Weekend Box Office Report 4/21/2013: Tom Cruises to the Top

Despite the title of his latest film epic, Oblivion, Tom Cruise shows once again why when all is said and done, he’s still good box office and is not about to fade into oblivion himself.   Oblivion blasts its way to a $38.2 million dollar opening.  This after his previous film, Jack Reacher, was declared dead on arrival although I don’t quite concur with that forensic analysis.

Was Jack Reacher a gigantic box office bonanza on the level of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol?  Of course not.  There are only so many Ghost Protocols, War of the World’s, or Minority Report’s that any actor can conjure up.  But if any other film a big name star takes part in doesn’t match their biggest successes, it’s labeled a failure.  Consider this.

Jack Reacher was up against some stiff competition in The Hobbit.  Another entry in the seemingly never ending Tolkien saga being milked for every cent Hollywood can squeeze out of it.  And although Reacher only grossed just over $15 million opening weekend, it did go on to take in $80 million domestically on a $60 million dollar budget.  Hardly a total disaster.  Stir in an overseas box office take of $136 million, and suddenly the film is well into profitability.   And once it reaches DVD and Blu-ray in a couple of weeks, those who haven’t seen it will find out just as I did that it was in fact, a damn good action, espionage, thriller.


I almost made it to see Oblivion this weekend, but my girlfriend Wilma wasn’t particularly keen on the idea.  She probably would have gone if I had been an obnoxious prick about it, but instead I decided to be Mr. Nice Guy.

Wilma had me run down the list of movies playing, what they were about, and where they were showing.  Any theater except those owned by Regal would do.  I’ll never step foot in another Regal cinema, but that’s a story I’ll try to get to later in the week.  We decided on The Place Beyond The Pines, a film that we knew little about but from the plot synopsis sounded very interesting.   We never made it there.

We had lunch at a place called Logan’s Roadhouse Grill (great meatloaf), then afterwards we decided to go to Burlington Coat Factory which was in this small strip mall that also housed one of those second run, admission only $1.00 theaters called the Starplex Cinema.  It was a perfect candidate to do one of my Road Trip reviews, that is if I could squeeze it in.  In other words, don’t look for that to happen.
 

Back when it was originally released, and because Wilma is a romantic kind of gal, she had wanted to see the Julianne Hough movie Safe Haven which was another straight from the heart romantic dopuses from writer, now producer, Nicholas Sparks.  As for myself,  I can only get into these types of films if they are the Romantic Comedy classification (they better be damn funny), Romantic Suspense classification (better keep me on the edge of my seat), or perhaps even just Romance Drama’s (better be damn meaningful)  if the drama part is laid on thick and heavy.  Straight romance movies bore the heck out of me and are fodder for Hallmark and Lifetime. 

So since we were already there,  because the next showing was just 30 minutes away, and most of all because it was  only a buck, I decided to be Good Guy Clyde, and escort her to see it.  Two other things worked in her favor: 
1.  The fact that it was an adult oriented romance film that meant the chances of there being a bunch of noisy rug rats running around the theater were pretty slim, even on a Saturday afternoon.
 
2.  It was only a dollar so what did I have to loose?  And we had just eaten lunch so there was no need to buy the popcorn or soft drinks which were just as overpriced as any other theater showing a first run film.  On the other hand, they are the Marge Schott of movie theaters and you can get a hot dog for $1.00 anytime.  I have to admit that I did fill a twinge of guilt for not purchasing anything from the concession stand since I know the theater makes nothing from the $1.00 admission.  But that only lasted a millisecond.  Next time I’ll be sure to get a wienie or two.
As for the film itself, since every thing I watch is always a candidate for  future page filler, all I’ll say is that the first fifteen minutes were intriguing, and the last fifteen minutes were fairly decent despite the fact that I couldn’t stop laughing at the ludicrous plot twist tacked on.   But everything in between was an exercise in never ending tedium.  Never has there been a romance that was as uninteresting and developed as slowly and as boringly as what happens between Julianne Hough and Josh Duhamel.  I wanted to take a nap in the worst way but managed to somehow stay awake.  Then again, what do I know?  Except that Wilma concurred with my opinion and this is a woman who likes practically everything she’s ever paid admission to.  Maybe the book was better, especially since it have a lofty rating of 4.6 stars from those on Amazon who have read it.  Count me out though.  I’ve been working on the same romantic/mystery/suspense trilogy for about three or four months now.

I had thought Safe Haven, like Jack Reacher, was a total bomb at the box office.  But that perception of mine must have come from the way the critics had savaged it (13 percent at Rotten Tomatoes).    The film managed to rake in $70 million domestically and over 16 million overseas on a shoe string $28 million dollar budget, so if profitability is the name of the game, Safe Haven achieved that goal.   I’m sure that my two bucks helped tremendously in that regards.  All I know is I still haven’t seen Jurassic Park 3D, and time is running out.  But the weekend is almost over, and unlike Reese Witherspoon, most of us had a pleasant enough time. 

Here are your Box Office totals:

It’s Amazon Pilot Season

Amazon is doing its best to get into the original content game just as Netflix has with House of Cards and Hemlock Grove.  Whether they will be successful or not depends on the quality of the offerings.  But they are trying something different.  They are letting viewers decide which shows should become series. 

I’m most interested in Zombie Land, but I’m kind of disappointed in the trailer I saw for it.  I’ll try to find the time to watch this weekend and get back to you but that’s not a promise.  I’ll be gone Saturday most of the day, still working on that same completely new movie review, plus there’s something that I want to write to go with it.  Kind of tough cramming it all in especially when you come home from work exhausted after already having spent eight hours in front of a computer screen.

You can watch any of these videos for free without belong to Amazon Prime and leave feedback.   Again, Netflix already has spent millions on the three exclusive series.  We’ll see if Amazon can play catch up.  Use the above link or just click on the graphic.

Something I hate reading in any review.

This is a pet peeve of mine, so I’m just going to go ahead and unload right now.  I just read this in a review of the classic TV series Eight is Enough, and it’s something that irritates me every time I read it  in any review of anything.

”Everyone can watch the show, and you don't have to worry about foul language or adult situations.”

Let me explain something to you.  I don’t give a damn.  That’s not why I bought the show.  I don’t think that’s why anybody should watch this show or any other show like it.  Just because someone doesn’t say damn or bare their butt isn’t what makes it special or worth watching or even not worth watching.  I’ve bought Eight is Enough, and I own a copy of Show Girls.  Your comment is just as stupid as if I said in a review, “Everybody should watch Showgirls because it has a lot of tits and ass so it’s a really great movie.  Give your children a lesson in female anatomy”

Hell, no show was any more clean pure family oriented than Full House  and that half hour of hell just plain flat out sucked.  What should I say, buy it even though it was a really sickeningly sweet piece of crap  because you don’t have to worry about D.J. giving Michelle the finger when she scribbles in her diary with a Crayola? 

I’ve seen some really pure as the driven snow shows that my kids watched and loved.  But there were just as many so called G rated fun for all shows that made them want to puke with boredom.  Shows like Full House.  Ugh!

If any adult with half a brain can’t figure out what certain members of their family may or may not be able to watch, then perhaps birth control should be on their agenda somewhere.  It’s just stupid to put it in a movie review.  It tells nothing about the show or movie.  Why not word it correctly?

”Hey look at me!  I’m pure!  I’m not watching any sex, nudity and violence.  I’m better than you are as a person.  My kids never hear dirty words in my house.  They just pick them up at school and on the street the same as I did when I was their age”

Give me a break.  I don’t know how old you are but if you’re my age, I hope I don’t know you.  You’re undoubtedly one of those people who sits in front of their TV 24 hours a day with your freakin’ notepad, writing down every damn, hell, or ass word so you can quickly pen a letter of complaint off to the FCC while one of the world’s top ten asshats, Tony Perkins, drools all over you.  I’m thinking that now, and only now, are you recovering from the stroke you had at the sight of Justin Timberlake exposing Janet Jackson’s breast for a millisecond at the Super Bowl.  And I bet if I scrolled through all the reviews there would be three or four people telling me how much better Eight is Enough is than something like The Shield, or Shameless, because it’s just good clean family fun.

If  you want to tell people something about the actual show, then please do so.  Sticking the label “Mr. & Mrs. Goody Two Shoes” on your forehead and broadcasting it as if the rest of us were morons just doesn’t fly.  I’m willing to bet that if you ever read my little commentary here, you’ll absolutely hate it.  I hope so.  Next time, tell us something about the show that might interest us, besides the fact that Nicholas didn’t say the fuck word.  We already know that.

 

Carnival to spend up to $900 million to clean up it’s poop decks, Royal Caribbean: We’re sorry. But your daughter took a dive in the ocean, so you’re confined to your especially selected room. Enjoy the rest of your trip.

What is the attraction people have regarding cruises anyway?  I have given consideration to going on one at some point in my life but it just doesn’t appeal to me.  I think some of these people who ship out have watched too many episodes of The Love Boat when they were younger.  Some of the Carnival Cruise ships can hold over 3000 people.  Why would you want to be stuck out on the ocean with that many sweaty, smelly, possibly diseased humans in a floating cracker jack box where there’s no way to escape?  And if the motor conks out, you’re pretty well stuck eating cans of sardines and crapping them back out in a Hefty Cinch Sack.  Now multiply doing that by several thousand and you have a pretty lousy stinking cruise.  Pun intended.

And hell, even if none of that happens, you never know when some drunk jack ass is going to attack you or push you overboard so that you can swim with the fishes or become shark bait. 

I have a lot of relatives that have gone on these cruises.  And they return to tell us how absolutely wonderful the trip was, except on those occasions when it wasn’t so hot.  These would be the times they’ve been injured, or spent the whole trip getting sick and losing their lunch in the no bigger than an outhouse bathroom of their cabin for the entire journey.  But still, they swear by them and will defend the cruise ship lines to their death.  Let’s hope it never comes to that.

My relations may have felt otherwise if they had been on one of the infamous recent poop cruises.  But Carnival has seen the error of its ways as if they had been struck by a holy vision of Captain Merrill Stubing or Blessed Mother Virginal Cruise Director Julie McCoy showing them the error of their ways. Okay, it probably had more to do with dwindling sales, high cancellations, and stock shares taking a pretty big tumble. 

From The Consumerist:

Carnival announced today that it has plans in the works involving $300 million in improvements to its entire fleet.

The money will be sunk into upgrading safety and creating redundant power systems, according to a press release on Carnival’s site (via Good Morning America), ostensibly so that if one engine fails the entire ship won’t be thrown into a state of septic emergency due to overflowing toilets.

Included in today’s improvements is a system-wide increase in emergency generator power across Carnival’s fleet of 24 ships and additional investments in the newest and most technically advanced fire prevention, detection and suppression systems………

…….In addition, Carnival is going to spend somewhere upward of another $600 million to improve its ships overall and make sure the sewagepalooza that struck the Carnival Triumph in February doesn’t happen on future trips.

Carnival is the world’s largest operator of cruise ships, with brands like the Princess (which had its own Poop Cruise event recently) and Cunard in its family, as well as the ill-fated Costa Concordia.

Meanwhile in Miami, a woman has filed a lawsuit against the Royal Caribbean Cruise lines because she claims she was confined to her cabin after her daughter fell overboard.  Maybe they thought she would try to jump into the ocean to look for her.  Nah, they could have had somebody accompany her especially since they had the personnel to guard any escape attempt from the room she was locked in.  It’s a wonder they didn’t handcuff her to a steam pipe

Here’s the story from Courthouse News:

Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines kept a woman under guard in her room for days after her daughter fell overboard and died, and wouldn't even let her go to the chapel to pray, the mother claims in court.    Vera Marion claims the cruise line didn't even bother to turn the ship around to look for her 21-year-old daughter until 2 hours after she fell overboard……

…..The crew of the Allure of the Seas did not notify the U.S. Coast Guard that a person had gone overboard until approximately 11:30 EST, approximately two hours after the crew first received report of the incident.   Following the person-overboard announcement, the crew denied Vera Marion access to her room, her belongings, or contact with her fellow work associates. She was moved by crew members to a cabin without a balcony and guarded there by crew members stationed outside her door and inside of her cabin.  She repeatedly pleaded with crew members to leave her alone, but they refused. This situation persisted for days.  For the remainder of the cruise, crew members did not permit Vera Marion to leave the cabin or travel anywhere about the ship without the presence of security.  They did not permit her to receive guests or messages that her associates had apparently left her or to contact them.  They did not even allow her to go to the chapel on board the ship to pray for her daughter's well-being,  The crew forced her to leave her cabin door unlocked, and "as a result, male crew members walked in on Vera Marion unannounced while she was undressed, on several occasions.   Marion, who also has two sons, says that despite her pleas,  Royal Caribbean made public that a twenty-one year-old woman from Bartlett, Tennessee went overboard.  Vera Marion's boys learned of this news from home and attempted unsuccessfully to contact their mother to ask if it was A'riel who went overboard.  A'riel's body has never been recovered.   The mother seeks compensatory and punitive damages for wrongful death, false imprisonment and negligent infliction of emotional distress.

I don't know about you but I think I'd rather have taken my chances on the Titanic or the Lusitania than sailing the ocean blue on these tugboats. I don't know, maybe someone thought A'riel was The Real Ariel and gave her a shove.  At any rate, the only poop cruise I want to be a part of is when I flush my commode and launch my business to cruise down through the city sewer lines.  But if you insist on going on one of these jaunts, be sure to pack a plunger, take extra Charmin, and don’t go within 100 feet of the railing.

First Hunger Games Catching Fire Teaser Trailer: It’s A Good One And On My Must See List For This Year.

Weekend Box Office Report 4/14/2013: Jackie Robinson Hits a Home Run, Ends Racism

If only it were true.  Robinson went a long way to breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball, but racism as we all know, continues onward to this day.  Where would the Tea Farty and many Republicans go and who would they vote for if they didn’t have their fearless leaders feeding into the paranoid delusions of their half witted followers that all minorities are out to get them?

I didn’t get to get out and see 42 this weekend, which was the number one film at the box office.  And I still haven’t made it out to find out if 3D dinosaurs are better than the 2D ones.  And time is running out on that one unless I want to invest in a 3D Flat Screen.  I don’t, not after having just invested in a 2D back in January.

Sometimes…..well most of the time, I hate living where I do.  Being 30 miles away from the nearest theater is a pain in the ass, not only because of the time it takes to get there and back, but because the cost of the gasoline you need to do it just adds to what is usually a pretty expensive outing anyway.  There have been many times I would have gone to see a movie during the week, but when you arrive home from your job at 5:00 or thereabouts, driving over sixty miles is far from being appealing no matter what the reason.

I have a nice enough blu-ray set up here at home, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.  Those movies I don’t make it out to the theater to see, I’ll watch from the comfort of my living room, even though I still prefer the theatrical presentation with it’s sticky floors, overpriced popcorn, crying brats, cell phone distractions, and the guy who sits next to me narrating the film on a continual basis.  Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that you can’t pause the action while you go take a squirt.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, 42 was given a CinemaScore of A+, and was like by all types of audiences be they male, female, young or old:

Financed by Legendary, whose CEO Thomas Tull personally produced the $40 million project, the PG-13-rated 42 recounts the career of Jackie Robinson. The film was written and directed by Brian Helgeland (A Knight’s Tale), and stars Chadwick Boseman as Robinson and Harrison Ford as the Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey. With an excellent A-plus CinemaScore from all four quadrants of the audience, it was embraced by moviegoers as it outperformed expectations, which had the movie opening in the mid-to-high-teen millions.

42 enjoyed something of a hometown advantage in Los Angeles, where the Dodgers now play: Of the top ten-grossing theaters playing the pic, five were in Los Angeles. “It played extremely well in large and small markets, urban and suburban, and we have a great road ahead of us,” said Dan Fellman, Warners president, domestic distribution. “Congratulations to Thomas Tull and Legendary for bringing the picture to us.”

The movie did play older: 83 percent of its audience was over 25, with 45 percent of the audience between 25 and 49. Gender-wise, it broke fairly evenly though, with 48 percent male and 52 percent female. While African-Americans contributed to the audience that turned out for the drama about breaking racial barriers, the film enjoyed broad appeal. “There’s not one pattern that jumps out,” Fellman said. The film is currently playing in 3003 locations, but Fellman expects to expand it further in the coming weekend.

And don't feel sorry for the Weinstein’s Scary Movie 5 either which only managed to scrape up a piddling $15 million which doesn’t at all compare favorably to the $40 million opening of it’s predecessor, Scary Movie 4.  The movie only cost about $17 million to make, and I’m sure it’ll make a profit from the rest of its domestic run and any other Euro’s it can scrape up overseas. You can alread preorder the DVD or Blu-ray if you wish.  Look for this pre-order price to come down quite a bit. 

I know this is going to sound bad but I haven’t even seen the first Scary Movie, let alone it’s long run of sequels.  The whole lame brain premise just doesn’t appeal to me and as long as this blog only has the equivalent of five visitors a week, then there’s no real reason to see some films I don’t want to put any effort into.  And besides that, aren’t most horror films already kind of a parody of themselves?

That doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll exclude bad movies from my viewing habits.  You should already know that from some of my previous Poo Poo winners.  But unless this blog miraculously rakes in $30 thousand a year so I can do nothing but write pointless crap twelve hours a day, I’ll have to keep my shit job until I can retire.  By that time I may be too decrepit to write at all.

On the other hand, Netflix does have the first two Scary Movies available for streaming and if they stay there long enough, I may get to them.  Maybe I’ll even be greatly surprised by their insightful humor and wicked parody of horror films.  Uh-huh.  I’ll let you know. 

There’s one other film I should mention before we get to the chart.  Tom Cruise’s Oblivion actually opened this past week as well.  But not in the U.S.  It hit the European circuit for a rather hefty total of $61.1 Million.  Good for first place in the international market.  It opens in the U.S. this coming weekend.  This is no longer unusual.  Many films have opened overseas before unfolding across the continental U.S.  Spielberg’s Adventures of Tin Tin played in Europe a long time before it arrived here because it was better known.  And there have been films that were declared flops in the U.S. that actually did fairly decent business overseas.  That’s the new world order, so get used to it.  Here’s the tallies:

Repeat! We have a winner in The Consumerist’s Worst Company in the U.S. It’s EA! Again!

I’m glad EA made the finals, but I think Bank of America should have taken the award.  Or maybe not.  That’s just logic talking.  Emotionally, I simply hate the fuck out of EA and I’m glad they are the winner.  EA is the epitome of American Corporations who just don’t give a rats ass about consumers.

They have done their best to destroy any enjoyment one could get out of gaming with their crappy half assed half finished over-priced games, their DRM always on connection schemes, their overpriced micro-transactions some of which include paying for game items plastered with advertising so they get paid twice, and their total lack of customer service.  Those last two words are not even in the EA vocabulary.

And the response last week of chief operating officer Pete Moore trying to blame EA’s performance on homohpobia is as disgusting as it gets.  When you start using the gay community as a shield because your company sucks big time, your just as bad as any Republican because you’re a hypocrite.

I can find nobody, and neither did The Consumerist, offering any evidence that people voted because they hated homosexual.  Simply put, practically everybody hates EA and their disgusting lies such as the continual falsehood regarding the DRM of Sim City.  The people who run this company are totally clueless, and the stockholders should be pissed off about it.  But apparently they are as stupid as those they hire to run this fiasco.  Or maybe they love losing money.

The Consumerist:

Make no mistake: Video games are big business. A company like EA — and Activision, Ubisoft, Nintendo, and Sony, etc. — merits just as much scrutiny as any other business that plays a leading role in a multibillion-dollar industry. It’s only a fractured, antiquated public perception that video games are somehow frivolous holdovers from childhood that allows gamers to be abused and taken advantage of by the very people who supply them the games they play.

“Until EA stops sucking the blood out of games in order to make uninspiring sequels, or at least until they begin caring about how much gamers hate their lack of respect for our money and intelligence, this is going to continue,” writes Penny Arcade’s Kuchera. “We don’t hate them because we’re homophobes, we hate them because they destroy companies we love. We hate them because they release poor games. We hate them because they claim our hate doesn’t matter as long as we give them our money.”

Instead of deflecting, we ask the higher-ups at EA to reflect on the following question:

When we live in an era marked by massive oil spills, faulty foreclosures by bad banks, and rampant consolidation in the airline and telecom industry, what does it say about EA’s business practices that so many people have — for the second year in a row — come out to hand it the title of Worst Company In America?

Something that is totally overlooked and seldom mentioned is that if EA is such a great company, why have they shown more losing quarters over the years than profitable ones?   And this is by a large margin.

For the quarter ended Dec. 31, EA posted a net loss of $45 million, or 15 cents a share, compared with a loss of $205 million, or 62 cents a share, a year earlier. Sales declined to $922 million from $1.06 billion.

When items such as deferred revenue and stock-based compensation are factored in, the company said it earned 57 cents per share on $1.2 billion in sales, compared with earnings of 99 cents per share on $1.65 billion in sales in the year-earlier period. The results were mostly in line with analysts' average expectation of 56 cents per share on revenue of $1.28 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

How can any company rake in that much cash and still stay in the minus column.  Better yet, how do they stay in business?

But this response may be the best one I’ve read to date regarding EA.  From Penny Arcade:

SimCity not only requires an Internet connection, a decision that has led to no end of technical problems, but we can no longer create huge cities. We can’t save our game, experiment with the design, and then reload. It’s not a sandbox anymore, and the playful nature of past games in the series has been replaced by a game that forces us to play a certain way.

The gutless reaction to these issues is just as large of a problem, and after I was personally blown off by Origin PR for daring to ask about whether customers can get a refund for their non-working game, I can understand the frustration on the part of gamers trying to fight for their money back. If their official PR is comfortable giving the finger to the press and refusing to comment on refunds, I can’t imagine how customers are treated.

You know my thoughts on Real Racing 3, a game made by the remnants of two other developers EA ate up before laying off their staff and smashing them together. The company’s reaction to the vocal dismay at the microtransaction model is, once again, that they’re making money so they don’t care if you don’t like it.

EA may have the reputation of being a company run by empty suits, but blowing off the hatred of gamers due to the “market” having spoken shows just how well deserved that reputation has become. It seems that no EA executive can even pretend to care about the massive backlash the company is facing from gamers who feel ripped off.

I’m sure they sell a lot of their big guns such as Madden (overpriced, hardly changes, you’re spending $60 every year just for new rosters) or The Sims 3 (They’ve lost a lot of customers, me included, with exorbitant micro-transactions in their Sims 3 Store while skimping on content in their stuff packs and expansion packs.  Each expansion pack brings new problems to the games functions with no fixes) but nobody is buying the rest of their crap because EA does not give a damn about the customer or the quality of their product.   

And As long as you have greedy clueless executives like Pete Moore blowing smoke up the ass of, well any two bit air headed reporter in listening distance,  and trying to use the flimsiest cover to hide behind in a feeble minded attempt to explain away winning an award such as this, then EA will always be a company that belongs in the shitter.  I hope sooner or later, they get the royal flush.

And despite Moore’s creed of statistics about customers doing this and that, most of which they are forced into in order to play shitty EA Games, nothing will change the fact that most people on this earth believe that EA has been a festering infection on the gaming industry.  Congratulations, to Mr. Moore and EA for their award. They deserve it.

Crossposted at Corporateownedusa.