(Pictured: The kind of neutered pussy offspring you can expect if you dragged your neutered pussy boyfriend to see Valentine’s Day with you.  Aw, isn’t that an adorable hat.)

The estimates for the four-day President’s Day weekend are in, and Valentine’s Day (عيد الحب), Garry Marshall’s Al-Qaeda recruitment tape, did even better than expected, earning $66 million and breaking the President’s Day box-office record by $14 million.  That’s a lot of new suicide bombers!

“Valentine’s” opened bigger than any previous pic bowing over Presidents Day or Valentine’s Day weekends and provided personal bests for director Garry Marshall and many cast members, including Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper and Jamie Foxx.

“We knocked it out of the park this time,” Warners distribution boss [Sheikh] Dan [Al-]Fellman said.  Adding, “Allahu Akbar! Ulululululululu!” [THR]

The previous President’s Day record holder?  Ghost Rider, starring Nic Cage.  So clearly this milestone is an indicator of quality.  Seems like I can barely go five minutes without someone bringing up Ghost Rider, or saying how Ghost Rider is the best movie ever made, or saying that if they were stranded on a desert island and could only have one movie for the rest of their lives, that it’d be Ghost Rider, and that they’d happily move to a deserted island if they could only watch Ghost Rider over and over again.
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(Birthday Dog thought he smelled cake)

I didn’t see Valentine’s Day, and for that I don’t apologize. I may pay prostitutes to stomp on my testicles in spike heels, sir, but I’m not a masochist.  Luckily for our purposes here, plenty of poor bastards did see it.  Here are their reports from the brink:

How obvious is ‘Valentine’s Day?’ Well, just take the scene in which a teenage boy approaches his girlfriend’s house to have sex for the first time in either of their lives. The song on the soundtrack at that time: Foreigner’s ‘Feels Like the First Time.’ -Florida Times-Union

Ashton Kutcher is a love-struck Los Angeles florist who’s just proposed to his sleep-over girlfriend, Jessica Alba. “I can be a sappy moron all day,” he crows, with unwarranted presumption. -Kurt Loder

Less funny or romantic than your average colonoscopy, this cringe-inducing bore provides dubious employment for four Oscar winners, two nominees and a raft of TV performers such as George Lopez, all of whom have been seen to better advantage elsewhere. -NY Post

There are a lot of Indians in the movie, for instance at the next table in an Indian restaurant, revealing that when Indians are out to dinner, they act just like Indians in a movie comedy. -Roger Ebert

Marshall, working from a script by Katherine Fugate, probably would have done better to pare some of the elements to concentrate more fully on… something. His golf game, maybe. -AZ Central

This feels less like a movie and more like a strategically programmed effort to turn as many demographic groups as possible into mooshy, gooshy, candy-heart-munching morons. -Washington Post

Now, even I have to admit, it is a little unfair to post a bunch of bad reviews for a movie Pete Hammond didn’t get to see (he was probably busy going through Sandra Bullock’s trash).  So for counter point, we go to the LA Times:
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Over the weekend, vacuous sorority girls all over the country dragged their neutered boyfriends along to see what would happen if an issue of Us Weekly and a little-kid-holding-a-rose-bouquet poster had a retarded baby.  The girls laughed when they were expected to laugh, the guys discussed finance, and a million satisfactory evenings were capped off with adequate, missionary-style sex.  Thus Valentine’s Day earned $54.4 million and became the number one movie at the box office.

The success of the film, an interconnected story of clichés that happen to white people, all but guarantees Hollywood will try to make 10 more of these barely-assembled buckets of smelly yak twat.  As an educated, middle-class white person, I’m sort of the target demographic, but the truth is, this movie makes me want to join Al-Qaeda.   In fact, I think that was the tagline.  ”Valentine’s Day, an Al-Qaeda-financed recruitment video starring Ashton Kutcher.”

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Above is the trailer for Valentine’s Day, a hastily-slapped together compilation of nauseating clichés aimed at brainless women and their dickless boyfriends starring Ashton Kutcher. It’s movies like this that remind me how the barrel of a gun tastes. Anyway, it hasn’t opened yet, but New Line is so sure it’s a hit that they’ve greenlit a spiritual sequel (can’t be a literal sequel since there isn’t actually a story) called New Year’s Eve.

Warner Bros’ New Line is in love with the Garry Marshall-directed Valentine’s Day because of its formula of cramming more than a dozen stars into a film and keeping the budget below $50 million. Now I’m told there’s a sort-of-sequel underway. Valentine’s Day scribe Katherine Fugate has turned in a draft of New Year’s Eve.

So these days, when most films can barely afford even 2 major stars, how did Valentine’s Day keep down costs for the cast including Julia Roberts, Jessica Alba, Bradley Cooper, Anne Hathaway, Patrick Dempsey, Taylor Lautner, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Topher Grace, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah and Emma Roberts? I’ve learned most worked for discounted quotes and some back-end because they were able to film their parts quickly and then leave for other projects. [DHD]

They should call it Summer’s Eve and let me shoot everyone who buys a ticket with a fire hose.

Now that we’ve got the best out of the way, it’s time for the fun part: the worst.  Not surprisingly, this list is a lot longer.  It should come as no surprise that the big winner is Old Dogs.  Whether it’s the actual trailer, with Seth Green getting cradled by a gorilla, this clip of gratuitous nutshots, the tagline “Sit. Stay. Play Dad.”  or releasing a publicity still in which you can clearly see a crewmember’s reflection, the entire marketing campaign was essentially a hate crime.  Worse than a hate crime, really, because it hurt white people.

RUNNERS UP:

Clash of the Titans (watch it below).  It doesn’t hold a candle to Old Dogs for sheer cringeworthy terribleness, but it does nicely illustrate the idiotic mindset behind your average awful trailer.  Plot? Dialog? Story?  Screw that, yo, we’ll just cut together imcomprehensible action sequences and set it to guitar!
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