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Movie Monday: Diary of a Wimpy Kid


diary.JPGThe box-office showdown figured to be a tag-team clash of celebrity heavyweights: In one corner sat Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler, tabloid faves and stars of the adventure rom-com The Bounty Hunter. In the other crouched Jude Law and past Oscar champ Forest Whitaker, titans of Universal Studios’ Repo Men.

Who wins? Some wimpy kid brandishing a diary.

Well, actually, the big box-office champion was still Alice in Wonderland, which lopped the heads off the competition for the third straight week with a $34.5 million take. But Diary of a Wimpy Kid, a PG-rated film with no-name actors and a teensy-weensy budget, snuck into second place with $21.8 mil, besting Bounty by $800,000. Repo Men proved to be positively, um, gutless (trust me, it’s funny if you know the film’s premise), snagging a mere $6.2 million.

I guess there’s two ways to look at this weekend’s cinematic tally. On one hand, it shows that family films rule: When filmmakers make movies that Mom, Dad and the kids can all munch popcorn at together, the results almost always are positive—at least as far as the bottom line goes.

But what Hollywood defines as “family” doesn’t always equate with what you’d like your family to actually see, and Wimpy is far from ideal family fare—at least from what I gather from our reviewer Bob Hoose. Granted, it’s probably better than a film predicated on, say, repossessing internal organs or locking Jennifer Aniston in the trunk of a car. But still, the bathroom humor in Wimpy was so extreme that Bob spent most of the film grimacing.

But perhaps if you saw the film, you had a different take. Did you find yourself wincing at Wimpy? Or was it wonderful? Or did you see Bounty or Repo Men instead?