Top 10 Movies Box Office This Week. Weekend Box Office Top Ten for March 11-13,2011. These Top 10 Movies Box Office of this week:
1. Battle:Los Angeles
Battle:Los Angeles. Aliens attack! Bullets start whizzing and pinging by. Both sides suffer casualties throughout all the skirmishes and firefights in Battle: Los Angeles. It’s complete chaos of the most entertaining order. Think Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down and consider how the action was shot – handheld, fast edits and a real sense of authenticity – and replace the opposing force with aliens.
It’s kind of awesome from a purely action perspective. The action is the crux of the film, depending on it to carry the film to the end. That usually doesn’t bode well for any movie, but it kind of, by some miracle, works here.
Battle: Los Angeles focuses on a squad filled with a bunch of relative unknowns compared to the star power of Aaron Eckhart as Staff Sgt. Nantz and Michelle Rodriguez as Tech Sgt. Santos. Required to search the remnants of a police station for civilians before the area is completely bombed to hell, they head off into the urban wilderness, shooting a whole lot of stuff on the way.
The film spends very little time setting up the conflict. It even starts with brief montages of explosions and a surreal panning shot of Los Angeles completely razed to promise you that yes, the explosions are coming.
And when they do arrive, it’s kinetic, heart-pounding and just comprehensible enough to thoroughly enjoy. Battle: Los Angeles loves the shaky cam and completely abuses it throughout its entirety. It shakes enough to instill some confusion, but keeps everything just within frame to be thrilling. Multiple set-pieces battles are interspersed throughout the entire movie and if you’ve simply dreamed of a fair fight between aliens and humans, then dream no more.
It’s all directed with realism and believability as priority, so it’s shocking how easily those elements are betrayed and undermined once the script comes into play. Dialogue ranges from passable to eye-rolling. You have choice archetypes, like Old War Veteran, Tough Chick and Glasses Guy, and they never elevate beyond their roles because the script doesn’t allow them. Only Aaron Eckhart’s character manages to come off as genuinely likable because he delivers those lines with such conviction and dedication that the script, at times, seems good.
Battle: Los Angeles spends too much time and effort trying to craft its characters and, clocking in at just a tad below two hours, either thirty minutes could’ve been excised or the dialogue could’ve been given a thorough rewrite. The mediocre script even affects the plot, bringing up questions that potentially undo the serious nature of the film entirely, but the plot holes strangely work in the film’s favor.
If the aliens are here for water, why won’t they just nuke the planet? Are the aliens seriously taking over L.A. street by street? You’re telling me a technologically advanced race is incapable of even launching an EMP, effectively rendering the electronics we depend on completely useless?
Once you start questioning motives and start making certain assumptions, Battle: Los Angeles starts not to make a lot of sense, and maybe that’s just the point. We just don’t know why the aliens are doing the things they’re doing. Their methodology is impractical, but when L.A. is on fire and marines are taking cover in a Domino’s, the marines don’t care about the whys, and maybe you shouldn’t either because that would just be snooty. Just enjoy the spectacle; it’s worth the price of admission.
2. Rango
Rango. PIRATES of the Caribbean trilogy director Gore Verbinski and star Johnny Depp team up for superbly animated oddity Rango – and the gobsmacking visuals make Pixar look like a cave painting.
From the way the light swirls around a glass of spirits in a Wild West saloon to the sparkling ruby inlays of an accordion in a mariachi band, and sunsets so gorgeous they seriously distract from the scenes playing out in the foreground, this is a triumph of eye candy over common sense that has to be seen to be believed.
The first animated feature from the special effects wizards at Industrial Light & Magic, Verbinski’s picture is a knockabout Western comedy with existentialism on its mind, peopled by furry critters, ambitious amphibians and creepy lizards – like The Good, The Bad And The Wriggly.
If not quite as funny or quite as clever as it thinks it is, and despite a bit of a slump in the middle, Rango is still enough of a slapstick hoot for older kids and younger teens while the spot-on movie references and zinger one-liners will leave more senior members of the audience with a dumb, satisfied smile on their face.
Perhaps with the kiddies in mind, the story is spelled out really simply and the much mentioned metaphors are hammered home unsubtly. There’s also an action climax that shamelessly rips off the finale of Pixar’s A Bug’s Life.
But there are magic moments along the way and the screenplay, by John Logan (Any Given Sunday, Gladiator, Hugo Cabret), is full of mad ideas and verbal delights.
Depp’s Rango is a fantasist loner chameleon left asking: “Who am I?” when a traumatic highway incident lands him in the dried-up desert town of Dirt.
This crumbling community, with its desperate reptiles and rodents, is suffering a severe drought and preyed on by a corrupt mayor (Ned Beatty, Lotso from Toy Story 3, here playing a turtle whose voice and water-based shenanigans recall John Huston in Polanski’s classic Chinatown).
Rango’s adventures involve an unlikely crush on iguana Beans (Isla Fisher) and a showdown with ruthless Rattlesnake Jake (Verbinski’s old pal Bill Nighy, riffing on Lee Van Cleef).
Then there’s a gloriously cinematic example of the kind of epiphany Homer Simpson stumbled upon when he ate an insanity pepper at a chilli cook-off and Johnny Cash spoke to him via a wolf. It’s that kind of a “trip", man.
Rango has a hippy, dippy feel about it with dream sequences, darkly surreal moments and a visitation by the Man With No Name himself (Justified’s Timothy Olyphant, sublimely channelling Clint Eastwood).
Caught up in this crazy world of Western characters, motifs and plot mechanics, surrounded by bad guys and parched in a landscape that owes much to John Ford’s beloved Monument Valley, Rango tries to do what chameleons generally do best – blend in.
And Depp certainly seems at home. The star of Terry Gilliam’s landmark film of the “unfilmable” book, Hunter S Thompson’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, relishes Rango’s spaced-out schtick while our hero dons a Hawaiian shirt and slaloms through the cacti like the stoned Raoul Duke of Hunter’s seminal Gonzo masterpiece.
Going back to that Pixar/ cave painting remark – over the top, perhaps, but Rango, with his tales of dispatching multiple bad guys with one ricocheting bullet, would know all about hyperbole and using exaggeration to make a point.
Trying to give full credit to the achievements of the stellar animation studio which brought us Toy Story, The Incredibles and Up usually involves a tangle of multi-digit figures and mind-boggling statistics – man hours per frame of action, the number of hairs on a rat’s face, etc etc etc.
Rango seems to have raised the bar, with an astonishing attention to detail throughout. And despite being “old-fashioned” 2D, the bright and photoreal images seem more 3D than many of the 3D movies you can only see for a few dollars more.
Other stand-outs among the voice cast include Ray Winstone, Alfred Molina and venerable veteran Harry Dean Stanton.
Roger Deakins, the Coens’ regular cinematographer who should have won the Oscar for True Grit, is credited as visual consultant, as he was on How To Train Your Dragon and WALL-E.
3. Red Riding Hood
Red Riding HoodNo matter what version you’ve heard, when it comes to traditional folklore and fairytales, there isn’t one that comes with more thematic baggage than Little Red Riding Hood. Whether as a parable on a young girl’s sexuality or simply a cautionary tale for kids about the dangers of wandering off the beaten path, most written adaptations over the last 300 years tend to follow the same narrative pattern before offering some type of intrinsic moral.
In Red Riding Hood, director Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) communicates none of the above, nor does she pretend to have the least bit of interest in capturing any of the enchantment, eeriness, or menacing quality of the original fable. Instead, Hardwicke is out to tap into the demographic of 13 to 18-year-old tweens who fund these gothic soap operas with their babysitting money. The Twilight Saga might shamelessly placate the horror/fantasy world, but at least Stephenie Meyer’s vamps and wolfboys brood vehemently. In the passionless Red Riding Hood, you’re lucky to get a blank stare and whimper.
Set in the medieval, snow-covered village of Daggerhorn (fortunately not the most optimal weather conditions to show off werewolf abs), a bloodthirsty beast has killed a human after 20 years of feasting only on the livestock appetizers he is served. Amanda Seyfried (Letters to Juliet) plays Valerie, a pretty little thing caught in a love triangle with a poor woodsman (Shiloh Fernandez) and a well-to-do blacksmith (Max Irons). Paranoia sweeps across the village when werewolf hunter Father Solomon (Gary Oldman) rides in and deems everyone a suspect, including creepy, old grandma (Julie Christie).
Unintentionally hilarious (the “what big eyes you have” scene begs for ridicule), Red Riding Hood piles on the dreadful dialogue and unconvincing romance like salad-bar fixings. The only way it could have possibly been hokier is if the climax actually featured a computer-generated wolf dressed in granny’s nightie knitting a doily.
4. The Adjustment Bureau
The Adjustment Bureau. At times of global crisis and anxiety, the cinema likes to come up with movies offering comfort and an assurance that larger spiritual forces are at work in the universe. One such period was in the early 1930s, another in the mid-40s as war gave way to a troubled peace and nuclear angst.
We seem to be entering a further such cycle at the moment, as Matt Damon goes straight from a mystic with supernatural powers in Clint Eastwood's Hereafter to a similar role in this odd thriller. He plays a politician heading towards the White House whose meeting in Manhattan with ballet dancer Emily Blunt leads to his discovery that the world is being monitored by a benign conspiracy.
Its representatives dress uniformly in 1950s-style fedoras and Brooks Brothers suits and are led by John Slattery, one of the stars of Mad Men. Based on a Philip K Dick story, the film reworks A Matter of Life and Death with elements of It's a Wonderful Life and shares techniques and themes with Christopher Nolan's Inception.
5. Mars Need Moms
Mars Need Moms. Take out the trash, eat your broccoli—who needs moms, anyway? Nine-year-old Milo finds out just how much he needs his mom when she's nabbed by Martians who plan to steal her mom-ness for their own young. Produced by the team behind "Disney's A Christmas Carol" and "The Polar Express," "Mars Needs Moms" showcases Milo's quest to save his mom—a wild adventure in Disney Digital 3D™ and IMAX® 3D that involves stowing away on a spaceship, navigating an elaborate, multi-level planet and taking on the alien nation and their leader. With the help of a tech-savvy, underground earthman named Gribble and a rebel Martian girl called Ki, Milo just might find his way back to his mom—in more ways than one. Based on the book by Berkeley Breathed
6. Beastly
7. Hall Pass
8. Just Go With It
9. Gnomeo and Juliet
10. The King's Speech
OK. Those's the Top 10 Movies Box Office This Week.[]
1. Battle:Los Angeles
Battle:Los Angeles. Aliens attack! Bullets start whizzing and pinging by. Both sides suffer casualties throughout all the skirmishes and firefights in Battle: Los Angeles. It’s complete chaos of the most entertaining order. Think Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down and consider how the action was shot – handheld, fast edits and a real sense of authenticity – and replace the opposing force with aliens.
It’s kind of awesome from a purely action perspective. The action is the crux of the film, depending on it to carry the film to the end. That usually doesn’t bode well for any movie, but it kind of, by some miracle, works here.
Battle: Los Angeles focuses on a squad filled with a bunch of relative unknowns compared to the star power of Aaron Eckhart as Staff Sgt. Nantz and Michelle Rodriguez as Tech Sgt. Santos. Required to search the remnants of a police station for civilians before the area is completely bombed to hell, they head off into the urban wilderness, shooting a whole lot of stuff on the way.
The film spends very little time setting up the conflict. It even starts with brief montages of explosions and a surreal panning shot of Los Angeles completely razed to promise you that yes, the explosions are coming.
And when they do arrive, it’s kinetic, heart-pounding and just comprehensible enough to thoroughly enjoy. Battle: Los Angeles loves the shaky cam and completely abuses it throughout its entirety. It shakes enough to instill some confusion, but keeps everything just within frame to be thrilling. Multiple set-pieces battles are interspersed throughout the entire movie and if you’ve simply dreamed of a fair fight between aliens and humans, then dream no more.
It’s all directed with realism and believability as priority, so it’s shocking how easily those elements are betrayed and undermined once the script comes into play. Dialogue ranges from passable to eye-rolling. You have choice archetypes, like Old War Veteran, Tough Chick and Glasses Guy, and they never elevate beyond their roles because the script doesn’t allow them. Only Aaron Eckhart’s character manages to come off as genuinely likable because he delivers those lines with such conviction and dedication that the script, at times, seems good.
Battle: Los Angeles spends too much time and effort trying to craft its characters and, clocking in at just a tad below two hours, either thirty minutes could’ve been excised or the dialogue could’ve been given a thorough rewrite. The mediocre script even affects the plot, bringing up questions that potentially undo the serious nature of the film entirely, but the plot holes strangely work in the film’s favor.
If the aliens are here for water, why won’t they just nuke the planet? Are the aliens seriously taking over L.A. street by street? You’re telling me a technologically advanced race is incapable of even launching an EMP, effectively rendering the electronics we depend on completely useless?
Once you start questioning motives and start making certain assumptions, Battle: Los Angeles starts not to make a lot of sense, and maybe that’s just the point. We just don’t know why the aliens are doing the things they’re doing. Their methodology is impractical, but when L.A. is on fire and marines are taking cover in a Domino’s, the marines don’t care about the whys, and maybe you shouldn’t either because that would just be snooty. Just enjoy the spectacle; it’s worth the price of admission.
2. Rango
Rango. PIRATES of the Caribbean trilogy director Gore Verbinski and star Johnny Depp team up for superbly animated oddity Rango – and the gobsmacking visuals make Pixar look like a cave painting.
From the way the light swirls around a glass of spirits in a Wild West saloon to the sparkling ruby inlays of an accordion in a mariachi band, and sunsets so gorgeous they seriously distract from the scenes playing out in the foreground, this is a triumph of eye candy over common sense that has to be seen to be believed.
The first animated feature from the special effects wizards at Industrial Light & Magic, Verbinski’s picture is a knockabout Western comedy with existentialism on its mind, peopled by furry critters, ambitious amphibians and creepy lizards – like The Good, The Bad And The Wriggly.
If not quite as funny or quite as clever as it thinks it is, and despite a bit of a slump in the middle, Rango is still enough of a slapstick hoot for older kids and younger teens while the spot-on movie references and zinger one-liners will leave more senior members of the audience with a dumb, satisfied smile on their face.
Perhaps with the kiddies in mind, the story is spelled out really simply and the much mentioned metaphors are hammered home unsubtly. There’s also an action climax that shamelessly rips off the finale of Pixar’s A Bug’s Life.
But there are magic moments along the way and the screenplay, by John Logan (Any Given Sunday, Gladiator, Hugo Cabret), is full of mad ideas and verbal delights.
Depp’s Rango is a fantasist loner chameleon left asking: “Who am I?” when a traumatic highway incident lands him in the dried-up desert town of Dirt.
This crumbling community, with its desperate reptiles and rodents, is suffering a severe drought and preyed on by a corrupt mayor (Ned Beatty, Lotso from Toy Story 3, here playing a turtle whose voice and water-based shenanigans recall John Huston in Polanski’s classic Chinatown).
Rango’s adventures involve an unlikely crush on iguana Beans (Isla Fisher) and a showdown with ruthless Rattlesnake Jake (Verbinski’s old pal Bill Nighy, riffing on Lee Van Cleef).
Then there’s a gloriously cinematic example of the kind of epiphany Homer Simpson stumbled upon when he ate an insanity pepper at a chilli cook-off and Johnny Cash spoke to him via a wolf. It’s that kind of a “trip", man.
Rango has a hippy, dippy feel about it with dream sequences, darkly surreal moments and a visitation by the Man With No Name himself (Justified’s Timothy Olyphant, sublimely channelling Clint Eastwood).
Caught up in this crazy world of Western characters, motifs and plot mechanics, surrounded by bad guys and parched in a landscape that owes much to John Ford’s beloved Monument Valley, Rango tries to do what chameleons generally do best – blend in.
And Depp certainly seems at home. The star of Terry Gilliam’s landmark film of the “unfilmable” book, Hunter S Thompson’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, relishes Rango’s spaced-out schtick while our hero dons a Hawaiian shirt and slaloms through the cacti like the stoned Raoul Duke of Hunter’s seminal Gonzo masterpiece.
Going back to that Pixar/ cave painting remark – over the top, perhaps, but Rango, with his tales of dispatching multiple bad guys with one ricocheting bullet, would know all about hyperbole and using exaggeration to make a point.
Trying to give full credit to the achievements of the stellar animation studio which brought us Toy Story, The Incredibles and Up usually involves a tangle of multi-digit figures and mind-boggling statistics – man hours per frame of action, the number of hairs on a rat’s face, etc etc etc.
Rango seems to have raised the bar, with an astonishing attention to detail throughout. And despite being “old-fashioned” 2D, the bright and photoreal images seem more 3D than many of the 3D movies you can only see for a few dollars more.
Other stand-outs among the voice cast include Ray Winstone, Alfred Molina and venerable veteran Harry Dean Stanton.
Roger Deakins, the Coens’ regular cinematographer who should have won the Oscar for True Grit, is credited as visual consultant, as he was on How To Train Your Dragon and WALL-E.
3. Red Riding Hood
Red Riding HoodNo matter what version you’ve heard, when it comes to traditional folklore and fairytales, there isn’t one that comes with more thematic baggage than Little Red Riding Hood. Whether as a parable on a young girl’s sexuality or simply a cautionary tale for kids about the dangers of wandering off the beaten path, most written adaptations over the last 300 years tend to follow the same narrative pattern before offering some type of intrinsic moral.
In Red Riding Hood, director Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) communicates none of the above, nor does she pretend to have the least bit of interest in capturing any of the enchantment, eeriness, or menacing quality of the original fable. Instead, Hardwicke is out to tap into the demographic of 13 to 18-year-old tweens who fund these gothic soap operas with their babysitting money. The Twilight Saga might shamelessly placate the horror/fantasy world, but at least Stephenie Meyer’s vamps and wolfboys brood vehemently. In the passionless Red Riding Hood, you’re lucky to get a blank stare and whimper.
Set in the medieval, snow-covered village of Daggerhorn (fortunately not the most optimal weather conditions to show off werewolf abs), a bloodthirsty beast has killed a human after 20 years of feasting only on the livestock appetizers he is served. Amanda Seyfried (Letters to Juliet) plays Valerie, a pretty little thing caught in a love triangle with a poor woodsman (Shiloh Fernandez) and a well-to-do blacksmith (Max Irons). Paranoia sweeps across the village when werewolf hunter Father Solomon (Gary Oldman) rides in and deems everyone a suspect, including creepy, old grandma (Julie Christie).
Unintentionally hilarious (the “what big eyes you have” scene begs for ridicule), Red Riding Hood piles on the dreadful dialogue and unconvincing romance like salad-bar fixings. The only way it could have possibly been hokier is if the climax actually featured a computer-generated wolf dressed in granny’s nightie knitting a doily.
4. The Adjustment Bureau
The Adjustment Bureau. At times of global crisis and anxiety, the cinema likes to come up with movies offering comfort and an assurance that larger spiritual forces are at work in the universe. One such period was in the early 1930s, another in the mid-40s as war gave way to a troubled peace and nuclear angst.
We seem to be entering a further such cycle at the moment, as Matt Damon goes straight from a mystic with supernatural powers in Clint Eastwood's Hereafter to a similar role in this odd thriller. He plays a politician heading towards the White House whose meeting in Manhattan with ballet dancer Emily Blunt leads to his discovery that the world is being monitored by a benign conspiracy.
Its representatives dress uniformly in 1950s-style fedoras and Brooks Brothers suits and are led by John Slattery, one of the stars of Mad Men. Based on a Philip K Dick story, the film reworks A Matter of Life and Death with elements of It's a Wonderful Life and shares techniques and themes with Christopher Nolan's Inception.
5. Mars Need Moms
Mars Need Moms. Take out the trash, eat your broccoli—who needs moms, anyway? Nine-year-old Milo finds out just how much he needs his mom when she's nabbed by Martians who plan to steal her mom-ness for their own young. Produced by the team behind "Disney's A Christmas Carol" and "The Polar Express," "Mars Needs Moms" showcases Milo's quest to save his mom—a wild adventure in Disney Digital 3D™ and IMAX® 3D that involves stowing away on a spaceship, navigating an elaborate, multi-level planet and taking on the alien nation and their leader. With the help of a tech-savvy, underground earthman named Gribble and a rebel Martian girl called Ki, Milo just might find his way back to his mom—in more ways than one. Based on the book by Berkeley Breathed
6. Beastly
7. Hall Pass
8. Just Go With It
9. Gnomeo and Juliet
10. The King's Speech
OK. Those's the Top 10 Movies Box Office This Week.[]
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