Weekend Box Office (08/07/11): Rise of the Planet of the Apes rises to the top, The Change-Up under-performs, Horrible Bosses crosses $100 million while Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II is the #3 global grosser ever..

While not quite as mighty as the first series reboot ten years earlier, Rise of the Planet of the Apes had a muscular debut big enough to easily win the weekend.  Scoring $54 million, the Rupert Wyatt science-fiction drama very-nearly played like an old-fashioned, adult-targeted blockbuster.  It opened on Friday with $19.7 million and dropped just 1% on Saturday and ended with the weekend with a solid 2.74x weekend multiplier.  The film scored an A- from Cinemascore and played 56% male.  It's another solid win for Fox, as the film allegedly cost just $90 million.  It's also pretty darn good, even if I'm not a fan of the last twenty minutes (if I may avoid spoilers, I think the film does itself a slight disservice by attaching itself to the Planet of the Apes franchise).  Even if he'll get little credit, it's a solid win for James Franco, as it's easily his biggest debut outside of the Spider-Man franchise, nearly doubling the $23 million debut of The Pineapple Express on this weekend of 2008.  And after the relative under-performance of Cowboys and Aliens (-56% this weekend, for a $15.7 million weekend and a $67 million running total for a miserable and utterly worthless mediocrity), this is an encouraging sign that you don't need to be 3D to be successful in the big-budget genre marketplace.  Ironically, Fox (home of Avatar) is the first studio this year to have two 2D films opening over $50 million (after X-Men: First Class).  For what it's worth, Rise of the Planet of the Apes scored the fourth-biggest 2D opening of the year, behind The Hangover part II ($87 million), Fast Five ($86 million), and X-Men: First Class ($55 million).

Review: Winnie the Pooh is feather-light and subtly clever family fare.

Winnie the Pooh
2011
72 minutes
rated G

by Scott Mendelson

This won't be the longest review I've ever written, as there is little to say other than a list of tempered superlatives.  Winnie the Pooh is exactly what a Winnie the Pooh movie should be, no more and no less.  It is quaint, gentle, subtle wicked and as cozy as a blanket just out of the dryer.  Running just under an hour after a five-minute short film (a surprisingly poignant fable involving a homeless dragon) and before the closing credits, the picture is a perfect introduction to the age-old Pooh mythology to a generation raised on somewhat more complicated and more visually frantic cartoons of our modern times.  It is beautifully animated with lush, but simple, 2D hand-drawn animation, with eager vocal performances to go with it.  If you're merely in the mood for a harmless but intelligent and thoughtful family cartoon to bide the time between Pixar and DreamWorks epics, it is as perfect a choice as can be imagined.  If you are a genuine fan of Winnie the Pooh, well, imagine you're a Batman nerd walking into The Dark Knight...

Review: Megamind: the 2D 35mm Experience (2010)

Megamind
2010
95 minutes
rated PG

I wrote in 2006 that, while both were fine films involving magic in the 1800s, The Prestige was superior to The Illusionist. The Ed Norton vehicle used magic to tell a more conventional and crowdpleasing period romance story. While the Chris Nolan puzzler was a more complicated, colder, more aloof picture that was actually about magic. So now we have the second animated fable involving the trials and tribulations of a supervillain. And a similar comparison can be made. Despicable Me is a terrific entertainment, and an emotionally-engaging little cartoon. Megamind is also solid entertainment and while it may not be as heartwarming, it has more beneath-the-surface pleasures than the former. That there can be legitimate debate over which supervillain's arc cartoon is the most terrific is a testament to how good a year it's been for animation.