Movie Releases, 7/28

Pirates is number one again--this should easily zip into the top 10 of all-time soon, whatever that means anymore. And looks like people stayed away from Lady in the Water after the beating it took by the critics. Monster House did well, and I think it will retain much of its audience after the first weekend, although it's going to have competition.

That competition is The Ant Bully, which I don't feel has been marketed very well by Warner Bros., but that's not a real surprise since WB has been one of the worst at that in the past couple of years (especially this year, with their awful Superman and Lady in the Water campaigns--I think heads are going to roll soon if not already). Anyway, I guess 8 years is enough to forget that Antz and A Bug's Life came out with the ant theme in the dawning of the digital animation era. This one concerns a kid, kind of like the bully Sid from Toy Story, getting shrunk down into an ant colony to learn the value of ant life and the danger of the magnifying glass.

And more comedy comes from Fox with John Tucker Must Die, a sort of offshoot of Mean Girls where a bunch of hotties who've been screwed every which way by the asshole title character plan to get revenge, using "American Dreams" cutie Brittany Snow to lure the libidinous basketball star into embarassing situations. There are some promising scenes from the trailer, so this might be fun.

But the big release is the curiously under-advertised Miami Vice, at least it seems that way to me. I didn't see a saturation of this, even though the trailers are really cool and it's got kickass director Michael Mann taking his creation from the eighties and blowing it up into a full-length, non-in-jokey kind of movie. Jamie Foxx is Tubbs and Colin Farrell is Crockett, while hot 40-year-old Gong Li plays alongside. I've actually been pumped for this movie since the first trailer I saw several months ago--it will be interesting if it can shake off the reputation of small-screen-to-big screen adaptations, although that rep hasn't hurt movies like Dukes of Hazzard.

Also opening limited is Woody Allen's 41st feature of his career, Scoop. This comedy kicks off a string of magician movies coming out this year, this one starring two actors, Scarlett Johansson and Hugh Jackman, who are in another one from Christopher Nolan called The Prestige opening in October (another one starring Edward Norton called The Illusionist hits in August, probably limited). This one returns Allen to comedy after his great Match Point, and it concerns an American journalist (Johansson) spying on a wealthy London socialite (Jackman) who she suspects of murder. But she starts falling for him...uh oh. And oh yeah, there's a comic ghost played by "Deadwood" star Ian McShane. Allen also stars as a magician helping Johansson out.

Also coming out is an indie that has a lot of buzz in Little Miss Sunshine. Abigail Breslin, the cute little girl from Signs, tries to get to the finals of a beauty pageant in a cross-country trip with her dysfunctional family, including Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, and Steve Carrell. Sort of a Vacation-y kind of movie, indie style.