HollywoodIdiocy.com

Tropic Thunder may not be set on a beach or feature starlets in skimpy swimwear, but Robert Downey Jr’s risky performance in black-face was apparently enough to help the movie cling to the top spot in box office draw in the weekend leading up to the coronation of the political messiah, Barry Obama.

Tropic Thunder garnered $16.2 million, just enough to hold off newcomers The House Bunny ($14.5 million) and Death Race ($12.6 million). The Dark Knight, knocked off its perch at number one last weekend by Tropic Thunder, slipped to fourth place overall this week, bringing in only $10.5 million in its sixth week of release.

Tropic Thunder has topped $65 million in two weeks, while The Dark Knight’s total now stands at $489 million domestically and $381 million overseas for a combined total of $871 million. The Dark Knight is now second only to Titanic in all-time box office.

When I first heard they were dusting off the old Matthew Broderick-Ally Sheedy movie WarGames and updating it for 2008, I was skeptical. The old film had been a fun thriller, but what with the mainstreaming of computer technology in the 25 years since the film’s debut, I just wasn’t sure they could carry off the same sort of “bumbling innocent” plot that had worked back when the tops in personal computer technology was either an Apple IIe or a Commodore 64, depending on your preference.

Happily, I was wrong. Not only has the concept been updated, it’s been brought to life by a solid post-September 11 re-conceptualization that makes the story more relevant than ever. War Games: The Dead Code takes place 25 years after the first film and JOSHUA is an historical footnote on diet pills. The hot new government super-computer is a piece of AI run amok known as Ripley (nice Aliens reference), who identifies terrorist cells by luring them with a big cash-for-play internet videogame that supposedly assesses terrorist skills and knowledge.

Basically, if you win at the Ripley war game, you are marked as a “person of interest” in bio-terrorism and the government comes after you, big time, guns blazing. Yikes! Yeah, that’s what Osama bin Laden and his cronies do all day when they’re not flying airplanes into skyscrapers … they’re playing videogames on the Internet. Right.

Despite the rather ridiculous presupposition of terrorist pastimes, the rest of the movie holds together rather well as a thriller; despite a PG-13 rating, however, parents should be warned that the language in this movie is nowhere near as clean-cut as its 1983 predecessor, which is a disappointment. Next thing you know, they’ll remake Short Circuit as a sexbot.

Matt Lanter of HEROES fame plays the lead role, while Amanda Walsh is his chess-club counterpart; neither seem destined to outshine Broderick-Sheedy, but stranger things have happened and both turn in solid performances and both are definitely better actors at this point in their careers than then-newcomers Broderick and Sheedy were at that time.

The extras are pleasant and in the end, War Games: The Dead Code delivers the goods well enough to say that it didn’t embarrass the legacy of its predecessor; however, aside from being a bit dated, the original is still the superior film and contains far less profanity, making it better family viewing than the remake.

Given its G rating, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Disney’s College Road Trip, but I was relatively confident that, at the very least, there’d be nothing offensive language-wise. On that count, I was correct and so the Martin Lawrence-Raven Symone father-daughter comedy was a welcome respite from the “unrated edition” stuff I usually wade through.

Despite being a Disney comedy, the film is not without some quirkiness; the most notable example is Lawrence’s obsession in the first half of the film with his son’s pet pig, which he claims is “eyeballing me.” The subplot shows promise for some genuine weirdness that I won’t spoil in the scope of this review, but then is dropped completely from the second half of the film with no real payoff on the idea.

Of course, the focus of the film is the father-daughter relationship, not the father-pig relationship; and despite the film being littered with promotional products and embedded advertising, the movie is enjoyable – if you’re a member of the younger set.

While a great “whole family” film, the comedy is a bit over the top for older audiences, and even the teen crowd that Symone’s character is part of would have a hard time swallowing the schmaltzy story being told. Still, better a bunch of sloppy sentiments about kids growing up and away from their parents than, saw, delving into the repetitive world of the Saw movie franchise, right? A person can only tolerate so much of that.

The conflict is a rather simple one; dad wants daughter to go to a college close to home and daughter, naturally, wants to go to a “much better school” halfway across the country. The action is livened up by a rare appearance by Donny Osmund, of all people, who submits an enjoyable performance as a Ned Flanders type.

By featuring Symone, who is anything but the typical emaciated Hollywood starlet that Miley Cyrus represents, the film offers an appealing protagonist who won’t make young kids feel quite so inadequate. Still, the bottom line here is that the film is funny in places, but probably in a way that will embarrass older kids, while younger kids will enjoy it quite a bit. As for the adults, well … anything’s better than the 500th viewing of The Parent Trap, right? Either version.

With a career revitalized by the Iron Man film, Robert Downey Jr.’s risky role in Tropic Thunder powered the campy comedy to an upset of The Dark Knight after a solid month of box office bat-dominance. Tropic Thunder scored $26 million in its debut, while The Dark Knight slipped to the second spot with $16.7 million.

Batman now has $471 million domestically, $328 million overseas, and a grand total that just eclipsed the $800 million mark. Star Wars: The Clone Wars ($15.5 million), Mirrors ($11.1 million) and Pineapple Express ($10 million) round out the Top 5 spots.

X-Files: I Want To Believe has already been pulled from theaters like the tiny Micro SD card its box office results unfortunately resembled.

Hypocrite actor George Clooney is willing to cause a fair amount of additional global warming if it means getting his candidate, Barack Obama, elected. How so?

Well, the Progesterone-needing actor learned from his support of John Kerry that making his support of a candidate know might actually hurt them, at least in the US. So Clooney is now willing to jet over to Europe to attend private fund-raisers on foreign soil in support of an Obama nation.

According to online reports, Clooney’s latest private jet trip was Geneva, Switzerland-bound, where for $1,000 you could attend a fund-raiser in the private home of one of Obama’s national finance committee members. For $10,000, you could accompany Clooney to the bash, though his private jet was still off-limits.

Wow, what a sacrifice for Clooney; by his own values, he is killing the planet for Barack Obama. Way to go, Georgie-boy!

One of Hollywood’s hottest female stars, Angelina Jolie, just became more interesting and a bit less brain-dead; while she hasn’t yet made up her mind, actress Angelina Jolie - wife of Brad Pitt - has made it known she hasn’t settled on a candidate yet for the 2008 presidential election, and that John McCain is still “in play” for her.

Jolie, hardly a “traditional conservative,” is the daughter of actor Jon Voight, who recently declared his support for McCain over Obama. Jolie is a celebrity goodwill ambassador of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, so who she supports wouldn’t matter much if she fell in with the rest of the Hollyweird Left, but if she choses to support McCain, it could raise a few eyebrows in much the same way that actor Ron Silver’s support for George W. Bush did in 2004.

Of course, Silver’s been in few films since outing his support for Bush, but quenching Jolie’s star power might be a bit more difficult for the Liberal Media Elite, considering Jolie is widely considered one of the top 5 female stars in Hollywood.

While HollywoodIdiocy.com remains firmly unconvinced that celebrity endorsements matter at all, we confess that the possibility of McCain gaining the support Jolie is at least of passing interest, and is sure to make producers re-check their corporate performance management charts for just how to respond.

The Dark Knight is showing signs of slowing its momentum, but is still doing powerful enough business to fend off the latest challenger, the Seth Rogan comedy, The Pineapple Express. Dark Knight had a $26 million weekend in its fourth week of release, while Pineapple Express enjoyed a close second place with $22.6 million in its debut bow.

The Dark Knight now totals $441 million domestically and $263 million overseas for a total of $704.6 million to date. The Mummy was third with $16 million, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 debuted at fourth place with $10.7 million, and Step Brothers rounded out the top five with $8.9 million. X-Files continued its unexpected plunge, dropping to 13th place, grossing only $1.1 million on the weekend, and quickly shedding screens in only its third week of release. That’s still better money than you can generate by buying auto insurance online, but not by much.

X-Files: I Want to Believe has grossed $19.6 million against a $30 million budget and seems unlikely to reach black ink until the Blu-Ray video release. The movie has yet to be released outside of the US.

Every rule that Smallville – the successful small-screen adaptation of Clark Kent’s Wonder Years – made in order to become a mainstream hit – sort of like Dawson’s Creek with superpowers – Birds of Prey totally ignored, to its detriment. In fact, the TV series was more of a traditional “comic book” than the actual comic book it was based on, of the same name.

Birds of Prey is a comic book that features the wheelchair-bound Barbara Gordon as Oracle, a computer genius, as well as Black Canary – also known as Dinah Lance. In the comic, both are 30-something heroines who play hero but also address midlife issues and not being “sweet young things” anymore.

So what is the show like? Well… not much like the comic, as it turns out. Oracle is there and well-cast, but Black Canary is transformed into a teenage rookie hero whose biggest concern is finding a solid natural acne treatment and who doesn’t even appear in every episode, and the star of the show quickly becomes Huntress, the alleged offspring of Batman and Catwoman, forcing the show to exist in a weird, post-Batman universe at a time just before Warner Brothers was about to launch … Batman Begins. Huh?

Aside from ignoring the comic book, and changing the character of villain Harley Quinn considerably, each episode was full of in-costume heroes (Smallville’s cardinal rule was no cape, no blue tights and no flying) and was mired in comic book terminology (demi-humans, for example) that left the mainstream audience confused.

Then, of course, there’s the whole issue of Huntress being considered a demi-human when neither Batman nor Catwoman possessed superpowers of any kind. Huh? In fact, “Huh?” is a word that’ll come up a lot while viewing this four-disc, complete series collection of Birds of Prey. Add in the occasional “what were they thinking” and you’ll begin to wonder just how Mark Millar and Alfred Gough struck on the right formula the first time around with Smallville, but were so off-target this time.

Still, Birds of Prey isn’t completely lacking in appeal; there are some nice commentaries, a half-decent collection of special features, and a handful of episodes that indicated the seeds were there for the show to really find itself and become watchable, if given enough time. Unfortunately, Birds of Prey never quite found itself in time and died an early death without the “back nine episodes” ever being approved for airing on The WB.

Birds of Prey isn’t a terrible DVD collection, but it does stand as a testament to just how difficult it is to get a superhero-based show to play well to a mainstream audience. If Smallville is the handbook on “what to do,” then Birds of Prey is the user’s manual on “what not to do.” This was a show that would have benefited quite a bit from the presence of Joss Whedon.

Even the undead can’t bring down The Dark Knight; that’s the lesson to be learned from this week’s box office results as the Caped Crusader stayed atop the weekend box office like pool floats, drawing $42.6 million to arrive at a new total of $393 million domestically. Add in an additional $202 million in foreign box office and The Dark Knight sits at an impressive $596 million in just 17 days.

Still, the Brenden Fraser vehicle, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor was not exactly blown over by The Dark Knight, earning a respectable $40.4 million for a strong second-place showing. That’s far more than last week’s challenger, X-Files: I Want to Believe, will probably gross at the box office at the end of its run. X-Files fell all the way to the ninth spot this week, drawing only $3.38 million in the crowded field and topping only $17 million in 10 days, far below expectations and marking the film as the biggest disappointment of the summer since Speed Racer.

Step Brothers was third with $16.5 million ($63.1 million to date), Mamma Mia! was fourth with $12.6 million ($87.4 million to date), and Journey to the Center of the Earth’s $6.6 million ($72.9 million to date) edges the Kevin Costner starrer, Swing Vote, for the fifth spot. The improbable political comedy struggled to earn $6.2 million in its debut, earmarking it as yet another bomb at the box office for the once-potent Costner.

Meanwhile, aside from Batman, this summer may have helped Brenden Fraser’s career more than any other; with two movies in the top five this past weekend, grossing a combined $47 million this weekend and a combined $113.3 million domestically to date, he’s proven himself to still be bankable.

When it comes to westerns, the big screen isn’t a very friendly home anymore, but several high-quality westerns have found a home on television and cable outlets. Such is the case with Broken Trail, which was the first original movie ever produced by American Movie Classics. Directed by veteran Western director Walter Hill and starring Robert Duvall and Thomas Hayden Church, the film won four Emmy Awards back when it was released in 2006.

That lineup of awards includes best miniseries, best lead actor, best supporting actor and best casting. Impressive lineup of gold, and Broken Trail is just about everything that another recent Western released on Blu-Ray, The Professionals, is not: It is a modern film, with modern pacing, featuring actors today’s generation will recognize, and was shot with modern-enough cameras to look sharp on HD. This helps it feel at home on the Blu-Ray format.

The story centers around an aging cowboy (Duvall) who wants to buy his own ranch and settle down, and so agrees to run a herd of horses from Oregon to Wyoming (in an era long before the convenience of Pacsafe, no less!) to sell to the British Army, and thus make the tidy sum he needs to make his dream come true.

Helping him along the way is his nephew (Church), who doesn’t really care for him. There are skeletons in the closet, and of course the journey gives them a chance to begin working out their differences.

Complications are tossed in when the pair come across a gang of ruthless slave-traders, transporting five Chinese women to a mining town where they’ll be forced into a life of prostitution. Our two horse-traders intervene and that drives the conflict of the longish movie.

Clocking in at over three hours, Broken Trail is a beautiful film, but not quite as compelling as the best “long” films, like Titanic or the Lord of the Rings movies. Still, there’s a nice set of special features and about the only drawback, really, is that the running time might seem a bit intimidating for some viewers.

The Professionals is a movie that’s about the same age as I am – and I’m no spring chicken. Made in 1966, the Richard Brooks-directed western starring Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance, and a bunch of other folks anyone born during the Reagan presidency or later won’t even recognize, is a kidnap-and-rescue adventure flick, set in 1917, and involving a group of “professionals” whose task it is to sneak into Mexico and rescue the wife of a wealthy Texan from a band of outlaws.

Why The Professionals was set as a priority for the Blu-Ray treatment over so many other, more recent and potentially more profitable films is a bit of a mystery. Sure, if one is a fan of westerns, this is a solid one; but the market for westerns hasn’t been very good for the past thirty years or so, ever since science fiction kind of took its place in 1975 or so, with the release of the original Star Wars.

If you enjoy the western genre and older films, though, The Professionals is one of the better examples of the genre – at least among films that don’t star John Wayne. Still, the film is a product of its time.

While there’s been some restoration work done to the film, the quality of the picture in HD isn’t really up to snuff with more recent films made in the HD era. And as for director Brooks’ style, the pacing and storytelling are slow and ponderous, compared to the adrenaline-charged filmmaking that today’s action audiences expect.

The film has some snappy dialog, which is a highlight. Here’s an example:

Dolworth to Fardan: “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Fardan: “Most of us are.”

Sure, it’s not down to the exact science that Arnold Schwarzenegger made famous and vaulted away in a self storage container, but there’s a bit more substance and context to it, as well. The extras to this DVD are only OK, since nearly everyone involved with the film is “no longer with us.” Still, it’s a solid western for its time, and only because it is so dated will this film likely fail to find a massive audience.

Even in its second week of release, The Dark Knight, the follow-up to 2005’s Batman Begins, is still high atop the weekend box office with a grand total of over $75 million in receipts domestically. The movie broke the record for opening weekend last week, and by Friday had broken the record for quickest movie to reach the $300 million mark.

The Dark Knight sits at approximately $314 million in domestic ticket sales after 10 days of release, and with foreign markets added in, that total jumps to $355 million. That places The Dark Knight well ahead of SpiderMan 3’s pace, and has some in Hollywood even whispering about eclipsing Titanic’s final total before it’s all done.

That might be a bit premature after only two weeks, but the film is certainly valued far above Tahitian pearls at this point, and is well on its way to becoming the most successful superhero movie of all time. That’s due in large part to Chris Nolan’s continued sober treatment of the Batman character; whereas Batman Begins felt like a James Bond film, The Dark Knight has more of a feel akin to Scarface, The Untouchables, or perhaps a James Patterson thriller.

In other words, Batman doesn’t feel like a “superhero” movie so much as it feels like a solid crime thriller; the gangsters in the film are not bumbling fools that the Joker rules over, but are hardcore, ruthless criminals who might have stepped out of the set of Oz or The Sopranos, rather than a comic book adaptation, and The Joker is genuinely at risk to the lowlifes he’s seeking to control, staying atop only by being just a bit more bloodthirsty and less predictable than they are.

But enough with the love-fest for The Dark Knight; two new movies made their mark this weekend as well. The Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers notched a solid $30 million to take second place, and Mamma Mia!, the smart counter-programming film to The Dark Knight, held onto third place with a respectable $17.8 million.

The surprise of the weekend was the poor performance of the very-well-done X-Files movie, I Want To Believe, which barely squeezed $10.2 million out of the weekend. Of course, being nearly six years removed from the TV show’s final bow, and almost a decade since the franchise’s last big-screen appearance, didn’t help. The film has been well-received by reviewers, but perhaps the biggest reason the film has stumbled is that it pursues a very similar demographic to that of The Dark Knight, and was released only one week following The Dark Knight’s debut; Fox would have been wise to push X-Files: I Want to Believe back into August, to get more breathing room from what most of Hollywood knew would be a monster hit in the form of The Dark Knight.

If Fox doesn’t stop believing in the X-Files film, though, it could become one of those long-run quiet hits that never really has a huge weekend, but does solid business for a long time as folks get other films ticked off on their must-see lists, and start searching for those quieter films they missed when concentrating on The Dark Knight and other top hit movies.

Next week brings the last huge “box office blockbuster” of the summer, the long-delayed Mummy sequel, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emporer. Identical demographics to The Dark Knight’s audience spell trouble for that one, too, I’m afriad. Swing Vote isn’t expected to make a big splash either, and August is a wasteland of quiet films, so The Dark Knight could have a good, long run and X-Files: I Want To Beleive could easily bounce back, given the chance, over the next five or six weeks.