Weekend Movies: Rehashes of Old Stories

This weekend is pathetic. It would almost have to be. No studio in its right mind would open an actually good movie against the unstoppable ‘Hunger Games’. One opener this weekend appeals to a young audience (well, an audience younger than should be attending ‘The Hunger Games’), but the other is a sequel hoping to pull away some of that crowd.

Tarsem Singh’s latest good-looking but not-so-good flick is the widest release of the weekend. ‘Mirror Mirror‘ is also the first of this year’s two Snow White flicks. While ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ appears dark and aims for teenage and adult audiences, ‘Mirror Mirror’ is going for the kids-under-12 audience. The seven dwarfs are featured in the film, but just like the main story at hand, liberty has been taken to change everything as you know it. The dwarfs have different names and personalities, and the story resembles a mix of ‘Tangled’ and ‘Robin Hood’. Lily Collins’ eyebrows steal the show. Julia Roberts is just as annoying as ever, and Armie Hammer needs to go away even quicker than he appeared. If this juvenile train wreck perks your interest, power to you. For me, my kids deserve better than this.

Opening on almost as many screens is ‘Wrath of the Titans‘ – you know, the sequel to the terrible ‘Clash of the Titans‘ remake that was produced during the Writer’s Strike and that everyone hated for of its awful script and atrocious 30-day post-conversion 3D. Yet that film still went on to gross almost $500 million worldwide. This time around, the script and 3D are improved as Perseus has to rescue his absentee father Zeus from hell. In doing so, Perseus must also defeat the biggest baddie of them all, his mile-high lava monster grandpa Kronos. This mindless action movie is at least quick and entertaining, two adjectives I can’t use to describe ‘Clash’.

Bully‘, the documentary that Harvey Weinstein has been bullying the MPAA over, finally hits the big screen this weekend. Weinstein believes that his movie is so good that everyone must see it, and that the R rating that the MPAA gave it will not make that possible, so he’s been contesting the rating for months. After two appeals, he’s decided to release it as “Unrated,” hoping that this will fix the problem. Truthfully, it doesn’t matter how great you think your movie is, if it doesn’t lie within the boundaries for language established by the MPAA, then it’s not going to get a lower rating. The guy did the same thing with ‘The King’s Speech‘. Does he get off on fighting with the MPAA? Someone needs to make a sequel about how Harvey Weinstein does this same thing every year. I believe it’s all just for free publicity.

The sports comedy ‘Goon‘ also opens today, which is funny because it hits Blu-ray in less than two months. Co-written by Jay Baruchel (who also co-stars in the film) and Evan Goldberg (‘Superbad‘), this appears to be an R-rated version of ‘Happy Gilmore‘. Seann William Scott plays an overly violent loser who takes his aggression to the rink in semi-pro hockey. See what I mean about the bizarro ‘Happy Gilmore’?

The director of ‘Blue Crush’ and ‘Into the Blue‘ may have made a movie without the word “blue” in the title, ‘Dark Tide‘, but he’s still incapable of filming a movie away from the sea. Halle Berry and the exotic-looking guy that Diane Lane sleeps with in ‘Unfaithful‘ star in this movie about shark attacks that ruin a woman’s diving business. Get this, Berry’s character is known as “the shark whisperer.” To save her business, she takes a wealthy thrill-seeker outside the cage for an intimate swim with the deadly great whites. If someone read this movie description to me during a game of Balderdash, I’d never believe that it was real.

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