G.I. BLOWS!

1. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra/Paramount Wknd/$ 56.2 Total/$ 56.2
2. Julie & Julia/Sony Wknd/4 20.1 Total/$ 20.1
3. G-Force/Disney Wknd/$ 9.8 Total/$ 86.1
4. Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince Wknd/$ 8.9 Total/$ 273.8
5. Funny People/Universal Wknd/$ 7.9 Total/$ 40.4
6. The Ugly Truth/Sony Wknd/$ 7.0 Total/$ 69.1
7. A Perfect Getaway/Universal Wknd/$ 5.8 Total/$ 5.8
8. Aliens in the Attic/Fox Wknd/$ 4.0 Total/$ 16.3
9. Orphan/Warner Wknd/$ 3.7 Total/$ 34.8
10. (500) Days of Summer/Fox Search Wknd/$ 3.7 Total/$ 12.3

G.I. BLOWS
G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra opens at number one and do you really need me to tell you this is a big piece of soulless crap? It lacks even the sense of fun of the first Transformers movie had, probably because you have no realistic frame of reference for a movie about giant robots from space, but you do for even the silliest movie about soldiers. And ironically enough, the soldiers in Transformers came off better than the supposedly super-elite guys here thanks to a more realistic attention to detail as to how a military operation is carried out. Now, when this came out, I was just beginning to transition out of my kiddie geekness into a more mature geekness, so both this and Transformers came a year too late for me to be a fan. Likewise, I looked at Knight Rider and thought, “Well this is just fucking stupid, but this Mad Max is the real deal.” Also, I was loyal to the original G.I. Joe toy (I had The Mummy’s Tomb kit) and only began to tolerate the existence of the new G.I. Joe unit when he actually made an appearance in the comic as its namesake. Because of this, 99% of everything you see here is new to me so I have no attachment and can’t muster that pure geek outrage I could do for something like Star Trek or Superman. The cruel irony is one of the reasons it sucks is the amateur efforts they put into giving these characters some shading and depth. The evil Baroness (Sienna Miller) is Duke’s (Channing Tatum) ex-fiancée, who apparently went to the dark side when her kid brother was killed in combat despite Duke’s promise to protect him. Then Duke himself abandons her out of guilt. Sorry, but when you’re doing a movie about a guy who wants to rule the world, motivations are just baggage. James Bond has gotten by for 45 years on just a naked lust for power for its bad guys and every Bond movie including Octopussy is better than this. It’s telling the best part of the movie, the conflict between Snake Eyes and his brother, Storm Shadow, requires no special effects and the more they try to explain the conflict the more it dilutes it. Then there’s the enormous Star Trek problem it suffers. Supposedly G.I. Joe is this top unit filled with hundreds of guys, but only these six people handle each and every problem the way Star Trek always had its stars doing all the work. What about the other 594 people in the background? Are they all just the G.I. Joe IT department? And while you don’t want too much reality in a movie like this, a covert ops team tearing downtown Paris apart does seem to be the height of stupidity. How is this either covert or protecting the people of Paris? Here’s a thought: given that France is a contributing nation of G.I. Joe why not let the authorities know you’ve got dangerous terrorists in Paris have them at least try to stop them? That way it makes some sort of sense that your guys have to suit up to save the day. Unlike the lack of all logic that has Duke being so outraged over his unit being killed by The Baroness that he demands to join G.I. Joe to chase her, but initially won’t tell them who she is. Also, G.I. Joe is using face recognition technology to try and find her, but can’t---even though we’re shown a flashback with her and Duke at a military function in Washington DC and her brother’s a freaking soldier!!! Oh, no. She’d never come across a camera there, much less a friggin' ATM like they mention. When your stupidity dampens the fun, you have a problem and this movie has a lot of problems.

WHAT EXACTLY IS IN HATERADE? CERTAINLY NOT BUTTER.
Julie and Julia opens at number two and don’t kid yourself; this is very good considering it made half the movie’s budget opening weekend. Meryl Streep has become not just a box office queen, but a summer box office queen and she’s done it in the Sean Connery way: pair yourself in A-list films with younger stars. Sean had a second golden age sharing screen time with Nicholas Cage, Kevin Costner, Alec Baldwin, Wesley Snipes, Christian Slater, Mark Harmon (and Meg Ryan) and even Richard Gere. Meryl had finally broken the $100M mark with co-stars like Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried and now Amy Adams. None a huge star, but as up-and-coming as it gets with a track record of both quality and box office success. The combo is clearly working for her. This is based on a book, which was an adaptation of a blog (and somewhere the gods of literature are crying). The blog was about a woman who was looking for direction and decided to chronicle trying to make every recipe in the Julia Child cookbook in the space of a year. Actually, while I hate to admit it, this alone might have made a semi-interesting small film, but the decision was made to adapt it alongside Julia Child’s own autobiography of her time in Paris learning to cook. It works and it doesn’t. Just as either story gets cooking, we have to go back to the other story and it’s not as seamless as it needs to be. Midway through the film it seems to have occurred to them that maybe it would help if Julie was actually reading about Julia Childs, thus somewhat justifying that half of the movie. Meryl Streep is as wonderful as ever. I’ll say it again: she’s the best actress to ever be on celluloid. Only Bette Davis is her peer and you Katherine Hepburn fans can keep your angry emails to yourself. Every role she ever played was Connecticut friggin’ Yankee. But while Meryl Streep gets to revel in playing someone who seems to have loved life and been loved by it in return, Amy Adams has to play someone who is openly described onscreen by herself and a close friend as a bitch, who at one point descends into such narcissism that she briefly drives her husband away. This is why I think it could have made a small film on its own, but it would not have been such light and fun summer fare and there’s no way Nora Ephron could have accomplished that. If there’s a flaw with this film, it’s that she can’t handle Julie’s somewhat darker story. The lighter, frothier, we-know-it’s-a-happy-ending Julia Child portion works fine because that’s what she’s good at. Any depth is a problem. And it really does kill me to say I enjoyed this because I so despise Nora Ephron. She’s as much a hack in her own right as Michael Bay. Just because shit isn’t blowing up doesn’t mean it’s not equally shallow. But I will give her points for understanding that if you’re making a movie about food you have to show the food and show the food looking wonderful! There’s a moment in this where you want to just taste butter and I can only attribute it to a broken clock being right twice a day that Ephron can be so evocative. Yes, I’m a hater.

PARENTS BEWARE
G-Force holds at number three, so know G-Force 2 is coming soon to a theater near you, just when your kids playing it all day at home has turned your brain to mush.

FUGLY AND FUGLIER
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is down to number four, followed by Funny People at number five and also in this is Jonah Hill, whose career is pretty much to make Seth Rogen look good by comparison. If you think Seth Rogen is ugly---and I do---standing next to Jonah Hill you suddenly think, “Well, maybe he’s not so bad.” I dropped HBO for budgetary reasons, but I did see the bit about them ragging on his ugliness on “entourage” on YouTube and I thought it was funny because it’s true. But what’s funny is that “entourage” comes from Mark Walberg, who has never been pretty. Sexy? Sure. Hot? Yeah. Good looking? I think not. So for him to be behind ragging on someone’s lack of good looks makes it twice as funny. What makes it best of all is that it was Turtle ragging on Seth Rogen! Turtle, who like Seth Rogen has dropped about 20 pounds vastly improving his appeal as well.

THE NOT-SO-UGLY TRUTH
The Ugly Truth is down to number six and with a $69M take against a $38M budget, this hasn’t been a total failure and at the end of the day will probably turn a profit, but nothing anyone will brag about on their resume.

BEFORE THIS BRUCE WILLIS, SO CLEARLY SHE LOST A BET WITH GOD
A Perfect Getaway opens at number seven and Mila Jovovich marrying Steve Zahn? Uh, no. Especially when you have Timothy Olyphant in your movie. That lets you know you’re watching a movie made by guys who look more like Steve Zahn and less like Timothy Olyphant. But at least there’s only an 8-year difference in their ages rather than the usual 10. This comes from David Twohy who brought us The Chronicles of Riddick and the sooner he gets on that next installment the better. Vin Diesel needs it and I need it.

IT JUST NEVER GETS OLD!
Aliens in the Attic is down to number eight, followed by The Orphan at number nine and say it with me THIRTYSOMETHING DWARF HOOKER!!!

APPARENTLY ENDLESS SUMMER
Finally, 500 Days of Summer enters the top ten and I have to ask “Why!?!” The more I think about this that angrier I get that it’s a) doing well and b) being praised as something original when it’s a gigantic clichéd piece of shit. That gives Joseph Gordon-Leavitt two pieces of shit in the top ten as he’s also in G.I. Joe. Ignore them both and instead watch him rock it in Brick.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW IS SEX IN SPACE
Defying Gravity premiered but I watched it as a free iTunes download. It’s pretty much being sold as “Grey’s Anatomy in Space” and they’re being kind as this is such a soap opera, Grey’s looks restrained by comparison. Set 43 years in the future it’s the story of a six-year mission around the solar system and I’m sure the reason NASA is nowhere to be seen here is that five minutes in we had astronaut instructors openly hitting on the trainees, another declaring the night before launch she wanted six years of sex in one night with one of the instructors she’s clearly been sleeping with; an astronaut who’d been drinking on launch day being cleared to go because the person in charge figures the cure to alcoholism is just to be somewhere he can’t get any, one stupid weightless sex scene and some of the worst wigs you’ll ever see on a person. So yeah, it’s bad. And they even go for the Grey’s Anatomy “crisis averted by one person talking sincerely to another” except these people are in space. Not to mention at least two scenes where bad VH1 sensitive music plays over an emotional moment. And because these writers think they’re clever in the year 2052 abortion is once again illegal. Oooooh! They’re daring! And don’t get me started on the bad science, but that’s what happens when NASA reads your shitty script and decides they’re not going to help you with your soap opera that isn’t so much about people exploring space, as it is people boning each other as they explore space. Poor Ron Livingston. He’s doomed to be known as either the guy from Office Space or the guy who dumped Carrie on Sex & The City with a post-it. And Malik Yoba is always the first sign you’re on a bad show. Were is not for my own uncontrollable geekness and the presence of Christina Cox, I never would have given this a second of my life. And that dumbass title makes me think of the musical Wicked.

ANOTHER REASON TO HATE RUNNING AND THE PEOPLE WHO DO IT
So, I ate pavement again thanks to an idiot jogger whose response to a potential collision was to not only freeze, but to move backwards into the very direction I was trying to go to in order to avoid her. To not kill her, I had to fall off my bike, thus giving me bruises and cuts on both legs along with a cut inside my mouth and actual damage to my bike this time. The chainwheel is bent. Two of them as a matter of fact. To repair it would require me investing at least another $50 into this bike and that’s where I drew the line. This is money that should be going into a new bike, not into an old one I bought for $40. The guys at the bike store know me all too well, so they did some free perfunctory repairs which worked just fine as I’m concerned. I never really deal with a gearshift below 15 anyway. This will just have to serve me until we make the jump to a new one. It figures. The TV does something weird just and the bike needs to be replaced. The cost of replacing either is about the same, because I’m not going cheap on something as important as my bike either. Fate clearly hates me. How else to you explain the cut in my mouth turning into a giant canker sore (not cold sore) and a sty in my eye on top of everything else?

IF YOU LEAVE, DON’T LEAVE NOW
Death truly took the 80’s away from me this week with the death of John Hughes. Fuck Michael Jackson, this man truly affected Generation X. Sixteen Candles nailed it for me. It was so on-point that 20 years later it still rings true. For me, ironically enough, he never hit it that well again. Yeah, The Breakfast Club is affecting when…you’re 17, but now I can’t even sit through five minutes of Judd Nelson’s nostril flaring. Weird Science was a mess then and remains one now and by Pretty and Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful he wasn’t even directing them and you could feel he was phoning it in as far as teen dramas go. Ironically, he broke with Molly Ringwald at this point because she said he’d gone Hollywood, but wound up moving his family back to the Midwest because he was afraid of how life there was affecting them. I hated Ferris Bueller’s Day off initially, because I agree with his sister: he’s an asshole so it’s 90 minutes of an asshole getting away with it. But in time it grew on me. Plane, Trains & Automobiles is a movie I’ve only seen once and never need to see again, because they chickened out in not making John Candy just annoying. No, he had to be tragic so you’d accept him. Still, I love She’s Having A Baby almost as much as Sixteen Candles and the soundtrack is nothing less than life-changing as it introduced me to Everything But The Girl, not to mention being the movie Kate Bush wrote “This Woman’s Work” for. And that’s it for me, because I don’t consider anything he didn’t write and direct truly a John Hughes film. This fortunately alleviates him of many of his crimes like Career Opportunites and Dutch and Drill Bit Taylor and bunch of crappy Disney remakes like Flubber (he also wrote the Beethoven films and Maid in Manhattan under the name Edmond Dantes). But not that of Curly Sue, which was the last film he wrote, produced and directed. Sad, huh? And sadder still this means once-promoted special edition DVDs of his best movies with deleted footage (like reportedly 90% of Elizabeth McGovern’s role in She’s Having a Baby) may never come to fruition