In a surprise to no one, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse grabbed the top spot at the box office like it was the last piece of cake this weekend, earning $69 million.  That was enough for the third highest Independence Day weekend opening (behind Spider-Man 2 and Transformers), and the seventh highest five-day opening, with $161 million.  Long story short, it’s doing about as well as everyone expected with few surprises either way.

The Last Airbender managed to earn $40.7 million, despite some of the worst reviews I’ve ever seen, and actually outgrossed Prince of Persia‘s four-day star by 50 percent.  I can only hope this increases the possibility that Shyamalan will eventually have to face an angry mob.

Elsewhere, there weren’t too many surprises.  Knight and Day reached $45 million ($70 million worldwide), which doesn’t sound too bad, but it also has a listed production budget (not including marketing) of $117 million.  It’d be nice if the lesson they took from this flop was that maybe making a movie that looks like 10 movies we’ve already seen isn’t the “safe bet” they always thought.  But let’s be serious, the lesson they take will probably be “CAMERON DIAZ’S HEAD SHOULD HAVE BEEN BIGGER ON THE POSTER.  PEOPLE MUST NOT HAVE KNOWN BIG STARS WERE IN THIS MOVIE.”

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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.

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This is the trailer for Restrepo, a documentary about a forward base in Afghanistan. The film consists largely of actual combat footage.  I’ve heard it’s moving and intense.  You can see it this weekend… provided you live near the Angelika Theater in New York or the Landmark on Pico in L.A.  The rest of the country, we’re not mature enough for movies aimed at adults, apparently.  Instead we get…

Knight and Day
I always thought James Mangold was a pretty good director, the trailer has Muse, and the reviews have even been mildly positive, for the most part.  And I don’t always mind Tom Cruise.  He was good in Collateral and Magnolia. What really offends me is the “On three” sequence at the end of every trailer and commercial (relive the magic below). Everything about that sequence is unforgivably retarded. He says “let’s go on three” and she runs into a hail of bullets on one because “she panicked.” And this is supposed to be funny. And they thought this sequence was so indicative of the value of this movie as a whole that they play it every ten minutes on TV. NO. F*CK YOU. THAT IS TERRIBLE. IF YOU CAN’T SEE WHY THAT SEQUENCE IS TERRIBLE I DON’T WANT TO KNOW YOU.

Grown Ups
Adam Sandler’s latest paycheck. I think I’m one of the few people in the world who thinks David Spade is funny. Other than Sandler if he’s not totally mailing it in (Funny People, Punch Drunk Love), Spade is probably the best comedic actor out of this group (his old Comedy Central show where he made fun of celebrities was great). I also object to everyone’s criticism of this being based on it being full of “fart” or “toilet humor.” Look, a laugh is a laugh. A real comedian doesn’t care whether you think he’s clever or not, so long as you’re laughing. The false perception that you’re a buffoon just comes with the territory. I’ll take Tracy Morgan talking about karate kicking pregnant ladies over some half-assed political discourse any day. That said, I watch the commercials for this flick and I can barely tell where the jokes are, unless Kevin James is falling down. Dennis Dugan is a massive hack. When you’ve directed You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, The Benchwarmers, and National Security, you shouldn’t be directing more movies, you should be in jail.

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It hasn’t ended up online yet, but if you’ve been watching the NBA finals or the World Cup at all in the last few days, you’ve probably seen the new commercial for Knight and Day that prominently features quotes calling it “FRESH” and “ORIGINAL,” and painting it as the island of creativity in a sea of remakes and sequels.  And I guaran-g*ddamn-tee you it was a direct response to trend pieces in the Hollywood Reporter and New York Times about how moviegoers are burnt out on sequels and remakes.

The ads are so hastily cut together that they don’t even attribute the quotes.  It’s just “FRESH” covering the entire screen, with no indication of whether the person who said it was Ben Lyons or DJ Jazzy Jeff (who’ve both been known to describe things as ‘fresh’), or whether the full sentence it came from was actually “Knight and Day is a pile of monkey sh*t that smells especially fresh.”  Are you f*cking kidding me, Knight and Day?  In the era of Pete Hammondses, you couldn’t find one empty suit with whom to identify a positive statement about your movie?

"Knight and Day is a masterpiece. I loved it even more than I love cleaning turds off my own assh*le with my tongue." -Pete Hammond

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Here’s another one of these faux-candid “viral” videos of Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise on the set of Knight and Day.  It’s newsworthy only in the sense that 20th Century Fox has been sending these out, and I only post it because it confounds me in every way.  Seriously, what in the f*ck is this? It’s so poorly conceived and executed and so pointless on every level that it might as well be one of those Mary Worth comic strips where two ladies stand in the backyard talking about stamps. The only thing I can figure is that they’re just making these to piss me off.

Let me see if I can identify what they were going for in this: you have an imaginary crew member, who for some reason was filming a fellow crew member while he puts a camera lens into a box.  We’re to believe that this guy, who presumably works in the camera department of a big Hollywood film, can’t shoot video without turning his camera 90 degrees clockwise for no apparent reason.  This person then captures, COMPLETELY BY ACCIDENT, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz playing soccer.  And here’s the kicker (Get it? kicker?  soccer?  I hate my life), THEY’RE REALLY GOOD.  Oh my gosh, people will say, I wasn’t planning on seeing this retarded hunk of sh*t movie BEFORE, but now that I know that CAMERON DIAZ AND TOM CRUISE ARE SURPRISINGLY GOOD AT SOCCER, I am powerless to resist such fascinating and candid Hollywood star power!  THANK YOU, MY MOM’S FRIEND WHO SENDS OUT EMAIL CHAIN LETTERS, WHAT WOULD I EVER DO WITHOUT YOU????

BUT WHAT OF THE DANCING CGI BABIES?!  I DEMAND THEM AT ONCE!!  I REFUSE TO SEE THIS MOVIE FILM UNLESS IT INVOLVES ELF BOWLING AND BIG MOUTH BILLY BASS!!  HOW WILL I KNOW YOUR MOVIE IS WORTHWHILE IF IT DOES NOT CAPITALIZE ON RECENT TRENDS??!! CALL THE WICHITA BRANCH! SET UP A BRAINSTORMING POWER POINT AT ONCE!