Your new box-office choices this weekend — if you’re a multiplex denizen only — seem pretty obvious (though remember you don’t have to just see what’s new). You have on one side, the populist, feel-good, by all accounts wonderful, Pixar 3D animated adventure, “Up,” and you have Sam Raimi’s goofball horror comedy, “Drag Me To Hell.”
We loved “Up” and hated “Drag Me To Hell,” but both have extremely good Rotten Tomatoes ratings. The Pete Docter animated film with a 98% rating and the Raimi flick with a 95% rating (though apparently less-discerning people OK with Raimi exactly revisiting 1981’s “The Evil Dead” without moving it an inch forward are fine with it; though the former is loads better).
And that’s it for mainstream fare. These two will go toe-to-toe at the box-office without competition outside of last week’s new openers (“Night At the Museum 2” which probably has legs and “Terminator Salvation” which likely doesn’t).
It’s a super sloooow weekend as if, all the other studios didn’t want to go up against “Pixar” and or figured that the Memorial Day weekend would be so gangbusters, to release a film the weekend afterwards might shortchange it monetarily.
From there it’s all indies and mostly weak ones. You have the Foreign Film Academy Award winner of this year, Japan’s “Departures” which is cloying and an awful mishmash of screwball comedy and wannabe-profound drama (somehow it still managed a 71% rating). But there’s also “Munyurangabo,” a sure-to-be little-seen Rwandan drama — the first full-length, narrative film in the Kinyarwanda language — that explores the friendship between two boys as they try to overcome the gap between their long-warring group of African tribes. It has a stellar 100% rating so far, but it also has all of six reviews so far.
Our indie pick of the week would certainly be Bruce McDonald’s subversive “anti”-Zombie fim, “Pontypool” which we saw at SXSW. It’s not perfect per se, but it is tremendously enjoyable and does feature an excellent lead performance by Stephan McHattie (known for playing Hollis Mason/Nite Owl in “Watchmen”) who doesn’t normally enjoy a chance to take on a lead role and he knocks it out of the park. The film is about an embittered morning radio DJ (McHattie) who finds himself reporting on a mysterious virus that is infecting the small, rural Canadian town he lives in. It turns out to be transmitted from speech and sound — definitely a twist on the zombie infection genre — and is a rollicking good midnight-madness-like time. We’d certainly recommend high and above over Raimi’s silly gore-lite nonsense.
The film “What Goes Up” with Steve Coogan and Hilary Duff, looked like a marginal indie curiosity, but currently has 12 reviews on RT with a abysmal 0.0%. Go see “Up” to beat the summer heat and if you’re in a limited release city, be sure to go see “Pontypool” late at night. Other than that, stay home and bone-up on DVDs. Might we suggest the work of Cannes-Grand Prix winner, Jacques Audiard.