Rank  Title                                 Weekend Gross  Locations

   1    The Incredible Hulk                    $54,537,800    3505
   2    Kung Fu Panda                          $34,321,000    4136
   3    The Happening                          $30,500,000    2986
   4    You Don't Mess With The Zohan          $16,400,000    3466
   5    Indiana Jones Kingdom Crystal Skull    $13,547,000    3804
   6    Sex And The City                       $10,185,000    3155
   7    Iron Man                               $5,130,000     2403
   8    The Strangers                          $4,097,000     2410
   9    Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian   $3,004,000     2308
   10   What Happens In Vegas                  $1,700,000     1422
   11   The Visitor                            $450,000       254
   12   Baby Mama                              $407,700       453

Weekend of 06/13/2008 to 06/15/2008 (C) 2008 by Rentrak Corporation

I helped along #3 and #4 this weekend. We went to see “You Don’t Mess With The Zohan” on Friday night after Brian’s birthday dinner with friends. Everyone but Brian liked it. Then last night, Brian and I went to see “The Happening” alone last night.

We have both generally enjoyed M. Night Shyamalan’s films but this one really sucked. I am not the pickiest moviegoer but I had real problems with this one. Mark Wahlberg, who did great as a porn star in Boogie Nights, was simply horribly horribly unbelievable as as high school science teacher.  So much of the movie was moved along by his character’s deductions and reasoning that it pretty much spoiled it for me and for several other people I’ve talked to.

I first saw Superbad the Monday after it opened while away at a conference.  I was hilarious.  There are a lot of great lines that you walk out quoting to your companions.  However, its hard to really pin down what it is that made the movie so funny.  When Brian and I first saw it we both laughed our asses of but in discussing it we decided that it was probably a guy thing and that our female friends would probably not enjoy it quite as much.   We were wrong.  By the following Saturday we had seen the movie three times, each time with different people.

In talking to some of the ladies I know who have seen it, I discovered they found it every bit as enjoyable.  as anyone who has read a review probably knows, the acting by the the three younger male leads was superb.  They captured that perfect level of feigned coolness laid over an intense, visceral feeling of awkwardness.  The jokes, while coarse and often mysogenistic do not come across as rooted ina  truly misogynistic world view.  They are more like the fag and nigger jokes me and my friends repeated to each other when we were kids because that is what we heard at home and our unique personalities had not yet gelled into a state where we felt strong enough to buck the system.

Th extremely candid feel of many of the exchanges between Evan and Seth reminded me of the kinds of ridiculous in retrospect but critcally important at the time conversations I had with friends when I was a teenager.  That connection to my younger self allowed the jokes and gags to reacher deeper into my mind and made them that much funnier.

As Heinlien pointed out so well in Stranger in a Land, what is funny to humans is frequently the misfortune of others.  Much of the laughter you will experience watching Superbad comes from an deep feeling of "Thank God that’s not me!".

I’m clearly not alone on my love of this movie.  After over 30,000 votes on IMDB, Superbad has a average rating of 8.4 out of 10.   That puts it at #128 of the IMDB’s top 250 movies of all time (based on User voting).

One of the first exchanges in the film is quoted below.  It is dialogue like that which sets the stage for everything that follows.

Evan: You could always subscribe to a site like Perfect Ten. I mean that could be anything, it could be a bowling site.
Seth: Yeah, but it doesn’t actually show dick going in which is a huge concern.
Evan: Right, I didn’t realize that.
Seth: Besides, have you ever seen a vagina by itself?
Evan: No.
Seth: (shakes his head) Not for me.

I was worried that everything that was worth seeing was in the trailers, but Christopher Walken doing comedy is usually worth seeing. 

I was pleasantly surprised.  For one, the impression I got from the trailer was WAY WAY off.   Some of the best stuff is in the trailers but the context eluded me completely.  I’m sure I just wasn’t paying enough attention. 

The movie was borderline good.  I did enjoy it, but if Christopher Walken had not been there to sholder the comic load it could have been horrible.

If you have any doubts about Walken’s comic skills you should really watch his reading of ‘The Three Little Pigs‘ on YouTube.