MAXY MAX

1. Max Payne/Fox Wknd/$ 18.0 Total/$ 18.0
2. Beverly Hills Chihuahua/Disney Wknd/$ 11.0 Total/$ 69.1
3. The Secret Life of Bees/Fox Wknd/$ 11.1 Total/$ 11.1
4. W./Lion’s Gate Wknd/$ 10.6 Total/$ 10.6
5. Eagle Eye/Par-DW Wknd/$ 7.3 Total/$ 81.3
6. Body of Lies/Warners Wknd/$ 6.9 Total/$ 24.5
7. Quarantine/Screen Gems Wknd/$ 6.3 Total/$ 24.7
8. Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist/Sony Wknd/$ 3.9 Total/$ 26.7
9. Sex Drive/ Wknd/$ 3.6 Total/$ 3.6
10. Nights In Rodanthe/Warner Wknd/$ 2.7 Total/$ 36.9

MAXY MAX & THE KILLING BUNCH
Opening at number one is Max Payne, a beneficiary of perhaps the most effectively deceptive ad campaign ever. That trailer looks amazing, suggesting a much, much better film about a metaphysical war on earth between good and evil. This, however, is yet another rehash about a cop looking for the killers of his wife and family. It’s not interesting, it’s not well done and I almost fell asleep. Do you have any idea how bad you have to be to put me to sleep? Not having a game console, I’ve never played the game upon which this movie is based, but given that every game not only has a storyline, but usually a pretty intricate one, you’d think just sticking to it would be enough. Well, it probably would have, only they choose not to do that here, jettisoning all but the bare bones of it: May Payne’s wife and daughter were killed by junkies and it has something to do with a drug. What does that have to do with other worldly beings with wings? Nothing whatsoever. And that’s why this movie sucks. It doesn’t stick to the story that made it successful (Max should be on a non-stop bad guy killing spree from the word “go”) and it doesn’t transcend to the images created for this new story. It’s justa fuck up from jumpstreet. And what the point is there in having a slutty sexy character who takes off her clothes and not show the nudity? Stranger still is the character is played by Russian model, Olga Kurylenko, who not only appeared in Hitman, another movie based on a videogame, but she actually did nudity in that one. But the worst part of the moviegoing experience for me was the 99.9% male audience I had to endure in a theater so packed I actually had to sit next to someone. Gamers are just as creepy in their own right as comic books geeks, no matter how mainstream video games may seem and to be trapped in a theater filled with them is not why I get up early on a Saturday morning to go to the movies. I do it to avoid these people who somehow feel the need to wear smelly cologne to an 11:30 am movie showing. Sigh.

SISTAS ARE DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES
Beverly Hills Chihuahua is down to number two followed by The Secret Life of Bees opening at number three and somewhere there are a lot of pissed off Black actresses as this cast includes Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys and Jennifer Hudson, meaning three jobs were lost to people who already have day jobs. All your sacrifice, all your training means nothing compared to a top ten single. And the cruelest irony is the film probably wouldn’t haven’t gotten made anyway had it not had names like Alicia Keys and Jennifer Hudson attached to it. Imagine being a Black actress and learning there’s a film being directed by a Black woman with not one, not two, not three but four prominent roles for Black women, but there’s only one available, because pop stars have taken the other three. It’s like being a White actress and finding out three out of the four available roles in a non-musical film have been taken by Britney Spears, Pink and Christina Aguilera. I think you’d be a little annoyed. Speaking of White actresses, of course one of them is the actual star of this film and that actress is Dakota Fanning, back after her years of childhood overexposure and creeping me the hell out with her pale skin and unnaturally deep voice. It’s about her living with four Black women in the racially charged south of the early 60’s, which is redundant to me because it’s not like there was a part of the south in the early 60’s that was filled with racial harmony. I don’t know much beyond that and I really don’t care. For all I know it’s a prequel to Akilah and The Bee or The Swarm.

HELL ISN’T A PLACE AND IT’S NOT PEOPLE. IT’S BAD, BAD, BAD MOVIES…IN FRENCH
W opens at number four and politics aside, I didn’t see this because I despise both Oliver Stone and his insistence that he’s making films that have something important to say. No, you’re not and no, they don’t. As always, the most intriguing thing about his movie is the casting. Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney (a role he obviously prepared for in The American President), Toby Jones as Karl Rove (he looks just like Truman Capote, so know this is perfect casting), Thandie Newton as Condolezza Rice, Jeffery Wright as Colin Powell and Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld alone are enough to pique my curiosity, but Rob Corddry as Ari Fleischer is just icing on the cake. But in the end, none of this could overcome the fact that is a two-hour political film from Oliver Stone and it would be hard to find better definition of hell for me without it being in a foreign language.

OTHERS
Eagle Eye is down to number five, followed by Body of Lies at number six and Quarantine at number seven.

I NEVER THOUGHT MATURITY WOULD BE MY PROBLEM
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist is down to number eight and also in this is Aaron Yoo who may be John Cho’s replacement as the ubiquitous Young Asian Male in movies that aren’t about martial arts (he was also in 21, Disturbia and The Wackness). And like John Cho (he’s Harold in Harold & Kumar, you assholes), he’s fucking 30 and looks 15. He and Gabrielle Union have the same deal with the devil. What’s the Asian equivalent of “Black don’t crack”? Kat Dennings, on the other hand, who plays Nora and is best known to most of you as Catherine Keener’s Virgin Goth Daughter in The 40 Year Old Virgin, is 22 which is a relief to me because I adore her and felt seriously creepy for doing because I thought she was in her teens. Now I just feel regular creepy. Kinda like how I feel about Allison Mack who plays Chloe on Smallville. Why was I born without the “lack-of-shame” gene that so many other middle age people seem to have (yes, George Clooney, I’m looking at you).

PATIENT, LAZY; WHAT’S THE REAL DIFFERENCE?
Sex Drive opens at number nine and I did consider seeing this for Seth Green alone so the “The big Mexican won’t go down!” joke was just icing on the cake. It seemed to be a bit more than your usual stupid teen sex comedy. Then I realized this would be on DVD soon with an “Unrated Director’s Cut” which meant tons more nudity so I decided to wait. Wit is great and all, but if you can get wit and full frontal nudity, why not be patient?

YES, I’M GOING TO SPOIL A BUNCH OF BAD MOVIES. SO SUE ME.
Nights In Rodanthe is down to number ten and take look a the Nicholas Spark body count in his work. Now, the commercial makes it clear what happens to Richard Gere when James Franco tells Diana Lane, “You gave my father his life back,” meaning he’s not around anymore to tell her that himself. In The Notebook, Gena Rowlands has Alzheimer’s and then both she and James Garner die. In Message In A Bottle, Kevin Costner dies. In Walk To Remember, Mandy Moore dies. I’m sensing a cheap knee-jerk trend. What hacks like Nicholas Sparks and the illiterates who support him don’t get is that Romeo & Juliet isn’t a great romance because they die. It’s a great romance because they almost make it and it’s the ache of that “almost” that stays with you. Going and dying off camera in a totally separate situation isn’t “almost.” It’s the person getting on a plane in a storm to go see their love and not picking up the phone to find out that other person is already in town. See, I could do that shit and do it better.

DR. JEKYLL & MR.BOND
Lame TV shows continue to roll out and do you remember The Long Kiss Goodnight? The “one” in the “one-two” punch that derailed both the careers of Geena Davis and her then-husband, Renny Harlin (the “two” was of course Cutthroat Island)? Well, for those of you who haven’t seen it, Geena Davis is a very unlikely superspy who loses her memory after she’s shot in the head and becomes a schoolteacher in a small town until and old enemy comes after her causing her memories to awaken. Once back as herself she tries to disavow her small town life until Samuel L. Jackson, the low-rent detective she’d actually hired to help find out about her pas, points out that the schoolteacher personality had to come from somewhere inside her. I bring this up because My Own Worse Enemy is about Christian Slater as a superspy who is deliberately given a separate personality as a boring suburban dad by the government to act as his cover, but for some reason the fake personality starts waking up in the middle of missions and the show is about basically how these two separate people inside the same man have to learn to work together or basically he’ll be killed by the government as a liability. It’s like a combination of The Long Kiss Good Night and True Lies. And Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Again, first you have to accept Christian Slater as an ass-kicking superspy, which should be a bit easier than accepting him as an air force pilot who can fight 6’2” John Travolta in Broken Arrow, because you’re not paying for it. Because my expectations were low, I didn’t think it was too bad, but you don’t have to be Freud to understand that if the fake personality is now breaking out when it shouldn’t, it’s because the real personality is starting to prefer it. The superspy would rather be a suburban dad. That this never crosses the mind of anyone in the government when problems begin tests your suspension of disbelief more than the 20-something who’s supposed to be a Russian spy Christian Slater has known for a decade (with the horribly original name of “Natasha” if that’s any indication of the creativity present). I will give them credit for not pretending Slater is a kid and not only giving him an age appropriate wife (the absolutely gorgeous Madchen Amick whom I’ve loved since Twin Peaks and who recently appeared on Gossip Girl humping the pretty boy Chace Crawford), but also making one of his children a teenager. The other problem is exactly why he’d need a separate personality to take over when on his down time? As True Lies showed, you don’t need it. It would be one thing if the suburban dad would be deactivated while on otherwise innocuous business trips so the spy to could take over without arousing suspicion, but that’s not what happens here. Basically, it’s a silly premise poorly explored. This year’s Bionic Woman.

HOLY DE-COMPOSING
Death took more from music this week starting with the composer of the Batman TV theme song, Neal Hefti. While the Nelson Riddle Orchestra tends to get most of the credit, he was the actual writer of the famous theme. Also Levi Stubbs, lead singer of The Four Tops died. He was unique in that he was the voice of the group and refused the spotlight over and over again. Always rejected attempts to make him into a solo artist. He was also married for 48 years. Death also took Kim Chan, who was “The old guy” in pretty much any movie where you needed an old Asian dude. He was the butcher in Chinatown in 9 ½ Weeks, the guy who brings Bruce Willis lunch in The Fifth Element, the crime boss in Lethal Weapon 4, etc… You’d know him if you saw him. But honestly, all of these dudes were over 70, so it’s not nearly as tragic as you might think.