I Am Number Four - DVD Review

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Starring Alex Pettyfer, Timothy Olyphant, Teresa Palmer, Dianna Argon, Callan McAuliffe, Kevin Durand and Jake Abel. Directed by D.J. Caruso.

My guess is that the series of books this is based on reads well as a series of books. But some of the young-adult books, when translated to film, only highlight the other stories from where they're deriving.

This movie centers on John Smith, an alien hiding out as a high-schooler. Smith is played by Alex Pettyfer, one of those British models where I don't get why he's suddenly landing these leading man roles. He's not much more than a model here, and his accent's all over the place.

This alien is being chased by other aliens, ones with gills next to their noses, tattoes on their heads, and sharp teeth. Smith's guardian (Timothy Olyphant) tries to keep him safe, but there's only so much he can do. Smith eventually learns he has special powers, like super-strength and flashlights in his palms.

Not really sure why Olyphant agreed to this, but he's the best thing in the movie, getting his Obi-Wan Kenobi on. Otherwise it's already leaving my memory banks at a rapid pace.

P.S. I get the need for product placement in movies, but when the movie starts to feel like a commercial for the iPhone, I check out. One close-up is fine, but every time his iPhone rings, do we have to get a close-up of it ringing in his hand, directly facing the camera so we can admire the product in all its glory?

Cars 2 - Movie Review

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Starring the voices of Owen Wilson, Larry the Cable Guy, Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, John Turturro, Eddie Izzard, Tony Shalhoub, Bonnie Hunt, Jason Isaacs, Thomas Krestchmann, Cheech Marin, Vanessa Redgrave and John Ratzenberger. Directed by John Lasseter.

If the message of the first Cars movie was to slow down and appreciate the little things, that's been oblitherated here. Speed up! There are rocket-launching cars trying to kill you!

Cars has generally been considered the weakest title in the Pixar canon by critics, although it's more friendly for repeat viewing by little kids than, say, richer fare like Ratatouille or Wall-E. Now Cars 2 will have that dubious distinction, and while I liked it, it's not going to make my top ten, and Pixar movies usually do.

This movie has twin storylines. The first revolves around Lightning McQueen (Wilson), who agrees to enter a tri-country world-class race where the cars all run on Allinol, an all-natural fuel poised to replace gasoline. The second revolves around Mater (Cable Guy), who is mistaken for a spy and gets sucked into the world of automotive espionage. Turns out someone from Big Oil is trying to sabotage the race.

If this had been from DreamWorks or Blue Sky, it'd probably get higher marks than what it's getting. But it's Pixar and it's supposed to have more heart than this. Emphasis here is on action and humor, and this movie winds up being more about Mater than McQueen. When we get to the climax and McQueen finds out what's been going on, he stops short of yelling, "You mean there's this whole other movie that been going on?!"

It's cute. More on par with Rio than Rango in this year's Best Animated hunt. In fact, with what's coming, it may be the first Pixar movie to not get nominated for Best Animated Film since the category was created.

Sai my 5-year-old: "It was AWESOME! Except for the sad parts."

Kill the Irishman - DVD Review

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Starring Ray Stevenson, Vincent D'Onofrio, Val Kilmer, Christopher Walken, Linda Cardinelli, Tony Darrow, Fionnula Flannigan, Bob Gunton, Steven R. Schirripa, Vinnie Jones, Mike Starr, Paul Sorvino, Tony Lo Bianco, Laura Ramsey and Robert Davi.
Directed by Jonathan Hensleigh.

The first two minutes give off a Goodfellas vibe, which can be good or bad. It primed me for a history lesson, a mafia movie set in Cleveland. Cleveland? Yep. It's based on a true story, so I guess Cleveland really was rocked by this many car bombs in 1976.

Ray Stevenson (Punisher War Zone) isn't quite the charismatic lead I would hope for in something like this. He plays Danny Green, an Irish union leader who decided he wasn't going to put up with the Italian mobsters taking all the good union jobs.

There are several attempts on his life; the title comes from the urgency of the Italians to get this guy, and they get more desperate with each failed attempt.

It's fine. It's an okay mafia movie. I was surprised by how little it had for Christopher Walken to do, and Val Kilmer isn't much more than the cop who pops up every once in a while to let Danny know he's watching. We get appearances from Goodfellas' Paul Sorvino, Sopranos' Steven R. Schirripa, Miller's Crossing's Mike Starr, and so on.

Weekend Box Office

1. Transformers: Dark of the Moon - $97.4 million ($162.12) - 1 wk (Par)
. . . 4013 screens / $24,271 per screen
2. Cars 2 - $25.11 ($116.04) - 2 wks (BV) -62%
. . . 4115 / $6103
3. Bad Teacher - $14.1 ($59.55) - 2 wks (Sony) -55.4%
. . . 3049 / $4624
4. Larry Crowne - $13 - 1 wk (U)
. . . 2973 / $4375
5. Monte Carlo - $7.6 - 1 wk (Fox)
. . . 2473 / $3073
6. Super 8 - $7.5 ($108.04) - 4 wks (Par) -37.6%
. . . 3088 / $2429
7. Green Lantern - $6.27 ($101.96) - 3 wks (WB) -65.2%
. . . 3280 / $1912
8. Mr. Popper's Penguins - $5.1 ($50.13) - 3 wks (Fox) -49.7%
. . . 2861 / $1783
9. Bridesmaids - $3.52 ($152.9) - 8 wks (U) -33.1%
. . . 1389 / $2535
10. Midnight in Paris - $3.44 ($33.64) - 7 wks (SPC) -17.6%
. . . 858 / $4007
11. X-Men: First Class - $2.9 ($138.61) - 5 wks (Fox) -56.6%
. . . 1602 / $1810
12. The Hangover II - $2.27 ($248.12) - 6 wks (WB) -59.3%
. . . 1568 / $1448
13. Pirates of the Caribbean 4 - $2.16 ($233.7) - 7 wks (BV) -56.3%
. . . 1473 / $1463
14. Kung Fu Panda 2 - $1.53 ($156.7) - 6 wks (DW) -63.5%
. . . 1281 / $1190
15. The Tree of Life - $1 ($7.5) - 6 wks (FS) -24.7%
. . . 228 / $4386

Further down, Thor passed $177 million, and thus justifies the greenlighting of Thor 2 for Summer 2013. Warner Bros. has said they're moving forward with Green Lantern 2, which makes no sense to me.

Transformers 3 should cross the magical $300 million domestic line, something no movie has yet done this year. But Pirates 4 just passed $1 billion wordlwide, so I don't think DIsney's too concerned about it domestically topping out at $250 mil.

Bridesmaids is now the highest-grossing movie ever produced by Judd Apatow.

Cars 2's steep drop indicates it won't be seeing the $200 million domestic mark, but I expect it'll be huge overseas.

Bad Teacher's turning out to be a quiet hit for Cameron Diaz.

Larry Crowne is the nail in the coffin of the notion that Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are still A-list movie stars. Or maybe no one wanted to spend their summer watching a midle-aged man get laid off, regardless of who embodied him.

Monte Carlo was cheap to make, but Fox must be disappointed Selena Gomez couldn't get more of her fans to come out. Should they have made more effort to point out that Glee's Cory Monteith is in it?

Midnight in Paris is on pace to become Woody Allen's highest-grosser of all time (if you don't adjust for inflation. His record is still the $40 million taken in by 1986's Hannah & Her Sisters.)

Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Movie Review

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Starring Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Tyrese Gibson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Patrick Dempsey, Kevin Dunn, Julie White, Alan Tudyk, Ken Jeong, and the voices of Bill Cullen, Hugo Weaving and Leonard Nimoy. Directed by Michael Bay.

This movie makes the best use of 3-D by any non-animated film since Avatar; by comparison, the other previews in 3-D before this movie looked dark and fuzzy. I appreciate that if they're going to price-gouge, Michael Bay at least makes sure it looks good, it looks worth it.

Having said that, I should say that the first one got the mildest of thumbs-up from me and I absolutely hated the second one. The third one is as good as the first one, however you want to define that, and maybe a little bit better.

I liked the opening sequence with the "real" reason for the space race in the 1960's. I giggled when they brought in the real Buzz Aldrin to confirm to Optimus Prime that, yes, the real reason we went to the moon was to explore the crashed spaceship just over the horizon from where Neil planted the flag. I was amused by the different levels of success they had at mixing real footage with CGI of three different presidents. (JFK looks like he walked out of The Polar Express).

There's also a sequence toward the end (you've seen pieces in the trailer) where a group of humans, including Sam (Shia LaBeouf), are trapped in a building that has been cut in half. Academy-Award nominations are in order for the visual effects teams.

Now I don't miss Megan Fox in the least, but they didn't do a better job in writing the character for her replacement, as embodied by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. She was somehow an embassy worker turned special assistant at a high-end car dealership...? Maybe she had a rich dad that hooked her up; I don't know. Her character never really made sense to me, but there's not much asked of the actress other than to be pretty.

The two ghetto-jive autobots from TF2 are gone, and the semi-apology for them is spreading the outrageous accents around. They range from Cheech Marin-ish to befuddled British. There's great voice work from Bill Cullen as Optimus Prime and Leonard Nimoy as Optimus's thought-to-be-dead mentor Sentinel Prime. Maybe part of it is the writing. The machines get some of the best lines.

The humor is more miss than hit. It's goofy to where I think either writer Ehren Kruger and director Michael Bay are trying to create what they think will make 13-year-olds laugh, or they have genuinely immature senses of humor. But Bay knows how to do action, even if there are patches where the movie feels like a trailer of itself.

Loved Alan Tudyk. Hated Ken Jeong. The movie's about twenty minutes too long. The climactic battle, I was ready for it to wrap up, and then Patrick Dempsey does something to make it last longer, and my first thought was, "No! How much longer is this movie going to be?"

So I appreciated that it didn't stink up the joint the way TF2 did.

Water for Elephants - Movie Review

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Starring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson, Christoph Waltz and Hal Holbrook.
Directed by Francis Lawrence.

From casting alone, we know what we're going to get, and we're not disappointed, or dazzled.

We get a nice bookend from Hal Holbrook, an old man at the circus. He remembers back to a time in 1931, where a great tragedy ruined the Benzini Brothers circus. And we're back in '31, and Holbrook's character is now played by Robert Pattinson of Twilight fame. Some geeks find it mandatory to hate Pattinson; I thought he was fine here.

He falls in love with the horse trainer (Reese Witherspoon), who happens to be married to the ringmaster (Christoph Waltz). I was hoping the movie would give the ringmaster shades of humanity, but we learn fairly early he has a habit of throwing employees off the train at night. It beats paying them, and if they die, well, so what. Oh, and he's cruel to animals!

Seriously, if you're the cruel boss, and you've married a gorgeous woman at least ten years younger than you, would you keep inviting that hunk over for dinner who's even younger than she is?

There is a period sweetness to it, though. It's one of those where I'm glad I saw it at the $2 theater instead of first-run, and I imagine the book is better.

Black Death - DVD Review

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Starring Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Carice van Houten, John Lynch, Tim McInnery, Kimberely Nixon, David Warner and Andy Nyman.
Directed by Christopher Smith.

This low-budget horror flick snuck up on me. I like Sean Bean, and I watched it because it had him, and there wound up being more to it than I originally thought.

During the time of the bubonic plague, word spreads of a village that is untouched by death. Naturally this must mean it's a town of witches, so Sean Bean leads a suspicious crew on a trk to this village, and we just know it isn't going to turn out too well for the villagers when they get there. Helping them on their way is a young monk (Eddie Redmayne) who's always wanted to see more of the world. Poor, pure-hearted boy.

The movie does wind up going to some places I didn't expect, a delightful surprise from a movie that seemed like it was going to paint by numbers. It's grim and gory, but worth it for fans of the genre.

Kaboom - DVD Review

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Starring Thomas Dekker, Haley Bennett, Chris Zylka, Juno Temple and Kelly Lynch. Directed by Gregg Araki.

A hedonistic bisexual college student has a strange recurring dream. It may or may not have something to do with the end of the world, and he tries to talk about it while sleeping with one girl he doesn't necessarily like and day-dreaming of his straight roommate. Eventually, finally, we get that third-act twist that doesn't undermine the whole movie so much as confirms that, yes, you've been wasting your time. It looks like it was made for about $50,000. Reminded me a lot of those ultracheap Nick Stahl movies that used to hit VOD after a weekend in theaters. I usually admire economic filmmaking but this should quickly fade into obscurity.

Summer TV Reviews

TNT's FALLING SKIES - It learns from V's mistakes. We see the aliens true form in the first few minutes, and the shows centers on freedom-fighters, indigenous people just trying to make life hard enough for the aliens so they'll decide it's not worth it and leave. I wish it could take a couple cast members from V, but the recognizable ones (Noah Wyle, Moon Bloodgood, Will Patton) are all good here.

ABC's COMBAT HOSPITAL - It's better than Off the Map, and I liked seeing Elias Koteas as the mentor. Not good enough to crack my regular viewing rotation, but I'd be happy for the show if it survived.

ABC's 101 WAYS TO LEAVE A GAME SHOW - Imagine Fear Factor, but where if you answer trivia questions, you don't have to do the stunts; the ones who get the questions wrong must be punished for their ignorance. It's the perfect mean cousin to Wipeout, where the host can't help but laugh at the losers who realize they're about to plunge from a high place when they miss the answer. I laughed too.

Green Lantern - Movie Review

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Starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Saarsgaard, Tim Robbins, Mark Strong, Angela Bassett and Jay O. Sanders. Directed by Martin Campbell.

This is another one of those movies where I can say it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but it is by no means good. In fact it's quite silly.

We start off with the mythology. The universe has been divided into 3600 sectors. Each sector gets its own Green Lantern, a space cop, a being that can wear a green ring that manifests into reality anything the ring-bearer can imagine. They use these rings to fight evil and keep the intergalactic peace. Green is the power of Will.

But then a being uses the color yellow, the power of Fear, to fight against the universe. He escapes from his prison, frying three Green Lanterns in the process. He grows with each kill, until he's this tentacled space cloud, making his way through the galaxies toward Oa, the central planet of the universe, headquarters of the Green Lanterns.

Turns out the Green Lanterns answers to the Ancients, nine immortal Mr. Magoos sitting in a Jedi-council circle atop 100-foot-tall high-chairs. They just sit there and crankily dispense "wisdom" when the Lanterns need their help. The leader of the Lanterns is Sinestro (Mark Strong), whom I've only known as a bad guy, but he's a good guy here. Okay, well, if Spider-Man can do movie after movie without turning Dr. Connors into the Lizard, I guess Sinestro can be a good guy here.

Anyway, the Lantern in Earth's sector gets mortally wounded by the evil space cloud (named Parallax) and crash-lands off the US coast. The way a new Lantern is chosen is up to the ring, so the ring sends out a green ball of energy to find the next in line, and it's supposed to be someone without fear. Also for the first time in history, it's a human, so who will the ring pick?

A cocky pilot named Hal Jordan, played by Ryan Reynolds, who's always seemed like a slight upgrade from Jason Lee to me. Hal is one of those mavericky maverick pilots that other people like to be stern with. Shoehorned in there, in the most awkward groan-worthy way, we learn Hal has daddy issues, as his dad was a pilot who died in a plane crash. Seriously. Screenplay malpractice here.

Sooo the ring picks Hal, and before he knows it, it's flying him to Oa, where he meets the other Lanterns and goes through some training. But it's like really hard and stuff, so he quits and goes back to Earth. I do believe I am giving that section of the movie justice.

And you know, that's really the part of the movie where I started to check out. Granted, the daddy-issues scenes were painful, but at least they were brief. Now that we're getting deeper into what the Lanterns can really do, we find out that they don't have that much imagination. There's never a creation, from Hal or any other Lantern, where I thought that was clever.

In supporting roles, Peter Saarsgaard has a lot of fun as Dr. Hector Hammond, who gets morphed into a bloated servant of Parallax after he gets infested by a little piece of it. I wish Hammond had been the main villain instead of the sub-villain to the space cloud. Pay attention, future comic book movies. When your choice for Main Villain is between a good actor and a giant CGI smoky octopus, go with the good actor.

Blake Lively's the blandest female interest since Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane. Tim Robbins get in a little smarm as a senator, but he and especially Angela Bassett don't have much to do. Seriously, after seeing Bassett in this and Rene Russo as a glorified extra in Thor, I feel like I should take up a fund. "Please donate to the 'Actresses Over 50 Deserve Bigger Parts' fund. Not all of them have to go to Meryl Streep."

Is it open for a sequel? Of course. I'm sure there's an outline somewhere that has Sinestro betray the Lanterns after getting seduced by the color yellow. I'm more curious if DC's going to try to go the Justice League route the same way Marvel has the Avengers coming. I can't really see Christian Bale's Batman, Henry Cavill's Superman and Ryan Reynolds's Green Lantern hooking up. For one thing, Hal's personality is closer to the Flash than the incarnations of GL I'm familiar with.

It's not Catwoman-level bad. I would just hope if you're going to spend this much money on a movie, you'd try to have a little more imagination.

The Company Men - DVD Review

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Starring Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Costner, Chris Cooper, Maria Bello, Rosemary Dewitt, Craig T. Nelson and Eamonn Walker.
Directed by John Wells.

Most people have been laid off or fired in their life, and it can be painful, one of the most stressful things that can happen to a person. It's interesting that this movie decided to focus on wealthier, white-collar workers, but that's the story they're telling and they're sticking to it. So more power to them.

Ben Affleck plays a regional sales manager who's cocky about his golf score, secure in his job because of his friendship with his boss (Tommy Lee Jones), the #2 man at GTX, a transportation manufacturing company. While #2 is away on business, the #1 CEO decides to do a round of layoffs to spike his stock options, and Affleck is among those let go. Then he gets a rude awakening as to just how bad the economy is.

The scene that stuck out for me was one where Jones is meeting a handful of others who are getting ready to do more layoffs. They make sure they're covering legally, but Jones asks "What about ethically?" and the room looks at him like he's speaking a foreign language.

How much is enough? Well, the CEO may have enough money to swim in a la Scrooge McDuck, and he doesn't give a second thought to the thousands of workers whose lives he's destroying to get it. But this is really more about coping, about the turmoil of this new economy.

Chris Cooper is another worker, high up in the company, but he's getting near 60 and has many expenses. When he gets axed, he sees just how rough the business world is. Why hire a middle-aged family man when you can hire a single 25-year-old who'll work 80 hours a week for half the pay?

The acting in the end is what won me over. And since a co-worker of mine got laid off just last week, I'm kinda raw and a bit cynical about corporate America right now. For many, though, the ending won't be as neatly wrapped as it is here.

The Rite - DVD Review

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Starring Anthony Hopkins, Colin O'Donoghue, Ciaran Hinds, Alice Braga, Toby Jones and Rutger Hauer. Directed by Mikael Hafstrom.

I like the occassional gothic demonic flick, even when I don't like them that much. They usually have elements I can cling to and revel in. This had nothing. It took forever to set up, and the third act had nothing unique or original about it. The script's not great, but the central problem is Colin O'Donaghue is utterly dull as the lead, a black hole of charisma. Not only can Anthony Hopkins not save it, he can't even make it passable.

Random Entertainment News - 6/22/11

- While Tarsem's Snow White movie (with Julia Roberts) has cast actual little-people actors like Danny Woodburn as the seven dwarfs, Snow White & the Huntsman sounds like it's going the Lord of the Rings route, as Ian McShane has been cast as the leader of the seven dwarfs in that film. Snow White & the Huntsman also stars Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron and Sam Claflin.

- Woody Allen's next movie, The Bop Decameron, will film in Italy. Allen will appear in this film alongside Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Penelope Cruz, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Judy Davis, Greta Gerwig and Judy Davis. It will open in 2012.

- Jamie Foxx is officially the lead in Quentin Tarantino's spaghetti-southern Django Unchained, about a freed slave who seeks to free his wife from an evil plantation owner, to be played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Christoph Waltz and Samuel L. Jackson co-star.

- Terry O'Quinn will join his former Lost co-star Daniel Dae Kim on several episodes of CBS's Hawaii Five-0 next season.

Midnight in Paris - Movie Review

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Starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Kathy Bates, Corey Stall, Carla Bruni, Adrien Brody, Tom Hiddleston, Alison Pill, Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy. Directed by Woody Allen.

It's nice to see Woody Allen back in fine form. He had me the first minute where we just get images of Paris, reminiscent of the opening of Manhattan. We see the famous and the alleys and the stairwells and the parks. Then we get Gil (Owen Wilson), a screenwriter vacationing in Paris with his fiancee (Rachel McAdams). She can't wait to get back to Malibu. He's in love with the city and would love to move there. He aspires to quit screenwriting to become a novelist, and hey, all the great American novelists spent some time in Paris.

Since this is an Allen film, we know he's going to be attracted to someone else, and that eventually comes, but in an unexpected way. Let's just say that he winds up meeting some of his idols. The standout for me, and the one that got the biggest laughs was Corey Stoll (Law & Order: LA) as Ernest Hemingway. It was one of those performances where he left me wanting more and I wished his part had been bigger.

Owen Wilson, it turns out, is the perfect stand-in for the typical Woody character. I wouldn't mind seeing them collaborate again.

I'm happy Woody's rediscovered his whimsy, and it's movies like this that demonstrate why so many name actors agree to be in his films. It might turn out to be like this. Other stand-outs include Marion Cottilard as the Frenchwoman who captures Gil's eye, and Michael Sheen as a pedantic friend-in-law Gil would just as soon ditch.

Random Entertainment News 6/19/11

- Evangeline Lilly (Lost) has joined the cast of The Hobbit for director Peter Jackson. She'll be playing a woodland elf. Also, Barry Humphries, best known as Dame Edna, will play the Goblin King, with the same motion-capture Andy Serkis uses as Gollum.

- Billy Bob Thornton will direct and star in the ensemble drama Jayne Mansfield's Car, co-starring Robert Duvall, Kevin Bacon, John Hurt and Robert Patrick.

- Thor Freudenethal (Diary of a Wimpy Kid) will direct Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters, sequel to The Lightning Thief. Logan Lerman will return as Percy.

- Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin will star in Labor Day for director Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air). It's a coming-of-age drama about a mother and son who give a stranger a ride, and that stranger turns out to be an escaped convict.

- Universal Pictures has staked out July 3, 2013, as the release date for Despicable Me 2.

- There've been many indications that JJ Abrams will not have Star Trek 2 ready for its current June 2012 release date and so Paramount is looking at other possible tentpole projects that could be done in time for next summer. One is GI Joe 2. Another is World War Z, which takes place ten years after a zombie uprising was successfully stopped. It'll star Brad Pitt, Ed Harris, Matthew Fox and Mirelle Enos (The Killing).

- Vanessa Minnillo is in and Jill Wagner is out as cohost of ABC's Wipeout.

Weekend Box Office

For the weekend of June 17-19.

1. Green Lantern - $52.69 million - 1 wk (WB)
. . . 3816 screens / $13,806 per screen
2. Super 8 - $21.25 ($72.78) - 2 wks (Par) -40.1%
. . . 3408 / $6235
3. Mr. Popper's Penguins - $18.2 - 1 wk (Fox)
. . . 3339 / $5451
4. X-Men: First Class - $11.5 ($119.93) - 3 wks (Fox) -52.3%
. . . 3375 / $3407
5. The Hangover Part II - $9.64 ($232.67) - 4 wks (WB) -45.5%
. . . 3460 / $2785
6. Kung Fu Panda 2 - $8.7 ($143.34) - 4 wks (DW) -47.4%
. . . 3469 / $2508
7. Bridesmaids - $7.49 ($136.84) - 6 wks (U) -25.6%
. . . 2573 / $2910
8. Pirates of the Caribbean 4 - $6.24 ($220.34) - 5 wks (BV) -43%
. . . 2742 / $2274
9. Midnight in Paris - $5.24 ($21.8) - 5 wks (SPC) -10.2%
. . . 1038 / $5045
10. Judy Moody - $2.24 ($11.17) - 2 wks (Rel) -63%
. . . 2524 / $888
11. Thor - $1.15 ($176.11) - 7 wks (Par) -53%
. . . 875 / $1309
12. The Tree of Life - $1.12 ($3.85) - 4 wks (FS) +34.8%
. . . 114 / $9781

Green Lantern did well. It did its job. Considering the $350 million the studio spent on production and marketing, it'll need to be big overseas to make a profit. So weird that movies have come to this.

Jim Carrey's entering that Eddie Murphy phase, I guess. Carrey hamming it up with penguins for the kids equals a mediocre opening and likely quick drop in the weeks to come.

Happy for Super 8's decent week 2 showing.

My Emmy Ballot - Drama Nominations

Best Drama
BOARDWALK EMPIRE
BREAKING BAD
GAME OF THRONES
THE GOOD WIFE
JUSTIFIED

Best Actor
Sean Bean, GAME OF THRONES
Bryan Cranston, BREAKING BAD
Michael C. Hall, DEXTER
Andrew Lincoln, THE WALKING DEAD
Timothy Olyphant, JUSTIFIED

Best Actress
Khandi Alexander, TREME
Mirielle Enos, THE KILLING
Michelle Fairlay, GAME OF THRONES
Anna Gunn, BREAKING BAD
Julianna Margulies, THE GOOD WIFE

Best Supporting Actor
Alan Cumming, THE GOOD WIFE
Peter Dinklage, GAME OF THRONES
Walton Goggins, JUSTIFIED
Aaron Paul, BREAKING BAD
Michael Shannon, BOARDWALK EMPIRE

Best Supporting Actress
Christina Hendricks, MAD MEN
Margo Martindale, JUSTIFIED
Kelly MacDonald, BOARDWALK EMPIRE
Julia Stiles, DEXTER
Maisie Williams, GAME OF THRONES

My Emmy Ballot: Comedy Nominations

Best Comedy
THE BIG BANG THEORY
COMMUNITY
MODERN FAMILY
THE OFFICE
PARKS & RECREATION

Best Actor
Alec Baldwin, 30 ROCK
Steve Carell, THE OFFICE
Louis CK, LOUIE
Ed O'Neill, MODERN FAMILY
Jim Parsons, THE BIG BANG THEORY

Best Actress
Jane Adams, HUNG
Courtney Cox, COUGAR TOWN
Tina Fey, 30 ROCK
Patricia Heaton, THE MIDDLE
Amy Poehler, PARKS & RECREATION

Best Supporting Actor
Ty Burrell, MODERN FAMILY
Donald Glover, COMMUNITY
Nick Offerman, PARKS & RECREATION
Danny Pudi, COMMUNITY
Eric Stonestreet, MODERN FAMILY

Best Supporting Actress
Julie Bowen, MODERN FAMILY
Alison Brie, COMMUNITY
Yvette Nicole Brown, COMMUNITY
Jenna Fischer, THE OFFICE
Christa Miller, COUGAR TOWN