And this weekend's box office results were...
Same as last week. Sorry, no change. Still the dog one, the Sandler one, Ben Button, Get Hitler!, and Liar Liar. I'll get back to you if society ever decides there is a better movie than Marley & Me (unlikely--it's one of our best movies).
And the movies you spent Grandma's Christmas tenner on were:
1. Marley and Me - $37 million, over $14 million of that coming from Christmas Day, giving the film the second largest Christmas opening ever. So I'm thinking, if I strung together a bunch of YouTube clips and call it Dogs Doing Things, would that make $100 million opening night or would it take the weekend?
2. Bedtime Stories - $28.1 million. Some people mean it when they say, "I will watch absolutely anything for a couple hours so long as I won't have to talk to my visiting relatives."
3. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - $27 million. I guess curiosity really did kill the cat. That doesn't really apply here, but great curiosity-based saying nonetheless.
4. Valkyrie - $21.5 million. Tom Cruise just doesn't have the same box office power he did before he got so odd. Wearing an eye-patch throughout a movie? That's WEIRD.
5. Yes Man - $16.5 million. Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler both have top comedies. The '90s are back, but somehow I'm less entertained than when I had a driving learner's permit.
If you've been looking for a film full of Hiter killin', constant whispering, torturing mosquitos with cigarettes, and Tom Cruise's wild-(one)-eyed stares, Valkyrie is going to be your favorite. Check out the new trailer:
This is what you get when you MapQuest* "Tom Cruise, other stern men in suits."
*Never use Google Maps. You're always going to want that MapQuest.
Valkyrie Poster [IMPA]
Empire Magazine has some exclusive new shots from Valkyrie, Bryan Singer's mostly-true story of an assassination attempt against Hitler. In this shot, Tom Cruise (playing the depth-perceptionless Claus Von Stauffenberg) gets romantic with a certain criminal globetrotter (and occasional time traveler).
So do you think this minor disability will be enough to get Tom Cruise an Oscar nomination, or should have also had a peg leg or a lisp or something?
New Valkyrie Pictures [Empire]
Man, I knew Tom Cruise had gotten pretty smug after acquiring a fake wife slave and a perfectly genetically-engineered infant, but I figured we'd hit a smugness plateau. It turns out, as the trailer for Valkyrie shows, it wasn't even close.
But what could possibly make Tom Cruise act more arrogant than sucking the soul from a promising young actress, breathing it into a fine porcelain doll, and parading around the results like a real family? Little more than a Nazi uniform, an eyepatch, and a sharply-parted and gelled perm.
Thankfully, such self-importance actually works for the role, in which Cruise plays a Nazi convinced he can take down Hitler and his regime with the help of Kenneth Branagh, Terence Stamp, Bill Nighy, and others that make Cruise look like the spring chicken he recalls in his daily viewings of Top Gun. Bryan Singer might have a winner on his hands.
Valkyrie Trailer [Yahoo!]
Astute readers, and those obsessed with Entertainment Tonight, may realize this featurette for Valkyrie was already released on ET and posted a month ago. But this new version has two distinct advantages:
First, it does not contain a preamble by Mary Hart or the ear-shattering theme music that announces to your neighbors the shame of you watching Entertainment Tonight.
Second, this version is much higher quality (even available on the fabled HD format!), allowing you to really make out the details of Tom Cruise as a happy pirate nazi, which will clearly be the next big internet meme once people get sick of robot zombie unicorns.
Valkyrie Featurette [Apple]
Can you believe Mary Hart is still on Entertainment Tonight? Or it's possible that she was enough of a historical figure on ET that an animatronic robot of her was erected, or that this is her ghost, still haunting the set. Either of those options seems more likely, actually, because she doesn't seem to have aged. And the only reviewer with worse taste in movies than my mom, Leonard Maltin? He's still there too. It seems only John Tesh had the necessary forehead mass to escape the near-unstoppable pull of Entertainment Tonight. Is it possible their life-long goal was anchoring a televised gossip rag with a blaring theme song?
Regardless, watch this behind-the-scenes feature for Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, with what ghost/robo Hart is calling "Tom Cruise's most controversial role yet" (She must be forgetting the role of heterosexual husband) as a German officer attempting to assassinate Adolf Hitler. If I had to break my ten-year Entertainment Tonight fast, so should you.
For those out of the know, Tom Cruise has recently taken some time away from ruining the life of his young bride to make a movie about a group of conspirators plotting to assassinate Hitler. These conspirators were particularly significant because they were comprised of German noblemen and officials, and their plans were more feasible than my android army idea. Above is the main cast, comprised of Cruise, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Kenneth Branagh, and, seated at left, the German equivalent of Howie Mandel. To get the full effectiveness of the image, print and tape inside a bathroom stall.
Tom Cruise and his conspirators [Daily Mail]
Eleven extras were injured during the filming of Tom Cruise's new movie Valkyrie when they fell off the back of a truck. A bolt on the side panel of the truck apparently came loose as the vehicle turned, throwing the eleven extras off. I hear this is the second worst injury in Hollywood, right after the time Rosie O'Donnell tried to do jumping jacks while taping an episode of The View.
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I Watch Stuff is a movie and video blog dedicated to bringing you the best and worst that Hollywood and the Internet have to offer and then, more often than not, making fun of it because it sucks.
