Ooga-Booga

The Devil made him do it. Or maybe his agent.

Films are often marketed by what "quadrant" they appeal to, the four quadrants being male, female, young and old. For instance, Sex & the City is a "single-quadrant" franchise, appealing almost entirely to women, whereas something like The Blind Side owes its box office success to being a four-quadrant film that ended up appealing to men and women, young and old. (Four-quadrant films are almost impossible to successfully conceive; they tend to be happy accidents that the Monday-morning quarterbacks pretend to have planned that way.) Avatar also transcended its genre origins (SciFi adventure) to become a four-quadrant film, whereas Tron Legacy (ha!) remained a two-quadrant (young males) and its box office died after its big opening weekend, killing this year's Christmas business with it.

Horror films are also single-quadrant films, appealing primarily to teens/young adults. However, these days the majority of horror films seem to be R-rated and gory (like the Saw franchise) or faux-Cinéma vérité (a la Paranormal Activity). An R-rated horror film is perceived to be more scary automatically in today's marketplace. I don't think it's impossible to make a scary PG-13 movie, but it requires real skill, all down the line. You need a tightly written tale, crisply edited, great spooky music and sound effects and a memorable baddie; instead audiences seem to get journeymen who are just picking their collective pocket for a quick buck with a cheap genre film.

The makers of The Rite, which opened last weekend, seem to have opted to try to buy themselves a second quadrant by paying for a big actor rather than punching up the story. Having sat through it, I can attest that the scariest thing about The Rite is what Anthony Hopkins will do for a dollar. (He's joined in the slumming by Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones, and Rutger Hauer, all of whom are old enough to know better, but can be absolved by virtue of the fact that they cannot command the kind of salary Anthony Hopkins does.)

The second scariest thing about The Rite is how much business it managed to do ($14.8 million opening weekend), but that's largely reflective of the lack of new product in the marketplace. Exorcism stories seem to hold some appeal, no doubt kept afloat by the pea-soup ocean of still-scared-stiff memories generated by The Exorcist, which was released in 1973 and is number 9 on the all-time box office list (with prices adjusted for ticket-price inflation, which is the most meaningful way to gauge a film's true popularity). The Exorcist is still one of the scariest effing films I've ever seen, and I don't even believe a lick of its dogma.

The Rite, which opened last weekend, was directed by Mikael Håfström, whose resume includes 2007's 1408 (which I haven't seen, but I hear is of decent quality and has well-written underpinnings in the form of being based on a Stephen King short story) and a piece of dreck called Derailed, which I made the mistake of watching on cable (I'm a Clive Owen fan). The Rite is "suggested" (ruh-roh, as Scooby Doo would say)) by a book about the training of modern-day exorcists with same title by Matt Baglio, who alleges it is nonfiction; to say I am 'skeptical' of its veracity would be too slight an adjective.

Some never-heard-of-him actor named Colin O'Donoghue plays an American priest called Michael Kovak who attends a seminary (for the free education...ooh, snap!) instead of running the family mortuary with his bloated old dad (Hauer), but seems to be deficient in the faith department. His priest school mentor (Jones) sees potential in him, so Michael gets shipped off to the Vatican for some brainwashing -- er, further education -- and attends exorcism school (talk about a sucky major). Seems that Michael, the poor unbelieving sod, still thinks people who call the exorcist might actually be oh, I don't know, mentally ill, so his exorcism prof (Hinds) makes him go see wacky old exorcist Father Lucas Trevant (Hopkins), who has hordes of Roman cats overrunning his courtyard (arguably the only realism in the film).

There's this and that in the way of scary deep voices coming from 'possessed' teenaged girls (yawn. who hasn't heard those?) and Hopkins riffs shamelessly from his Hannibal Lecter litany of ooh-scary calm line deliveries (where's Count Floyd when you need him?). Naturally by the end of the film, Michael gives up on reality and joins Team Exorcism (I don't want anyone to think there's a happy ending).

Isn't Anthony Hopkins rich enough to pay for his own Roman Holiday without dragging us along on this nonsense? Last year he played daddy to The Wolfman and 2011 promises yet another embarrassment from Hopkins as he bellows his way through a scene as Thor's eye-patch wearing pops, Odin, in the upcoming Thor movie (rhymes with bore...and snore). What's next, a frigging Magic sequel?

Want to make a Catholic-themed movie that'll scare the crap out of people? Oh wait, someone already did. It's called Deliver Us From Evil, the 2006 documentary about Father Oliver O'Grady, who abused more than two dozen children (by his own admission) over a 30-year period, while the Church systematically shuffled him from parish to parish. He went to prison in 1993, served half his sentence, was paroled in 2000 and deported back to Ireland in 2001. The Irish authorities lost track of O"Grady in 2006 or so, and there were reports of him living in The Netherlands. Last month he resurfaced; he was arrested in Dublin, in possession of a laptop computer crawling with kiddie porn.

There's no exorcism for the real evil in the world, is there?

Father O'Grady

Where's the Beef?

The Company Men has been kicked around, release-wise, since last year. Slated to open in October, then given a one-week, award-qualifying run in December, it's now finally out to just over 100 theaters this weekend. The Company Men was written and directed by John Wells, the man who gave us TV's ER, which in retrospect seems like a Cassavettes film in its nuances compared to the current likes of Grey's Anatomy, a poorly written hospital show populated with the world's most repellently narcissistic characters (it's a miracle that the superfluous patients get any attention at all). Most importantly, ER gave us George Clooney, for which we are forever grateful.

(Mmmm...Clooney)

The Company Men is set in Boston, during the fall of 2008, when the financial markets all fell down and the best minds of corporate America tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together again by getting rid of all their employees, who apparently were interfering with their profit margins. It's about men getting laid off from really, really high-paying jobs and having to cope with downgrading from their Mc- and actual mansions, which are stuffed with stuff. Some of these guys are old and actually knew how to do things with their hands once-upon-a-time, and are played with appropriate gravitas by Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper. Some of them are arrogant dickwads with MBAs who, in their late 30s, will finally have to grow-the-fuck-up and are played by Ben Affleck, an actor who arouses an instant schadenfreude in me.

Sadly, a large part of the story centers on Affleck's character, Bobby Walker, who is a two-dimensional, textbook study of how people react to these things. It's the classic Kübler-Ross model, commonly known as the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In Bobby, this translates as 18-hole delusion, snark, whining to his mortgage company over the phone, losing his Porsche, and having to go actually work, for his [gasp] working class brother-in-law (then, at the end, getting a fairy godfather reprieve of sorts -- more on this later). Bobby's wife, Maggie (played by Rosemarie DeWitt), returns to work as a nurse (nice breadwinning skills to fall back on), so I can only assume that she must be able to tap into some Nurse Jackie-level meds that enable her to put up with Bobby's behavior with the saintly acceptance she gives him. (I can't help thinking that if Maggie was a real-life New Englander with working class roots, she would have given him the beat-down he deserves: see The Fighter.)

Tommy Lee Jones plays Gene McClary, the number two guy at the company, which is run by his best friend and former college roommate (we learn at an expositional testimonial dinner), James Salinger, played with appropriate blankness by Craig T. Nelson. TLJ gets the millionaire-with-a-conscience role, conflicted about sugar-coating the stock value, upset that underlings are being trimmed from the roster, sometimes -- gasp -- talking back to the CEO. He's got a wife back home at the manse who wants to take the corporate jet down to Palm Beach for a shopping weekend, but old Gene's banging the hot HR lady, Sally Wilcox, who's laying off more than she can chew (Maria Bello). When Gene gets his walking papers, he walks them over to Sally's place for a little late-mid-life shack up.

Chris Cooper plays Phil Woodward, a 60-year-old who worked his way up from ship-welding to constructing a white-collar gilded cage that houses a realistically frumpy, headachy wife and a teenaged daughter whose senior trip is going to Italy (on Cooper's face, you can see the cost being tallied in Phil's weary head). Laid off, he gets to endure a banal resume review by the overly familiar, up-with-people harpy at the outplacement center, another moment Cooper nails with minimal dialogue. (Of the three leads, Cooper's character is both the least-written and the most satisfying. The man knows how to make silence matter.)

Kevin Costner pops up as Jack Dolan, Bobby's contractor brother-in-law who regularly taunts Bobby about his paper-pushing uselessness but makes a Bobby an initially-rebuffed job offer after one of the adorable kids lets it be known at Thanksgiving that her daddy is unemployed. (News flash: the cute Kevin Costner has left the planet. He has thickened in body, and now sports hair akin to glued-on ginger pubes.)

So Bobby gets to make new pals at his outplacement center (they even play touch-football together!), and doubles-down on the humble pie, moving his family into his parent's house after the McMansion goes bye-bye, and schlepping buckets of cement for Jack. He goes to a Hail-Mary job interview in Chicago, only to have gotten the date wrong (d'oh!) and now is too poor to fly back the following week. Lucky for him, rich old Gene decides to start a consulting firm and hires Bobby to help restart a shipping yard in Gloucester (because yeah, that could happen). It pays $80,000 a year, half his original salary but, by golly, he might just make it after all. On $80,000 a year.

Luckily for John Wells, both Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper are excellent actors who can breathe life into clichéd characters. Their scenes are the ones that make The Company Men worth watching. The rest of it has a generic feel, and despite the presence of Roger Deakins as cinematographer, the film has little in the way of visual flair. It's kind of like a really long, middlebrow network TV episode. Lifetime Television for Male Menopause -- complete with tenuous relation to "real-life" events.

But where's the beef? The outrage? The actual financial events in this movie are often literally going on as noise in the background -- on TV, the box of John Wells' power (most of which manifests itself in the role of producer. not writer/director). Few things in cinema piss me off more than bad movies about important subjects, because they get graded on a curve. For instance, Gandi -- great guy, Gandi -- overrated, bloated film. The Company Men ends with the lead's problem solved in a deus ex machina manner -- while millions of Americans continue to live day-by-day in a "jobless recovery," the oxymoronic elephant in the room, -- that it really makes me mad that I wasted two hours of my underpaid, underemployed life on it.

Skip The Company Men and see Charles Ferguson's intellectually rigorous and righteously angering Inside Job instead. It's still playing theatrically, and comes out on DVD in March. You won't be sorry -- and maybe if enough of us peons get angry, the powers that be will be. (Hey -- you have your fantasies, I have mine.)

Slackerhero: The Green Hornet

Seth Rogen apparently slimmed down for his role of Brett Reid, aka The Green Hornet, but he needn't have bothered. He still carries himself like a tubby schlubby. And I'm always imagining an ever-present cloud of pot smoke surrounding him, like Pigpen's cloud of dirt on Peanuts. Hardly the Nietzschean ideal, in either case.

Based on a 1930s radio serial, then adapted as a single-season TV show in the mid-1960s to cash-in on the campy Batman craze (and mostly notable for its casting of Bruce Lee as Kato), The Green Hornet is one of those long-languishing superhero properties that has been in perpetual turnaround for the last 20 years. For some reason, it was this version that finally get made -- with a script by Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg, with whom he also wrote the somewhat violent stoner caper The Pineapple Express and the comedy Superbad. For the director, they hired Michael Gondry, best known for directing Charlie Kaufman's wonderful script of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Not exactly franchise-y superhero resumes from any corner of the project.

If I gave a shit about the character of the Green Hornet, I might be troubled by this weird melange. But as someone who finds the tedium of the modern superhero movie to be greatly improved by humor, I was mildly entertained by the goofiness of The Green Hornet. I had no expectations of plot coherence, and it's a good thing -- really, a Los Angeles where a newspaper is widely read and influential, and where all manner of ethnic crime cartels are all controlled by the erudite Nazi from Inglorious Basterds? That's crazy talk! (Not seeing it in 3D also improved my mood.)

Brett Reid, a slacker scion of the fictional paper of record, is living a life of babyman ease in his father's poolhouse, which is larger than my apartment building. His father dies, and Brett assumes the mantle of adulthood, aided by his father's mechanic, Kato, whom Brett keeps on the payroll because he can make a mean cappuccino. (If this doesn't signify the 0.5% of the population that controls the wealth of this country in 2011, I don't know what does.) He and Kato bicker amusingly, the main joke being that Brett is an inept Seth Rogen character and Kato knows martial arts and is a mechanic (and barrista). The beard, Cameron Diaz, shows up to make sure we don't think things are getting too gay.

There are driving things with their fixed-up car, some kung fu fighting, a Gangster's Paradise duet, and it all slides by evenly enough. Hey, it's January and there's not a whole lot of other commercially-hyped product in the marketplace (Season of the Witch, anyone?). At the very least, you won't hate yourself when you watch it on cable in a year.

The Nicolas Cage Enigma

Which Academy Award-winning actor has made more than 50 feature films in his now 29-year career, and has worked with the following directors: Michael Bay, The Coen Brothers, Martha Coolidge, Francis Ford Coppola, John Dahl, Brian DiPalma, Mike Figgis, Werner Herzog, Spike Jonze, David Lynch, Alan Parker, Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorcese, and John Woo?

I'll give you another clue -- it's the same actor whose latest release, Season of the Witch, got a 5% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

That's right, it's none other than Nicolas Cage. Let's call him Nic, shall we?

There seem to be two types of Nic Cage movies, the really good -- and increasingly far-between -- ones (like Adaptation), and the crappy ones where his characters seem to be struggling with weird prophecies and/or weird hair. Season of The Witch falls firmly into the second category.

Although his Jesus-weave looks okay in Season of The Witch, the story is like donkey shit stuck to your shoe. Nic plays a 14th-Century Crusader who loses his sense of mission after impaling a Turkish woman and defects along with his comrade-at-arms, played by Ron Perlman, in hulking sidekick mode. (Also, the Crusades were already over before the time this film is set. Just sayin'.)

Returning to their home country (unspecified, though the film was shot in Hungary & Austria), they find the people stricken with the plague (lots of boils & other gross makeup). Naturally, this outbreak is blamed on a young, dark-haired woman the locals call the Black Witch. The deserters are recognized and thrown in prison, but their sentence is commuted when they agree to transport the Black Witch (with various other, minor characters who won't survive) to a far-off monastery where there's a book that the monks can read aloud from and break the witch's spell.

They complete the tedious journey, minus a soul or two, only to find that all the monks are also dead from the plague and that the young girl is not a witch -- but is possessed by the Devil. (Luckily, the monks' magic spell book has one for exorcism as well.) There's flapping of leathery wings, zombie monks, immolation and other stuff until all the woo-woo words are spoken and the possession is broken. (Also, Ron Perlman head-butts the Devil. Perhaps his agent will be next.)

So, yet another crappy Nic Cage movie has been unleashed into the world, with Drive Angry (in 3D, no less) to arrive next month. You'd think we would have become immune to the mediocrity of Nic's choices by now, and yet we've not. (In fact, people have retained a weird affection for him, an example of which is Nic Cage as Everyone, a very funny blog where people submit photoshopped images of Nic Cage as, well, everyone.)

I've been informally polling my cinema co-workers and other friends and almost everyone still has an opinion, awareness, or expression of alarm about Nic's increasingly dire output. Nobody complains when Matthew McConaughey makes another mediocre movie, but that's because his acting range consists of shirt on or shirt off. But Nic Cage, when the spirit moves him, can still act.

The most recent case in point is a wonderfully "out there" film entitled Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009). Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, this is Werner Herzog's "re-imagining" of Abel Ferrara's 1992 movie (which starred Harvey Keitel as a NYPD Lieutenant, moaning and swinging his ween). Herzog makes great use of Nic's manic energy, and this new Lieutenant's rage and pain feel very real (plus, Nic has a "lucky" crack pipe and no one has to see Harvey's dick this time).

Some of my other favorite Nic Cage characters include: the sweet, soulful boyfriend of the Valley Girl (1983); the hapless baby-and-diaper-stealing crook in the early Coen Brothers hit Raising Arizona (1987); Cher's one-handed passione in the crowd-pleasing Moonstruck (1987); Sailor, whose leather jacket signifies his individuality in David Lynch's road-trip-from-hell, Wild at Heart (1990); the man who cannot leave town, no matter how hard he tries, in John Dahl's blackly humorous noir, Red Rock West; his Oscar-winning role as the alcoholic screenwriter on a death spiral in the unglamorous Leaving Las Vegas (1995); twin screenwriters Charlie and Donald Kaufman, cracking the story in Adaptation (2002); and the OCD conman trying to balance work and a daughter in Matchstick Men (2003).

As part of my meditation on the enigma of Nic Cage, I re-watched Adaptation the other day. It's a wonderful, complex film, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze, the same team that gave us the delirious Being John Malkovich. The break-all-the-rules story uses a fictionalized Charlie Kaufman (as played by Nic) as the central character, a hyperanalytical screenwriter struggling to adapt Susan Orleans' The Orchid Thief as a film. In the film (and in the writing credits for the film), Charlie has a twin brother named Donald, also played by Nic, who is identical in looks but opposite to Charlie in every other way. Donald is completely obtuse and oblivious to the agonizing self-doubt that paralyzes Charlie.

Donald, who is at loose ends, decides one day to become a screenwriter himself, which he does by boning up on all the quickie screenplay books and taking a Robert McKee seminar. Donald writes a completely crackpot story called The 3, about a cop, a kidnapper and a victim, all of whom -- ta da! -- are actually the same person, one with multiple personality disorder. Charlie rightly punches holes in the logic of the story, but Donald is undeterred, plugging away with his cracked mirrors motif and choosing "Happy Together" as theme music. I realized that what Donald was writing sounded very much like a bad Nic Cage movie.

Near the end of Adaptation, Charlie shares an experience with Donald of something upsetting he witnessed when they were teenagers -- a girl Donald liked making fun of him when his back was turned. Donald tells Charlie that he knew what had happened but that he didn't care, because he still loved the girl: Donald decided that the things he loved defined him, not what loved him.

Perhaps there are two Cages -- Nicolas and Nic -- who function like Charlie and Donald Kaufman. We want Nicholas Cage to reach for the excellence of Charlie, but he'd rather be Donald, riding a motorcycle and having his head catch on fire (with a sequel to come). As long as he makes an occasional Charlie movie, I'm willing to wait it out.

3Don't: Ways to Improve Your Moviegoing in 2011

I've been trying to think of ways to incorporate my experiences as a cinema worker into this blog, so that it's not just reviews of individual films. How about something New Year's resolution-y (as Buffy might say), like ways to become a better moviegoer in 2011? Consider this the first in an occasional series.

3D is a complete rip-off.

It exists to pad box office revenues, not improve your moviegoing experience. Good movies don't need it, and it won't save a bad one.

In 2008, only one of the top ten films was in 3D, Pixar's WALL-E. In 2009, two of the top ten, the juggernaut of Avatar and Pixar's Up, were in 3D. This year, five of the top ten, and 11 of the top 20 were 3D (although no breakdown of how much of their grosses were from 3D, and which were from 2D prints of the same films): Toy Story 3 was number one with $415 million (the quality of the story, not just the 3D, was the driver), Alice in Blunderland (2), Despicable Me (7), Shrek Forever Crappier (8), How to Train Your Dragon (9), Tangled (11), Crap of the Titans (which was an added after-effect 3D hack-job at 12), Megamind (14), Tron; Legacyzzzz (15), The Hopefully-Last Airbender (one of the worst-reviewed, and worst 3D post-production add-ons of the year, at 16) and Jackass 3D (20). (These are all domestic grosses and rankings.)

3D artificially inflates a movie's grosses due to the added fees charged by each movie theater. My theater charges an extra $3.50 for adults and $2.00 for kids. AMC charges an extra $4 per ticket, and an extra $6 per IMAX 3D ticket (and some of the AMC's billing themselves as IMAX are not even true IMAX). You might think that's good financial news for theaters, right?

Well, the rub is that opening weekend grosses are split 90-10, in favor of the studios. Putting that into real numbers, let's use last year's Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton's craptacular 3D outing which definitely owes inflated 3D pricing for its second-place finish in the 2010 box office standings. Rounding the numbers, it had a $116 million opening weekend ($334 million total), of which 90% ($104.4 million) went back to it perpetrators at Disney, leaving $11.6 million to be divided by 3,728, the number of screens it opened on that weekend. For each screen, that equals a whopping $3,111.

Box office grosses, however, are not the best indicator of a film's actual attendance number, though. Let's do some more math.

As an exhibitor, you'd gross the same amount on a 3D film that attracts 1000 people ($1800, 10% of an $18 ticket total of $18,000), versus a 2D film that attracts 1241 people. However, and this is critical, with the 3D audience of 1000, you lose the potential to sell an extra 241 people concessions, so if your theater averages $3 in concessions sales per person, that's an additional $723 to add to the $1800, a 40% bump. If you have an "underperforming" 3D title tying up one of your big houses, you're hosed, because the bread-and-butter of movie theaters is the popcorn-and-butter your guests are gobbling up in the dark. (More on this in a future blog.) When the Studios look at the Rentrak numbers on Monday mornings, they only care about their grosses, not how much popcorn money the exhibitor lost out on with 20% fewer people walking through the door, which is how you can get stuck still having to carry a moribund 3D title that actually has fewer attendees than a 2D title you can drop.


Keep in mind also that theaters have had to make huge capital investments in new digital projectors and in those 3D glasses. At my theater, we have expensive, state-of-the-art, reusable glasses, which require staff to distribute, sanitize and account for every single damn pair of them, every single day we sell a 3D ticket. Loss of even a single pair costs us money. (Other theaters use disposable glasses, which in theory are recycled, but I can't speak to that from my own experience. And the glasses all suck, just in different ways.)

But one thing you can be sure of, no matter what kind of glasses you're wearing, the end result does not justify the hassle of the glasses themselves or the added expense. Next time you're at a 3D movie, take the glasses off. What do you see? A picture that's about 30% brighter than the one you're watching, for starters. Also, little kids don't always like the glasses, even though a sizable number of 3D films are geared to the under-10 set. Nothing like handing a toddler a pair of 3D glasses and hoping that his distracted parents don't let him break them -- or that they feel "entitled" to let Junior have at 'em after feeling ripped off on the surcharge.

Except for an occasional scene of flying, no film I have seen in 3D gained anything by the process. And in animation, it does add a little roundness of dimensionality, but better animation (and scripts) could achieve that dimensionality without the 3D. Pixar films will -- and do -- do excellent business, with or without 3D.

My strongest recommendation to slow down the onslaught of 3D is to actively seek out and choose to see 2D versions of the same films. This is especially true for children's films, where the added fees can make moviegoing an expensive event for families (although not as much as other forms of entertainment -- another blog to come), or the extra fees are being spent on tickets, instead of popcorn. And fanboys, you guys who are already drooling for The Green Lantern next weekend, put your Spider-Man wallets away. Unless it's an NC-17 movie titled Scarlett Johansson Taking a Shower, you're not getting your money's worth, either.

I was hoping a call for a quasi-boycott movement might work. According to a MPAA report on Theatrical Motion Picture Statistics for 2009, only 10% of the U.S. population is construed as "frequent" moviegoers, which means one or more times per month, but this group accounted for half the movie tickets purchased. Even if only 10% of frequent moviegoers stopped going to 3D movies, it would have a chilling effect on the box office. But 2011 promises to yield a steady -- at times, spurting -- stream of yet more 3D.

I was poking around the Internet, doing a little research for this piece, when I found an article published in The Huffington Post  today, entitled "2011: The Year 3D Kills Mainstream Moviegoing?," which had an excellent list of all the 3D films slated for release in 2011: The Green Hornet, Sanctum, Gnomeo and Juliet, Drive Angry, Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, Mars Needs Moms, Thor, Priest, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Kung Fu Panda 2, Green Lantern, Cars 2, Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II, Captain America, The Smurfs, Conan the Barbarian, Fright Night, Spy Kids 4, Final Destination 5, Piranha 3DD, Dolphin Tale, The Three Musketeers, Contagion, Puss in Boots, Immortals, Happy Feet 2, Arthur Christmas, Hugo Cabret, Sherlock Holmes 2, Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, and The Adventures of Tin-Tin. (List from Scott Mendelson's piece in today's Huffington Post.)

One of the interesting things that the article points out is that of these 32 titles, 26 of them are slated to be released in a 34-week period, some of them against each other. And it also posits that this flood of product may effectively shut down the option for theaters to also run the same titles in 2D (something we are often able to do successfully, especially with kid's movies).

I can safely say that I have little to no interest in about 95% of these movies, regardless of their format (nor did the makers of the films have any interest in or expectation of my attendance), but a few stand out as having broad enough appeal to make my job those weekends a living hell.

My co-workers and I got what amounted to an early Christmas gift when Warner Bros. aborted their 3D release of the first part of the Harry Potter finale this past November, mostly due to the crap quality of the transfer process (as the film was not originally shot in 3D). Warners took a lot of heat, justifiably, for the poor quality of the Clash of the Titans make-a-quick-buck transfer and didn't dare have Potterites go Voldemort on them if they did the same to HP. Those Potter films are already shot so dark they'd probably disappear with the 3D overlay, and both parts of Deathly Hallows were shot together, so let's hope they balk again come July.

The Pirates weekend was always going to be a drag because those movies are so effing long (plus about 8 minutes of credits) its hard for theaters to program the showtimes. Now it will be a drag, plus with thousands of 3D glasses to wash. Arggh, indeed. Cars 2, like all Pixar movies, will be huge.

But Contagion, slated for release in October, is a thriller starring Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Jude Law and Elliot Gould, among many others, and is clearly not geared at teenyboppers. It's directed by Steven Soderbergh, for crying out loud. What are we going to see, 3D shots of spores in petri dishes?

I'm begging you, stop going to 3D movies. Now.