New in Theatres · April 27, 2012
Lots and lots of choices this week! There are four new major flicks fighting for your theatre-going dollars.
There’s Mr. High Fidelity in his macabre Edgar Allan Poe crime drama. You’ve got another raunchy romantic comedy from the unstoppable Apatow machine! Jason Statham and his gun show even make it out to kick the shit out of everyone in sight.
And if you’re thinking to yourself “Hey SurlyGurls, what about the families!? I’m not taking my kids to any of those!”… don’t you worry! The people behind ‘Chicken Run’ have an adorable little animated pirate movie for you! They’ve got your back! That’s so nice! You should do them a solid and go see their movie, it looks like your best bet at the Box Office this week.
THE RAVEN
“The only one who can stop a serial killer is the man who inspired him.”
Directing: James McTeigue
Writing: Ben Livingston, Hannah Shakespeare
Starring: John Cusack, Alice Eve, Luke Evans, Brendan Gleeson
Price of Admission will get you: another example of Cusack’s recent poor movie choices. Sure, visually it looks good, but the whole idea is ridiculous – merging Edgar Allan Poe and ‘Seven’ is a terrible idea. We think John Cusack is well on his way to being the next Nicolas Cage!!
Running Time · 111 min
Genre · Mystery / Thriller
Rating · R
THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT
“A comedy about the journey between popping the question and tying the knot.”
Directing: Nicholas Stoller
Writing: Jason Segel, Nicholas Stoller
Starring: Jason Segel, Emily Blunt, Chris Pratt, Alison Brie
Price of Admission will get you: an uncompromisingly formulaic and predictable rom-com about the unpredictability of love and life.
Running Time · 124 min
Genre · Comedy / Romance
Rating · R
Box Office Results · April 22, 2012
It took five weeks, but the Box Office finally has a new victor.
The new relationship comedy ‘Think Like A Man’ stole the crown from ‘The Hunger Games’ over the weekend, ending its month-long reign atop the Box Office. The movie based on the popular Steve Harvey book ‘Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man’, pulled in $33M over the weekend. Apparently, audiences decided to trade the battle royale of ‘The Hunger Games’ for the Battle of the Sexes.
Speaking of relationships, Pretty Boy Zac Efron’s new romance flick ‘The Lucky One’ debuted in second place with $22.8M – much better than ol’ ‘Charlie St. Cloud’ did! (Remember that thing!?) But, this movie has Nicholas Sparks behind it, and evidently everything he cranks out is goddamn gold! Seriously, this is the SEVENTH film based on one of his novels!!
Disney’s ‘Chimpanzee’ also had a pretty good weekend. The film opened in the fourth spot with $10.2M, making it the most successful opening of all the DisneyNature documentaries; earning more than ‘Earth’, ‘Oceans’, and ‘African Cats’.
Here is the estimated breakdown of the weekend totals:
|
TW |
LW |
Movie Title |
Weekend Gross |
Total Gross |
Week |
| 1 | - | Think Like a Man | $33,000,000 | $33,000,000 | 1 |
| 2 | - | The Lucky One | $22,805,000 | $22,805,000 | 1 |
| 3 | 1 | The Hunger Games | $14,500,000 | $356,900,000 | 5 |
| 4 | - | Chimpanzee | $10,205,000 | $10,205,000 | 1 |
| 5 | 2 | The Three Stooges | $9,200,000 | $29,355,000 | 2 |
| 6 | 3 | The Cabin in the Woods | $7,750,000 | $26,980,000 | 2 |
| 7 | 5 | American Reunion | $5,200,000 | $48,300,000 | 3 |
| 8 | 4 | Titanic 3D | $5,000,000 | $52,828,000 | 3 |
| 9 | 8 | 21 Jump Street | $4,600,000 | $127,066,000 | 6 |
| 10 | 7 | Mirror Mirror | $4,114,000 | $55,206,000 | 4 |
(via boxofficemojo.com)
[Image Credit: Screen Gems]
New in Theatres · April 20, 2012
Happy 420 Everyone!
Many people will be spending the weekend sparking up or heading out into their communities to pick up trash for Earth Day. But, if somewhere between the mary jane and the garbage collecting you’d like to see a movie or two…here are your new choices.
Directing: Scott Hicks
Writing: Will Fetters (screenplay), Nicholas Sparks (novel)
Starring: Zac Efron, Taylor Schilling, Blythe Danner, Riley Thomas Stewart
Price of Admission will get you: Zac Efron doing his best in a movie that looks like it was tailor-made for Channing Tatum (He’s so hot right now).
Running Time · 101 min
Genre · Drama
Rating · PG-13
THINK LIKE A MAN
“Let the mind games begin.”
Directing: Tim Story
Writing: Steve Harvey (book), Keith Merryman, David A. Newman (screenplay),
Starring: Chris Brown, Gabrielle Union, Kevin Hart, Michael Ealy
Price of Admission will get you: so-called “comedy” about how all men are selfish jerks and all women are scheming bitches. Sounds like a great date movie!
Running Time · 123 min
Genre · Comedy
Rating · PG-13
Directing: Alastair Fothergill | Mark Linfield
Starring: Tim Allen
Price of Admission will get you: a cute documentary with cheesy narration by the Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor and some bold anthropomorphization of the title subjects.
Running Time · 78 min
Genre · Documentary
Rating · G
C2E2 Round Up – The SurlyGurls Favourite’s From Artist Alley
One of our favourite things about attending comic conventions is the chance to be surrounded by artistic and creative people. We spent an inordinate amount of time walking the aisles of Artist Alley at C2E2 this year, blowing most of our money on prints and original artworks.
Aside from broadening our already large collections of art from cons all over North America, we got to meet some of the nicest, most talented people we have ever had the chance to chat with. Not only does it mean more when you learn the story behind the prints you’re buying, but it also tends to give Andrea the desire to draw and draw and draw whenever we return home. (She’s the creative genius behind our SurlyGurls yelling faces!)
We thought we would enlighten you all with some of our favourite artists that we met this year. They are all 100% worthy of your time, so you should check them out…NOW!
One of the coolest things that happened this year was a small Twitter sensation over our friend Matt Graham’s commissioned piece from Mark Brooks. Matt had Mark sketch Kristen Stewart as the new Snow White from the upcoming film ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’.
The Mark Brooks commission of Snow White our friend Matt received at C2E2
Brooks is best known for his exclusive partnership with Marvel, having contributed art work to many of their most popular titles including Marvel Age, Cable & Deadpool, The Amazing Spiderman and New X-Men.
Like this:
A Recipe For Adventure With Josh Gates And ‘Destination Dinners’
It’s no secret, we are big fans of Josh Gates and his fabulous travel/monster hunting show, Destination Truth. So when the option to head to C2E2 this past weekend presented itself, we jumped at the opportunity.
Having raged about the fact that every year he’s relegated to moderating panels for crap like ‘Sanctuary’ at SDCC instead of being given his own panel, we were quite excited to attend his hour-long Q&A session.
We would finally get to hear all the behind the scenes stories and anecdotes from his five-years as Syfy’s resident globe-trotting monster hunter. It was his fans chance to inquire about whatever happened to that weird alien carcass he unearthed in Chile, or the follow-up to what the yeti hair he discovered in Bhutan really was.
When the panel began Gates seemed to be somewhat nervous, not knowing where to sit or what to do at first. (This is the guy that climbed into a decrepit gondola over a gaping chasm of death in Bhutan without blinking an eye.) He recovered quickly and was back to his wise-cracking, pop-culture-referencing self in no time. He delighted the crowd with a hilarious story about accidentally getting locked in a stair well with his C2E2 handler who had just delivered a gigantic Starbucks beverage to him on stage.
Like this:
The SurlyGurls Head To The Windy City for C2E2
“The Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo — also known as C2E2 — is a convention spanning the latest and greatest from the worlds of comics, movies, television, toys, anime, manga and video games. C2E2 is lovingly handcrafted by the same people that bring you the New York Comic Con. Come meet your favorite comic artists, creators and celebrities, and mingle with other comic con fans in Chicago. C2E2 is the con Chicago needs and the con you deserve!”
The longest day of your life is the day you spend sitting at your desk, watching the clock countdown to your escape from work. That was exactly what happened to us on Thursday as we waited for our C2E2 adventure to begin.
Our good friends Lenna and Matt Graham – both of who are also pop culture addicts and super creative; Lenna works as a graphic artist and Matt is a fantastic artist and comic-book blogger – picked us up and we hit the road for our epic midnight road-trip to Chicago.
We got a quick bit of sleep in Benton Harbor, MI and started out for the last two hours of our drive first thing in the morning. What none of us accounted for: crossing into a different time zone. We ended up dropping Matt – who had to pick up his press pass – at McCormick Place a good hour before the doors opened. We quickly checked into the hotel, dropped our suitcases and headed back ourselves to pick up our passes and start the weekend.
Like this:
Box Office Results · April 15, 2012
Well friends, one month has passed and ‘The Hunger Games’ is still in the top spot at the Box Office. Setting up shop in the top of the charts hasn’t happened since ‘Avatar’ hit theatres in January 2010 and the sexy blue cat-people of Pandora took over the Box Office.
Even stranger than those blue cat-people, is the fact that ‘The Three Stooges‘ reboot did better than Joss Whedon’s latest project?!
‘The Three Stooges’ secured the second place with about $17M. How that managed to occur is well beyond the SurlyGurls realm of understanding! There was virtually no advertising, no real pre-release reviews and the little bit we did see looked like a cinematic atrocity!!! But, men love it and it was relatively family-friendly… so we suppose all the Dads were eager to take their sons to see something that wasn’t ‘The Hunger Games‘ or ‘Mirror Mirror‘.
Like we were saying, ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ opened in third place with $14.7M. Though we haven’t had a chance to see this movie yet with all our C2E2 fun this weekend in Chicago, it simply blows our minds that this didn’t do a little better. The horror/comedy has been well-received by the critics and is currently sitting at a 92% on RottenTomatoes.com.
Oh well, we will most likely see it before the week is out, love it and then really be confused about the fact a reboot about three idiots and their out-dated vaudevillian comedy stylings was able to overtake …anything!
Barely breaking into the Top Ten, was ‘Lockout’ with $6.2M and a spot in the ninth position. Guy Pearce’s “Let’s borrow from absolutely everything” sci-fi extravaganza failed to connect with audiences in spite of the fact it ripped off all its ideas and concepts from anything that was ever even remotely popular.
Here is the estimated breakdown of the weekend totals:
| TW | LW | MOVIE TITLE | Weekend Gross | Total Gross | Week |
| 1 | 1 | The Hunger Games | $21,096,824 | $336,666,363 | 4 |
| 2 | - | The Three Stooges | $17,010,125 | $17,010,125 | 1 |
| 3 | - | The Cabin in the Woods | $14,743,614 | $14,743,614 | 1 |
| 4 | 3 | Titanic 3D | $11,930,249 | $44,723,819 | 2 |
| 5 | 2 | American Reunion | $10,473,810 | $39,712,535 | 2 |
| 6 | 4 | Wrath of the Titans | $6,906,209 | $71,252,005 | 3 |
| 7 | 5 | Mirror Mirror | $6,847,924 | $49,316,185 | 3 |
| 8 | 6 | 21 Jump Street | $6,558,868 | $120,323,681 | 5 |
| 9 | - | Lockout | $6,231,836 | $6,231,836 | 1 |
| 10 | 7 | Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax | $3,051,285 | $204,513,915 | 7 |
(via boxofficemojo.com)
