I Modified This Tube Sock.

Bit of a hiatus, but I went on a mini-break to Copenhagen, which turned into a much longer stay thanks to a certain Icelandic volcano spreading ash everywhere and causing a bit of a European airspace shutdown - you may have heard something about it. That's all right, trains and ferries saved the day.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm still not well behind. I am. I watched Fantastic Mr Fox a while ago, and I'm a little rusty on it because of that. But I know I liked it. I didn't love it, but I liked it. I think the vocal talent was very, very charismatic (with George Clooney doing his thing, and Meryl Streep showing that even without her physical presence, her comic timing is terrific.) I think it looked really cool - I loved the stop-motion, cute little characters and the production design of the whole thing. It didn't quite grab me, but it was a nice little romp. Jason Schwartzmann was hilariously petulant, Willem Dafoe was brilliantly disguised, Eric Chase Anderson held well against far more experienced cast, Bill Murray and Jarvis Cocker worked, Owen Wilson just made me think of Owen Wilson, and I'm not a huge Owen Wilson fan so...


Alexandre Desplat (who? Who's he? Oh, him) did great things with the score, unsurprisingly. It's really a pity he doesn't score more films than he does. What? He did seven scores for 2009 films? Lazy. He's scored five films I've seen in the last six months? Work harder, man!


Look, I'm not going to knock Wes Anderson, really. He at least goes for what he wants to do. You can feel his style, whether you love it or hate it. As I think I mentioned here, I liked his Life Aquatic, but from what I've seen of the rest of his work I'm a little ho-hum. But you do know what you're getting, and you must admit that that has things going for it. Still... 3.5 stars.

Good Lordy.

Weekend box office figures for the States have just been published over at Box Office Mojo and they were a bit surprising.

Firstly, Twilight II plummeted. Plum. Met. Ed. If estimates hold up it dropped 70% from last weekend. With such a big opening it was always going to drop big - The Dark Knight dropped over 50% and Spider-Man 3 dropped over 60%. But that's still a steep drop for something with this exposure. Still, a mammoth hit.

The Blind Side, the new Sandra Bullock film, grew over the Thanksgiving holiday. Quite significantly. It was her biggest opening ever last weekend, and added 17% this weekend to cross $100mil in ten days. That's pretty damn good for her. As in, it will probably become her highest grosser by a long margin.

Precious continued to do well. I don't know what expansion plans there are, but I imagine they'll be rolling out a little wider to bump it back up in the rankings - its screen average is good enough to warrant.

The Fantastic Mr Fox opened fairly poorly, I reckon, in a decently wide release.

The Road finally went out on only 111 screens, and pulled in an ok crowd, logging almost $14k per screen. I actually thought the divisive reviews would kill this, but it might just end up pulling through all right. I really want to see it.

By far the most astonishing feat, however, was the newest Disney 2D animation effort. The Princess and the Frog opened in two theatres and pulled in (wait for it...) over $700k. That's over $350,000 a site! Seriously, in terms of per site averages, that's the third biggest on record after The Lion King (which did close to $800k per. site.) and Pocahontas. And we all gasped for air when Precious did its $104k/site on 18 (which is still impressive, because no film has ever done that kind of money per site at that many theatres.) Holy Gemini.