This weekend is not what you would call promising in terms of new movies at your local bijou. Even if you live in New York or LA, things might be deemed scarce. But you can always stay home and watch ‘The Social Network‘! Or ‘Piranha 3D‘! Or maybe you’ve instantly become a fan of NBC’s dreadful new television series ‘The Cape‘. That’ll be back this week, right?

The biggest thing opening today is ‘The Green Hornet‘, Michel Gondry’s comedic take on the serialized crime fighter. It’s not a very good movie, and I’m not even sure what audience it’s going to attract this weekend. The action sequences aren’t thrilling or different enough to entice fans of large-scale blockbusters, and it’s certainly not sufficiently funny or gross-out for the Judd Apatow acolytes. I also wonder what parents will think when they take their kids to see this, thinking it’s a lighthearted satire on superheroes, and then are forced to endure Seth Rogen’s misogynistic rants towards Cameron Diaz. (It really is gross.)

Maybe people will show up this weekend, but I think that this thing will die a quick death after that.

The other big movie opening is the Ron Howard comedy ‘The Dilemma‘. I haven’t seen this one yet (the impending snowpocalypse shuttered most of my late-week screening plans), but I can tell you that the set-up – wherein Vince Vaughn spies his best friend’s wife cheating on him – sounds at least marginally entertaining. It has a cast filled out by Kevin James, Jennifer Connelly, Winona Ryder and Queen Latifah. I think Ron Howard’s been on kind of a streak lately. I loved ‘Frost/Nixon‘ and thought that ‘Angels & Demons‘ was a laughable hoot. So, I’ll probably see it this weekend, but I might not tell anybody that I did.

The movies opening in limited release are so tiny and unimportant that they’re barely worth mentioning. One of them is the incredibly limited release of Alex Cox’s ‘Repo Man’ follow-up, ‘Repo Chick‘. The trailer for this thing is so bad and amateurish, with a ‘Mutant Chronicles‘-level misuse of blue screen effects, that I can’t muster any more enthusiasm for it.

‘Barney’s Version‘, a comedic drama that stars Paul Giamatti, Dustin Hoffman, Minnie Driver, and Rosamund Pike, has been making the festival rounds since Toronto. It opens in somewhat wide release this weekend. I really know nothing about it, and I missed all my press screenings. With a cast like that, well, I’d watch them read the newspaper. This movie could be like sex or pizza; even when it’s bad, it’s probably still pretty good.

Oooh, next week an amazing South Korean melodrama opens that everyone should seek out and see ten times! It’s that good! But we’ll save that for next week. I hope everyone can dig yourselves out of the snow and have a great weekend!