Week 22: Men in Black 3
I was a big fan of the first Men in Black movie. I saw it a few times, I got my parents to buy me black Ray Bans for some occasion or another I even coveted the weird oblong watches for an awful long time and really got bailed out when I found out Elvis was in to them too. It was a truly funny comedy that also seemed to be very New York-y a quality that eludes most movies that are set in the Big Apple. I think it’s important to express my appreciation for the first Men in Black so you understand how crushed I was by Men in Black 2 and how low my expectations were for the third installment. Men in Black 3 was legitimately delightful.
We’re getting into spoiler country here and maybe later into the province of the ultra-nerdy, be warned.
The plot is a bit of a mess. They don’t handle nearly enough of the hand waving I require to accept time travel as a plausible plot device. Not only to they not bother to explain away the causality loops that plague most time travel fiction in the history of the world but they handle characters traveling within the scope of the events of the movie in a really bizarre way. Towards the end of the film two characters travel back in time some 30 seconds. Instead of that meaning there are two copies of each of those characters they instead just start in the same places but have the knowledge of what’s coming. This means the protagonist becomes brilliant and skillfully foils the villain who has learned nothing at all. For an otherwise clever movie this comes across as exceptionally dull.
Week 22 Preview
Ah, Memorial Day weekend the official start of the summer blockbuster season. What about The Hunger Games and The Avengers? Mere spring blockbusters. They hardly count at all. Those grosses are basically monopoly money. Summer movie season is the game of kings.
The Incumbent
It’s going to be sad saying goodbye to The Avengers. It’s had a hell of a run and should continue to make solid money but It’ll probably get knocked down to about $35 million and that’s just not enough to win Memorial Day weekend.
Opening This Weekend
Men in Black 3: It’s been 15 years since Men in Black and 10 years since the last entry in the series. Apparently the fine people and Amblin thing we’ve been clamoring for more because here it comes. The word of mouth on the picture isn’t great and there have been a ton of free or discounted ticket promotions that don’t seem to reveal a ton of faith in the movie. Those are all completely dwarfed by the massive 4,200 theater release and the high wattage star power of Will Smith.
Chernobyl Diaries: It seems like they’ve been airing TV spots for this for months and I still feel like I know nothing about it. It appears to be a The Hills Have Eyes kind of movie but set in the ruins of Chernobyl. It trails MIB3 in theater count by about 1,800 theaters. It also has fewer theaters than The Avengers, Battleship, Dark Shadows, and What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I think it can probably outgross most of those movies as it’s a change of pace but it’s not going to finish anywhere near the top of the board.
My Prediction: Will Smith makes movies that make a lot of money. He hasn’t been the star of a summer action movie in four years and I have to believe there’s a lot of pent up demand there. You have to go back to 1993’s Made in America to find a Will Smith movie released between Memorial Day and Labor Day that didn’t open number one. Men in Black 3 is the no-brainer pick.
Week 21 : The Avengers
I should be sick of this movie by now. I’ve sat and watched it very attentively three weeks in a row. There really isn’t all THAT much to it, world threatened, heroes gather, big pretty fight scene, shawarma, credits. I should be begging for a change. I am not even a little tired of seeing The Avengers.
There are a ton of things to notice that keep me coming back. It was pointed out to me that there has been a bunch of kvetching about Scarlett Johansson’s performance as Black Widow. I even saw that someone somewhere called her a “female Keanu Reeves” because of how wooden she appears in the movie. I disagree. She’s cold but kind of in the way you would expect a former spy to be cold. Even more so if you take her as a Soviet-era spy but I guess time and age have made that pretty impossible at this point although she did say she started young. She does about as much emoting as Captain America and Hawkeye who are her closest equivalents. Hell, the only person in the movie showing off a ton of serious acting is the monster form of The Hulk and someone please tell me where the line is to start campaigning for that green piece of CGI to win an acting Oscar.
Weird physics things started to bug me on the third go around. The jets on Iron Man’s armor can propel what is probably a pretty heavy thing through the air at very fast speeds but he basically fires that jet into a cluster of people when he falls off of Stark tower and they aren’t just instantly crushed by the force. Agent Hill is also very close to that grenade that explodes on the bridge and only giver her a minor facial cut and does no collateral damage. A pretty crummy grenade if you ask me. These are the musings of a nerd who has run out of other things to think about.
The Avengers is a fantastic superhero movie but it’s important to consider the way in which it’s fantastic. It is probably the most similar to actual comic books of any of the big deal superhero movies and that’s a big departure. The Christopher Nolan Batman oeuvre has been widely celebrated but it isn’t really like any of the source material. Avengers is probably as close as we’ll get to seeing a comic cook-type story on a big screen and that should make the “comics need legitimacy” crowd very happy. It’s big and action-y and loud and mostly perfect.
Maybe that’s the superhero movie we all deserve.
Week 21 Preview
I’ve actually been thinking about this week for over a month. That’s how completely psychotic this project has made me.
The Incumbent
The Avengers. The destroyer of box office records. Maker of $50 million in salary and escalators for Robert Downey Jr. Spawner of untold sequels and spin-offs. If something else wins this weekend it will be less about Avengers having failed and more about how it succeeded so totally that it ran out of audience. A good problem to have.
Opening this weekend
The Dictator: OK so this has been open for a few days already apparently. You didn’t notice either? Yeah that’s a bad sign for their fortunes. Sacha Baron Cohen is back and doing a crazy vaguely middle eastern character. He’s also been absolutely everywhere with this character for months. Without the Borat hook of interacting with people not in on the joke I’m not sure vague terrorism jokes are enough really.
Battleship: It’s like Transformers except instead of being based on some really cool toys and a cartoon series that wasn’t that great but seems to pull on the nostalgia strings it’s based on the board game you would play when your more fun games were broken or something. It is opening in a ton of theaters and this is stupid action movie season but I just don’t want to believe the Liam Neeson + Rihanna + board game + aliens = $$$. Also don’t the “Battleship Sunk at Box Office” headlines just write themselves?
What to Expect When You’re Expecting: How many of these ensemble romantic comedies come out in a year? I am really not prepared to see one again. Don’t make me go back. Also, I put the over/under on birthing scenes in here at three and, honestly, gross. It’s in a ton of theaters and while the reviews are fairly universally terrible there might be a pent up demand for a chick flick after two weeks of everyone going to The Avengers.
My Prediction: I can imagine the scenario where The Avengers loses. The Dictator and Battleship are both aimed at the young male demographic that comprises the base of The Avengers audience. Combine that with Expecting potentially drawing of some couples and an upset is certainly plausible. That said, I think Avengers will earn more than the tree opening movies combined. Assemble!
I forgot what day it was!
I’ll have a real write-up in a few hours. I’m picking Avengers and I wanted that up in case the winner becomes apparent in the next few hours.
Week 20: The Avengers
Could we just not release any more movies this year? I would be cool seeing The Avengers another 32 times. OK, that’s probably not true. It would invariably start being an unbearable chore. I will, however, guarantee that I will see The Avengers at least another 32 times over the course of my life. It held up excellently for a second viewing.
This project has led to having a lot of conversations with friends about movies. Practically everyone I talked to this week talked to me about The Avengers. These have run the gamut from mutual gushing about its quality, revealing secrets about the production (Alexis Denisof is in this movie? Get out of town!), and even a couple terse disagreements. I was complaining to my friend Max that I thought the second act gets dragged down when all of the major characters spend a lot of time talking and arguing about a plot that I don’t think is particularly interesting (Spies are sneaky and deceptive? You don’t say!) and that that could get cut down in favor of getting to action faster. Max said that this was the rare movie that could not be better by losing 15 minutes. I don’t know if I’d go all that far but I think I see the point of that longer period of downtime. While it isn’t even a little surprising that the heroes set aside their differences and fight evil together there’s a lot of value in having them actually talk about how dissimilar Tony Stark and Thor are. I relent.
Another thing I heard frequently this week was how useless it was to see the movie in 3D. Being a devout contrarian I made sure that was exactly how I saw it this week. The Avengers was not shot in 3D, they put it in in post. This usually means it’s not an artistic decision but rather an excuse to get another three bucks out of every patron. Fittingly the 3D isn’t mind-blowing but it adds a really pleasant depth of field to the images. It never really stands out but it also never looks terrible. Pleasant experience, maybe you’d be happier with the three dollars.
The Avengers crushed Dark Shadows, obliterated the second weekend record and toppled numerous other box office records. We’re really in a no man’s land with this film in terms of success. I’d always suspected that Battleship would have a real chance in the third week and that, undoubtedly, Men in Black 3 would knock it off. I’m not sure anymore. Maybe this is going to have a prolonged run that pushes aside blockbuster challengers as effortlessly as a Hulk through a crowd of alien invaders. We’re through the tesseract here people.
Week 20 Preview
This is probably not going to be as exciting a weekend as last weekend was. I’m not going to lie, it feels like a bit of a letdown. Let’s get down to it.
The Incumbent
There’s a bit of history at work with The Avengers this weekend. Geek movies tend to drop off faster than less nerdy fare. The conventional wisdom is the entire nerd herd goes and sees it as soon as possible (I know more than one person that has already seen Avengers twice) and then they move on. That said, the word of mouth on The Avengers is incredible and I really want to see something top $100 million two weeks in a row so fuck history and statistics!
Opening this weekend
Dark Shadows: Depp and Burton back in the saddle together again. Not just the log line in a series of disturbing erotic internet fan fictions but also a brief description of a movie opening this weekend. Apparently this is an adaptation of a soap opera from the 70s that I’ve never heard of. I think it looks completely unbearable which is good because it’s probably going to get rolled.
My Prediction: I would consider The Avengers a failure this weekend if it doesn’t triple the take of Dark Shadows. It’s worth noting at this point that no one really cares if I consider a movie a failure. Nor will it diminish my enjoyment of seeing The Avengers again one iota.
Week 19: The Avengers
Wow.
The Avengers is a fantastic movie. Probably the best superhero movie ever made. I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you this as statistics suggest you’ve already seen it. I feel the format requires me to make declarative statements in the hope that some studio publicist will see it and use it on the back of a DVD box. The chance of that happening is probably somewhere around zero but an amateur film critic has to have a dream. Onward to nuance! Also probably mild spoilers, I won’t be talking plot but I will be referencing a specific line of dialogue.
I was really stunned by how much it felt like a Joss Whedon project. I knew going in that he directed it and that he had a share of the writing credit but I figured the people putting up the $220 million wouldn’t be hesitant to let go of the reigns of their movie to a man who was last seen failing to get Dollhouse to catch on and watching Serenity crash and burn. The dialogue has that Whedon-y energy. The women are treated like people (of the three women with the most screen time two of them are completely not defined by the men they want to bone). The tortured broody character is, by far, the most interesting. It’s like they made a Buffy movie and then threw in Iron Man and Thor.
I struggle to come up with anything negative to say about the movie. The second act drags a little and I just don’t care about a lot of those elements of the plot. I find it completely incomprehensible that Tony Stark doesn’t know what Shawarma is. That’s particularly galling because of how completely plausible it is for Captain America or Thor to not know. The payoff for that bit is delightful though. I’m sure I’ll have more to complain about as I see this movie for a second, third or even fourth time but right now it’s the shining movie on the hill as far as I’m concerned.
I’m supposed to be learning things about the American movie-going public through all of this and what has The Avengers revealed? That you can make a giant movie if you use five other movies as set-up. That the first weekend in May is just generally golden if you appeal to an audience starved for an action movie. That Firefly should never have been cancelled. Ok, maybe not that. A man can dream.
Week 19 Preview
Let’s be quick here. The Avengers accounted for 94% of Fandango’s sales this week. Amazing when you consider the comic nerd base probably got their tickets a month ago. It’s going to be a monster. I’m picking it this week and I feel a little dirty about the easy win.
Week 18: Think Like a Man
I had something of a dark night of the soul moment this weekend. It became clear on Saturday morning that Think Like a Man was going to repeat at number one. I was completely floored. I had nowhere to go, I felt like I had covered everything I thought about the movie last week and was caught completely unprepared. More importantly I suddenly felt powerless. This project has been really fun but this would be six weeks with only seeing two different movies and, frankly, movies I was neither particularly jazzed for nor that were pitched towards my demographic. I was despairing but at the 11th hour I was saved.
While complaining about the situation on Facebook and asking for volunteers to subject themselves to this experience with me it turned out that my friend Darien is something of a Steve Harvey fan. She’s a regular listener to his morning radio show; I did not know that he had a radio show. She knew about his advice paradigm to women facing relationship problems; I could only remember one piece of advice from the movie I had seen a week earlier. She even recognized a minor character on the radio show purely by voice when he appeared on screen. I finally had what I’d never had in 17 weeks of seeing these movies: an expert.
Darien’s reaction was a real mixed bag. In a winding post-movie conversation that concluded with a brief exchange of hungover texts this morning I can say she thought the following things about this movie: It was really sexist, there are pieces of advice she would follow, it was mostly a train wreck, she plans to own it on DVD,. I guess this is a home run for Think Like a Man. A ticket and a DVD purchase and only a bare minimum of loathing. On the other hand the highlight of the entire evening was accidentally walking into the wrong theater and seeing the trailer for The Hobbit. A transcendent movie Think Like a Man really isn’t.
The most shocking thing this weekend was that Think Like a Man completely curbstomped The Five-Year Engagement. Engagement finished below two other date movies in their second week and week six of The Hunger Games. It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback this and say that the film had some really atrocious marketing but Jason Segel has never been the lead in a film that opened number one. Maybe he just isn’t that level of movie star. A sad thought really as I enjoy his work a great deal.
About Me
I'm Art Tebbel, a writer and improvisor currently living in Los Angeles. Box Office Democracy is a journey through 2012 watching only the number one movies in America.
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