VS. THE INCREDIBLES

1. Despicable Me/Universal Wknd/$ 60.1 Total/$ 60.1

2. Eclipse/Summit Wknd/$ 33.4 Total/$ 237.0

3. Predators/Fox Wknd/$ 25.3 Total/$ 25.3

4. Toy Story 3/Disney Wknd/$ 22.0 Total/$ 340.2

5. The Last Airbender/Paramount Wknd/$ 17.5 Total/$ 100.2

6. Grown Ups/Sony Wknd/$ 16.4 Total/$ 111.3

7. Knight & Day/Fox Wknd/$ 7.9 Total/$ 61.9

8. The Kung Fu Kid/Sony Wknd/$ 5.7 Total/$ 164.6

9. The A-Team/Fox Wknd/$ 1.8 Total/$ 74.0

10.Cyrus/Fox Searchlight Wknd/$ 1.4 Total/$ 3.5

PREDICTABLE ME

Despicable Me opens at number one and I won’t lie: I laughed, but at the same time, I forgot it as soon as I left the theater. Like most cheap sweet treats, it just goes right through you, as opposed to something well-made that has resonance. It’s the difference between a Twinkie and a cake made from scratch by your mom. None of the laughs or heart-tugging goes beyond the basic set-up. Comically cruel mother, goofy yellow lab minions, partially deaf chief scientists, three cute orphan girls…what you see is what you get. They know it’s enough and they don’t try for more, which makes you wonder why even bother hiring someone like Steve Carrel who is capable of it. The difference between this and what Pixar does is that Pixar would have gone for more. There would have been more than a one-note joke about Gru's less-than-loving mother. There would have been more to the relationship between Gru and his partially deaf chief scientist. There would have been more personality to the girls beyond being very cute. There would have been more…well, there’s not much more you can do with a lab minion and they do their part of effectively stealing the movie every chance they get. But there isn’t more because the creators were more than content with just being good enough and given the box office there’s no motivation to try harder. Only the art design and soundtrack are above-average. The former looking very much like the superior The Incredibles (indeed, Gru could be one of their villains) and the latter simply (from Pharrell) by being new, rather than using a bunch of old pop hits to convey emotions. It made me want to buy the soundtrack and go home and watch a better animated movie.

TOO OLD, TOO STRAIGHT, TOO LITERATE

Eclipse is down to number two and I really don’t care.

IF IT MAKES MONEY, YOU CAN NEVER KILL IT

Predators opens at number three and I never really cared for the first Predator movie. Seriously. Watching a superior creature pick off inferior creatures one by one was boring. It was only when Arnold was fighting it in the last 20 minutes that it was any fun. Same with the underrated second film whose 20-minute citywide battle with Danny Glover and The Predator was damn near awesome. Finally someone realized this and decided the entire movie should be a fight, not a slaughter, so rather than a rescue team or cops or scientists and civilians like the Aliens Vs Predator movies, they’ve gone with soldiers and murders, people who aren’t just going to lay back and die. Or, as a character points out, people who are “Predators” themselves (get it? the title has two meanings). Clearly being on another planet doesn’t allow for the very dull “Oh, my god! What is it!?!” portion that has bogged down every Predator movie. As hunters themselves, they size up very quickly what’s being done to them and decide to fight back rather than simply be prey. And here are four words I never thought I’d say: Adrien Brody, action star. Like Matt Damon before him, an unlikely paring, but it’s easier to train an actor to fight than it is a wrestler to act. An actor can build muscles sooner than muscles can build talent. And talent does build muscles in this case. In a direct homage to the original Predator, a ripped and stripped Adrien Brody covers himself with mud before going mano a mano with the Predator. But this isn’t a reboot the way some have mistakenly mentioned. It’s a direct sequel as the first film is actually cited. Sorry, Danny Glover. No mention for you.

IT’S MY CURSE ON YOU FOR BATMAN, BITCH!

Toy Story 3 is down to number four and no one got luckier with this than Michael Keaton who needed a guaranteed win in a big way. He voices Ken, the clear breakout star of this installment, who insists over and over than he’s not a girl’s toy---right after mentioning “Ken’s Dreamhouse.” He generates more laughs by himself than entire other computer animated movies. And despite initially getting jokes for his vanity and self-denial, Ken is also given a layer of loneliness and compassion. Again, why Pixar almost always does it better. Sorry, Cars, but an animated remake of Doc Hollywood is not what the world needed. Nor did it want cooking rats, Ratatouille.

SO MANY REASONS TO HATE, SO LITTLE TIME.

The Last Airbender is down to number five and I never watched this show, so I was going in remarkably free of my usual righteous geek anger in such matters. I was, however going in with my opinion that M. Night Shyamalan is a one trick pony who got lucky with The Sixth Sense and has been stinking up movie theaters with his out-of-control, ego-driven, intelligence insulting Twilight Zone episode rip-offs. A preset story would hopefully limit that, but his style is clearly only conducive to movies where people stand still and talk for extended periods of time. If they’ve got to move around and fight, he hasn’t got a clue, not to mention realizing that special effects laden action scenes really don’t work at night. And he seriously fails in terms of writing. Granted, condensing a years long storyline into a first installment cannot be easy, but that’s why you hire professional writers rather than think you can do it yourself. Of course you have realize you’re a shit writer and have been for almost your entire career, but it’s clear from Signs he is nowhere near that level of self-awareness (seriously, aliens who can’t bear water attack a planet that’s 75% water!?!). The problem the Airbender fans have and have has since day one is that the characters of the story are clearly prominently Asian and multi-ethnic at the very least, while the casting was seriously whitewashed. Another wise corporate decision to ignore the bird-in-the-hand fans who made the show successful in favor of the two-in-the-bush who have never heard of it and clearly don’t give a shit. What’s worse is this coming from a minority director himself. Though I guess we’re lucky that in a movie filled with East Indian actors, he didn’t cast himself in a major role, thus completing the hat trick of failure. Again.

IT’S THE TRADE OFF FOR MONEY AND POWER

Grown Ups is down to number six and if you don’t believe that “Black don’t crack” look at Chris Rock in comparison to the other cast members all the same age. They should be grateful SNL clearly never thought anyone Asian was funny because then they’d look positively geriatric.

NOTICE WE’RE NOT HAVING THIS CONVERSATION ABOUT DENZEL AND HALLE

Knight & Day is down to number seven and is it a requirement that Cameron Diaz put on a bikini or prance around in underwear in every movie she makes regardless of the plot? It can’t be easy to do it after all this time, and time is the problem because she’s done it so much, you can honestly remember it looking better. Same for him in the same beach scene. I mean, if you think aging is hard on you or me, imagine what it must be like for people like this, who at any moment can turn on the TV and see Top Gun or There’s Something About Mary and see their bodies untouched by the ravages of time. I’d have an eating disorder or a drug problem or both. You can almost understand why actors go under the knife when they’re constantly being reminded what’s been lost. Personally, I don’t think Cameron Diaz has ever looked as good as when she actually did have curves in The Mask. Those ten pounds of baby fat made all the difference in the world. Tom Cruise is showing his age here too but it seems worse because he keeps trying to look young, doing the same things he was doing ten years ago for the Mission Impossible movies, rather than playing a more mature character. No 40-something guy is jumping off rooftops like this. And yes, the fact that they both earn millions of dollars a year makes it okay for us to judge them like this.

AND IF WILL SMITH HAS A DAUGHTER, YOU KNOW WHAT THE THIRD FILM WILL BE

The Kung Fu Kid is down to number eight and at $165 million from a $40M budget you can say, yes, it’s been mildly successful. And there’s another $40M overseas, so the only question is how lame will the sequel be and how awful will the song be, because Peter Cetera’s “Glow of Love” from Karate Kid 2 was truly a plague on mankind.

IT’S LIKE PORN IN THIS WAY

The A-Team is down to number nine, followed by Cyrus entering the top ten at number ten and with John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill in the cast, Marisa Tomei must have felt like the most beautiful woman in the world on-set. But it may be some karmic payback for having won her undeserved Oscar playing the love interest for Joe Pesci, that she keeps having kiss ugly men for the rest of her career. I mean, did you see that love scene with Phillips Seymour Hoffman? That’s when you know acting is a job. Plus, Mickey Rourke 20 years after he destroyed his looks with plastic surgery. The Matt Dillons and Mel Gibsons (before everyone knew he was crazy) are few and far between. More often than naught, it’s Adam Sandler.

NO SLEEP IN BROOKLYN

I know I said I’d never go back to Brooklyn but I was made unto a liar when some of the inner circle of Jezebel A had an impromptu get-together and I somehow made the guest list. One good thing about the summer is that the city is relatively empty and places that are usually packed on a Friday night Peculiar Pub on Bleecker were still busy but with seats to be found. They were already three pitchers of sangria in from dinner by the time they remembered to tell me where they were---not that it stopped email and texts asking where the hell I was. Upon my arrival I was then forced to drink four shots of tequila in rapid succession. Ouch. I would pay for that, but it’s only the four shots that had me agreeing to go to Brooklyn with them. Well, that and a lot of cleavage. They were very proud of the cleavage. It was in fact a selling point to get me to come out. They hopped in one of the honest cabs who wouldn’t take five and since I was not going to pay $20 for a cab to Brooklyn alone, I hopped on the train, which seemed to move quickly, but took me half a friggin’ hour due to track work which skipped my stop forcing me to double back. Byt the time I’d arrived, they’d stopped drinking and continued the cannabis from earlier when they’d all disappear outside for a few minutes. I was grateful given the tequila shots I was still dealing with. From what I remember of the conversation it was much ribbing of the Canadian woman in denial about her accent. Well, that and learning th proper ethnic slur for French Canadians. Because everyone was over 30, we crashed around 2:00 am. Well, they crashed. The fact someone forgot to close the window making the air conditioning in the basement somewhat ineffectual left me sweaty, drunk, tossing and turning most of the night until I finally settled into some seriously weird, yet coherent dream where my family owned some giant gothic hotel and I was now assuming the reins, only to discover my grandmother kept her secret deformed children in the basement. Stranger still, rather than hang out when we woke up the next morning I saw the overcast skies and decided I needed to go if I were going to catch a bike ride before the rain fell (of course it never rained, but the threat of it kept the paths wonderfully free). Yeah, I can’t figure it out either. I even went for a swim before joining them for drinks. When did I become this person!?!