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Weekend Movie Guide: We called the dog Indiana!
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Don't fucking push any levers! | Photo courtesy of Paramount
By now you've probably read everything you want to read about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. All I'll add is a few interesting stats: the total domestic box office of all the films that Harrison Ford has appeared in is a staggering $3,094,851,491. That's just ahead of the films that George Lucas has produced ($2,977,630,768) and behind the movies that Steven Spielberg has directed ($3,447,944,266). Crystal Skull did $25M on Thursday alone so those totals will rise to even more insane levels over the next few months.
When are distributors going to learn that war pictures will not succeed in the current marketplace? War, Inc. is the latest shoo-in failure. It's getting pilloried by critics so it probably deserves its fate. John Cusack stars as a hit man brought into the fictional country of Turaqistan to assassinate a Middle Eastern oil minister. It's presumably a dark satire but one of the requirements of a good satire (see Thank You For Smoking) is that you have to side with the bad guys. What's more, Grosse Pointe Blank did this story better a decade ago.
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Jonathan Rhys-Meyers doing what he does best...staring. | Photo courtesy of Sony Classics
I've just about had it with movies that advertise themselves as "based on true events". What that's really telling me as a viewer is that the movie I am about to see isn't actually true. The latest entry into this false world is The Children of Huang Shi. It tells the "true story" of an Englishman who savesthousands of Chinese schoolchildren by leading them through a treacherous band of mountains to safety. That Englishman, of course, is the bad actor Jonathan Rhys-Meyers who can currently be seen ruining The Tudors on Showtime.
Uwe Boll made his bones (and many enemies) adapting video games into movies. After years of doing that for a marginal profit, he finally decided to make a break and that break is Postal. It's a "comedy" in the same sense that his previous video game adaptations were "movies". Then again, if the only prerequisite of a comedy is that you laugh then Postal is definitely a comedy. Whether you laugh in the right spots is really immaterial, right? Isn't an unintentional laugh as valid as an intentional one? The answer is no.
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