Image Credit: Barry WetcherThis weekend, children ruled at the box office, as they so often do. Alice in Wonderland continued to prove that its boisterous, overstuffed, clattery fairy-tale landscape is a giant hit with audiences, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, with a very impressive opening, made good on its feisty promise of a socially awkward, quick-brained nerd’s dreams of acceptance. Right now, though, I’d like to take note of a few of the other stories that the box office told this weekend. Stories that aren’t necessarily pretty, but that take the temperature of today’s moviegoers in revealing, and even fascinating, ways. So here goes:
If you build a bad romantic comedy, they will come (sort of). We’re obsessed in this culture with “winners” and “losers,” so the big news about The Bounty Hunter is that it was “beaten” by Diary of a Wimpy Kid (i.e., it happened to make four-fifths of a million dollars less). To me, however, the real news is that another cookie-cutter synthetic-screwball dud, with the charming Jennifer Aniston being abused by the charmless Gerard Butler, the two of them skulking through the rituals of romcom banter like grim soldiers being put through a drill, managed to withstand a fusilade of lousy reviews to do — big surprise — just fine in the marketplace. The point? That when moviegoers, like so many of you on this site, complain, “Why can’t the studios make a romantic comedy that isn’t a borderline insult?” the answer is: “Because the romantic comedies that are insults have no trouble finding an audience.” That said, I do buy the argument (or, at least, I would like to believe) that if The Bounty Hunter had actually been a good movie, it might have done even more business. Does anyone remember Jennifer Aniston’s very first romantic comedy, Picture Perfect (co-starring Jay Mohr), from 1997? It was terrific! I’ve been waiting for her to make a romantic comedy that good ever since, but if The Bounty Hunter holds on (which, of course, it may not), she’ll have that much less motivation to break out of the ghetto of ersatz chemistry and plastic squabbling. READ FULL STORY »
