No, nothing has bumped it from the top spot on weekly box office returns. Indeed, at $48.5 million for the weekend, it earned nearly three times what second place Sherlock Holmes did ($16.6 million), meaning for the third straight week the top and second spots are unchanged.
But the second place ranking earned by Avatar is instead to be found on the all-time top 5 international box office takes. That’s right, at $1.335 billion, it has passed Lord of the Rings: Return of the King ($1.129) to settle in behind 1997’s mega hit Titanic, which earned $1.842 billion worldwide. That means we have James Cameron to thank for the two movies that have earned more money than any other in the entire history of cinema. King of the World, indeed.
And perhaps his little blue aliens have what it takes to sink the unsinkable big boat. At $429 million in domestic take, Avatar has done nearly twice as well overseas, and its numbers are still climbing.
Then again, come this weekend there will be some new competition in the heavily marketed Denzel Washington doomsday pic The Book of Eli.
The apocalypse ain't got nothin' on me.
As for what will be released tomorrow worth adding to your Netflix, well, it’s slim pickings.
There is the war drama The Hurt Locker, which has won a lot of critical acclaim and will likely be in the race for the Best Picture Oscar.
But more interesting to me is a film I hadn’t seen much buzz about, a psychological sci-fi flick in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey called Moon. It’s got Kevin Spacey as the evil computer! Check out the trailer and add if it moves you.
Ok, so maybe I shouldn’t bash the new Disney pic The Princess and the Frog. Truth is, I know nothing about it. And though Pixar is great and all, I’m honestly excited to see a non-CG animated flick in the vein of Disney classics. But really when the title talks about a princess and a frog and the (presumed) protagonists look like those above, it doesn’t just ooze creativity, does it? Yay for diversity, but isn’t this what Disney has been giving us for, I don’t a know, a zillion years? Then again, they do it better than anyone else, which is why they’re Disney.
Other box office notes: Look who is still holding strong at #2. Yeah, it’s The Blind Side. I still haven’t seen it, but I’m told by friends (just as I predicted would happen some weeks ago) it’s tear-jerkingly good.
"You want a beer?"
Finally, at long last, Little Rock will get to see The Road this weekend. Based on Cormac McCarthy’s best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, it stars Viggo Mortensen as a father making a journey with his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) across a post apocalyptic landscape. More than one Sync staffer is looking forward to this finally opening locally, including some of us who haven’t yet read the book (in case you want to get me anything for Christmas).
Zee map. It needs more swastika.
Lastly, if you’re looking for something for the Netflix queue, of course the big name choices from this week’s releases will be The Hangover and Inglourious Basterds. But I’m also intrigued by Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, the (true, I think) story of how a watershed moment in modern culture came to be thanks to an unsuccessful interior designer trying to save his family’s struggling motel in upstate New York. Far out, man.
In 2012, the new doomsday flick of apocalyptic cinema veteran Roland Emmerich, whose credits include Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and Godzilla, the end of the world looks so good you almost can’t wait for it to get here.
Unfortunately, when does arrive, so too will scenes so contrived as to seem laughable and clichés so trite as to induce eye rolling as the world literally comes crashing down around you.
In short, 2012 is, in all likelihood, exactly what you expect it to be: a big budget special effects extravaganza that is passable as a decent mass destruction flick but likely won’t win any accolades for being groundbreaking cinema.
But there is definitely a lot of groundbreaking in this movie. Indeed, thanks to a galactic alignment of some kind, the sun is getting super active and the normally harmless neutrinos it emits have started interfering with matter, so much so, in fact, that they’re having an effect on the earth. The crust is starting to slip.
That’s bad. And the Mayans saw it coming centuries ago. Because they totally understood astrophysics, subatomic particles and plate tectonics back then.
Thankfully a young government scientist named Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and some friends around the world manage to spot what’s going on — just like the Mayans did! We mentioned the Mayans, right? — and give the president (omgomg Danny Glover) and his right hand man (Oliver Platt) a heads up. It earns him a spot on the president’s staff and a chance to make eyes at the first daughter (Thandie Newton), a brilliant hottie doctor who loves art, reading and speaks French.
Meanwhile — and stop me if you’ve heard this one — deadbeat dad Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a gifted writer who just can’t sell his book and drives around a burly, rich Russian to pay the bills, is trying to reconnect with his kids — a petulant and distant son who admires his mom’s new boyfriend and calls his dad by name and a daughter who has a weird thing for hats and still wets the bed at age 7. A camping trip to Yellowstone leads them to stumble upon suspicious government operations and provides them a run-in with a crazy conspiracy theorist radio DJ who (surprise!) just happens to be right about everything that’s going on.
There’s a multinational government plan to save humanity, a lot of righteous indignation about not being able to save everyone, some teary goodbyes and a rather long, drawn out and complicated chain of events that eventually nets all the people who matter (to the film) a chance at survival — with a few tragic sacrifices along the way. But those folks are soon forgotten.
And in the meantime, the destruction is rampant, if not always believable, and looks fantastic. Seriously, as freeway bridges collapse and cars go careening off, you can see them taking out individual people along the way.
The only hit is that sometimes it feels like the director was just playing a game of SimCity — building a marvelous construction with occasionally shoddy foundations and poor planning only so that he could hit the natural disaster button and tear it all down. At least it’s fun to watch in the process, and the acting isn’t terrible. It’s no Independence Day, though.
Beachfront property - cheap! Fixer-uper.
As a parting gift, I offer 12 things everyone should do or know before 2012
1. Learn to fly a plane. Even just a few hours of training before doomsday will be a valuable commodity and will provide you with several narrow escapes in a variety of aircrafts.
2. Speaking of which, small planes apparently use the same gas cars do. Just pull ‘em up to the pump and grab some unleaded.
3. Save up 1 billion Euros. The U.S. will still be the leader of the free world, but the dollar won‘t cut it.
4. Buy a limo or RV. They are the preferred vehicle for driving over buckling, cracked and crumbling pavement. They can also, in some cases, survive pyroclastic impact.
5. Move away from the coast. Everything gets flooded eventually, but the coastal cities always go down first.
6. Avoid identifiable landmarks like the Washington Monument, the Sistine Chapel, and the Bellagio in Las Vegas. They’re highly susceptible to dramatic collapse when the end comes.
7. Don’t worry about losing power, even if half the city has already fallen into a fissure.
8. Governments simply cant be trusted. Lunatics, on the other hand, can.
9. The summer Olympic Games are apparently held in December.
10. At some point in the near future, metallurgy will make great leaps forward and provide us with a new wonder metal that is apparently impervious to all manner of collision.
11. Unattractive people don’t stand much of a chance. Even attractive people get no guarantees, particularly if they have loose sexual morals.
12. A 2012 Bentley sedan will seat around nine people in relative comfort.
