WHERE'S SATAN WHEN YOU NEED HIM!?!

1. Avatar/Fox Wknd/$ 36.0 Total/$ 552.8

2. Legion/SGem Wknd/$ 18.2 Total/$ 18.2

3. The Book of Eli/Warner Wknd/$ 17.0 Total/$ 62.0

4. The Tooth Fairy/Fox Wknd/$ 14.5 Total/$ 14.5

5. The Lovely Bones/Par Wknd/$ 8.8 Total/$ 31.6

6. Sherlock Holmes/Warners Wknd/$ 7.1 Total/$ 191.6

7. Extraordinary Measures/CBS Wknd/$ 7.0 Total/$ 7.0

8. Alvin & The Chipmunks 2/Fox Wknd/$ 6.5 Total/$ 204.2 4.

9. It’s Complicated/Universal Wknd/$ 11.0 Total/$ 98.7

10.The Spy Next Door/LGF Wknd/$ 4.8 Total/$ 18.7

REMEMBER: SHIT FLOATS, DIAMONDS SINK

Avatar rises back to the number one spot and apparently there’s some griping from Kathryn Bigelow fans because Cameron won Best Director over The Hurt Locker at The Golden Globes. Get the fuck over it. First of all, when did the fucking Golden Globes become respectable!?! They are the Pia Zadora Awards for fuck’s sake! Second, since when does quality beat popularity? Titanic was a piece of crap, but the biggest grossing film of all time (not adjusted for inflation) and so it beat out L.A. Confidential. Forrest Gump was a piece of crap and beat out Pulp Fiction. And Dances With Wolves, which is what Cameron fully admits this is, beat GoodFellas. She’s not special. This is not the patriarchy slamming her down. Not to mention, Cameron---who is her ex-husband---is the reason she directed The Hurt Locker to begin with.

YOU KNOW WHAT THIS PLOT NEEDS? HMMM. COULD IT BE…SATAN!

Legion opens at number two and if you must see one angels vs. humanity film, then go rent The Prophecy and save your money on this. It’s disappointing too, because the idea of an angel with a machine gun trying to defend humanity from God himself just sounds awesome. Unfortunately, the people behind this clearly thought that was enough and didn’t go beyond it. Basically, God has tired of humanity and sends angels down to wipe us out, only the angels apparently need to possess human bodies to do this, even though we see they can come down as themselves when they want. And when they possess someone, people take on a demonic appearance, which is odd considering they’re angels. Also the one angel who’s decided to rebel against God is Michael and in the only subtle yet effective scene of the film we see you clearly lose your obedience collar if you’re willing to sacrifice your wings. Of course this begs the question of why exactly an angel needs an obedience collar? Don’t expect answers because we’re too busy with horror/disaster movie exposition, as we meet the group of people who are going to be trapped to face of with the angels, learning just enough about them so we’ll supposedly miss them when they die. We don’t and this is time that would have been better spent on explaining why the baby the waitress is carrying will be the salvation of all mankind. Or more importantly WHERE THE HELL IS SATAN!?! Seriously, God comes after mankind, the key is an unborn child…how much more interesting would it have been if Satan showed up to take advantage of the situation!?! He does in The Prophecy and is played by none other than Vigo Mortensen. Yeah, you’re really better off seeing that.

IT REMINDED ME ODDLY OF GENE WILDER CARRYING AROUND THE TORAH IN THE FRISCO KID

The Book of Eli is down to number three and we’ve got a little more God on tap as the book Eli is carrying in a post-apocalyptic world is The Bible. This is basically every lone gunman/samurai movie you’ve ever seen---not that it’s a bad thing. It’s a well-used plot for a reason. Lone badass comes into town, doesn’t want to get involved, gets pushed and the head baddie and his henchmen live to regret it. Well, they don’t live, but they regret it. We’ve even got the whore who needs to be saved, except they don’t make the mistake that the producers of Pretty Woman made decades ago: it’s her first time and the hero saves her from that fate. Seriously, the reason I truly hate Pretty Woman is because she was supposed to be this hooker who still remained innocent inside, whereas if they’d made it her first night ever and Richard Gere actually saved her from being a hooker it truly is a fairy tale wouldn’t be such a goddamned offensive movie. Here, Denzel Washington refuses to help turn Mia Kunis into a whore, which is a bookend from a decade ago when his dick alone managed to get Mila Jovovich (another Russian-born beauty) to give up being a hooker in He Got Game (from Spike Lee, of course). And like any good gunfighter/samurai, she becomes his charge, joining him on the road. They even have the head henchman wanting her! In fact, if there’s anything missing from this, it’s more gunfights/swordfights. Eli just kicks ass a bit too easily. One nice ironic twist is that they don’t deify The Bible. It’s nothing but what Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman believe it to be. Denzel sees it as part of mankind’s salvation, while Gary Oldman realizes he can use it to manipulate and control people and flat out calls it a weapon. There’s even the reason there are no Bibles left: they were destroyed because they were seen as the cause of the war that’s all but wiped out mankind.

CAN YOU SMELL HOW THE ROCK IS WHORING?

Speaking of whores, The Tooth Fairy opens at number three and The Rock continues to make Walt Disney a happy pimp. Now the gruff guy dealing with kids is as old as movies. Even Cary Grant did it in Father Goose, but what makes this take on it suck is how utterly saccharine they feel it needs to be. The Rock as The Tooth Fairy does bring a smile to your face, but one look at the trailer shows you, like the producers of Legion, they thought that was enough. I’ll probably spend more creative energy thinking how to trash it than they put into trying to make it entertaining for anyone over the age of four who can’t stop laughing at a giant man in fluffy wings.

IF I WANTED THIS, I’D READ BOOKS

The Lovely Bones is down to number four and living in NYC I forget that we’ll get movies opening weeks before the rest of the country so this seems like it’s been around forever for me…around forever not sparking the slightest bit of interest. Sorry, but a book about a girl watching her family trying to carry on after she’s raped, murdered and dismembered is not a book I’m going to read, I don’t care how good it is. Similarly even though the movie decides not to include the rape or dismemberment or show the murder, I’m still not that interested. Only when dad is a tough cop or ex-CIA agent who gets to kill lots and lots of people to avenge her would this interest me. A suburban family falling apart because they can’t deal with the cruelty forced upon them by fate isn’t going to get it. I saw The Sweet Hereafter (where a bus filled with schoolchildren goes into a frozen lake) and as good as it was, that’s enough for one life. I was grateful to see this got poor reviews, but it’s clear from the trailers that Peter Jackson decided to make a movie to fit his strengths (widely criticized CGI depictions of the colorful afterlife of the girl) than make a movie to properly reflect the book (can you believe some people are upset about the missing rape and dismemberment!?!). And I’m sorry, but even after all these years, I can only take anything with Marky Mark so seriously because I’m just not buying him outside of certain roles. Loving suburban dad? I don’t think so.

I’M NOT SAYING IT’S HER FAULT, BUT…WAIT, THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I’M SAYING

Sherlock Holmes is down to number six and Guy Richie needed this like he needed air. His gangster movies started bombing and when strayed from formula and tried to get arty and his producer proved he could do them even better with Layer Cake. Then came his disastrous remake of Swept Away with Madonna and their eventual divorce. He needed a winner and got one as this has made $363M worldwide off a $90M budget. What’s sad and funny is that there’s a pretty good chance that if he and Madonna had stayed together, she might have had the Rachel McAdams role---and don’t think she doesn’t know it. His biggest hit ever and she’s nowhere in sight to enjoy it. He’s somewhere laughing his ass off over that…just before he gets into bed with at 20-year-old model himself.

THAT OLD GUY CLAIMS TO HAVE MADE THE KESSEL RUN IN LESS THAN 12 PAR SECS. YEAH, I KNOW. A PAR SEC ISN’T A MEASUREMENT OF TIME.

Extraordinary Measures opens at number seven and when the hell did releasing all these damn Hallmark Hall of Fame movies into theaters become acceptable!?! I mean, it’s from CBS where Hallmark Hall of Fame movies usually run for god’s sake. How is this difference from a dozen other films just like it? Oh, they don’t have Harrison Ford in them, that’s what. As my mom said when she saw the commercial for this, “My baby had to get old eventually, I guess.” Yes, Harrison Ford is an old man and now best suited to playing cranky old men who don’t get love interests so they don’t creep us out by touching the younger woman they would inevitably pair him with. And given Han Solo is now 70, younger will mean 50-something and that’s still two friggin’ decades. I’m sure this is touching and all, but I really don’t give a crap. I don’t watch it TV so I’m sure as hell not going to pay to see it.

THE CINEMATIC CIRCLE OF LIFE!

Alvin & The Chipmunks 2 is down to number eight, followed by It’s Complicated at number nine and The Spy Next Door at number ten and after all the bone-breaking work Jackie Chan has done in his four decade career (he’s actually a stuntman in Enter The Dragon with Bruce Lee) he’s earned a right to do crappy children’s films like this, but do they have to be so clearly awful? His job now is to assume the role left by Mako when he died last year: cranky teacher to the next young martial arts superstar. You know, like Mako was for him in The Big Brawl in 1980? But he is doing that too, I guess, playing the Mr. Miyagi role in the remake of The Karate Kid.

PLUS THERE’S LOTS OF VIOLENCE!

I don’t watch The Simpsons any longer, dropped South Park when I realized I gave up 30 minutes of my life literally watching a piece of shit; never watched The Family Guy because it is shit and Robot Chicken doesn’t seem to run new episodes, so as far as animated shows go, Archer was a gift from heaven. This ascended almost immediately to my favorite new show, it’s so fucking funny. Archer is a secret agent at an agency his mother runs complete with all the issues that might suggest. Let me put it this way Archer is either planning to kill someone for sleeping with his mother or getting an erection when someone describes killing his mother. Yeah, it’s like that. And it’s on FX, so the language and situations are pretty adult. And by adult I mean Archer fighting with another agent naked in the locker room and stopping when they realize their penises are touching. Add to this an office filled with equally crazy employees---one of whom is Archer’s ex who dresses like Modesty Blaze and has a porn fetish---and you have a show I cannot wait to see each and every week.

TAKE A CHANCE ON ME

Also new this year is The Human Target, based on a comic book character that exists in the same comic book universe as Superman and Batman. Needless to say, they aren’t here. I don’t remember a lot about the old Human Target back up stories in Action Comics, but I do recall his thing was to actually impersonate the person in danger, hence the title “The Human Target.” He once took actually Bruce Wayne’s place. That’s the not case here. Here he’s just some bodyguard you hire. But there aren’t that many action series on today beyond your typical police procedurals and this had one of the best mano-a-mano fight scenes I’ve seen on TV in a long time, maybe ever. For the promise of more of that I’ll be coming back. Plus, I’ve liked this guy since Keen Eddie.

PRETTY PEOPLE SHOULD BE EVIL, CRAZY OR STUPID. OTHERWISE IT’S NOT FAIR.

So this didn’t happen last week because I’ve been oddly social recently. First, I had a long-delayed dinner with a friend I hadn’t seen since I was in the hospital. The Sunday after that I had dinner with my cousin who’s been taking advantage of being assigned to Washington (she works for the Justice Department) to visit NYC and see shows as many shows as she possibly can, and the Monday after that I had lunch with the Tall Canadian Blonde Who Looks Like Joan Allen I used to work with at the real estate agency, who I also hadn’t seen since being in the hospital. Needless to say which one I enjoyed the most, all due respect to family and my old friend. I so adore the Tall Canadian Blonde Who Looks Like Joan Allen, I went to the Upper East Side for lunch with her. It’s always odd being around people who are genetically blessed and know how to dress. They look like a walking clothing ad. T.C.B.W.L.L.J.A. almost always looks like a Ralph Lauren ad. It’s a joy to behold and appropriate given she’s Canadian and Ralph Lauren is a Jew from The Bronx, but both project this clean all-american image. She’s also as nice as she is lovely, which just freaks me out because if I looked like Taye Diggs or George Clooney, it’s be on a path of world domination. I’d get away with murder based on a tight t-shirt and a smile.

HE WAS BORN ON A GEEKY DAY, 1966…

I also went out to see live music like I keep swearing to do but never actually manage to. It’s always a result of someone else because I’m apparently incapable of opening a paper or magazine to see who’s in town. This time Surrogate Sister’s actual brother was playing with his band Flying Machine at Webster Hall as part of a show for 101.9. For the first time they added covers to their act one of which was Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper” and the other was none other than Andrew Gold’s 70’s AM classic, “Lonely Boy.” Surrogate Sister mocked me for enjoying it so much, pointing out only I was old enough to remember it. The irony is, they both came out the same year and “Lonely Boy” was the bigger hit. So fuck you all! After the show we went drinking which I honestly didn’t expect because she and her husband had to get back to Long Beach. This was problematic for me because I hadn’t eaten dinner, having opted for a nap after work. Yes, the upside is you get drunk faster and cheaper, but the downside you get seriously, painfully drunk if you’re not careful and once we started approaching midnight I decided to tap out. Good thing too, because even though I ate dinner right after leaving, I was still far from peak the next morning. And as it turns out, Surrogate Sister was actually still drunk for her trip back to Long Beach the next morning. But before I left I was introduced to a friend of hers who actually represents comic book artists for a living and this is a result of one of those stories you always read about. He was an investment banker, bought comic book art, became friends with the artists who knew dick about how to sell their work like all artists, said he’d help them and boom! He left the corporate world and has a job he loves. Jealousy had me torn between murder and suicide.