Doubt
Philip Seymour Hoffman is thrilling to watch as a priest accused of abuse by god-like nun Meryl Streep. Streep's highly-studied Bronx accent cracks me up, but this is a crackerjack stage play by John Patrick Shanley that he adopted for the screen and directed. Viola Davis makes a deep impression, and Amy Adams is a cute nun. Buy it.

Add to Netflix queue | Buy at Amazon | Read Jeffrey M. Anderson's review.

The Tale of Despereaux
Quoting myself: "A slapdash character study of two rodents ... a gentle and nurturing children's story, imparting lessons without being too condescending to its audience." This could become a family perennial. With the voices of Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman, and Emma Watson. Buy it.

Add to Netflix queue | Buy at Amazon | Read my review.

The Day the Earth Stood Still
You've already seen the best bits in the trailer. Seriously. Even allowing for Keanu Reeves' intentionally blank slate and the prototypical "annoying kid," and crushing on Jennifer Connelly, this was a deadly bore that didn't come close to the far superior original. Skip it.

Add to Netflix queue | Buy at Amazon | Read William Goss' review.

Yes Man
Jim Carrey stars in what our man Will Goss described as "a minor lark in the Canadian comedian's career ... familiar and funny in about equal measure." Still, Carrey familiarity + Zooey Deschanel makes me want to check it out. Rent it.

Add to Netflix queue | Buy at Amazon | Read William Goss' review.

Bedtime Stories

Adam Sandler has always seemed child-like, but Jette Kernion said: "Watching Bedtime Stories is about as delightful as peeking into your Christmas stocking and finding it empty except for a few lint-covered peppermints." (Note: Released this past Sunday.) Skip it.

Add to Netflix queue | Buy at Amazon | Read Jette Kernion's review.

This past weekend at the box office brought us the fairly mediocre Push, in which Dakota Fanning (roughly 14 at the time of filming) played a snappy psychic 13-year-old with rebel streaks in her hair, whiny quips at every turn, and an unfortunate penchant for short skirts and shots.

The weekend before that gave us the fairly entertaining Taken, in which Maggie Grace (24 or 25 at the time of filming, by our best guess) played a seemingly psychotic 17-year-old with a U2 fascination, a disturbingly giddy run not unlike the one at the 5:20 mark here, and a fortunate (for us) habit of getting snapped up by European human traffickers and thus not proving to be a distraction while Liam Neeson goes all out of bubble gum on the streets of France.

So, among those of you who saw both films, which teen did you find to be more aggravating with their respective performance: Fanning or Grace? (Or, for the real saints out there, were you irritated by neither?)

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.

As the season marches on, 'for your consideration' ads litter the trades and various awards analysis websites. However, there aren't nearly enough campaigns for the year's worst performances.

You have your obnoxious kids (Jaden Smith in The Day The Earth Stood Still, Logan Lerman in Meet Bill). You have your touched individuals who straddle the line between functional and, ahem, 'full retard' (Sophie Okonedo in The Secret Life of Bees, Omar Benson Miller in Miracle at St. Anna, David Morse in Hounddog). You've got your guys that give 'insane' a bad name (Jason Butler Harner in Changeling, Donny Osmond in College Road Trip), and you've got your girls that give English a bad name (Ahney Her in Gran Torino, Natalya Rudakova in Transporter 3).

Oh, and then there's just about the entire cast of The Happening. (If I had to pick just one person, though, I'd go with the gardener who babbles on about hot dogs. The man's priceless.)

So, unless we're about to let Witless Protection sweep the Razzies, what were some of your least favorite performances of the year?

The weekend's sole big-budget multiplex offering -- the sappy alien-invasion remake The Day the Earth Stood Still -- opened well with $31 million. But the bigger news lies under the top 10. This was the weekend that Doubt and Gran Torino began their elaborate platform releases, which Miramax and Warner Bros. (respectively) hope will result in multiple Oscar nominations. Doubt opened on 15 screens and grossed $525,000 for a $35,000 per-screen average. Gran Torino -- a goofy, entertaining little movie that's only an awards contender because of Clint Eastwood's involvement -- opened to $284,000 on 6 screens for $47,333 per screen.

Another piece of Oscar bait, The Reader, opened with marginally less fanfare, ending up with $170,000 on 8 screens ($21,250 per screen).

These sets of numbers are promising, but the real test for these movies is what happens once they expand beyond their ultra-limited initial releases. Slumdog Millionare, for example, is handling its slow expansion very well, with $13,000 per-screen on 170 screens, after five weeks.

There's not much to say about the other wide new releases. Nothing Like the Holidays, Overture's niche-y Christmas offering, was predictably lackluster, opening to $3.5 million. The computer-animated Delgo was another flop for Freestyle Releasing (which, as a commenter helpfully pointed out last week, is a for-hire distributor that has nothing to do with the production of its films) with less than $1 million on over 2000 screens.

The only other thing I want to point out this week is that Quantum of Solace may have trouble setting the all-time Bond franchise record I had expected it to set handily. It has not held up well after a strong opening, and is now $10 million shy of Casino Royale's $167 million. Its weekend gross was $3.8 million, so it's going to be close.

The full top 10 -- and then some -- is under the jump.

What's going on with Summit Entertainment pulling Catherine Hardwicke off of the Twilight films? And who should they get to replace her? Does The Day the Earth Stood Still work as 'hard" science fiction, or is it just hard to watch? And what can cooking with pork tell us about modern leading men? Joining us to talk about these topics and much, much more on The Rocchi Review this week is writer and editor Devin Faraci of Chud.com, who shares his thoughts on the Oscar race and why, precisely, Punisher: War Zone works for him and a wide variety of other topics. You can listen to the podcast here at Cinematical by clicking below:



As ever, you can download the entire podcast right here -- and those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.

This may sound silly, but there's no way that The Day The Earth Stood Still would exist today in any sort of proverbial vacuum. To get the most obvious reason out of the way, we wouldn't have the 1951 original to lift from, in which an extraterrestrial visitor advises Earthlings to knock off their paranoid Cold War aggression, or else. Secondly, this incarnation is so transparently indebted to the likes of Twentieth Century Fox's other PG-13 sci-fi actioners, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, that it's hard to imagine the same studio putting out this film first. Better yet, try seeing this particular re-imagining come about without the success of Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds bolstering the profile of other '50s sci-fi efforts (new variations on Forbidden Planet and When Worlds Collide loom still on the horizon).

No, I'm afraid that it was fated to be that the Earth would stand still once more, albeit in Manhattan instead of Washington D.C., because that's how Roland Emmerich would've done it, and with a robotic threat adjusted from the height of Yao Ming to something several stories taller. Who needs flying saucers when giant orbs will do? And why bother with a pesky still-relevant message against the tolls of war when environmental concerns are all the rage? If anything, TDTESS '08 shares most characteristics with the aforementioned metallic menace: it's sleek, loud and incapable of expressing emotion beyond some big booms.

Not long ago it was rumored that when J.J. Abrams' Star Trek hits theaters this May 8, it will do so by arriving in both conventional theaters and on IMAX screens. While nothing official has been announced yet, it appears the folks in charge are waiting till The Day the Earth Stood Still hits theaters. Why? Well, according to our peeps, a Star Trek trailer will be attached to IMAX prints of that film. Here's what a source told us: "We got our print-info sheet for Day the Earth Stood Still in IMAX and attached is a trailer for Star Trek. So it appears that JJ Abrams Trek Reboot/Remake is coming to IMAX in May."

Not for nothing, but it seems like a fairly obvious choice to bring Star Trek to IMAX theaters since, as proven by The Dark Knight, the fanboy-ish stuff thrives in that environment. Unfortunately, unlike Dark Knight, Abrams did not shoot any of the film with IMAX cameras; instead, the flick will be converted to fit the format. What say you? How will you watch Star Trek -- in regular theaters or on IMAX screens?

No, not the remake -- although I am getting a little more excited about the flick than I thought I would, plus it's kinda silly to promote discussion on a film that isn't out yet. I'm talking about the original 1951 science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. (And "original" would really qualify, as this is one of the few genre greats that was based on an original screenplay and not adapted from an outside source.) Wrong-o! (See comments below.)

So it was next week's remake that first got me thinking, but what inspired me to bang out a few words was the brand-new two-disc special edition of TDTESS. (Standard or Blu-Ray!) More specifically, the awesomeness of this new edition. (Oh, and the Blu-Ray comes with a "Make Your Own Theremin Score" and a "Gort Command! Game." Nifty!) Those who own the older DVD will be pleased to note that most of the extras (including an excellent audio commentary between Robert Wise and Nicholas Meyer) have been ported over, but here's the important part: NEW supplements! An isolated score track (cooool), a new commentary with music and film historians (very cooool), and about eight NEW featurettes! Frankly if Fox can find something else to put on their next edition, I'll be pretty impressed.

Plus the disc opens with a 7.5-minute promo for the remake ... and I really think those guys might have come up with something cool. Like, a remake that takes a classic movie and fuses it with a few NEW ideas. No, the movie didn't NEED to be remade, but that doesn't mean a remake can't rock. I could be wrong, of course, but that's the vibe I'm getting right now. Plus <ahem> Jennifer Connelly is in it. Enough said.

Last night, in preparation for the upcoming Keanu-centric remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, I watched the 1951 original, which I had never seen. It's much more thoughtful than most of the men-from-outer-space B-movies that filled the era's drive-ins, emphasizing its message more than its special effects or suspense (though those elements are well represented too). It holds up pretty well for being 57 years old. I probably won't be nearly as interesting when I'm that age.

One scene made me laugh, though, and while I realize I'm not the first person to notice it, I wanted to share it in case you hadn't. It comes about 18 minutes in, when a humanoid alien has arrived and been under observation at a military hospital. Two doctors have this conversation about him and his home planet:

DOCTOR ONE: How old do you think he is?
DOCTOR TWO: Oh, I'd say 35, 38.
DOCTOR ONE: He told me this morning while I was examining him. He's 78.
DOCTOR TWO: Oh, I don't believe it.
DOCTOR ONE: Life expectancy is a hundred and thirty.
DOCTOR TWO: Well, how does he explain that?
DOCTOR ONE: He says their medicine is that much more advanced. He was very nice about it, but he made me feel like a third-class witch doctor!

And as they're having this conversation, both doctors are lighting up cigarettes. If you were writing a comedy sketch, you couldn't do better than having 1950s doctors appear mystified by another planet's advanced medicine while smoking cigarettes themselves. In fact, Saturday Night Live did something very similar to that in a 1993 sketch called "Trent Markham, Lung Doctor," where Phil Hartman played a chain-smoking 1950s TV doctor who had no idea how his patient had gotten "lung fever."