Some evenings you just feel more isolated from your culture than others

I do, anyway. And tonight, looking at the list of the top films at the box office, is one of those evenings. In the top 25, there is only one that I might even consider going to see, Happy Endings.

I liked Don Roos' The Opposite of Sex a lot, and this one has been getting some good reviews. But I can't shake the feeling based on summaries that I've read and clips that I've seen that it's something of a retread. God knows I'm not one to criticize a man for returning to his basic themes, but...

Moving up the list, we find at #11 Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I discussed this at length on the old blog; I guess a lot of people like paying for George Lucas' ranch expansion and his children's college. They're so generous. Me, I would rather have actually been awed and overpowered, but hey, what do I know?

Before moving on to the top two, I want to draw a perhaps-thin distintion. I don't like to see anyone criticise things they don't know about; so I'm going to be trying not to do that in what follows.

What I will be talking about is why, based on what I know about the top two movies at the box office this week, I have no interest in seeing them. And I'll acknowledge up-front that they've both been getting generally good reviews, and it's entirely possible that I'm "wrong."

So: Wedding Crashers. Rolling Stone is comparing its stars to Belushi and Akyroyd. I can''t accept that. Acording to the RT consensus:

Wedding Crashers is both raunchy and sweet, and features top-notch comic performances from Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson.

Maybe. But the trailer sure made it look like another one of those sorry, I'm just a dumb guy, can't be blamed for treating women like cattle even if it means tricking a girl into losing her virginity, stories.

And AmericaBlog informs me there is what John calls

a gratuitously homophobic thread running through the movie that's kind of surprising for a movie made in 2005

Now, on to number one. Sigh. I was really hoping Charlie and the Chocolate Factory would be a flop. I think even more than I want Joss Whedon's Firefly movie to be flop, though for related reasons.

Not to go all Catcher in the Rye on y'all, but one of the things that really pushes my buttons--as perhaps many of yours--is hypocrisy. I don't think I would have had quite as negative a reaction to the misogynistic, sexist turns Whedon's series took in their final years, had it not been for the fact that he promotes, and his fans and friends in the press perpetuate, the image of Joss Whedon: Champion of Feminism.

Similarly, perhaps Tim Burton's movies wouldn't be such a pet peeve of mine if it weren't for the fact that his accepted image is that of the fey, pretentious beret-wearing dark visioned, pale-skinned artist goth.

Nonsense. He's a talentless mainstream hack; okay maybe not talentless, but his talents don't extend to storytelling. He makes movies not to tell stories but for McDonald's tie-ins. And I'm sorry, anyone who makes Mars Attacks! and Planet of the Apes and the Batman movies and Edward Scissorhands doesn't get to play the artist card for a long, long time.