Movie Nation

“Frozen” continues to pile up the cash in a film field devoid of other cartoons, coming in second over the five day Christmas weekend — over $40 million. That adds up to almost $250 million in total domestic box office since its November opening.

But “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” is proving to have legs, too, winning another week, dominating December and holding off big openings from “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Hustle,” in turn. “Smaug” cleared another $50 million.

“Anchorman 2” has hit $84 million so far — no a world beater, but a decent sized hit should clear $125 by the time serious competition moves in.

“Wolf” bettered “Hustle” — both in the mid-$30s this Christmas week.

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” had cleared $25 million since Christmas Day. Not bad, but not huge.

That’s the same neighborhood as “Saving Mr. Banks,” which isn’t lighting the world on fire either.

“47 Ronin” didn’t blow up, but it didn’t bomb.

“Grudge Match” did, not even hitting $15 over five days.

“Wolf of Wall Street” opened strong on Wednesday, and is neck and neck with the almost-as-long “The Hobbit” sequel for the big prize on this year’s contested holiday box office race.

“Smaug” appears to have collected a couple of hundred thousand bucks more on Wed., but “Wolf” was close behind it and could take the lead by the weekend — depending on the word of mouth. A $9.2 or $9.3 million to $9.1 million finish on Wed.

“Anchorman 2” is still doing well, but not great — over $8 on Wednesday. Plainly, the character is over-exposed. Too many TV reruns of the original film, too much Ferrell foolishness in all those in character appearances. Overdid it. It is sticking around though, a week after opening.

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” came in close to $8.

“47 Ronin” opened at over $7 million on Wed. Will that hold up over the weekend? Terrible reviews won’t help.

And as expected, “Grudge Match” bombed. Studios should stop spending money on Stallone. His audience has aged out of going to the movies.

The oft-told Japanese tale of the “47 Ronin,” disgraced samurai who regained their honor by avenging their dead master and sacrificing themselves in the process earns an ignominious Keanu Reeves reconfiguring this holiday season.

An endless recession, a tsunami and nuclear meltdown, and now this. It’s enough to bring seppuku back as a national sport.

Keanu’s ronin romp is streaked with supernatural touches — battles with a witch, digital demons and special effects giants. It’s a staggeringly slow, tin-eared fiasco that doesn’t deserve the flourish of an ending this medieval tale generally earns. You catch the final act and you forget that first-time feature director Carl Rinsch has no experience or apparent skill for this material and that his leading man is every bit as much of a stiff as he.

Kai (Keanu) is a half-breed raised in a warlord’s household. He can never be a full-fledged samurai or play in all the samurai games, supposedly because of his race. Reeves is physically awkward enough to suggest that maybe his hosts didn’t trust him with the sword. Action scenes are sped up to allow him to manage the choreography without hurting himself or others.

Only Oishi (veteran Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada of “Lost” and “The Wolverine”) sees worth in Kai. But a scheming rival to their master Lord Asano (Min Tanaka), the sinister Lord Kira (Tadanobu Asano), gets the old man killed and the shogun exiles Asano’s samurai to the countryside as ronin, samurai who will never have a master again, starving outcasts.

Cut to a year later and evil Lord Kira is about to marry the princess (Kô Shibasaki) who inherited their province, who also happens to be Kai’s one and only love. So Oishi gets the band back together to stop this.

It’s a movie of pointless scenes — let’s go to the village famous for swordsmiths to arm ourselves, only we never see a forge — and inane dialogue scripted by a team that has “Fast & Furious” and “Killshot” credits.

“I’m not afraid of you.”

“You SHOULD be.”

That’s an exchange with the witch (Rinko Kikuchi), who is malevolent enough without a neat Medusa-haired, flowing cape effect that shows she’s a shape shifter.

A few too-obvious digital demons must be dispatched.

And in between those fights and the finale is a whole lot of not much of anything — snow, swords, sorcery and tiny tastes of Noh Theatre. Gedde Watanabe, who had quite a Hollywood career playing racial cliches, heads a theater troupe in a Shakespearean scheme to get the ronin into Lord Kira’s proximity.

Sanada brings dignity to the proceedings with lines like this — “All that will be left of our brief lives will be the pride our children feel when they speak our names.”

But Keanu is left asking the rhetorical question which only the producers can answer.

“What use am I to you?”

They needed him to get this made. Unfortunately.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images, and thematic elements

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Hiroyuki Sanada, Kô Shibasaki, Rinko Kikuchi, Tadanobu Asano

Credits: Directed Carl Rinsch, scripted by Chris Morgan and Hossein Amini. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:53

“Grudge Match” is a sort of “Punchy Old Men”, a slow-footed high-concept comedy that pairs up the screen’s greatest pugilists, circa 1981, for a few slaps and a few laughs.
DeNiro and Stallone square off as aged boxers brought back by desperation and a desperate fight promoter, played by Kevin Hart. Hart slows his roll to match his two leads, and the whole movie, with every punch, every gag and most performances passing by at half speed.
“Razor” Sharp (Stallone) and “Kid” McDonnen (DeNiro) were light heavyweights who had unfinished business in the ’80s. Razor walked away from a decisive third fight after each had taken out the other once in their rivalry.
Kid, a boozing braggart, never forgave Razor. He drinks and does a Jake LaMotta sort of stage act in his bar, runs a used car dealership and lives the ex-jock’s dream in their hometown of Pittsburgh.
Razor went broke, went to work in a steel mill and never got over the woman who came between them — played by Kim Basinger.
Then the son of the promoter who ripped them off, back in the day (Hart) cons them into doing some video game motion capture work, reviving their rivalry for a few bucks. That could lead to “Kardashian SEX tape money” if he can get the two 60somethings back in the ring.

It borrows a few plot points from Stallone’s “Rocky Balboa” back in 2006, with a viral video of the guys mixing it up at the video game recording studio putting them back in the news.
Alan Arkin is the foul-mouthed old man Razor wants to train him. Kid can’t convince anybody that the fight is anything but a joke, so his newly-discovered adult son (Jon Bernthal) takes the gig.
Let the countdown to “Grudgement Day” begin.
There’s a comforting “We’re not dead yet” message to this, especially in the inevitable training sequences. Stallone, who has battled age with the sorts of things that turn your face into wood, looks rough, even if he can still carry the bulk. But DeNiro, who has been playing old men for 20 years, looks a decade younger, jumping rope, hitting the bag, doing pull ups.
It’s a shame the banter isn’t sharper, that the whole thing wasn’t played at motor-mouthed Kevin Hart’s normal speed. His zingers lack the pop and the frequency that he delivers in most comedies. Most scenes, he’s interacting with a phone. He’s not even on the set with the stars.
Stallone was never the most graceful with a line, mumbling, struggling to get the funny to pop out. But he’s convincingly tough (slapping a certain Mixed Martial Arts poseur silly). And he makes the “Rocky” references work. Handed a glass full of raw eggs to drink, he cracks “Fighters still do this? Looks like a lotta cholesterol.”
DeNiro isn’t given enough funny stuff to do or say. “I’ve had my shots. A shotta Jim Beam. A shotta Johnny Walker.”
Arkin can do his aged, deaf trainer in his sleep — “Don’t use sarcasm on me. I’m an old man. I confuse easy.”
A funny line, a tired bit of business with Basinger (four Oscar winners are in this cast), a smart-mouthed kid, as formulas go, this one feels gassed.
It’s all very much in the style of Peter “My Fellow Americans/Get Smart” Segal — slow, sentimental, slick and sadly recycled. And it’s perfectly passable holiday entertainment for people who dated during the “Rocky” and “Raging Bull” era. Just don’t expect this “Grudge Match” to be much of a challenge.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sports action violence, sexual content and language
Cast: Robert DeNiro, Sylvester Stallone, Alan Arkin, Kevin Hart, Kim Basinger
Credits: Directed by Peter Segal, written by Tim Kelleher and Rodney Rothman.  A  Warner Bros.  release.
Running time: 1:53

A grim chapter in Navy SEALs history earns a heroic, no-punches-pulled accounting in “Lone Survivor,” an above average action outing for Mark Wahlberg & Co.
Based on the true story of the ill-fated SEAL Team 10 and a mission that went messy in 2005, it is still very much a movie. A few scenes, a few sentiments and the tone seem inspired by the John Wayne flag-waver “The Green Berets,” an another war film about another battle in another war (Vietnam), but also one where victory is spun out of something that looked nothing like victory at the time.
Wahlberg, Ben Foster (“3:10 to Yuma”), Taylor Kitsch (“John Carter,” “Battleship”) and Emile Hirsch (“Into the Wild”) are SEALs dropped off in Afghanistan to kill a Taliban leader. “Rules of Engagement” are debated and are blamed for things going wrong. It’s the mountains, so communications are poor. And one bad thing leads to another as this intrepid team tries to shoot its way through every AK-47 toting Taliban between there and rescue.
Writer-director Peter Berg, recovering from “Battleship,” frames his film within the culture of these fighting men, opening with real scenes of the brutal training (and wash-out rituals) of the SEALs.
Their code is in the clipped, hard language exchanged between officers (Eric Bana is in charge of the mission) and the men who do the dirty work.
“Moderation’s for cowards,” “Never shoot a large caliber man with a small caliber bullet,”
“You’re never out of the fight.”
The “helluva big gunfight” that breaks out as their mission unravels is shot in extreme close-ups, bursts of blood squirting up through the dust, gurgling, sucking wounds and the ringing, temporary deafness of a round that exploded too close to your head. Much of this stuff is excruciatingly real.
If nothing else, Berg forces us to appreciate the code these men live by and the toughness that is beaten into them, toughness that keeps them going as the wounds pile up even as they dole out kill-shots by the score on their numberless foes.
But the saga takes many a melodramatic turn as team is whittled down and rescue becomes more remote as a possibility. The third act where the film’s “true story” origins start to beggar belief in the worst John Wayne movie fashion. Fact-based or not, events turn cinematically familiar and far-fetched.
“Lone Survivor” — yeah, the title gives too much away — contains some of the most brutally vivid combat footage ever filmed. The characters are only superficially sketched in, but we still fear for them, understand their code and above all else, appreciate the dirty, bloody, high-risk work these professionals do. That they go through all this and risk everything, by choice, is something Berg, to his credit, never lets us forget.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody war violence and pervasive language
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Ben Foster, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Eric Bana
Credits: Written and directed by Peter Berg. A Universal release.
Running time: 1:58

“August: Osage County” travels from the stage to the screen with much of its theatricality intact. Too much. For all the scenic prairie panoramas and lived-in look of the big, rural Oklahoma house that is the setting, it still feels like a play — with Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts and pretty much everybody else playing to the back row.
A sharp-tongued melodrama of cruelty, comical cursing, “big scenes” and shocking revelations, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tracy Letts kept it all in there and then some in this all-star serving of Oscar bait.
Streep tosses moderation away as the salty, testy matriarch, Violet, a pill-popping cancer patient who has spoken her mean-spirited mind for so long she can’t control her tongue.
“I’m just truth-telling,” she says, laughing off the pained or furious reactions of those who feel her wrath. “Damn fine day to tell the truth.”
Violet’s illness, we’re amusingly informed, is “cancer of the mouth.”
And that “damn fine day” is the day of her husband’s funeral. We’ve met the sweetly poetic drinker Beverly (Sam Shepard) in the opening scenes. We’ve seen the bigoted, bullying martinet he endures, every day. When he disappears and Violet summons her sister (Margo Martindale) and daughters (Roberts, Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis), we know he’s not coming back. Death was just an extreme means of escape.
Menfolk show up, too. There’s Charlie (Chris Cooper), who has always joked away Violet’s mean streak and winked through the sarcasm it brings out in his own wife, Violet’s sister, Mattie Fae (Martindale). “Little Charlie” (Benedict Cumberbatch, showing a vulnerable side) is their clumsy, put-upon son. Dermot Mulroney is Steve, the Ferrari-driving Florida hustler that Karen (Lewis) brings home.
And college professor Bill (Ewan McGregor) may be secretly separated from Barb (Roberts). But he’s there as moral support to his short-tempered, foul-mouthed wife and their messed up 14 year-old daughter (Abigail Breslin).
Letts wrote wonderful, distinct characters, and the film is so well cast that you buy into this version of the Weston clan. The men are thinly drawn cliches, but the women are clever variations on a mean theme. You sense inherited bitterness in the lot of them, even when they’re smiling and drinking too much red wine. The marvelous exceptions are Karen, who fled the family, and Ivy (Nicholson) who stayed behind — both played as wounded women trying not to flinch at the next assault they know is coming.
The big, ugly moments come from Violet and her oldest. Streep and Roberts give us contrasting visions of what it means to commit to a role. Streep, pale, with chemo-thinned hair not-really-hidden by a wig, staggers and lurches between bemused incoherence and unbottled rage, lashing out at Barb, the only one to really stand up to her. Roberts doesn’t let herself look as timeworn and grief-stricken as you’d expect. But she ratchets up the volume to the point where you fear violence. And you fear the daughter she’s raising to curse and smoke (at 14) and “truth tell” just like her.
There are tasty, testy-lines — “You’d have a lot more credibility if you had any credibility.” And there are melodramatic flourishes aplenty, with actors breaking off into two or three character scenes (very theatrical) to tell each other anecdotes of the maudlin or life-is-misery variety.
Director John Wells (“The Company Men”) presides over this in a way that makes the filmed version of this toxic, caustically amusing tale a spectacle we gawk at, slack-jawed in wonder at the depth of the dysfunction.
But does it make us or even allow us to feel anything? Not really. We brace ourselves for the next hit, maybe wince in recognition, here and there. “Osage County” does offer up one almost-heartbreaking moment. But it’s so icky that, like the rest of the film, you kind of want to wash it out of your mouth — with supermarket Merlot — rather than savor it.

MPAA Rating: R for language including sexual references, and for drug material
Cast: Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis, Margo Martindale, Sam Shepard, Abigail Breslin, Dermot Mulroney
Credits: Directed by John Wells, scripted by Tracy Letts, based on his play.  A Weinstein Co. release.
Running time: 2:05

Leonardo DiCaprio’s most charismatic performance ever anchors Martin Scorsese’s robust and raunchy lowlifes-of-high-finance comedy “The Wolf of Wall Street.” This is their greatest teaming, a veritable “Citizen Kane” of the post “Greed is good” era — three hours of cocaine and orgies and high-living by the sorts of gauche gamblers who brought that age, and the world economy, to its knees.
It is Scorsese’s “La Dolce Vita”, a manic, coke-fueled stock market “Goodfellas” following the rise and epic fall of a crook. All that’s missing are the victims, and the outrage.
DiCaprio is Jordan Belfort, an eager beaver young broker-in-training who takes the mesmerizing patter from his drugs, sex and making money mentor (Matthew McConaughey) to heart. The name of the game, Mark Hanna purrs, is “moving the money from the client’s pocket to your pocket.”
A light goes off in idealistic Jordan’s head. Who cares if the client does well? It’s all about your commissions, your shady deals, getting rich because “money makes you a better person.”
A light goes off in the viewer’s head, too. Before anybody starts stamping DiCaprio’s name on the Oscar, here’s old Matthew to remind us that nobody has had a better year acting in the movies — nobody. If Mark Hanna had more than two scenes, he might have stolen the movie.
But this isn’t Oliver Stone’s preachy, good-man-falls-far opera “Wall Street.” This is about Jordan’s layoff during the financial crash of 1987 and his rebirth as a penny stocks trading bottom feeder, the sort of smooth, money-printing huckster who lures proteges and followers like a revival preacher. Donnie (Jonah Hill) is the first. Assorted other “guys from the neighborhood” follow.
That’s the genius of this. The savvier Wall Street pundits noticed how brokers, traders and derivatives specialists went from making a very good living in the early Reagan years to making obscene amounts of money by the end of the Reagan years. And these pundits asked “How did these goons get so smart?” And “How do they figure they’re worth that kind of money?”
“The Wolf of Wall Street” captures the delusional, under-educated ignoramuses with nothing but hunger who nag clients into buying stocks which might make them money, might lose money. But either way, these guys got paid.
DiCaprio brings a religious fervor to this performance. Where his Gatsby was shy, aloof and shady, Jordan Belfort is Oral Roberts and Joel Osteen, pep rallying his flock to his prosperity gospel.
“There is no nobility in poverty,” he thunders. “I want you to deal with your problems by getting RICH!.”
Marriages founder and a mountain of cocaine goes up Jordan and his team’s noses. Hill, wearing shiny, fake teeth and that boyish hedonism that’s been his trademark, brings a crackling, improvisational feel to his scenes with DiCaprio, a blur of words and blow blasting from one to the other as they cannot believe how rich they’re getting and how they’re squandering all this money.
The otherworldly beauty Margot Robbie plays “The Duchess of Bay Ridge,” stunning but just as New York working class as any of them once she opens her “Guinea Gulch” (Italian-Brooklyn) mouth. Or course Jordan must have her, but she makes little impression beyond the lust that first inspires him.  Kyle Chandler blandly plays the F.B.I. agent who puts Jordan in his sights.
It’s a movie in which its melodramatic flourishes — a storm at sea in which all Jordan and Donnie can do is cope with Quaaludes, a plane crash — are made no less melodramatic by the fact that they’re actually true.
Three hours might not seem excessive for a satiric indictment of Wall Street ethics. But for a comedy that glamorizes the Bacchanalia of Belfort’s world — dwarf tossing, stripper-packed office parties, all manner of drugs, the pursuit of sexsploits further and further from conventional — it’s a bit much. There’s too much repetition, too many scenes left in to show off the high-rollers’ endless array of human failings and petty ambitions.
For such a manic movie, Scorsese never brings urgency to the proceedings. That’s a big reason this “Goodfellas” has no sense of tragedy or judgement to it. It amuses, but never makes us feel.
Our most moral crime film creator sits on the fence, observing and enjoying the mayhem, forcing us to make the “See where this got us?” leap. Because he, like the greedy grovelers his movie documents, was having too much fun to bother with that.

MPAA Rating: R for sequences of strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language throughout, and for some violence.
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Rob Reiner
Credits: Directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Terence Winter, based on a Jordan Belfort memoir.  A Paramount release.
Running time: 3:00

James Thurber‘s whimsical short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” was about a bored, unassuming married man who escapes his humdrum life through wildly adventurous fantasies in which he becomes a war hero, a test pilot and the like. He avoids the boredom of errands and life’s routine that way.
In Ben Stiller‘s new film based on that 1939 story, the daydreaming Walter Mitty becomes a shy 40something who isn’t so much avoiding reality as using fantasy as an excuse for not seizing the day, for not asking the cute woman (Kristen Wiig) at the office out, for never traveling and experiencing the world. He’s not so much avoiding his dull reality as failing to, as the Latins said, “carpe diem.”
It’s a charming, whimsical and ever-so-slight film, a bit of an over-reach but pleasant enough, even when it falls short.
Walter Mitty is a methodical man, carefully budgeting his life, looking after his elderly mother (Shirley MacLaine), too dull to have anything to post on his eHarmony dating profile, too shy to reach out to that pretty new hire Cheryl (Wiig) at the office.
He has managed the photographic negatives at Life Magazine for 16 years, living vicariously through the hero photographer (Sean Penn) who still shoots photos on celluloid in an Instagram world. But Life has just been taken over by a company that plans to close it after one last issue.
And the meticulous Walter, hounded by the corporate boor (Adam Scott) now in charge, has misplaced an image the famous photographer insisted was “the quintessence of Life.”
Every day, Walter walks through Life’s halls and loses himself in shots of mountain climbers in the Himalayas. He imagines the witty comebacks that would insult the new boss to his core or win the fair Cheryl. He “zones out” in these fantasies. Everybody notices.

And he sees that Life motto, emblazoned on the wall, which begins with “To see Life; see the world.” And he never has.
One of the clever conceits of Steve Conrad’s adaptation of the Thurber story is to incorporate elements from “It’s a Wonderful Life” in it. Walter has been too caught up in responsibility and his own timidity to ever live the life of his dreams.
But that missing photo and photographer give him purpose. His stumbling conversations with “let’s follow the clues” Cheryl convince him that he has a mission — to track down the elusive photographer and find “frame 25,” “the quintessence of Life.”
Queue up the Arcade Fire. You know the song. And we’re off — to Greenland, Iceland and beyond, chasing a ghost, a photograph and a dream, emptying the bank account even as his life and career are upended in the Great Media Disruption that is journalism today.
A cute touch — Walter doling out updates on the days he seizes to his eHarmony support tech (Patton Oswalt). Clever bits include the notion that all the new bosses wear beards, with Ted (Scott) acting out his sarcastic fury at Walter’s spacey daydreaming by labeling him “Major Tom,” from David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity.”
One dream Walter wants to make come true is “a little ‘Pina Colada Song’ kind of thing” with Cheryl, making her see him anew, as someone who is more than he seems. The movie gives us hints (which Cheryl never sees) that this is actually true.
The film’s ambition and reach seem greater than they actually are, much like the locations (Iceland stands in for most of the exotic places Walter travels) and the product placement plot points. Its quiet tone — built around Stiller’s buttoned-down, meek, Steve Carell-like performance — can make you think it’s deeper than it is.
But the visuals of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” cast a spell. The “world is changing, time to change with it” story — with its many forms of obsolescence, from photo magazines to Kodak film to photographers and “negative managers” — will resonate with anyone who has poured years into a job that this disruptive, digital age has killed.
And the message — Life isn’t a magazine, a job or a savings account, but an experience — is as timeless as the boring and bored “Walter Mittyesque” dreamer that James Thurber created 75 years ago, back when Life was still a magazine.

MPAA Rating:PG for some crude comments, language and action violence
Cast: Ben Stiller, Kristin Wiig, Sean Penn, Shirley MacLaine, Adam Scott
Credits: Directed by Ben Still , written by Steve Conrad, based on the James Thurber story. A 20th Century Fox release.
Running time: 1:54

Unlucky 2013? Some weekends, it seemed that way at the movies.
Big bad movies, cheap bad movies, ill-advisedly awful and ignominious efforts.
Johnny Depp outstayed his welcome, Adam Sandler sucker punched his enabling fans one last time, Will Smith made a movie so bad people were attaching Scientology recruitment to his motives and Disney made a Pixar spin off that is the worst thing ever to wear Mouse Ears.
And since someday, college kids will create drinking games to get them through “R.I.P.D.” with the once-and-always “dude,” Jeff Bridges, and there’s only enough space for two goshawful horror movies on any year’s list, let’s remember the unmemorable — the very worst in movies, 2013.

“The Lone Ranger” — Twice, big money has been thrown at this “Masked Man” Western on the big screen, and both films were disasters for the ages. A few clever bits — the Ranger galloping through a moving train, Tonto and the Ranger buried in sand and slinging insults — lift your hopes. The rest? Shockingly violent, shockingly stupid. Everybody involved should have seen this coming.
“Creature” — Show this one to your kid, the one whining about becoming an actress. “Someday, honey, you could end up stripping for a no talent hack who has a villain named ‘Lockjaw’ butcher your character and your career.”
“Grownups 2” — A make-work farce for Adam Sandler’s cronies, from David Spade to Dan Patrick, this summer party comedy climaxes with a set by the J. Geils Band. Without J. Geils. He was smart enough to skip this disaster.
“After Earth” — A sci-fi flop that Will Smith manufactured for his charisma-starved kid.
“Planes” — Disney’s worst animated film ever was shipped to theaters on John Lasseter’s watch, Pixar cultists. Chew on that.
“A Madea Christmas” — Fox News has it right. There is a war on Christmas. Madea says so. But she’s that war’s generalissimo.
“Movie 43/InAPPpropriate Comedy” — These assembled cameo sketch comedies make one wonder what jokes they threw out as “not funny enough.”
“The Last Exorcism 2” — Deadly dull, an unscary sequel to the latest “The Devil is REAL” franchise. Instantly forgettable. And forgotten.
“A Good Day to Die Hard” — The ignominious end of a franchise, a finale even worse than the one with Kevin Smith in it. And that’s saying something.
“Free Birds” — Even the best animated films weren’t classics in 2013, but this turkey of a Thanksgiving time-travel farce was a fiasco from the get go.
“The Heat” — Take the couple of laughs — they were in the trailers — from “Identity Thief” and “The Heat” and you’d have a Melissa McCarthy comedy with…four laughs.

It’s a pretty close race for this weekend’s box office title, closer than one might have expected. But then, “The Hobbit” is a bit of an underperformer. And heaven knows, Will Ferrell & Co. have been selling the heck out of “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.”

“Desolation of Smaug” looks to end the weekend in the low $30s, “Anchorman 2” right around $30.

“American Hustle” is doing a $19-20 million opening, not bad for a serious Oscar contender.

“Walking with Dinosaurs 3D” isn’t reaching the very young audience and its parents that it needs to. Under $10 million, maybe $8 million.

“Hunger Games” has faded after making over $370 million. Domestically.

“Madea” is sliding off the table.