Angels Fall

That crashing sound you hear is not coming from Crash, the upscale contemproary drama which opened just fine over the weekend, and which I'll be catching this Tuesday afternoon. And those horrified gasps have nothing to do with House of Wax, which y'all knew was gonna be bad, and which even I am not going near. (The Jacket? Word. The Amityville Horror. Sure enough. But House of Wax? Even Nick's Flick Picks draws the line sometimes.)

Naw, that flaming ruin on yon horizon is Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, which all but entered Cutthroat Island territory this weekend with a big, fat, wet box-office bellyflop: $20 million for a movie that cost $130 to make? Ooh, child. When you add in foreign grosses, the rest of the U.S. run, and DVD residuals, I guess Ridley and his lower-rung producers will still be glad they sprang for this mess, but that is some high-profile swan-diving we're seeing. Color me surprised.

I'm actually kind of glad that Kingdom suffered such a dramatic collapse, 'cause the film needs some drama, any drama, anywhere, about anything. Here's what I posted to the Cinemarati roundtable after seeing this thing: I didn't like, dislike, enjoy, embrace, reject, resent, resist, or feel this movie. It was over there, and I was over here. This movie happened to be happening in a room that I was also in, at the same time. Of all the movies I have ever seen, it was one.

And here is a totally revealing, totally on-the-money conversation between my Blogger pals Modern Fabulousity and Brilliant at Breakfast, who basically conclude exactly the same thing. My question now is, are we done with the whole "Sword 'n' Sandals" bit for a while, after so many failures in a row, or is Vin Diesel really gonna hit us up with that wack-ass Hannibal/Carthage movie he's been threatening for a while now? I will personally hajj myself out to the Holy Land if God will reward me by blocking that junk. Especially since Vin's trying to get cute and direct this crap himself, and have the whole thing scripted in Aramaic, by the perp who wrote Amistad and King Arthur. Heaven forefend, people.