His last movie, December’s Jack Reacher, may have lost its opening weekend showdown with hobbits, but Tom Cruise reasserted his box office superiority over the past several days with the science-fiction action drama Oblivion. Grossing an estimated $38 million in its debut frame, and facing no real wide release competition, nor a weekend with still-on-the-lam Boston Marathon bombers, the film easily unseated the Jackie Robinson tale 42, which grossed $18 million-plus in its second week, bringing its cumulative domestic total thus far to $54 million. Animated family film The Croods held steady in third place, pulling in another $9.5 million and bringing its five-week total to just under $155 million, while the fifth sequel in the Scary Movie franchise dropped 55 percent in its second weekend, pulling in just $6.3 million. Slotting fifth, in its fourth week of release, G.I. Joe: Retaliation grossed $5.78 million, raising its Stateside haul to just over $111 million, and probably guaranteeing another installment.
Rounding out the top 10, Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond the Pines pulled in $4.74 million; Die-Hard-in-the-White-House Olympus Has Fallen rang up $4.5 million; the Evil Dead remake scared up $4.1 million; Jurassic Park 3D pulled in just over $4 million flat; and Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful conjured up an additional $3.05 million, pushing past the $220 million domestic mark in its seventh week of release.
Daily Archives: April 22, 2013
Family Weekend
If you’ve ever pined for a cross between The Parent Trap and The Ref, then Family Weekend might be for you.
Overachieving 16-year-old jump-roping star Emily Smith-Dungy (Olesya Rulin) is fed up with her self-absorbed parents Samantha and Duncan (Kristin Chenoweth and Matthew Modine, the latter of whom is done up like a cousin of Dumb & Dumber‘s Jeff Daniels). Her mom is a work-obsessed business executive, while her dad is a happy-go-lucky artist who can’t be bothered to earn a paycheck. So, enlisting help from her eccentric grandmother GG (Shirley Jones) and younger sister Lucinda (Joey King), an aspiring actress, Emily hatches a plot to kidnap them and bring some order and affection to the home.
If it at times seems to ping-pong between familiar-to-a-fault plotting and reaching over its shoulder to achieve leftfield wackiness in its characterizations, Family Weekend scores because of its cast — particularly the charming young Rulin and King, who turns in a lively performance. They help elevate the material, written by Matt K. Turner and directed by Benjamin Epps, and the movie works more often it doesn’t owing to its energy and differentiation from so much of its teen-comedy brethren, of which this is only nominally.
Housed in a regular plastic case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, Family Weekend comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track. Bonus features consist of a brief making-of featurette, as well as a handful of webisodes. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)