- According to NASA scientists, the sci-fi film with the most absurd science is the Roland Emmerich disaster film 2012, followed by The Core, Volcano, Chain Reaction, The Sixth Day, and What the #$*! Do We Know?. Dude, I fucking told you The Matrix might be real.
- David Cronenberg has signed Robert Pattinson on to star in an adaptation of Cosmopolis, so now you know where the director of Videodrome stands on the issue of Jacob versus Edward.
- The Ridley Scott-produced, audience-footage-generated film Life in a Day will briefly be available to watch on YouTube before its theatrical release. In Ridley Scott's head, that probably sounds really cutting edge.
- Bob Odenkirk revealed he'll be re-teaming with David Cross--along with Krysten Ritter, Rainn Wilson, and Dennis Farina--when he directs Annie Jenkins: A Not Very Romantic Comedy, which sounds kind of promising if we completely ignore Odenkirk's The Brothers Solomon.
Note that these box office totals are for the five-day Thanksgiving weekend. It will make a difference when you're entering them into Excel.
1. New Moon - $66 million. $230 million total. Yet 1995's The Baby-Sitters Club grossed less than $10 million. Adapting stupid 14-year-old girl fiction into stupid 14-year-old girl movies is such a perplexing sport.
2. The Blind Side - $57.5 million. That's over $100 million in two weeks for Sandra Bullock putting on a shoddy Southern accent to rescue a giant boy. Figure that one out.
3. 2012 - $25.5 million. I suppose seeing Earth destroyed on Thanksgiving weekend made audiences thankful to know we live in the relatively non-disastrous world we do, with over two years to go until the devastating events of 2012 become reality.
4. Old Dogs - $24million. Note: this middling box office showing is in no way an indication of the likelihood of Old Dogs 2.
5. A Christmas Carol - $22.6 million. The Fantastic Mr. Fox was just too much of an actually-funny-and-not-creepy-to-look-at choice for families looking for an animated comedy.
Weekend Box Office Results [Box Office Mojo]
This past weekend, teen and pre-teen girls ran to get into New Moon quicker than they run to get into a codependent, embarrassingly long-term relationship with some dude from high school, and the film opened to the third highest weekend of all time. Here's how it all panned out:
1. The Twilight Saga: New Moon - Fucking hell, $140.7 million? Stephanie Meyers can finally afford to get the experimental surgery to fuse solid gold sparkles into her skin. A few thousand times.
2. The Blind Side - $34.5 million. Pretty decent considering its tough vampire competition, and how it looked like such an utter POS.
3. 2012 - $26.5 million. They Mayans were right. They always predicted, "2012 will make more than it deserves given its poor critical reception, but what more would you expect from the brutish hoi polloi?"
4. Planet 51 - Ouch, $12.6 million. You have to figure paying someone to come up with the tagline "there's no space like home" probably cost that much. Unfortunately.
5. A Christmas Carol - $12.2 million, but that could easily get a boost in upcoming weeks, as we get closer to the season when audiences want to see a terrifying old man effigy move around in creepily unnatural ways while Jim Carrey shouts.
Weekend Box Office Results [Box Office Mojo]
Your weekend box office results. Save a tree; don't print them out this week.
1. 2012 - $65 million, a huge outpouring of support for the film's once hugely popular but now aging star, Flooding and Explosions.
2. A Christmas Carol - $22.3 million, another mediocre weekend that gives hope we might not have to endure A Christmas Carol 2: Scrooge the Pooch.
3. The Men Who Stare at Goats - $6.2 million. Don't believe any of this film's B.S. staring-at-goats-could-kill-them theories. I've stared at so many animals and people wishing they would die, and it never pays off.
4. Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire - $6.1 million--and that's on only 174 screens--giving hope to all those other little indie dramas that also have the endorsements of two of America's most influential women (Oprah and Madea).
5. This Is It - $5.1 million. Weren't we promised this would be out of theaters by now, finally allowing Michael Jackson's soul to escape the limbo of consumerism?
Weekend Box Office Results [Box Office Mojo]
I sure hope you like movies--because some are opening this weekend! Such as:
2012
Director: Roland Emmerich
Starring: John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor
Good if you want to see: shit gettin' fucked up, dudes!
Fantastic Mr. Fox (limited)
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: George Clooney, Bill Murray, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman
Good if you want to see: Wes Anderson's typically meticulous filmmaking applied to Roald Dahl and stop-motion woodland animals; a fox in a corduroy suit; probably some furries in the back row quietly masturbating
Pirate Radio
Director: Richard Curtis
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Nick Frost
Good if you want to see: some guys running a radio station out of a boat; Nick Frost for once not playing Simon Pegg's fat and stupid yet lovable friend
Uncertainty (limited)
Director: Scott McGehee
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lynn Collins
Good if you want to see: a Joseph Gordon-Levitt indie melodrama and a Joseph Gordon-Levitt cell phone thriller epoxied together into Sliding Doors 2: This Time One of the Doors leads to Eagle Eye
Titled 2013, naturally:
“The plan is that it is 2013 and it’s about what happens after the disaster,” Emmerich told EW while walking the red carpet for the 2012 premiere Tuesday. “It is about the resettling of Earth. That is very, very fascinating. (2012 writer/producer) Harald Kloser and I came up with the idea and we have the luxury of having a producer on the film who is a big TV producer, Mark Gordon. We said to Mark, ‘Why don’t you do a TV show that picks up where the movie leaves off and call it 2013?’ I think it will focus on a group of people who survived but not on the boats … maybe they were on a piece of land that was spared or one that became an island in the process of the crust moving. There are so many possibilities of what they could do and I’d be excited to watch it.”
There are so many possibilities for what they could do in post-disaster-ravaged Earth! The characters could search through rubble; give the millions of mutilated bodies proper burials; futilely forage for nourishment in the scorched, barren landscape; turn to cannibalism, eating former friends and family out of desperation; eventually starve to death; build a hut--the options are limitless! Well, I suppose limited by Earth's delicate ecosystem being utterly destroyed, but otherwise limitless.
What happens when you cut out all the effects shots from a five-minute clip of Roland Emmerich's newest disaster film, 2012? You get a sad, shouty minute-and-a-half acting reel composed of John Cusack doing a Conan-driving-his-desk Late Night sketch:
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Think the American 2012 trailer looked good? Wait until you see the Japanese trailer! It's still mostly shots of Earth crumbling to pieces--along with John Cusack expressing, "Ut-ohs, the Earth!"--but this time there are Japanese subtitles! But if you're really into watching ground caving in, you will love this:
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Finally, a movie involving a global catastrophe of some nature! I was getting worried I'd have to go back to the first half of the decade, or to NBC's recent television event Meteor, starring Christopher Lloyd and Seinfeld's Jason Alexander, to see fictional disasters happening. But no, there's also this.
'2012' Poster [Yahoo]
Roland Emmerich, director of such regular-people-and-a-few-government-people-coping-with-apocalyptic-events films as Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day after Tomorrow, has a new regular-people-and-a-few-government-people-coping-with-apocalyptic-events film coming out this November, and this time the danger is more real, and more vague than ever. It's not monsters, aliens, nor global warming or cooling--this time it's just crazy shit happening, dudes!:
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No, I'm not buying the disaster film's websites that claim life on Earth is ending in the year 2012, but I would believe these videos of Woody Harrelson ranting about living on a super volcano were real if he didn't begin them by introducing himself as Charlie Frost. I think I'll follow along with the series just in case it devolves to Woody shouting about the worth of hemp products. Then we'll know he's just lost it.
Thanks to Kim for passing along this email from Sony Pictures. They're getting all cute and J.J. Abramsey for that 2012 movie, and have set up a site that explains (with visuals!) how the triple-threat of solar flares, crystal displacement, and Planet X will destroy Earth. I knew we shouldn't have displaced those crystals in 2011:
IHC - Institute for Human Continuity
Greetings,
Thank you for registering for the lottery and for your interest in survival and the Institute for Human Continuity. As a holder of a lottery number, I wanted to inform you of the launch of the comprehensive website for the Institute for Human Continuity where you can find out more information regarding the IHC lottery and what to do concerning survival.
The information contained on the site represents the culmination of years of thinking by the world’s most prominent people and outlines the ambitious initiatives the institute is developing in its efforts to preserve mankind beyond 2012.
In the weeks ahead, we will continue to update the site with new findings and valuable information. So please be sure to visit the site regularly to stay informed.
We need your help to insure a future beyond 2012.
Sincerely,
Dr. Sorën Ulfert, PhD
Communications Director
The Institute for Human Continuity
Twitter: sorenulfert
Email: s.ulfert@TheIHC.com
A lottery for survival is a cute idea, but let's face it, if humanity is ever faced with extinction, it won't be a chance drawing that determines who carries on our species. It's all going to come down to who's invested in personal rocket crafts, which I assume will be only the Japanese. They'll probably be driving to work in personal rocket crafts by 2012, so try to get a Japanese businessman as a pen pal now if you don't want to be human fuel.
Oh man. I hope you haven't made your post-watching-2012 Olive Garden reservations yet, because we're going to have to wait until November to see Roland Emmerich's the-world-is-ending-in-three-years! movie. From Variety:
Sony is pushing back the release of Roland Emmerich's actioner "2012" from July 10 to Nov. 13, the same date the studio used to launch the previous two James Bond pics.
Sony prexy of worldwide distribution Rory Bruer said the studio has a very strong summer slate -- including tentpole "Angels and Demons" (May 15) and Denzel Washington-John Travolta actioner "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" (June 12) -- and it made sense to move "2012" to November.
Also, Sony has international distribution rights to McG's "Terminator: Salvation," which opens day-and-date on May 22. Warners is releasing domestically.
I guess my concerns about the impending apocalypse will have to remain vague and visually unrealized for an extra four months. I've been assuming locusts would be involved. There will probably be locusts, right?
Roland Emmerich, director of Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow, has made another movie on his favorite subject: some kind of disaster destroying Earth. The trailer suggests doing a "Google search" on "2012" (the trailer's main goal is confusing grandparents with terms they don't understand), so I did that. Results reveal that Sarah Palin is stoking speculation she'll run again in 2012 (that's a real apocalypse, ya know!?), AND THAT THE MAYAN CALENDAR WILL END ITS 13th CYCLE, which many crazies interpret as meaning humans will die, be elevated to a higher level, or "that Biaviian aliens will allow passage aboard their Great Mother Ship." Ancient civilizations and crazy people have never been wrong about anything before, so we should probably just take this movie a fact. However John Cusack survives is how we will survive as a people.
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