10/07/10

Tops at the Box: I’ve been fighting with friends for weeks about The Social Network, director David Fincher’s new movie about Mark Zuckerberg, the bratty kid who invented Facebook. The naysayers all seem to be laughing at the same joke, calling the movie “The Facebook Movie,” implying that someone actually made a movie about status updates, wall conversations and photos of daughters in their undies. C’mon, would David Fincher, at the height of his career, really waste his time anything but golden scripts? A campus-set movie about some young brainiacs who start a company that not only makes billions of dollars, but changes the way we communicate - a great subject for a movie. Add to that the combo of Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin and, in our opinion, you have a must-see film. Not too surprisingly, given the current competition, the film took the No. 1 spot this past weekend, bringing in $23 million over its first three days. Looking around the theater before the movie started I saw a surprisingly young, Hangover type of crowd. I wondered if these would really be the kids who would appreciate and understand the film, or if they, too, thought they were about to see “The Facebook Movie.” Needless to say, through most of the movie I felt like I was the only one getting all the great jokes and humorous nuances or Sorkin’s script. Walking out afterwards I heard the kids complaining about the naps they just took. The wrong people are seeing this movie, it seems. Hopefully the cinephile set, recognizes the facts, shaves their cool beards and shapes up and gets out to the theatre to see this excellent flick about a bratty and unstoppable young genius. One of the best American films of the year, for sure.

More From the Box: The awful-looking Legend of the Guardians, directed by the soulless Zack Snyder, took the No. 2 spot last weekend with another $11 million at the box, upping its so far total to just over $30 million. Considering the $80 million budget, Guardians is shaping up to be quite the failure. We love that. Last weekend’s No. 3 film, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, cooled off quite a bit, upping its 10-day total to $36 million, just over half its budget. Looks like another failure for Stone. Ben Affleck’s excellent crime saga, The Town, continued to kick butt, upping it’s three week total to about $65 million in the U.S. while surprisingly good John Hughes-inspired comedy Easy A took the No. 5 spot, upping its three-week total to $42 million with a $7 million weekend. Also of note: Inception is somehow still in the Top 10, 12 weeks after its release, upping its worldwide total to about $775 million, making it the 33rd highest grossing film ever. The All-Time Moneymakers of Cinema: James Cameron; Lord of the Rings; Harry Potter; Michael Bay; Star Wars; and, it seems, Inception and Batman director Christopher Nolan. Who’d have thunk it back in 2000 when Memento came out?