... and all that other stuff

When the traditional summer pastime fails to captivate and inspire, a viable alternative for me has become the summer box office race. Thanks to sites like BOMand RT, watching the millions pile up (or not) weekend after weekend for various feature films takes on the drama of any sporting contest. There are statistics galore, records to smash, and punditry at all levels. I can't for the life of me see the real significance of p2 breaking the 10th day BO record relative to a just plain overall week 2 record, but the numbers are there, and I can't help but find myself impressed nonetheless.

For the rooting interest, there's definitely a skew towards affiliated projects, but generally I just go for the movie I like. Luckily that typicaly jibes well with the affiliations, particularly this year with p2. Catching screenings becomes something like cacthing ballgames. Besides plain old personal enjoyment, there are conversations to be had about how well the thing will perform down the line. There's even smack talking, or at least awkward concessions when your film underperforms somewhat.

I talked about p2 at length, but I've been watching other stuff that I've been meaning to write about.

Box scores from the summer BO Race...

Superman Returns: Classic beats New"I'm back." It seems that the popular consensus on the return of the Superman has settled down firmly somewhere around 'disappointment'. My expectations weren't very high for it anyway, but I was hoping that the six years of development hell the project wallowed in would've resulted in a minimally compelling re-imagining of the man o' steel to make him relevant today. It's quite a challenge, but I didn't see much point otherwise.

Their approach? Make some truly radical changes... to Lois Lane! Everything else in the movie, from the titles to the soundtrack to Lex and Super himself, stayed pretty much the same as the original movies. But Lois is now a jilted single career mom, which might have worked if she wasn't cast as somebody who looked like a fifteen-year-old. All this, and she still goes into rooms and locales alone (or with offspring in tow!) that b-grade horror movie bimbos from our parents' generation would've known to avoid. It's a competently-made film otherwise, but stuff just seemed to become less and less important and coherent as the movie went on.

Also have to remark on the 3D -- It's pretty crummy. It seems that they skimped on some features of stereoscopy and tried to compensate by overdoing it in other areas. The result was that everybody looked like they were on flat cards moving in and out of the screen at ludicrous speeds while lacking the motion blur to make that motion seem organic. There are lots of different ways to tackle stereoscopic 3D, so don't let this film chase you off from other 3D films.

The Devil Wears Prada: Style ties SubstanceMiranda Priestly and the Fashion Factory I'm still not entirely sure what a sleeper hit is, but I think this is it. While all eyes were on the MoS over the July 4 weekend, this became kind of a curiosity as it held its own amazingly well and has kept apace with Superman in the weeks since then. I wouldn't be surprised to see Super drop below it in the daily BO (obviously never the overall BO) in coming weeks. (looks like it did over this weekend)

I caught one of our screenings for this and did indeed find myself enjoying it way more than I'd care to admit and actually saw it a second time with the Moms because I knew she'd like it. It's your basic Cinderella story with Streep as some twisted merge of the fairy godmother and the wicked stepmother. Hathaway's cute enough as the protagonist. It isn't any more redeeming than, say, Johny Depp cavorting about on a sailboat, but in some ways it's as if the fashion industry was making some attempt to explain itself in this movie in a way that non-fashion types like myself can appreciate.

Okay, this entry's already pretty long. I'll hit some of the other stuff later this week.