Diary of a Mad Black Woman, 9-12-09:  Dear Diary: I just watched Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All by Myself.  The story was quite life affirming.  I leave the theater with a newfound perspective on life and the calm that comes with it.  Leaving the parking lot now, hoping to stop by the church social.  Hey! A guy just cut me off, even though I clearly had the right of way.  I’M A KILL YOU YOU STUPID MUTHAF*CKA!

Aaaanyway, this weekend, black folks proved once again that they like watching dudes cross dress almost as much as the British.  Tyler Perry always kills it even though I’ve never seen a movie of his (though my grandpa likes them — true story).  His I Can Do Bad All by Myself was number one by a large margin this weekend, earning $24 million and $10,656 per screen, the highest per screen average since Inglourious Basterds three weeks ago.

All About Steve‘s second weekend drop of 48% is shockingly low for a film whose best reviews were basically, “I’m gonna play devil’s advocate here and say maaaybe this film isn’t the cinematic equivalent of a gorilla fingerpainting with its own feces.”  Still, at $21 mil total, it’s far from a hit (thank God).  Now, can we stop it with the Eve-Steve puns already?  We get it, Adam & Steve went to see Stevita on Christmas Steve.  It’s been done.  Next person who makes one, I’m coming to your house to play “Steve of Destruction” on a ukulele while douching with Summer’s Steve.

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The Final Destination won the weekend again with a lackluster $12.4 mil, down 54.6% from its first weekend, which is actually pretty good for a crappy horror film.  Do we even have to still keep calling these “horror films”?  That seems like giving them too much credit.  How about “loud noise flicks”.

All About Steve pulled in $11.2 million for number two, which is sad considering it is, to my knowledge, the worst reviewed film of the year.  Jesus, could they make the poster look any more like Simple Jack? What the f’ck is she doing?  Why the f’ck is she holding an umbrella?  Who the f’ck’s idea was this? You’ve done it again, Fox execs.  Here, have a  herring and a red ball to balance on your snout.

Elsewhere, Inglourious Basterds landed in the three spot (which your mom lets me do sometimes) and should cross $100 million in a few weeks.

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Are you a liberal who enjoyed Inglourious Basterds?  Ha, you totally got punk’d, ya stupid socialist!  Yet again you’ve made the mistake of not filtering all the action through the lens of your fundamentalist political ideology!  Ha, idiot!  Says some guy at Breitbart:

It is interesting indeed to see those who applaud Tarantino’s latest, admittedly excellent work, revel in the unbridled revenge against Nazis who get what’s coming to them.  Many of whom, without batting an eye, view al-Qaeda killers as deserving of respect, protection, and the benefit of civilian law.  Since all that separates al-Qaeda from the Nazis is the means – industrial power, modern education, and an organized national base – one wonders why a certain amount of cognitive dissonance wouldn’t kick in after a liberal enjoyed screening “Basterds.”

That’s right, hippies!  Other than those three things I just mentioned and a bunch of other stuff, Nazis are EXACTLY LIKE al-Qaeda!  INDUBITABLY!

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(Squinting at the guy on the left, Pitt thought, “Pfff, you think you can sneak an Asian stand-in past me?  I bang my girlfriend in front of a Cambodian kid.”)

Waiter? I’ll have a kickass movie with my 8-ball, please.

Inglourious Basterds is the tongue-in-cheek WWII epic Tarantino would’ve written in ’95 or ’96 if he’d been doing more coke back then. Which is to say it’s classic Quentin –- ballsy, bloody, eccentric, with multiple interconnected stories coming together just so –- but not without the excessive talk that almost ruined Kill Bill 2 and made Death Proof his least enjoyable movie to date. (I’d rather date Jackie Browne, she puts out). The dialog isn’t excruciatingly mundane this time, but just because the words are smart and thought provoking doesn’t mean there couldn’t have been less of them. Tarantino is a savant in the way that he can nail certain aspects of human nature, even within an intricate, whacked-out plot (without being able to spell! How the hell does he do that?). But at times it feels like he deals with self-editing the way an autistic deals with spontaneity.
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Okay, fess up: do you know anyone who saw The Final Destination this weekend?  I know a few people (biblically, boosh), and I’m pretty sure no one I know saw it.  Yet it made almost $30 million and was number one at the box office this weekend.  Which leads me to believe there’s a giant underground city out there somewhere full of  three million toothless Final Destination-loving yokels.  Now there’s your horror movie plot.  Wait, no — chick with huge tits discovers underground yokel city.  There, now it’s perfect.  Pay me.  ADDITIONAL FUN FACT: This week’s number one was originally slated for home video release.  That’s right, some movie execs actually overestimated the country’s intelligence level.  That’s it, I’m buying a helmet.

Elsewhere, Nikki Finke writes:

But even Hollywood is embarrassed by the fact that this weekend’s Top 4 competing films featuring horror, death, gore, mayhem, war, Nazis, aliens, and sci-fi all did so well at the box office. “What a sad statement on movie-going humanity,” a top studio exec emailed me. “And let’s look at the ratings for the top 4 movies at the box office tonight: ‘R’, ‘R’, ‘R’, and ‘R’. Yikes.”

Oh please. Hollywood is embarrassed about Nazis now? They make a new Holocaust movie every two weeks. Or does it not count as a Nazi movie if there’s also a pianist with Bell’s Palsy? And aside from Final D and H2,  Inglourious Basterds and District 9 clocked in at number two and four, and both of those are clearly films aimed at literate adults, which is about the best we can hope for in the age of G-Force and Paul Blart.  But I can see how the success of challenging, auteur-driven, R-rated flicks might be scary to someone who spends all day preparing Venn diagrams about Kevin James talking to zoo animals.  Dear “top studio exec”: F yourself.  F yourself in your huge vagina.

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