- The decision to postpone the release of Shutter Island from last fall until February 2010 has proven to be a wise one for Paramount Pictures. For the second straight week, the duo of Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese garnered the top spot at the box office with a take of $22.2 million, fending off several new releases and raising its total box office to $75 million-plus. The least-imaginative, most time-wasting new release had to be Kevin Smith’s “comedy” Cop Out, starring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, and yet it raked in $18.5 million for a second-place spot in the rankings. Coming in third place was the R-rated horror film The Crazies, which debuted with $16.5 million and was the second-strongest opener behind Cop Out (no movie should ever be behind Cop Out on any list, by the way, it sucks that much). In fourth place was the big-budget blockbuster that just wouldn’t die, James Cameron’s Avatar. In its freaking eleventh weekend in theaters, the animated albatross of a movie dipped just 14 percent and grossed an additional $14 million, putting its domestic gross at $706 million. One area where the film might suffer is the competition to hold onto is 3-D and IMAX screens now that Disney’s Alice in Wonderland will be opening up. Those tickets cost a significant chunk more than a normal movie ticket, so Cameron and the studio definitely want to hang onto them for as long as possible. In fifth place for the weekend was Fox’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which used its family-friendly status as pretty much the only PG-rated film in theaters to conjure up $9.8 million. Filling out the rest of the top 10 were returning films such as Valentine’s Day (sixth with $9.5 million and a cumulative total in excess of $100 million), Dear John (seventh with $5 million its fourth weekend in theaters), The Wolfman (eighth with a measly $4 million for a total gross of $57 million), The Tooth Fairy (ninth with $3.4 million) and Crazy Heart, which rounded out the top 10 with $2.5 million. All told, it’s not an impressive collection of movies and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t go to see a single one of them over the weekend………
- The competitors for Apple's iPad continue to line up and based on what I’ve seen from the iPad thus far, Apple’s attempt at a tablet computer would do well to be wary of any and all rivals. Every computer company with an R&D budget over $50 seems to be working on its own version of a touch-enabled, multimedia-sporting device. Count Dell among them, as it has announced plans for the Mini 5 (a name that is still in beta) -- a tablet with a 5-inch capacitive touchscreen that, according to Michael Dell, will debut "in a couple of months." Unlike the iPad, the Mini 5 (or whatever Dell ends up calling it) will have a built-in camera. The 5-megapixel camera will be located on the back and the Mini 5 will also have a separate front-facing camera that can be used for video conferencing, a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1-GHz processor. The Mini 5 will also offer the same apps that are available on most smartphones and will include a set of specialized tools and programs for business users. One area where the Mini 5 will fall short of the iPad is screen size, as its 5-inch screen will put it closer to the Sony PSP than the longer design of the iPad. But of course, the major question is what operating system the tablet will run. That would be the latest version of Google's Android operating system, version 2.0 or higher. Potential users will also be happy to know that unlike the iPad, which features a 4:3 aspect ratio, Dell's tablets will support the 16:9 ratio that is used for watching widescreen movies. "It's a device optimized for media consumption," said Neeraj Choubey, general manager of the tablets division at Dell. "It will offer the full Web-browsing experience so you have something that you are holding in your hand that replaces everything the smartphone does and takes on quite a bit of the features of a laptop." According to Dell, the Mini 5 will be the first in a series of tablet PCs that will eventually grow to include several different screen sizes. One aspect of its new tablet that Dell won't comment on just yet is pricing, although the company claims that prices will be “competitive” in relation to the $500 to $830 Apple is charging for iPads. What remains to be seen is whether, collectively, all of these tablet computer offerings can actually draw significant interest from consumers. In the past, offerings of slates and convertible notebooks haven’t drawn a huge following. Personally I am never going to be down with touch-screen computers simply because I see the oil and filth that come off people’s hands onto mice and keyboards for standard computers and the idea of touching a screen over and over again and transferring that same filth to the screen is just a no-go…………
- Don’t rush into anything, NFL. Just because your current overtime rules are blatantly broken and give the team that wins the coin toss an unfairly high advantage in terms of winning games doesn’t mean you need to hurry up and fix the system. Oh wait, yes it does. As it works right now, the NFL’s overtime system allows the team that wins the coin toss to either receive the ball (duh, the obvious choice) or defend a particular end of the field. The team that scores first wins and the game ends immediately, meaning that the losing team could go the entire overtime without touching the ball on offense. That’s exactly what has happened an overwhelming majority of the time, both in regular-season and playoff games, and there has been a growing chorus of cries the past few seasons for the system to change. As you’d expect, the tools who run the league have stopped up their ears and both the owners and the competition committee, which is theoretically supposed to address issues such as this, have dropped the ball over and over again when it comes to revising overtime. But the turning point may have come this past season when NFL golden boy/egomanic Brett Favre and his Minnesota Vikings lost the NFC championship game in overtime after New Orleans won the coin toss and marched down the field for the winning field goal. With that example freshly seared into their minds, league officials are said to be seriously considering a change in the overtime structure – for the playoffs only. NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said Saturday the league could change its overtime format for playoff games at a meeting next month. No, don’t fix the problem for the whole season, just for the playoffs. What happens if a team loses a regular-season game in overtime without touching the ball and that team misses the playoffs because of that loss? Way to fix half of the problem, NFL! But back to the solution itself…..under the new format, both teams would get the ball at least once unless the first team to get the ball scores a touchdown. If the first team to get the ball makes a field goal and the other team ties the game, play would continue until one team scored again. "There have been various concepts that have been discussed in recent years, but this one has never been proposed," Aiello said. The competition committee will present the new concept to teams and players at league meetings March 21-24 in Orlando, Fla., after which a vote could be held and at least two thirds of the teams would need to agree to the changes for new rules to be adopted. There have already been discussions between the competition committee and the players' union during last week’s NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis, but those merely set the stage for what’s to come. As much as I hate Favre (and will always hate him), if he is the impetus for this rule changing, then at least his career will have had some value for me. The current overtime rules have been in place ever since overtime was adopted for regular season games in 1974. Overtime for playoff games always has been sudden death, so changing it at this point would be a long time coming…………
- I’m going to take this next story as definitive proof that even God himself hates the plague that is MTV’s Jersey Shore. While Jersey Shore cast members Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi and Vinny Guadagnino were attending a party in New York (and really, what party is complete without two IQ-deprived, vapid, moronic reality TV cast members who pander to the worst stereotypes of ethnicities that several of them aren’t even a member of) at the Sony Building when a glass roof shattered and ice and glass fell into the lobby. The party, which took place Saturday night, was to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim. Ten people were injured in the accident, but no one was seriously hurt. After the collapse, Polizzi tweeted: "Omg roof just collapsed at the purim event! We thought the dj was beatin the beat hardcore but nope, the roof couldn't handle snooki and vin." No, judging by your portly physique and both yours and Guadagnino’s massive egos, it’s not at all surprising that the roof just couldn’t take the weight. While some might look at this is a terrible accident that nearly caused serious injury to a lot of people, I choose to view it differently. I view it as just one failed attempt to remove these despicable Jersey Shore fools from our society. We can try again, y’all, and if we stick with it, eventually we can rid our lives and television sets of these heinous d-bags…………
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