Tagged: diet pills

Wall Street 2 ekes out win

It wasn’t huge, nor was it impressive, but Oliver Stone’s sequel to his 80′s anti-greed screed earned top honors during a down week at the box office last weekend. Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps earned a meager $19 million over the weekend, just a drop in the bucket compared to its $70 million budget. The film seems unlikely to develop legs in the coming weeks.

Equally disappointing was the second-place finish by Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole, the much ballyhooed 3D animated epic, which boasted an $80 million budget but registered only $16 million in its open bow. The best performance among newbies was the $20-million budgeted You Again, which came in fifth place behind The Town and Easy A, but managed to draw $8.4 million, which was over 40 percent of its budget.

The box office has been on diet pills all month and even though it grew slightly with three new films out, the $90 million total for the top 15 releases was still far lower than Hollywood has been hoping. With a couple mild expectation horror films and the anti-Facebook propaganda piece, The Social Network, set to debut this weekend, it would be surprising if we saw enough of an uptick to kick off October to boost box office back into $100-million-plus territory.

Good news for True Blood fans!

While HBO is putting its PR department on diet pills rather than reveal whether TRUE BLOOD will be renewed for a third season, there is good news for fans of the series. At the San Diego Comic-Con, author of the book series that inspired the TV phenom, Charlaine Harris, announced she’d just signed a three-book deal on her Sookie Stackhouse novels that will keep the series alive through 2014, at least.

Of course, the next book in the series is expected to arrive on schedule in May 2010, and her current book contract for Sookie goes through the novel expected in May 2011. The new contract covers annual installments expected in May 2012, May 2013 and May 2014. Ms. Harris seems to inspire plenty of confidence in publishers through her speed and efficiency in delivering entertaining reads in a timely manner.

Start the mourning now: Monk ending

While USA renewed MONK this week for an eighth season, the network also revealed it will mark the final bow for the Tony Shaloub-helmed dramedy. Shaloub has played the obsessive-compulsive detective long enough to make up for being part of NBC’s Wings, which is saying something.

Monk has always been a series on diet pills, producing only 16 episodes per season, and this final season, which begins next summer, in June, will be the same. That’s just as Shaloub and company would have it.

All the key players are still in place for the final season of Monk, including Traylor Howard as Monk’s assistant, Natalie Teeger. No word yet on whether producers will mend fences and bring back Bitty Schram for one final bow as Monk’s original assistant, Sharona Fleming, but one can only hope.

Review: War Games: The Dead Code (DVD)

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.