fun with dick and jane Tagged Articles at Cinematical

You really expect a movie headlined by Will Smith -- the consensus Biggest Movie Star in the World -- to at least break $20 million in its opening weekend. You'd have to go back to 2001's Ali to find one that didn't. Instead, Seven Pounds -- poorly reviewed and marketed to emphasize the central mystery in a way that turned out mystifying -- played second fiddle to Jim Carrey's Yes Man, pulling in $16 million to Yes Man's $18.1 million.

The Seven Pounds result is actually not terribly surprising, even given the Will Smith factor -- the movie is a morose downer, with none of the uplifting, holiday-appropriate draw of 2006's affable The Pursuit of Happyness (another Smith-Gabriele Muccino collaboration), and the people looking for that sort of thing have a lot to choose from this time of year, most of it carrying more cred. I'm a bit more taken aback by Yes Man's relatively weak opening. For a high-concept Jim Carrey comedy, opening a good three weeks after the last big light-hearted offering, $18 million is uninspiring. It's in the same ballpark as Fun with Dick and Jane, opening around the same time three years ago, but that one went up against three other comedies opening the same weekend, and was harder to market. I wonder if Jim Carrey's draw might be waning a bit.

Warner Bros. has released the first photos (click on each to view a larger version) from Yes Man, starring Jim Carrey as a guy who signs up for a self-help program in which the idea is to say 'yes' to everything and anything. At first, things are just peachy for our little 'yes man' until he realizes how much of a chore the whole thing really is. I imagine the film will bring Carrey back to his comedic roots, as it definitely evokes a sort of Liar Liar flavor. God knows Carrey is desperate for a hit; his last comedy, Fun with Dick and Jane, was okay at best. And let us not even go near his dramatic efforts (except for the awe-inspiring Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), because we won't find much gold under that rainbow.

Peyton Reed (The Break-Up) directs off a script from a couple of newbies, and Yes Man also stars the delicious Zooey Deschanel (who shall play my wife when and if anyone ever wants to make a biopic on my life), Bradley Cooper, Rhys Darby, John Michael Higgins, Danny Masterson, Terrence Stamp, Molly Sims and Rocky Carroll. Yes Man is due out in theaters on December 19.

• Christa McAuliffe: Reach For The Stars - Massachusetts native Christa McAuliffe has become quite inseparable from the image of the ghastly tendrils of smoke hanging over the Florida sky after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in January 1986, but she's also remembered as a schoolteacher who never stopped teaching. It is this second image on which first-time filmmakers Renée Sotile and Mary Jo Godges focus, going beyond blindly reverent fluff and digging into the humanity that made the loss of McAuliffe and the subsequent grounding of the Shuttle so much of a tragedy. With a warm, comforting narration by Susan Sarandon and a note-perfect song track by Carly Simon (whose tapes McAuliffe brought aboard Challenger), the film captures the spirit of exploration and discovery through McAuliffe's example, and not by just stating she was a shining star we should all try hard to emulate.
 

If all goes well (fingers crossed), there will be a series of these going up over the next week or so in an effort to manage the outrageous number of holiday releases. Today's installment is jam-packed with hilarity, featuring three comedies that may or may not actually be funny. The short: The Ringer is sweet, Cheaper by the Dozen 2 is painful, and Fun with Dick and Jane is, well, just that. Details follow.

• The Ringer: No one's wildly in love with The Ringer, but they don't hate it, either. Most, like Roger Ebert, come to realize that they "kinda liked its spirit," even though its studied fairness sometimes costs it "many chances to be funnier." Even Nathan Lee of The New York Times, who has no love for star Johnny Knoxville, grudgingly admits that the movie ultimately overcomes the "seemingly insurmountable handicap" of his presence "to wind up a fairly winning comedy."

• Cheaper by the Dozen 2: Let's just start with the fact that even our editors were not cruel enough to send any Cinematical staff to a screening, and close with this quote from Peter Bradshaw's review: "Of all the mysteries concerning those Extraordinary Rendition planes passing through UK airspace, one at least is solved. We now know what the in-flight movie is." Yikes. (Weirdly, Roger Ebert sort of liked it. So, you know, maybe it's not THAT bad - me, I'm not going to risk it, but do what you need to do.)

• Fun with Dick and Jane: For what it's worth, pretty much everyone likes Alec Baldwin. Other than that...our own Robert is not the only one to describe this as, like its title, "fun." Most people seem to find it inoffensive (which, considering Jim Carrey's track record, is probably something of an accomplishment) and mildly amusing, though there's one guy in Minneapolis who thinks it's a work of towering genius. And yes, we'll be keeping an eye on him.

Also hitting theaters in more limited release during this first wave of holiday openings are a blind Ralph Fiennes in The White Countess, Munich (James was impressed), and, at long last, the award-winning Caché (which Christopher saw as a meditation on the media).