse Williams and Vincent D'Onofrio.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua.

If you've seen Training Day, Dark Blue, Deep Cover, or any corrupt-cop movie in the past 40 years, you've seen Brooklyn's Finest. The appeal then is just watching a different set of actors go through familiar motions.

It's an ensemble piece that focusses on three different, very loosely connected cops. So loose that I don't think any gets more than ten seconds of screen-time shared with another. Richard Gere is the beat cop who has one week until retirement. Don Cheadle is the undercover cop who's been under so long he's starting to lose his grip on his own humanity. Ethan Hawke is the detective struggling with the temptation to pocket drug money from their busts with his bills stacking up.

There are so many cliches in the movie that it has fun with it. It sets up about twelve cliched plot turns but only follows eight of them, while the other four just evaporate. It gets pretty violent, and director Antoine Fuqua has a fetish for blood splattering on the wall. In fact, it got to where any time a character was standing near a wall, I figured he wasn't long for this world.

The performances are all fine, especially Hawke as the cop at the end of his rope. It's also nice to see Snipes in a movie that didn't go straight to DVD. It all builds to an allegedly powerful climax but th impact isn't there, maybe because it feels so inevitable.

Knight & Day - Movie Review


**1/2

Starring Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard, Viola Davis, Jordi Molla, Paul Dano, Maggie Grace, Marc Blucas, Celia Weston and Dale Dye.
Directed by James Mangold.

This was the first movie I've seen where I felt like the director was thinking about how it would look on an iPod. There are numerous close-ups of Cruise & Diaz, and it reminded me of the Shatner & Nimoy close-ups on the Star Trek series, filmed for 13-inch screens so their heads fill up the entire screen. I always found it funny how I could see the varying shades of Mr. Nimoy's make-up.

But that's just one piece. I want to go to another. There's a scene late in the movie where Diaz's character is given "experimental truth serum." Comic opportunities are exploited to positive effect from that, and it made me wish more of the movie had been in that spirit.

Cruise plays Roy Miller, a CIA agent gone rogue. Diaz plays June, a car-restorer who bumps into him at the airport. After Roy kills everyone on their plane, he needs to keep June with him for a while to keep her safe. Is he crazy? Is he actually the bad guy? The movie plays with those questions for a while.

Good stunt-work. Cruise and Diaz are likeable performers, though Diaz is better at comedy. We saw this at the $1.50 theater, and it was perfect for that price. Fun, amusing, utterly forgettable.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Big Lake - TV Review

Chris Gethard seems like a nice guy, but he has a breathy delivery like he's recording animated voices while trying not to wake up his baby. He's not really the problem. Comedy Central's new show Big Lake has some of the flattest laughs of any sitcom pilot ever. Worse than Hank. Decent cast, weak writing. I can see why Jon Heder backed out of starring in it. I'd DVR'd two episodes, but I deleted the second one.

A Single Man - DVD Review

***1/2

Starring Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult, Matthew Goode, Lee Pace and Ginnifer Goodwin.
Directed by Tom Ford.

Finally got a chance to see this little film from late last year that created a buzz for it being the performance of Colin Firth's career. Maybe so. I'm glad he got this chance. I can't say he buried himself in the role, but that we got to see what Firth can really do when he's the center of attention and he can take the time here and there to just pause and absorb what's going on.

I've noticed I'm a sucker for the dramatic pause. When I watched Wall Street again, as fun as it was to lap up the ooze from Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko, my favorite moment was the five-second pause Martin Sheen takes when he realizes how corrupted his son has become. There's the look on Jeff Bridges's face that washes over him in Crazy Heart when he realizes that due to his drinking, he has lost his girlfriend's son. Any movie worth its salt that casts Robert Duvall makes sure to give him one or two.

Firth gets a few of those here. He's a starched shirt of a professor in 1962, and he's just lost his long-time lover in a car crash. Being a closeted homosexual, he has to keep hidden the grief he's suffering. There are several agonizing moments Firth is allowed.

My vote still would have been for Bridges, but Firth was definitely worthy of the consideration.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Michael Douglas has Throat Cancer

I wish him a full recovery, for the sake of himself, his wife and family.

And I'm looking forward to Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - Movie Review


***1/2

Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, Brandon Routh, Jason Schwartzman, Ellen Wong, Alison Pill, Mark Webber, Mae Whitman and Aubrey Plaza.
Directed by Edgar Wright.

Once I saw the 80% RottenTomato ranking I figured I'd like it, but it was even better than I expected. Michael Cera, who's been getting annoying lately, is still playing the same variant of his normal persona, but it all works here as Scott Pilgrim, a young man in love who must battle evil to get it.

The movie is very plugged in. It's like watching The Fly remade as The iPhone, with music, TV, video games references constantly, with characters defined in stat-mode, and it never slows down. If a joke fizzles, meh, the next one's on its way.

That's Chris Evans, taking between his gags as The Human Torch and Captain America, as an evil movie star. That's Brandon "Superman" Routh, as an evil bass player. Scott's sister is Oscar-nominee Anna Kendrick. My favorite though was Kieran Culkin as Scott's sarcastic gay roommate Wallace. Reminded me of a younger Robert Downey Jr.

We had a blast.

The Bounty Hunter - DVD Review

**

Starring Jennifer Aniston, Gerard Butler, Jason Sudeikis, Christine Baranski, Cathy Moriarty, Peter Greene, Jeff Garlin and Dorian Missick.
Directed by Andy Tennant.

Saw this a while ago but haven't found much energy to review it. It's not terrible but it's not good. It's very formula, and the "they-hate-each-other-til-they-love-each-other" arc wasn't believable to me. The scene that sums it up for me is when Gerard Butler, as a bounty hunter, is chasing a guy across a gold course. He runs into the driving range. Do the people stop? No, each one hits their balls as he gets it front of them, as not one golfer notices there's a guy out there running. Several actors show up to get their Supporting Player paydays before going back to their more fulfilling work on TV, like Christine Baranski (The Good Wife) and Jeff Garlin (Curb Your Enthusiasm).

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Repo Men - DVD Review


*

Starring Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Liev Schreiber, Alice Braga and Carice van Houten.
Directed by Miguel Sapochnik.

Sometime in the future - a murky, shapeless future - strictly privatized health-care will result in expensive organ transplants with outrageous interest rates where it's been made legal for repo men to cut your organs out if you can't pay. This was the premise for the junky Repo: The Genetic Opera not long ago, and even with the same basic premise, this movie is about as bad, just for different reasons. Where R:TGO seemed to be aspiring to be terrible, trying to be the next Rocky Horror cult film, Repo Men thinks it's saying something.

The first third isn't too bad, setting up the world, the psychopaths who have fun cutting people up legally. Jude Law (Remy) and Forest Whitaker (Jake) have a decent buddy chemistry, and Liev Schreiber becomes a master at offering that fake reassuring smile when we know his evil will eventually manifest itself.

When Remy goes out to do "one last job", as his wife has threatened to leave him if he doesn't quit, he gets zapped by faulty equipment. He wakes up to find he has his own new heart, one that he has to pay for. This is where I got yanked out.

I was giving the movie the ugly, brutal, inhumane society it'd created, but if you're on the job, and it's your own company's faulty equipment that nukes your heart, doesn't the company have to pay for it? Wouldn't they give him a special deal? Wouldn't this world be full of lawyers salivating at the chance of slapping this artificial-organ company with a lawsuit? This movie doesn't want you to think about things. Ever.

It's also when Remy now has an artificial heart that the movie decides to start taking itself seriously, at its own peril. The soundtrack gets all somber, and he meets an underground society of people with defaulted loans on their artificial organs, hiding, unable to pay. Now wifeless, he even gets a new love interest.

Toward the end, there's one reveal that demonstrates how jaw-droppingly stupid one character is, and that gets topped off by one of the worst twist endings in movie history. Just because I didn't see it coming doesn't make it good.

After.Life - DVD Review

*1/2

Starring Christina Ricci, Liam Neeson, Justin Long, Josh Charles, Chandler Canterbury and Celia Weston.
Directed by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo.

Half-hour premise stretched out to 90 minutes. We're waiting the whole time for the surely Twilight Zone ending, but it ends on a fairly ambiguous note.

Christina Ricci plays a young woman who gets into a car crash. She's awake, alive on the slab at the mortuary, where funeral director Liam Neeson is preparing her body. Or is she really dead? He seems to be the only one who can hear her.

It's largely a two-character a movie, but we get the occassional distraction from her histrionic fiance (Justin Long, who's better at comedy) and an unconvincingly mustachioed Josh Charles (The Good Wife). I go back to my original assertion. 30 minute premise, 90 minute movie. And the "twist" ending doesn't answer the one question that is the premise for the entire film.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

NBC's Last Comic Standing concludes

I watched the two-hour finale, and weirdly, the least funny comic of the final five, Felipe Esparza, won the $250,000. I meet the news with a shurg because previous winners haven't really gone on to anything.

The thing that stuck out most to me was when Kathy Griffin performed. She had pumped-in laughs. Everyone else who performed had to earn the laughs of the crowd, but every punchline of hers got the same amount of laughs at the same volume. It was weird.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Diary of a Wimpy Kid - DVD Review


***

Starring Zachary Gordon, Robert Capron, Rachael Harris, Steve Zahn, Chloe Moretz, Devon Bostwick and Grayson Russell.
Directed by Thor Freudenthal.

The books are better, but it conveyed just enough charm that I'm glad I rented it.

Zachary Gordon (National Treasure 2) plays Greg Heffley, a middle-school kid obsessed with "being cool" and therefore sabotages his image every attempt he makes to enhance it. Watching it in live-action, it's not as obvious in the books, but man, Greg can be a selfish jerk sometimes. I think that actually plays to the movie's advantage. We don't mind all these bad things happening to him since he has some actual growing up to do.

It covers a lot of familiar ground when the general horrors of puberty and surviving middle school. It does so with wit and insight. In fact, this might serve to frighten 10-year-olds into never wanting to go to middle school. For every movie like this, there are twenty dreadful tweenage sitcoms on Disney or Nick.

They've already greenlit the sequel, and I'm sure I'll rent that too.

News Tidbits

- Jennifer Aniston, who stars with Jason Bateman in The Switch opening later this month, said she'd love to be a part of the planned Arrested Development movie, which'd reunite Bateman, Michael Cera, Portia de Rossi, and the rest from the cancelled Fox TV show.

- Polygamous family getting their own reality show on TLC.

- Constatin Films developing an animated 3D Tarzan movie.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Despicable Me - Movie Review


***

Starring the voices of Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand, Kristen Wiig, Will Arnett, Miranda Cosgrove and Julie Andrews.
Directed by Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud.

For Best Animated Film of 2010, we have our third nominee. It's not as good as Toy Story 3 or How to Train Your Dragon, but it easily beats out Shrek Forever After.

Carell voices Gru, a modern-day supervillain who's conspiring to pull off the biggest heist in history. He wants to steal the moon. To do so, he needs a shrink ray. He steals one, only to have it stolen from a younger, nerdier supervillain named Vector. How to get it back? Well, fortune has it he's a sucker for girl-scout cookies. So Gru adopts three girls to deliver the cookies, one box of which will contain robot cookies. Work with me here.

So you have the worst possible parental figure in the world now serving as dad to three girls. Hijinks ensue.

The story arc is predictable from there, but I still enjoyed the throw-away gags, sight gags, and the extra stuff with the little yellow minions. (It never does explain where they came from. Did he make them in a lab?) If I had to choose between a Despicable Me 2 or a Shrek 5, I'd pick DM2 in a heartbeat.

Chloe - DVD Review


**

Starring Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried, Max Theiriot and Nina Dobrev.
Directed by Atom Egoyan.

A good cast can disguise a bad movie for only so long.

Moore and Neeson are a married couple hitting a bit of a rough patch. Moore is sure her husband is cheating on her, and to prove it, she hires a prostitute (Seyfried) to come on to him and see if he takes the bait and tries to sleep with her. But eventually it becomes clear this is a Fatal Attraction rip-off.

The main three players bring gravitas to roles that might have benefitted from a more campy approach, but nothing could redeem those final fifteen minutes no matter what tone they opted for. If the climax concluded with one of them having magic powers, it would not have been less ridiculous.

Friday's Box Office

1. The Other Guys - $13.2 million - 1 day
2. Step Up 3-D - $6.6 - 1 day
3. Inception - $5.53 ($214.66) - 22 days
4. Dinner for Schmucks - $3.38 ($39.63) - 8 days
5. Salt - $3 ($83.88) - 15 days
6. Despicable Me - $2.92 ($202.92) - 29 days
7. Cats & Dogs 2 - $2.15 ($21.68) - 8 days
8. Charlie St. Cloud - $1.72 ($20.52) - 8 days
9. Toy Story 3 - $.86 ($394.13) - 50 days
10. Grown Ups - $.75 ($154.01) - 43 days
11. Twilight: Eclipse - $.74 ($291.55) - 38 days

So does this mean Will Ferrell is still a bigger movie-star than Steve Carell? Or maybe The Other Guys benefitted from a clearer marketing campaign and big supporting players like Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, Steve Coogan, etc. Either way it should get $38 million for the weekend and be another $100 million hit for Ferrell.

"One move can change a generation." That line from the Step Up 3-D trailer always makes me giggle. Unless you're already Chuck Berry or Michael Jackson, I'm not really sure how much truth there is to that sentiment. It should get $18 million and therefore be considered successful.

Inception's finally been knocked from the top perch, but mission accomplished money-wise for all involved. If it's not nominated for Best Picture this year it's a crime, especially when there are ten nominees now.

Everything else is petering out. Schmucks won't match what Date Night did. Salt might still squeak across the $100 million mark. Cats & Dogs 2 and Charlie St. Cloud are going to quickly disappear.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Quentin Tarantino rebooting the Shadow?

Dark Horizons has the scoop on the possibility of QT working on a Shadow script.

The 1994 film with Alec Baldwin, Penelope Ann Miller and Ian McKellen was one of those mid-1990's embarrassments for superhero movies. There were a lot of bad ones after Tim Burton's Batman and before Sam Raimi's Superman. I remember the purple-suited Billy Zane in The Phantom around the same time, and I wanted to see it just because it was giving Braveheart's Patrick McGoohan work.

St. John of Las Vegas - DVD Review

*1/2

Starring Steve Buscemi, Romany Malco, Peter Dinklage, Sarah Silverman and Tim Blake Nelson.

Very game cast, but my goodness, they have nothing to do. This feels like two episodes of a cable series that hasn't found its voice yet.

Buscemi plays a former gambler who's moved to New Mexico, but his new job in fraud investigation sends him right back to Las Vegas, where he does not want to be. It has the air of being a comedy, and with Sarah Silverman and Romany Malco (Weeds) hanging around, I expected laughs to happen. I think I smiled once.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Inception - Movie Review


****

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine, Tom Berenger, Lukas Haas, Dileep Rao and Pete Postlethwaite.
Directed by Christopher Nolan.

Finally, a movie that deserves as much analysis and dissection as any season of Lost. There is a purpose behind the actions of characters, even their names, and everything happens for a reason.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, an expert at infiltrating people's dreams and stealing valuable information that rests in there. After unsuccessfully trying to extract information from a CEO named Seito (Ken Watanabe) he gets a reverse offer. Seito would like him not to steal, but plant an idea into the mind of his main competitor. If he does so, he'll pull the right strings to get Cobb's arrest warrant dropped. (Why Cobb is on the run is revealed later in the film). Cobb pulls a team together and the long con is on.

It's hard to imagine another filmmaker that could be given this budget ($160 million) and be given the liberty to make an intelligent thriller like this, but when you make the highest-grossing non-James Cameron movie of all time, liberty must be granted. It's a movie I'd be glad to see again, if just to analyze my theories about what was really going on.

I'd like to do a spoiler-filled write-up later, but suffice to say, I'm sure it'll be one of the ten nominees for Best Picture in about six months.

Inception still #1 at box-office

For the weekend of July 30-August 1.

1. Inception - $27.52 million ($193.35) - 3 wks (WB) -35.6%
3545 screens / $7763 per screen
2. Dinner for Schmucks - $23.3 - 1 wk (DW)
2911 / $8004
3. Salt - $19.25 ($70.8) - 2 wks (Sony) -46.5%
3612 / $5329
4. Despicable Me - $15.54 ($190.35) - 4 wks (U) -34.4%
3602 / $4315
5. Cats & Dogs 2 - $12.53 - 1 wk (WB)
3705 / $3381
6. Charlie St. Cloud - $12.14 - 1 wk (U)
2718 / $4465
7. Toy Story 3 - $5.04 ($389.67) - 7 wks (BV) -43.5%
2105 / $2392
8. Grown Ups - $4.5 ($150.71) - 6 wks (Sony) -39.4%
2269 / $1983
9. The Sorcerer's Apprentice - $4.32 ($51.88) - 3 wks (BV) -55.2%
2524 / $1712
10. Twilight: Eclipse - $3.97 ($288.2) - 5 wks (Sum) -44.8%
2334 / $1699
11. Ramona & Beezus - $3.65 ($16.31) - 2 wks (Fox) -53.3%
2719 / $1342
12. The Kids Are All Right - $3.46 ($9.57) - 4 wks (Foc) +33.5%
847 / $4089
13. The Last Airbender - $1.76 ($127.24) - 5 wks (Par) -58.3%
1238 / $1421