It's the penultimate week of the regular season. Rusty sits firmly in control of first place, but most other positions are still pretty fluid. The good thing for everyone is this is another week where you're guaranteed 200 points unless you're a complete idiot. The #1 movie will obviously be that one about a fascist government that has almost unlimited power and yet is completely unable to kill a 16-year-old girl. You'd think such a totalitarian government would have access to the world's best assassins, who could easily kill a girl whose only skills are shooting arrows and pining over Abercrombie and Fitch models. But then I suppose they commit the classic comic book/Bond movie villain mistake of instead of simply killing the hero they try to kill her in some elaborate scheme. Instead of sharks with lasers they decide on a Super Hunger Games and other such nonsense. At least in Star Wars you could say the Empire had a hard time finding Luke Skywalker; these bozos know where Katniss lives (they even give her a house!) and still can't figure out how to kill her. Anyway, this is why I never read books #2 and #3, because they sounded dumb.
Oh yeah and there's some dumb Vince Vaughn "comedy" playing. Though I think a movie about Vince Vaughn fathering 500 kids should be labeled as horror. I mean is there anyone you would less want to be the father of 500 kids? Adam Sandler maybe. Justin Bieber. That guy in charge of North Korea. Feel free to weigh in on that.
Anyway, here's the list of movies from my local megaplex (* denotes a new release)
- 12 Years a Slave
- About Time
- All is Lost
- Blue is the Warmest Color* (It sounds like French lesbian porn, but it's French so it's "art")
- Captain Phillips
- Carrie
- Charlie Countryman
- Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2
- Dallas Buyer's Club*
- Delivery Man*
- Ender's Game
- Free Birds
- Gravity
- Jackass: Bad Grandpa
- Last Vegas
- Rush
- The Best Man Holiday
- The Counselor
- The Hunger Games: Catching Fire*
- Thor: The Dark World
And I'll pick
- Hunger Games 2 $100M
- Thor 2 $18M
- Best Man Holiday $15M
You make your picks in the comments.
And a bonus 100 points to anyone who knows the significance of today's date other than the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination.
May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor!
9 comments:
perchance is it the day you were born? I win!! :p
I was going to hit Wikipeda till your brother chimed in. I'll have to see the movie, but I'm guessing it would be like trying to kill Will Smith. Everyone would notice. I hope Best Man 2 stays in the top ten because it's a great moment in Black cinema.
1. Hunger Games 2 $98M
2. Thor: The Dark World $23M
3. Best Man Holiday $16M
Happy day of your birth!
1. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire $180M
2 .Thor: The Dark World $18M
3. The Best Man Holiday 15M
I agree with Maurice it should stay up to at least #3.
It's been a very interesting year for Abercrombie & Fitch (talking about this because you brought it up in your post). The stock YTD is among the worst performers and the CEO recently got put on the "Wall of Shame" on CNBC's "Mad Money" along with other horrible Chief Executive Officers that have driven their companies into the ground. Apparently, the brand A&F is so disliked that if the company doesn't completely restructure, it may go the way of Linens & Things. Funny how fashion is all the rage one year and is completely dead the next. I do agree with the Wall Street analysis of A&F. "They were cool in the late 90's and early 2000's but the company has lost sight of what teens and those in their early twenties want to wear. The CEO needs to be replaced with someone under 30 that isn't a creepy pedophile-type person. And 'cool' is not what people were all excited about ten years ago."
Also Happy Birthday.
Here are my picks for today:
1) The Hunger Games $110 million
2) Thor $21 million
3) The Best Man Holiday $18 million
Briane Pagel sent out an email to your close blog followers like myself to let us know it was your birthday. So that may break the rules on your bonus 100.
So I get 100 bonus points for everyone who gets it right!
Happy Birthday. I was going to buy you a present but I haven't yet found one within my budget. All those free links are meant to sort of be a present.
First picks:
1. Hunger Games 2: Hunger Boogaloo. (That joke never gets old): $80mil.
2. Dallas Buyer's club $20 mil
3. 500 Vince Vaughns: $10 mil.
As for all the other stuff:
I only just now realized that EVERY YEAR OF YOUR LIFE has been marked by Baby Boomers talking about the death of a mildly-effective president who likely would have gone down in history with the rep LBJ has had he not been shot. JFK, like Kurt Cobain, benefited from his early demise because it elevated him to legendary status without needing to actually, you know, BE LEGENDARY.
JFK also benefitted by being the favorite president of a giant cohort of AMAZINGLY self-involved people. The Baby Boomers have spent their life being told how interesting they are, and then spent their life telling themselves how interesting they are, and they can get away with it because they're the largest blip ever in consumer culture, so what they like is what gets sold.
But was JFK more interesting/effective as a president than Obama? Reagan? Reagan had nuclear scares. Obama energized the young people. You could argue that Worst President Ever was more worthy of repeated study than JFK. And I already made the point on Twitter today that only the Boomers go nuts over a dead president: In 1931 I bet there were few "A Look Back At The Day Garfield was shot" articles.
You, my friend, are like Butters on "South Park." His birthday was 9/11. I feel bad for you.
Now: Hunger Games 2: I heard this morning that they send them back to a second hunger games. WHY? ASSUMING that the "hunger games" dystopia is in any way a working structure for a society, it would still have to follow logical rules, and if the leader simply changes those rules at any time, you have an additional instability built into the system that makes it less likely to work. Hunger Games is the worst kind of dystopia/futurecrap: a setup made up just to be interesting or to serve the plot, rather than imagining a future that might exist and then having the story derive from that.
At least in "Star Wars" -- perhaps the most slapdash of now-mythologized scifi -- the Empire as it turns out grew out of an actual crisis that led to the consolidation of power (much like WWII is said to have been born in the punitive sanctions that killed the Weimar Republic.)
Teens will buy any junk now. When I was a teen *puts on old-man glasses, squints at paper, worries about kids being on his lawn* I wanted scifi that made SENSE, even if it was weird. Piers Anthony's "Proton" from the Split Infinity books, for example, had people working as naked serfs for 20 year stints, but explained that by pointing out that they earned enough in that 20 years to retire on another planet, and by pointing out that the "Game" and the promise of a new citizen being added each year, were big draws for serfs. THAT was a dystopia you could set your watch to.
(Plus, there was a naked lady robot programmed to please the main character and that made a HUGE impression on my 8th-grade mind.)
Happy birthday! (I knew without Briane telling me)
And I agree about the impression of Split Infinity on middle schoolers.
1. Catching Fire: $155m
2. Thor 2: $16m
3. Best Man Holiday: $15m
Happy Birthday, I had no idea, Briane told me. But to be honest, without people reminding me, I wouldn't even know when my birthday came around.
Catching Fire: $130 mil
Thor 2: $17 mil
Best Man Holiday - $16 mil
Hunger games 2 - $142m
Thor 2 - $16m
Best Man - $10m
I hope you managed to have a special Birthday even though so much distraction was happening around the country.
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