Weekend Movies: Fun with Math

What does this mild weekend have in store for us? Nothing great. There’s a moral-pushing sports drama and the fifth title in a spoof franchise that never should have made it past the first. The only thing that these two movies have in common is that both have numbers in their titles.

Surprising to me, the parody movie is getting the wider release. More than 3,000 screens will debut ‘Scary Movie 5‘. What does it say for a franchise if you can’t get the Wayans brothers, of all people, to return for it? This time, audiences are stuck watching washed-up, has-been and never-been actors Lindsay Lohan, Ashley Tisdale, Charlie Sheen, Terry Crews, Jerry O’Connell, Kendra Wilkinson, Molly Shannon, Chris Elliott, Snoop Dogg (now known as Snoop Lyon), Bow Wow, Katt Williams and Darrell Hammond. This is the kind of movie that makes me embarassed to live in the nation that made it.

Opening on just over 2,900 screens is the Jackie Robinson sports bio-pic ‘42‘. If you, like me, believe that the trailers paint it as the most clichéd, uneventful and overly dramatic movie of the year, then you ought to be pleasantly surprised by how not bad it is. Harrison Ford chomps through scenery as Branch Rickey, the man who made Robinson a first-of-a-kind sports icon, but television actor Chadwick Boseman actually does a great job commanding the film as the baseball Hall of Famer. However, if you found the use of the n-word offensively excessive in ‘Django Unchained’, you may want to steer clear of ’42’.

Terrence Malick’s ‘Tree of Life‘ follow-up ‘To the Wonder‘ is opening on a few screens. Trailers appear to follow the same fly-on-the-wall narrative-free perspective. This one follows Ben Affleck’s romances with Olga Kurylenko and Rachel McAdams. Javier Bardem co-stars. Magnolia has not yet announced the plan for its expansion.

Another notable indie release is ‘Disconnect‘. Along the lines of ‘Crash‘, the movie takes us through multiple character stories that all have one common element – people are distracted by or addictively connected to the internet. It’s expected that by the end of the film, we learn how these now-disconnected people are actually connected outside the web. The notable cast members include Jason Bateman, Hope Davis, Frank Grillo, Michael Nyqvst, Paula Patton and Alexander Skarsgård.

1 comment

  1. William Henley

    “Not Today” also opened this past weekend:

    http://www.moviefone.com/movie/not-today/60645/synopsis

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1564870/

    Seems to be a pretty limited release – only two theaters in a 25 mile radius of me are showing it, and I live in the middle of Dallas / Fort Worth, so there are theaters everywhere.

    Only reason I knwo about this movie at all is because our church was promoting it because there is a song in the movie performed by one of our church members.

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