Reviews and More

The box office champ for this week is a film that I’m 99% sure I won’t be watching, even when it comes out on DVD. 10,000 B.C. somehow managed to destroy the competition this week with a $35.7 domestic haul. I’m not sure what kind of audience this film drew, though, because it just looks supremely stupid to me. In addition, it got panned by lots of critics, so I’m a bit surprised that it did so well.

Second place went to another newcomer, the Martin Lawrence comedy College Road Trip. This film, about a protective father who tags along on his daughter’s visits to prospective colleges and universities, sold $14 million in tickets.

Vantage Point, which I actually went to see this weekend, came in third place with $7.5 million in sales, bringing its three-week total to $51.7 million.

Meanwhile, last week’s winner, the Will Ferrell comedy Semi-Pro, slid all the way down to fourth place with a meager $5.75 million worth of tickets sold. It looks like Ferrell’s not going to break the $100 million mark with that movie.

Here’s the complete Top 10 at the American box office for the weekend:

1. 10,000 B.C., $35.7 million
2. College Road Trip, $14 million
3. Vantage Point, $7.5 million
4. Semi-Pro, $5.75 million
5. The Bank Job, $5.71 million
6. The Spiderwick Chronicles, $4.8 million
7. The Other Boleyn Girl, $4 million
8. Jumper, $3.75 million
9. Step Up 2 the Streets, $3.05 million
10. Fool’s Gold, $2.8 million

I’m doing pretty well in the reading department this year. Even though we’re still in early March, I’ve already read (or listened to) 12 different titles. Unfortunately, not many of them have been classics, so that’s something I’d like to work on.

I most recently completed Playing for Pizza by John Grisham, but haven’t written up my review yet. I’m also in the middle of yet another Agatha Christie book (Towards Zero), which unfortunately, is pretty boring. I’ve got two Christie reviews queued up and ready to publish (Five Little Pigs and The Moving Finger), and will try to get those up sometime this week.

Speaking of Christie, it’s a lot of fun reading an author whose works literally span decades. In her earliest novels, the detectives had very few truly scientific tools to work with. But as time progresses, Christie introduces the use of fingerprints to place suspects at the scene and autopsy analysis to give an accurate estimate of the time of death.

I also notice this sort of thing in the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connelly. When the series first stats out in the early 1990s, Bosch has to stop off at pay phones whenever he had to make a call. Later on, however, he carries a pager, a cell phone, and a laptop computer. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he also starts buying online auto insurance or using online dating sites in future books!

Anyway, back to the point of this post. Here are the next five books on my “To Read” list:

1. Body Surfing by Anita Shreve (audiobook)
2. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
3. Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli
4. Angels Flight by Michael Connelly (audiobook)
5. Duma Key by Stephen King