Why I'd rather see What to Expect When You're Expecting than Battleship.

I'd imagine I'm one of the few 'geek bloggers' who would rather see What To Expect When You're Expecting more than a number of the 'big summer tentpoles'. Aside from perhaps my advancing age, part of this is that a number of the summer films just-plain don't look very good. Aside from the fact that most of us are film nerds and anticipate the new releases as a matter of course, are any of us all that psyched to see Battleship, Men In Black 3, or Total Recall?  Is there a reason we pretend to be excited about ever bigger would-be blockbusters that all-but flaunt their lack of substance at us like a badge of pride?  At the very least, the Lionsgate adaptation of the classic self-help book for pregnant parents promises to actually be 'about something' and have a certain emphasis on human relationships and what-not.  And, as a participatory father forever irked by a popular culture that presumes that dads don't do jack-shit to help raise their kids ("I'd love to change that diaper, but there's no changing table in the men's restroom."), I am at least somewhat pleased by the recent ad campaign.  Lionsgate knows it has female audiences in the bag already, so as noted in the poster above and the trailer after the jump, it's aggressively pitching to men.  

Weekend Box Office (07/31/11) part II: Attack the Block scores in limited release, Captain America tumbles, Harry Potter 7.2 crosses $1 billion worldwide.

Meanwhile, a little farther down the chart, the much-anticipated and raved-about by geek critics Attack the Block was released on just eight screens by Screen Gems, with respectable results.  The film earned $130,000 for a solid $16,307 per-screen average.  Of course, this means little in terms of the film's mainstream play ability, and I do not yet know the expansion plans for the British alien invasion import.  But every movie geek on my Twitter feed has been begging everyone else to see this one.  As for me, I'm hoping that it goes to the much closer Arclight Sherman Oaks next weekend (as opposed to the much farther Arclight Hollywood).  I'm also a little nervous about those allegedly thick British accents, as I'm a little hard of hearing and am debating on waiting for the subtitled-DVD.  But for those unafraid of accents, everyone I know seems to have really enjoyed this one.  Also debuting in limited release was The Devil's Double ($95,000 on five screens) and The Guard ($80,000 on four screens).

Weekend Box Office (06/26/11): Cars 2 soars, Bad Teacher sets Diaz record, Green Lantern collapses.

To the surprise of no one, a Pixar picture topped the box office in its debut weekend, making it 12/12 since 1995.  Cars 2 (or as I like to call it: "Finally, a Pixar movie that won't make you violently sob in front of your children!") weathered some surprisingly savage reviews to still debut with $66.1 million over the weekend.  The opening is the fifth biggest in the studio's history, behind the $68.1 million debut of Up (it's at $109 million worldwide thus far).  The film had a low (for animation) 2.64x weekend multiplier (it opened with $25 million on Friday), but that means little more than that it was a sequel with a certain 'want-to-see' factor.  Heck, Toy Story 3 had a 2.6x weekend multiplier last year, causing me to (needlessly) wonder if the film was going to end up front-loaded overall.  Regardless, there has never been a Pixar movie to end up with less than 3.5x its opening weekend (Wall-E: $63m opening/$223m total).  So even if the critically trashed and more-or-less kid-targeted Cars 2 somehow sinks to a 'new low' of just 3.3x this weekend's number, it still ends up with $218 million.  If it merely does the 3.77x weekend-to-final number of Toy Story 3 ($110m/$415m), Cars 2 ends up with $249 million.

REVIEW: Bad Teacher doesn't deserve tenure, lacks focus and narrative drive.

Bad Teacher
2011
89 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

I didn't laugh all that much at Bad Teacher.  I wasn't offended by Bad Teacher, nor did I find Diaz's scheming protagonist particularly unlikable.  But the film suffers from the same malady as last summer's The Other Guys.  Like that film, Bad Teacher is filled with solid comedic character actors doing occasionally amusing broad turns. But like the Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg caper, the Jake Kasdan-directed picture feels like a handful of strung-together sketch moments, often disconnected from each other and failing to exist as a whole narrative.  Of course, comedies that exist purely to patch together one comedic sketch after another can work if those sketches stand on their own two feet.  But this is not the case, and Bad Teacher fails as a comedy and as a story.

Bad Teacher gets a red-band trailer.

Cameron Diaz has always an obvious urge to play around in the R-rated comedy sandbox. The Sweetest Thing may not be a great movie, but it's a game attempt at fashioning a fem-driven comedy that was just as filthy and profane as the typical male road-trip farce. So it's good to see her returning to the raunch pool yet again. Director Jake Kasdan has an unfortunate habit of making fine films (Walk Hard, Zero Effect, The TV Set) that absolutely no one sees, so hopefully this could have his shot at mainstream exposure. As for the film itself, it looks pleasantly amusing, with the always winning conceit of a foul and relatively horrible adult being put in charge of kids. I'm sure the film will get some flack over Diaz's profane and generally unpleasant (and her desire to find a man to take care of her), but it's a little refreshing to see a mainstream comedy where the men are mainly saintly pieces of background scenery while the women get to be center-stage assholes. If this and Bridesmaids both become solid hits, we could (hopefully) see a more consistent output of female-driven comedies. And more importantly, they will be prevalent enough where we won't have to analyze every one of them within an inch of their lives in regards to their gender politics. Bad Teacher comes out June 24th. As always, we'll see...

Scott Mendelson