Funny People is the best thing Adam Sandler’s done in 10 years and it still made $11 million less than I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry in its opening weekend, which is why I don’t clean up dog poop and purposely piss on the seat in public restrooms. You deserve this, America. Regardless, its $23.4 million debut was good enough for number one on this year’s worst box office weekend overall.
But those sh*tty box office numbers are good news for anyone hoping to see some flaming turds get stomped, and get stomped they did. The $45 million budgeted (yet oddly direct-to-DVD-looking) Aliens in the Attic debuted at $7.8 million — suck it, Fox — while Jerry Bruckheimer’s $150 million G-Force (which had three fart jokes in the trailer) still has a long way to go with its total now at $66.5 mil. Fingers crossed that continues to go down faster than Brett Ratner on a plate of taquitos. Katherine Heigl’s epic snatch napkin The Ugly Truth also fell 53% in its second weekend, down to $13 million. Meanwhile Harry Potter performed respectably, and I managed to totally not care about it for the second week in a row.
Wow, there are some turkeys opening this week, folks. I’m going to continue to recommend Up, Anvil, and The Hurt Locker. Nonetheless, OPENING THIS WEEKEND:
The Ugly Truth
Katherine Heigl stars in an intelligence-insulting rom-com. If you’ve seen the orgasm scene and you’re still considering seeing this, congratulations, I hate you. Wanna save yourself 10 bucks? Just look at the two pictures above back and forth really fast as you gradually lose the will to live.
G-Force
Fart jokes in the trailer, y’all! Speaking of two pictures that communicate an entire movie, the best part of the press tour for this one was Nic Cage looking like this:
…while sitting next to this: 
Orphan
SECRET DWARF HOOKER!!! Need I say more? I actually kind of want to see this now. …Hold me.
In the Loop
I haven’t covered this one much because the trailer bugged the living hell out of me. But I’m told part of the reason for that is that the movie has an epic amount of swearing in it and is actually quite good. I can’t confirm that it’s good, but I love swearing. Check out this speech by Patton. Now there was a guy who could swear.
(One way or another, the Sheik would have what she was having)
An international press junket for Katherine Heigl’s The Ugly Truth at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills had to be moved after a bomb threat emptied the building.
So what did Sony execs do? Shepherd all the junketeers including the movie stars and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association from the green median on Burton Way across the street to the nearby restaurant Il Cielo — and set up the junket there until the hotel gave the all-clear signal. As my source emailed, “Publicists never give up.” [DHD]
Meanwhile, terrorists are lazy, apparently. The people who made The Ugly Truth and a room full of publicists? Talk about a missed recruiting opportunity. Deliver that bomb via a white guy with dreadlocks listening to techno in his car and trust me, the whole world would ululate as one.
You know that scene in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm in a restaurant? Of course you do, it’s the most famous romantic comedy scene of all time. Well Katherine Heigl and the makers of The Ugly Truth do too, which is why they made this… uh, homage? Which manages to take all the sexiness and surprise out of the original and turn it into lame, plodding gag about vibrating underwear (”I’ll have what she’s having” is now “What’s in ceviche?”). I’m not sure if they meant to rip off When Harry Met Sally or the under-the-table-jerk-off scene in Wedding Crashers, but in either case, Heigl’s fake orgasm is one of the least sexy, least convincing ever, and I’d like to think I know a little something about fake orgasms. And she was raised a Mormon, so you’d think she’d know a little something about magic underwear.
[via Comingsoon]
It seems the way to write a Hollywood rom-com these days is to collect your most insanely obvious and intuitive relationship observations and fashion a crude narrative out of them. Like, “If you meet a guy and he seems uninterested at first but then says, ‘call me in six beers,’ and later you have sex with him but he never calls and then when you confront him about it he says he was weirded out by your oversized labia …he’s just not that into you.” Such brilliant insight into the human condition abounds in this red-band clip from The Ugly Truth.
And all the while, Katherine Heigl has to pretend like this is all coming from a mutant with superhuman powers of perception who has shapeshifted into the form of her father in order to make her feel more comfortable. I can’t wait until the next scene, when Gerard Butler and his mangled accent explain the trouble with dingleberries.
