Movies Daily by Zach Cannon

Hellboy cleaned up at the box office this weekend. It took in almost $36 million, about $13 million more than its predecessor. The first only made $66 million domestically, but despite the more positive reception of the new movie, it probably won’t be too much more successful. Why? Because by Thursday people will be saying “Whoboy?” when The Dark Knight owns cineplexes (I’ve heard it’s sold out midnight and 3 a.m. showings across the country and 6 a.m. showings are now filling up).

Anyways, Hancock bumped down to number 2, but lost 50% of its audience from last weekend (no surprise, really, considering the last-weekend numbers don’t take into account midnight Wednesday through midnight Friday).

P.S. No one care about Meet Dave this weekend. Eddie Murphy, please retire.

Here’s the full list:

1. Hellboy II: The Golden Army: $35.8 million
2. Hancock: $33 million
3. Journey to the Center of the Earth: $20.6 million
4. Wall-E: $18.5 million
5. Wanted: $11.5 million
6. Get Smart: $7 million
7. Meet Dave: $5.3 million
8. Kung Fu Panda: $4.3 million
9. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl: $2.4 million
10. Indiana Jones: $2.25 million

While my trip to New York has nothing to do with movies, the play I just saw, Monty Python’s Spamalot, does. If you’re in any of the cities in which it’s playing, go see it, it’s a hilarious adaptation of the movie.

While I wish I could review it, I’ve about as much knowledge of musical theater as I do of carburetors (which isn’t very much, considering I had to rely on spell check to even write carburetors), so instead, I’ll do my regular Saturday ritual of rounding up this week’s trailers.

Tyler Perry is back to make a gajilion more dollars at the box office with this film, Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys. See the trailer here.

Mark Wahlberg gets noir in the big-screen adaptation of the video game Max Payne. It looks… interesting, and I mean that in kind of an apathetic way, if that makes any sense. You can see the trailer here.

Repo! The Genetic Opera, on the other hand, looks downright bizarre. Someone on the ‘nets gave it the high-concept “Blade Runner meets Rocky Horror,” and if you watch this trailer (click on the link on the top right), it definitely has what it takes to sit alongside those as a cult classic.

The Spanish zombie-flick [Rec], which I’ve read is extremely terrifying/good, has been Americanized and named Quarantine. Unfortunately for the producers of this movie they released their remake after Cloverfield, and this will probably be referred to as “that zombie movie like Cloverfield” until the end of time. Unless, of course, it’s really good, but it doesn’t look that way. See the trailer here.

As if Tropic Thunder didn’t parody war movies enough, now they’ve made a faux-documentary (or is it just a trailer for a faux-documentary?) that parodies documentaries about war movies. You can find the Web site and trailer for the film, Rain of Madness, here.

Since Dark Knight fever is building up around the country, here’s something trailer-related to the newest Batman movie: what trailers will be appearing before it. And the good folks at JoBlo.com have put together all the theatrical trailers for each Batman film, so you can watch and compare. Find them all here.

I have about six minutes to post if I want to make any money today, so here’s a lame excuse for a post.

Hellboy II is the big release today. Is it good? 88% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave it a positive rating while the general consensus reads “Del Toro crafts a stellar comic book sequel, boasting visuals that are as imaginative as the characters are endearing.”

The other big release, Journey to the Center of the Earth, is a test for the future of 3-D. It’s Brendan Frasier’s first movie of the summer (the second, the third Mummy film, will be out in August). It only got a 62% on Rotten Tomatoes and its consensus reads: “Modern visuals and an old fasioned storyline make this family adventure/comedy a fast-paced, kitschy ride.”

Finally, the film nobody cares about, Meet Dave, another bore from Eddy Murphy. It got a 21% on Rotten Tomatoes and its consensus is pretty predictable: Easy gags and slack direction drag this occasionally clever alien-out-of-planet comedy down to unimaginative lows.

Considering I’m in New York and I spent all of last weekend rewatching AMC‘s Mad Men on On Demand, I decided to dedicate today’s post to the show. When Mad Men started last year, it received decent, but not stellar reviews. If you peruse its page on Metacritic, only 77% of the reviews are positive. When the DVD of Mad Men came out a few weeks ago, nobody had a single bad thing to say about the show. You can read EW’s DVD review of it here and listen to NPR’s here. Also, the inimitable Peter Travers dedicated his entire DVD column — available here — to Mad Men the day it came out — and that was the same week Point Break was released on BluRay, so there was definitely something else to talk about.

Mad Men grew slowly on critics and it did with audiences as well. In its initial run, it did alright ratings-wise, then it won two Golden Globes, got some buzz and attracted even more viewers in reruns. Now it’s available on Comcast’s On Demand and I can’t imagine it won’t get even more eyes on it before season two debuts July 27, especially since it’s on the Emmy Awards short list for Best Drama Series (the full list of nominees will be out next Tuesday) and already won a Peabody.

So why did Mad Men slowly become so popular? For the uninitiated, it’s about ad men who work at the fictional Madison Avenue ad company Sterling-Cooper in 1960. When it started, it was just beautiful and clever but the characters are so deeply drawn and so well constructed, that it took a few episodes before you could start to fully appreciate it. In the first few hours, Don Draper (played phenomenally by Jon Hamm) seems like nothing more than a dashing, intelligent, and chain-smoking womanizer who may have had a slight case of PTSD. And then, someone mistakes him on the train for Dick Whitman, he nervously carries on a conversation with the person, but doesn’t mention it again. Shortly after, a man shows up in his office, claiming to be Dick Whitman’s brother. It all leads to a dark secret about Don’s past and it was one of television’s most engaging mysteries.

But the show’s magic doesn’t just lie in Don, but also in the rest of the ensemble cast. There’s Vincent Kartheiser’s constantly emasculated Pete; the sultry Joan (Christina Hendricks), who rules over the office secretaries and looks damn good doing it; Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), the newbie secretary who quickly becomes a junior copywriter and single mother; Don’s wife Betty (January Jones), who slowly starts to realize that her housewife role hurts her more than it makes her happy; the perfectly dry John Slattery as partner Roger Sterling; the quirky Betram Cooper (Robert Morse) as the Ayn Rand-obsessed, perpetually barefoot other-partner; and many, many other factors that make this show so great that will only make this run-on sentence more of a run-on.

Originally, I was going write a review and give a few links. But I found so many links about Mad Men on Google, that I’ll do a half-assed review and give you a thousand or so links, many of which I’ve already posted above. So, if you don’t believe me that the show is good, check out all these links and see for yourself.

A guide to the world of Mad Men New York.

A spot-on essay about the role of image in Mad Men.

A brief recap of season one to prepare you for season two.

A recent interview with Elisabeth Moss about the show.

A somewhat-recent profile about Jon Hamm.

USA Today’s preview of Season 2.

Rolling Stone’s preview of Season 2.

Entertainment Weekly’s preview of Season 2.

Some photos off AMC.com from Season 2.

Some publicity photos off AMC.com for Season 2.

A slideshow depicting how they created the ad campaign for Mad Men Season 2. I had a geek moment today when I saw the exact spot in Grand Central Station where the pictures for it were taken.

A very long (10 pages) article in The New York Times profiling Mad Men.

James Hibberd from The Hollywood Reporter dishes on the future of Mad Men and how the show could jump a few years every season for five seasons until it reaches 1969.

Early tomorrow morning, I’ll be headed to New York City for a five-day vacation, so till Monday I’ll have truncated posts. So here’s a quick run down of today’s news.

Robert Downey, Jr., who will apparently star in every movie between now and 2010, has been cast in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes as the titular detective. There could end up being a pair of competing Holmes movies if the Ferrell-Cohen version gets production started soon enough.

The ’80s Commie-fest Red Dawn is getting a new day in cineplexes. It’s being remade with second-unit extraordinaire Dan Bradley at the helm and Carl Ellsworth at the pen (that particular phrase to describe when someone writes a script doesn’t exactly work). In the same article that covers the remake, it also mentions that a number of directors, including Darren Aronofsky, have been spoken with about a new RoboCop film.

I misspoke a bit yesterday when I said that Quentin Tarantino was stepping out of his comfort zone and letting someone other than the Weinstein Brothers produce his Inglorious Bastards. In reality, The Weinstein Company is co-financing, distributing and marketing the film , which means that when QT sent out his script to four studios yesterday, he was probably seeking more co-financing.

SAG has said they’ll address AMPTP’s offer to them tomorrow, but the producers made it harder for them to turn it down today. In short, the producers said the pay increases in their new offer will be retroactive to July 1 if the deal is ratified by August 15. You can read more about it here.

Despite a quiet day in Hollywood, there were a few big news items. For Quentin Tarantino aficionados, the script for his long-gestating WWII project Inglorious Bastards went out to studios today, and rumor has it he’s looking to cast Brad Pitt. To me, Tarantino is a bit indulgent, and, despite all the fanboy drooling over this project, Inglorious Bastards seems no different. Perhaps one sign though that the movie isn’t going to be a repeat of Kill Bill or, worse, Death Proof: Tarantino seems to be stepping out of his safe zone and getting his film produced by someone other than the Brothers Weinstein.

The bigger, more important news is that of the AFTRA vote. The guild ratified AMPTP’s offer for a primetime deal. (Read a press release on Deadline Hollywood here.) The producers put out their “final offer” to SAG this week and that guild will respond to AMPTP on Thursday. Considering the growing support and opposition of the AFTRA contract by various actors, this could either be an ordeal that ends rather quickly, or could lead to a strike and might end up being dragged out for some time.

Slightly less important news: DreamWorks Animation and Intel have struck a deal to help develop 3-D technology and techniques. DreamWorks has said in the past that they want to release all of their future animated films in 3-D and both companies will use this opportunity to test out their new toys until they can make that a reality.

Finally, here’s an interesting article about how The Incredible Hulk probably won’t do much better than the 2003 Hulk at the box office, but will be considered a far greater success.

Whoever owns The Weather Channel is LOADED. NBC Universal just bought the network for $3.5 billion in cash. Of course, buying The Weather Channel is a package deal; not only do you get one of the most watched cable nets, but you also get one of the most visited Web sites, Weather.com. Think of how many people you know that check it before leaving the house, or going on a trip. It’s enough to rank it the 15th most visited site on the ‘net.

Speaking of popular Web sites, YouTube has been ordered by a court to release who watches their videos and when. The ruling comes out of a suit Viacom brought against the Web site for the copyright infringement that occurs when its programs are shown on YouTube. This article explains that the information could be as detailed as giving the IP address of who watched which video, which essentially gives the Viacom the ability to knock on your door and suing you personally, just like what happened a few years ago during the Napster/Music downloading hoopla. As everyone should know by now, nothing is private in the information age.

Aint It Cool News has some new photos up from the new Harry Potter movie, my favorite, left, depicts a very sinister-looking Malfoy.

As if the upcoming Watchmen adaptation didn’t already look cool enough, the comic’s artist Dave Gibbons chimes in on the film’s art design and how it translates in this video . Plus, you get a small glimpse at what Rorschach looks like in the film.

Also in the Cool Video department is this one, which puts you in the shoes of Stanley Kubrick on the set of The Shining. One take + lots of moving parts + Kubrick = advertising genius.

There seems to be an American Gangster sequel in the works. A salsa singer in Puerto Rico has claimed that he’s been cast as a Mexican Cop in the sequel to last year’s mob epic. As the original article points out, it’s probably a DTV sequel about another gangster that has nothing to do with Frank Lucas or Richie Roberts.

If you thought the rescue mission in Colombia last week sounded like something out of a Hollywood action movie, well, it’s about to be. Vertigo Entertainment and a Colombian TV network won the rights to the story of Ingrid Betancourt and the 14 other hostages that were rescued in an undercover operation that involved Colombian officials taking acting classes, pretending to be FARC rebels and eventually confusing the real rebels and walking away with their hostages.

This summer the box office has already been immensely successful and Hancock has only furthered that success. After WALL-E last week, the box office was 4% ahead of last year’s, which was the most successful ever. Though it didn’t make as much as Transformers did this weekend last year, Hancock still took in a pretty penny, earning $66 million Friday-Sunday and $107 million since it started showing previews Tuesday night. That might somewhat slow this summer’s ability to top last summer’s, but with more big hits on the way (Hellboy, Step Brothers, X-Files, The Mummy 3, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder and, of course, The Dark Knight, to name a few) and barring any more increases in gas/box office prices, this will be the most successful summer ever.

This weekend’s other release, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, placed eighth and took in $6 million. Also noteworthy: Indiana Jones is still in the top ten (seven) and has surpassed $300 million, while Kung Fu Panda (five) has nearly taken in $200 million, a decent gross for an animated film, which will only be topped by WALL-E (second this week with $33 million for a total of $128 million) this summer.

Here’s the complete list:

1. Hancock: $66 million
2. WALL-E: $33 million
3. Wanted: $20.6 million
4. Get Smart: $ 11 million
5. Kung Fu Panda: $7.5 million
6. The Incredible Hulk: $4.9 million
7. Indiana Jones … Crystal Skull: $3.9 million
8. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl: $3.6 million
9. Sex and the City: $2.3 million
10. You Don’t Mess with the Zohan: $2 million

It’s interesting sometimes how differently a movie looks depending on the way a trailer is cut. The red band trailer for The Wackness focused more the relationship between Ben Kingsley and Josh Peck and the little weed-selling outfit they run. In this new trailer, it’s made to look more like a quirky love story set in the early ’90s.

Here’s a preview for a strange looking indie comedy. Called Harold, it’s about a teenager who’s already massively afflicted by male pattern baldness and has trouble fitting in at school so he uses his older look to buy beer, get friends, that sort of thing. That one joke is stretched pretty far in the trailer, so I can’t imagine the film itself being much fun.

Since thousands of freshmen are about to hit college, we’re getting, College, a late-August col-com (that’s college comedy) about a group of high school kids who go to a college campus for a weekend of debauchery. It looks OK; not particularly funny. It’s coming out against the probably horrible Disaster Movie and will get buried behind the other August comedies of Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder but it could become a popular cult hit like Road Trip. Find the trailer here .

Mathieu Kassovitz has had some memorable roles in many movies (Amelie, Munich), but the last American film he directed, Gothika, didn’t turn out to well. Now, he has a very big futuristic actioner with Vin Diesel. It’s not quite my cup of tea, but you can catch the preview here.

Speaking of foreign directors, the last times Fernando Meirelles directed an English-language film, The Constant Gardener, his leading lady, Rachel Weisz, won an Academy Award. He’s back with claustrophobic thriller about a group of people who get locked in quarantine after a strange illness leaves its victims blind. You can catch the trailer here.

Earlier this week, I linked a Russian Web site that had the trailer for the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Now a high-quality version of the trailer is available here.

Finally, the big trailer for the week is the first one for the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace. It’s very reminiscent of a Jason Bourne film (have you ever noticed how Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer and James Bond have the same initials?), with Bond going rogue and hunting down the terrorist group he busts at the end of the first. There’s good action and some of the beautiful cinematography that director Marc Forster is known for. You can find it here.

Seeing as it’s the Fourth of July and all, I’m celebrating by doing as little work as possible. So I’ll take the easy way out for a Friday and sum up this weekend’s big releases.

First up is Hancock. As far as I understand, Hancock is one of the best cases of false advertisement this summer. It looks like a post-modern, hilarious take on the superhero genre. What I’ve read is that it’s actually about a fallen god who doesn’t remember his past and acts like a crappy superhero, until he meets a PR agent who tries to turn around his reputation, right around the god has sex with an underage girl and goes to jail. Strange? Yup, made even stranger by the fact that the PR agents wife is also a fallen god and is also Hancock’s true soul mate, or something along those lines. I haven’t seen the movie and I won’t this weekend based on everything I’ve heard so far: the movie is supposed to be uneven and bland. Over on Rotten Tomatoes, it got just a 38% Tomatometer ranking, not very good for recent Will Smith movies.

The other movie, which I also won’t see because I’m not a 12-year-old girl, is Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, which is based on the American Girl series. It has a 78% on Rotten Tomatoes and the general critical consensus says “Refreshingly sweet and sincere, Kit’s doll-and-book-inspired do-good mystery may be geared towards the tween girl but will please audiences of all ages.” May be a good choice if your kids haven’t already seen Wall-E.

Anyways, that’s all from me for today. Enjoy your BBQs and fireworks and happy 232nd birthday to the U.S.A.