JUMP FOR MY CASH

1. Jumper/Fox Wknd/$ 27.2 Total/$ 33.9
2. Step Up 2/Touch Wknd/$ 19.7 Total/$ 26.3
3. The Spiderwick Chronicles/Par Wknd/$ 19.1 Total/$ 21.4
4. Fool’s Gold/Warner Wknd/$ 13.1 Total/$ 42.0
5. Definitely Maybe/Universal Wknd/$ 9.8 Total/$ 12.9
6. Welcome Home Roscoe…/Uni Wknd/$ 8.5 Total/$ 28.8
7. Juno/Fox Searchlight Wknd/$ 4.6 Total/$ 124.1
8. The Bucket List/Warner Wknd/$ 4.1 Total/$ 81.1
9. Hannah Montana/Disney Wknd/$ 3.3 Total/$ 58.4
10. 27 Dresses/Fox Wknd/$ 3.2 Total/$ 69.9


THANKFULLY, NO POINTER SISTERS ON THE SOUNDTRACK EITHER
Jumper opens at number one and this blows not because it’s utterly ridiculous (it is) or that it looks like it was thrown together in a week (it does) or even because it lacks the simply whimsy to ever use Van Halen’s “Jump” or House of Pain’s “Jump Around” or David Bowie’s “Jump” at any time in the movie (it doesn’t), no this blows because it’s essentially a pilot for a series and not an actual movie committed to giving you a complete story. This movie is so concerned with setting up sequels it fails to cohere now. Based on teen novel, Jumper is about people who have the ability to transport themselves (and things) anywhere they can imagine, but are pursued by a crazy religious order intent on wiping them all out. This wasn’t part of the book, so obviously the screenwriters watched the Highlander TV show (where a group of human nutjobs decided that all the immortals were evil and set out to kill them all), not to mention X-Men comics, which also has this aspect. Needless to say this movie requires an incredible suspension of disbelief. No, not the premise. You either buy into that or not. No, it’s the realistic applications of the premise. See, for the fantastic to be truly effective it does need to be grounded in some sort of reality. This being the case, as neat an idea as it was to have Hayden Christiansen sunning himself on top of the Sphinx PEOPLE CAN SEE YOU ON THE TOP OF THE SPHINX! He simply couldn’t do it without being noticed! Also, the Paladins (the people hunting Jumpers) have figured out that an electric shock can prevent a “jump” but Jumpers don’t have the common sense to throw on some insulation? A wetsuit and some rubber boots and you can kick the crap out of all of them, no problem. But then you don’t really have a movie then, now do you? Not to mention if some religious order has been tracking these people that means governments must know and there’s no way in hell they’re going to allow such valuable weapons to be killed. Finally, if the Jumpers and the Paladins have been at war for centuries, how is there no organized Jumper offensive? You’ve just got the one guy fighting them (Jamie Bell) and the movie would have been better off being more about him or him with Hayden Christensen (Christensen actually calls it “Marvel Team-Up” showing you comic books read did have an influence on this) than it is with the puppy dog romance with Rachel Bilson, who seems to have turned into half-sized clone of Cindy Crawford. Nice, but I prefer a full-sized adult beverage, not the sippy cup.

THIS IS HOWJOHN TRAVOLTA BECAME THE BEST DANCER IN BROOKLYN
Step Up 2 opens at number two and while I hate to play the race card, imagine if you will a series of movies about a French baseball team. Yes, French. Imagine, while there were Americans actually in it, the best baseball players were still all French. This is how I feel about these movies where the best street dancers are White kids (worse yet is the trailer that shows some black guy freaking out because “Tyla Gage is in the buildin’!?!”). But the audience for this isn’t the minority population who created it, but the majority population who loves emulating the minority population. Ironically, I was actually forced to sit through the first half-hour of Step It Up by my sister and yes, only her cancer made that happen. A broken leg or elective surgery wouldn’t have gotten that. In that one you had the streetwise dancer meet the traditional dancer. Romance ensues. Here it’s the same story again, but the genders seem to be reversed, but if anything it’s even crappier dialogue. I don’t think there’s ever been a good movie made where one character speaks emphatically about the heart and guts of another character. Not. One. It’s only in bad movies that you get clichéd speeches like that. Even in 48 Hours they had the sense to make fun of Nick Nolte for saying it (“Just because you say it with conviction, it don’t mean shit to me!”). But no one goes for dialogue anyway. They go for the dancing and from an old man’s point of view it doesn’t look bad. And from a dirty old man’s point of view, watching that girl move in rain isn’t bad at all. I’m not buying her as a street kid but they do get points for not making her a skinny little blonde. Plus, I’m a sucker for a scratchy voice.

LORD OF THE GEEKS – A TRILOGY
The Spiderwick Chronicles opens at number three and I used to think that the most surefire ways of making easy money were drugs and porn, but now I see that the road to fast cash is fantasy children’s books. J.K. Rowling is the most successful author in the history of the printed word (beating out that God guy at number two with his Bible) and there doesn’t seem to be any end to similar works. Kid never seem to get tired of it, so I’m thinking I need to create a series of books about some geek who discovers he’s the foretold hero of some mystical land where no other men grow over 5’6” and maximize their penis length at 4 inches. Okay, maybe that’s more of an adult fantasy series, but you get where I’m going. I have no idea what this one is about and I probably never will.

PLUS THERE’S THAT “24” MONEY KEIFER’S BRINGING IN
Fool’s Gold is down to number four and is it just me or does Donald Sutherland always seem to have a shit-eating grin on his face when he makes these movies so obviously for the paycheck, as if to say, “I can’t believe I’m getting away with phoning it in like this at my age and I keep on working! I don’t even have to play the bad guy all the time like John Voight!” Obviously he took a page from the Michael Caine playbook on how to cruise your way into easy money in your golden years.

PROBABLY NOT
Definitely Maybe opens at number five and considering this was a long weekend coupled with Valentine’s Day, this is kinda of a failure for a romantic comedy. It didn’t get my dollar because it had a runtime bordering on two hours. Sorry, but nothing this frothy should be that fucking long. It’s a shame too, because it has nothing but likable actresses in the lead roles, though I don’t quite get how the girl has to figure out who her mother is in her father’s life and I think that was a problem for others as well. Ryan Reynolds continues to be an almost run star with a series of near misses. He’s got everything you need---looks, height, comic timing---but continues to make bad choices in films. To my knowledge, his only real hit that he has carried on his own was Van Wilder. What’s odd is that he seemed to be the guy you’d call when Jim Carrey wasn’t available, but even Jim Carrey briefly had his run when his shit didn’t stink. Ryan Reynolds has never gotten that far yet and he’s not getting any younger. But that’s the true test of stardom for a dude. If you’re paired with same age female stars as you get older, you’re not really a star. Only A-listers get to have their females leads pretty much stop at aging at 30.

THERE’S A REASON YOU NEVER SAW MARTIN ON SOUL FOOD
Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins is down to number six and it’s worse than I thought for Joy Bryant and Nicole Ari Parker as they are the two love interests for Martin Lawrence. They have to split time with for Martin Lawrence while Will Smith is making a movie with a dog and CGI monsters. That’s gotta hurt. I think Joy Bryant probably did better because in real life she actually hooked up with fugly 50 cent, while Nicole Ari Parker is actually married to pretty boy Boris Kodjoe, who was her co-star recently presented as a date for Angie Harmon on Women’s Murder Club. She had to s-t-r-e-c-h.

TELL ‘EM TO KISS YOUR ACHY BREAKY ASS
Juno is down to number seven, followed by The Bucket List at number eight and Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds at number nine and are we really getting up in arms about this girl not wearing a seat belt? Seriously? Billy Ray felt he had to apologize for this? She’s not on drugs, we’ve never seen her vagina in public and she’s not dating a parasitic drug addict. This is not an issue. Call me when she’s drunk driving with a joint hanging off her lips, then I’ll worry about her seat belt.

ISN’T A BACK UP PLAN LIKE ACCOUNTING?
Finally 27 Dresses closes out the top ten at number ten and I can’t believe this movie didn’t get a Valentine’s Day push from the studio given it’s done $86M worldwide and only cost $30M. What’s funny is that this is from Anne Fletcher, the director of the first Step Up movie. She started as a dancer, became a choreographer and is now a director. And Andy Tennant the director of Fool’s Gold started off as a dancer in none other than Grease. I hear Michael Bay did some time as “Boy In A Cage” at club Beef Jerky but that’s purely a rumor.

IT AIN’T HIM BABE
Not in the top ten but up for an Oscar is I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes visualization of the life of Bob Dylan. This is the epitome of an art film in that it could give a rat’s ass about you sitting there in the audience. This is someone utterly expressing their artistic point-of-view and everything else be damned. Your first clue is the two hour and fifteen minute run time. Your second is that Bob Dylan is never named once in the film. Instead, the character of Bob Dylan is given different names and played by everyone from Richard Gere to Heath Ledger to Christian Bale to Cate Blanchett. At one point he’s even played by a black kid going by the name of Woody Guthrie, singing the same types of songs until he’s told sing about his own times and not someone else’s. Unless you’re a huge Bob Dylan fan and have your head stuck up his ass, this is going to be a bit of a struggle for you, because so much of what goes on requires an intimate knowledge of his work and life. I know enough to get that Cate Blanchett plays him during his superstar electric conversion asshole phase as shown in Don’t Look Back and Christian Bale as the folk star just previous to that (and they both do uncanny impressions of him). I got that Julianne Moore was Joan Baez. I even got the Richard Gere segment was in reference to his appearance and work on the Pat Garret and Billy The Kid film from the 60’s (what no reference to Hearts of Fire the movie he did with Fiona in the 80s!?!), but to get what part of his life Heath Ledger is playing when the movie shows us that Heath Ledger is the actor who played the Christian Bale version of Bob Dylan is something else again. It is, in a word, as pretentious as all get out and it might have worked if not for painfully indulgent scenes like the Billy The Kid sequence (so dull all I could focus on was how much I liked the boots Richard Gere was wearing) and dragging out scenes that were initially interesting like Bob Dylan as a black kid named Woody Guthrie or Cate Blanchett as the superstar asshole. The most effective scenes are the ones with Christian Bale mainly because he doesn’t overstay his welcome. The Heath Ledger sequence however, only had morbid curiosity going for it, otherwise it was just an endurance test. And don’t get me started on the strange sequence involving Bruce Greenwood as an English journalist (he later plays Pat Garrett). This why I was so looking forward to seeing Jumper, which clocked in at 88 minutes and barely had any acting in it at all.

‘CAUSE I’M A FUNNY MUTHAFUCKA
There’s a book out now about Captain Kirk and his romantic adventures called Captain Kirk’s Guide To Women. This bothered me because it was a funny idea that I thought of first and didn’t make a dime on it. See, when I was working at the real estate agency there were times when there was absolutely nothing do. This was usually on the Friday of a holiday weekends when others had gone home and I was alone in the office sometimes until 7:00 that night. Obviously I tried to use this time to find a new job, but occasionally I’d use it to indulge chasing the dream of writing for a living. Once, there was actually a brief glimmer of hope when I returned home from work one day to find a message from none other than Tom DeFalco (longtime editor and writer at Marvel Comics) on my machine responding to my entree to become a writer for the re-launch of Cracked Magazine. Yes, the weaker sister of Mad was back and looking for writers for their more “Maxim” approach (yes, I was whoring myself). I wound up talking with two editors; one who got me and liked my stuff and another who was a clueless douchebag who was utterly confused by things like “Kevin Federline’s Guide To Hooking Up With Celebrities” “A Guide On How To Use The Race Card” and finally a fashion supplement on how more working class accessories such as miner’s helmets and tool belts could appropriated as high fashion the way welding goggles and work boots have been (yeah, that was definitely too highbrow for a douchebag). Still another was the cliché of magazine parodies and in one of them I’d used a similar Captain Kirk joke. So now, you can see a little of what Cracked Magazine (it re-launched in ’06 and died again in ’07) didn’t care for (some of the jokes may be dated):