- Burn After Reading ($19.4 million)
- Tyler Perry’s The Family that Preys ($18.0 million)
- Righteous Kill ($16.5 million)
- The Women ($10.1 million)
- The House Bunny ($4.3 million)
- Tropic Thunder ($4.2 million)
- The Dark Knight ($4.0 million)
- Bangkok Dangerous ($2.4 million)
- Traitor ($2.1 million)
- Death Race ($2.0 million)
- Burn After Reading (3½ stars): Unapologetically and hilariously pointless. If you like the Coen Brothers, it's definitely worth checking out.
- Angel-A (3½ stars): A French-language film from Luc Besson, this film is one of the most aesthetically striking I've seen in a while. It's shot completely in black & white with Paris as its backdrop, if that says anything at all. It's a touching story: funny, poignant and sweet. Its ending takes away from the impact of the story a bit, but all in all, it's a solid and beautiful piece of work.
- Meet Bill (3½ stars): Any synopsis I've run through my head comes out sounding like some sort of after-school special, which doesn't do the movie justice. Yes, it's a coming of age story; yes, there's a middle-aged schlub mentoring a wild-child prep school teen; yes, they change each other for the better. BUT this movie is better than that. It's not sappy, and it's not even necessarily heart-warming so much as it simply affirms the fact that life is what you make of it even if you don't know what the hell you're doing.
What I Read:
I fulfilled my sisterly duties by finishing Peter Pan
this week. I didn't necessarily agree with its themes, but I appreciated the story nonetheless. While the story is essentially the same as the Disney-fied versions I've seen over the years, the tone is entirely different. I'd almost peg it as cynical much of the time.Having finished that, I felt the need to return to something whimsical, so I've picked back up my Chronicles of Narnia
tome to read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.What I Wrote:
This weekend I've been working feverishly on MUTE in an attempt to finish my gamma draft by Tuesday in time for discussion at a write-in. I spent Saturday ripping apart some scenes, and I spent Sunday putting them back together. I'm about halfway through, so hopefully tomorrow will prove similarly productive.
Additionally, I'm spending more and more time planning Fairytale Redux for NaNoWriMo 2008, which is probably why I felt the need to move onto some more whimsical reading material. I was recently introduced to a character who might knock MUTE's Sieg off his pedestal as my favorite character I've written. But we'll see. The story's turning out to be fairly epic, but I'm trying to hold off on feeling overwhelmed until November when I'll have thousands of other writers with whom to commiserate.
