Holy crap.  Okay, so imagine the plot of the new Karate Kid.  Now, replace the Beijing setting with Indonesia.  Good, now imagine that the main character isn’t just some kid, it’s a young Barack Obama.  That’s basically the story of Obama Anak Mentang, or Little Obama.  It opens today in Indonesia, where they don’t have to worry about pesky things like political correctness.  What do the Indonesian kids say about little Barry Obama?

“Westerner, but dark colored.  Weird hair.  Big nose.”

Wow.  Okay, but what about the Mr. Miyagi character who teaches Barack Obama to box?  (I don’t know, dude, just go with it).

“Being a new kid here is not easy.  Not with your curly hair.  Not by being so different.”

His mentor also appears to be a gay man. So basically, Indonesian kids make fun of Barack Obama’s curly hair, so a gay man teaches him to box. Now do you understand why I like MMA so much?

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems Fox’s brilliant viral campaign featuring Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise doing candid things was a failure, as Knight and Day landed a distant third at the box office.  I was about to take Schadenfreude Sloth out for a walk, but Kevin James farted on his head and hit him in the groin with a football.  Grown Ups earned $41 million, doubling Knight and Day‘s $20.5 million take and landing it in second behind Toy Story 3 ($59 million), thereby proving that audiences will literally pay for Adam Sandler to take a sh*t on their face.  The only thing he’s not allowed to do is make fun of himself or anything thoughtful (sorry, Funny People). Sorry, Adam Sandler, you must play the lovable every man from now until the end of time.  You are the Will Smith of comedy.  Speaking of which…

Karate Kid landed in fourth.  Not a bad showing, but probably not the smash hit people predicted after the big opening weekend.  So don’t start wearing sneakers with pictures of yourself on them just yet, Jaden Smith.  What’s that?  Aw, crap.

The two biggest losers of the weekend were Jonah Hex, which fell 70% from last weekend, earning $1.6 million this weekend and still short of the $10 million mark, cumulatively; and Killers, which earned $2 million and fell 60% from last weekend.  I still maintain that Jonah Hex was a glorious, glorious trainwreck.  Meanwhile, if life was fair, the people who financed Killers would be less popular than the CEO of BP right now.  Sure, one indirectly contributed to an ecological catastrophe, but at least that was an accident.  The Killers people not only put Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl into a movie together… they did it on purpose.

Read the rest of this entry »

I thought we needed a nice palate cleanser after all that Will-Smith’s-son-makes-more-in-a-weekend-than-you’ll-make-your-entire-life news this morning, and Black 20 has come through yet again with another fine mashup, “Jackie Chan Hates Karate Kids.”  It’s basically a literal interpretation of my decree from last week, “Karate Kid would be better if it was just Jackie Chan beating up kids for two hours.”  Yeah, that’s right, I called something I wrote a decree.  I chiseled it onto a stone tablet while I was on the sh*tter.  Anyway, point is, it’s fun to watch kids getting beat up, because kids are obnoxious and lack upper-body strength, like women.

[via IGN]

If not putting your whole hand in your pocket is cool, Bieber and Jaden are Davis and Coltrane.

Precious, booger-lipped wiener kids everywhere breathed a sigh of relief into their gilded inhalers this week as Jaden Smith proved that children of celebrities can succeed, so long as their parents buy them Jackie Chan.  Or, to put it in plain English, The Karate Kid earned $56 six million godd*mned dollars this week.  If you vote with your pocketbook, the American moviegoer overwhelmingly checked the box next to “I hate Jesus, America, puppies, and ice cream.”

While Karate Kid was making twice what the studio had predicted, The A-Team underperformed almost as much.  It earned $26 million for the weekend, which, in and of itself isn’t horrible, but as Deadline says:

That’s embarrassing for what was supposed to be the start of another franchise and a nailbiter between the two opening movies. It turned out not even close. ”A pretty spectacular win,” one Sony exec exulted. “Not even Jerry Weintraub predicted that.”

Man, who would’ve thought a crappy-TV-show-based film that went through eleven screenwriters wouldn’t be a huge hit, huh?  I tell you, it’s a strange time to be alive.  Hey, assh*les, even McDonald’s had to make sure people liked their burgers before they started thinking franchise.  But let’s not let the A-Team detract from the real news: the era of celeb karaoke has officially upon us.  Thanks, Will and Jaden Smith, you’ve ruined everything for everyone.  I can’t wait until Tom Hanks’ kid gets to be a movie star now.  …Wait, what?  Aw crap.

Read the rest of this entry »

Opening this Weekend (trailers after the jump)

Karate Kid
It’s currently tracking 53% on RottenTomatoes, which means that, if you were to divorce it from all historical contexts and future implications, the movie itself probably isn’t that bad.  (The most satisfactory movie of summer, said Shrugsworth McWhogivesafuk)  However, as the old saying goes, you vote with your pocketbook, and the last thing I want to vote for is to give more celebrities the ability to buy a movie so that their booger-faced wiener kid can play Celebrity Rockband with some sh*t I’ve already seen 100 times on cable.  But hey, that’s just me.

The A-Team
This one’s got a similarly mixed recommended rating, but for some reason, the concept doesn’t offend me as much.  The idea is stupid, the footage I’ve seen so far is stupid, but it looks like “epically stupid” was the vibe they went for, and at least that I can respect.  “Is he trying to shoot down our drones?“  “No, he’s flying the tank.”  Duh, Mr. Poindexter, did you fall asleep during falling tank driver’s ed or something?  Stupid for stupid’s sake is okay by me, and at the very least, it won’t create any future former child actors.  However, there’s one thing that always gives me pause on modern movies with gratuitous action: the dreaded shakey cam.  I didn’t notice it much in the advance clips, but for what it’s worth, Ebert called it “queasy-cam anarchy,” writing, “The movie uses the new style of violent action, which fragments sequences into so many bits and pieces that it’s impossible to form any sense of what’s happening, or where, or to whom.“  Uh oh.

Winter’s Bone
Debra Granik’s tour-de-chainsaw that squirrel-knifed its way into my heart at Sundance opens today in New York and L.A.  And it’s the proud recipient of my inaugural “FilmDrunk Seal of Approval.”

Other reviewers have taken issue with the film’s “excessive bleakness,” and it’s definitely bleak as f*ck, but I found the attention to detail in creating that world to be charming. I thought it paid off in the end.  Plus, f*cking hillbillies and meth and chainsaws, dude.  See it early, New York and LA’ers, so that the rest of the country can get some action.  Oh yeah, and Jennifer Lawrence is real purdy.

Read the rest of this entry »